An Obsession with Food

Street Food In Emeryville, Edible East Bay

2010-08-07T17:27:00.000-07:00

I have a new article in the current issue of Edible East Bay. It talks about the way street food converted my office's lunchtime attitude from apathy to excitement. Yes, street food enthusiasm is not a new piece, but I hoped that the more personal spin would make it more engaging.

The street food scene has exploded in the Bay Area, especially in Emeryville, which opens its arms wide to any business that wants to set up shop. That not only makes it easy for trucks and carts to hang out their shingles, it ensures a hefty number of companies whose employees all get hungry. I wrote about Liba, Seoul On Wheels, and Jon's Street Eats.

Since I turned in my article, two more excellent food trucks, Primo's Parilla and Chairman Bao, have started parking near my work. If you want a quick bead on Emeryville food trucks, by the way, you can follow the Twitter list I made for myself.

In addition to the article, I've been asked to speak on the subject of Street Food at this year's Eat Real Festival in Oakland. Come out to heckle or cheer, but say hi either way.

Lack Of Mothering Yields Mother

2010-08-04T13:58:00.000-07:00

Imagine pulling this slightly squishy, inch-plus thick disc out of a glass jar on your counter.

I had ignored my white wine vinegar for a couple of months, but it was nonplussed by the neglect. It continued to churn out the material that lots of people call the mother (I view the mother as the whole culture of bacteria in the liquid, and the sheet as a byproduct of the process and an indicator of the culture's health.) By the time I looked at it, it had created this monster of a wheel. And the vinegar underneath smelled perfect: I bottled off a half-bottle of it and refilled it with more white wine.

Just Food Benefit

2010-07-27T21:37:00.000-07:00

My good friend Amy sent me this press release, and I wanted to pass it along to you. The Ashoka Youth Venture programs I've seen her organize have been really interesting: Grassroots food justice programs helping low-income neighborhoods in creative ways. Here's a link to the event information.

It is with great excitement that I introduce you to A Night to Benefit JUST FOOD- a fundraising event for JUST FOOD, a program that Ashoka’s Youth Venture San Francisco Bay Area will be launching this Fall in collaboration with the Earth Island Institute. JUST FOOD will support teams of young people as they start their own sustainable social ventures surrounding the theme of food justice, and connect them into a powerful global network. I hope that you will attend our fundraising event on July 30th at 6:30pm. Please see the attached 2-page invitation to register and to learn more about Mollie Katzen and James Berk, our two award-winning guest speakers for the evening.

Secret Ingredients

2010-05-25T13:29:00.000-07:00

The best time to read Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink may be just after you've finished taking a creative nonfiction writing course. While my professor assigned us a wide range of essays to ponder and critique, virtually none were examples within my genre: food and wine writing.

Secret Ingredients fills that gap. Every piece I've read — it is our current read-aloud book for road trips — seems to hit it out of the park. The very first essay, "All You Can Hold For Five Bucks," about traditional New York beefsteaks has colorful details, well-constructed scenes, good dialog, and a narrative flow that keeps you moving through it. And that piece is followed by another excellent one. And another.

The New Yorker has always been able to attract top talent, and so it's no surprise to find great pieces throughout this thick book, which spans not only the magazine's eighty-year history but a wide range of topics: from eating rats at restaurants that specialize in their preparation to eating at Fernand Point's La Pyramide at its height. There is a sprawling essay about Julia Child and a story by Roald Dahl. In fact, if I have a problem with this book, it's only that every entry reminds me of how far I still have to go as a writer.

But I do have one note of caution. Make sure you're well fed before you sit down to read the book. Because if you're at all hungry, as Melissa and I were on a recent road trip, this book will make you hungrier still.

TasteLive With Nautilus Estate

2010-04-16T13:05:00.000-07:00

I pushed through the heavy doors into the lobby of Local Kitchen, a restaurant that sits on First Street just before a major Bay Bridge on-ramp. Horns honked as drivers fumed under the late afternoon sun. Cars jockeyed for what few inches they could muster from the thicket of steel and glass around them.

The restaurant lobby was cool and quiet. Thick, frosted windows made the evening traffic vanish. I wandered to a room to my left, and mentioned to the waitress that I was here for a tasting of New Zealand wines. I milled about with the other people in the room, who greeted each other like old friends. Maybe these were the Twitterers I was meeting? They were dressed well, but it could be, right? It's not like anyone knows what anyone looks like on Twitter.

I smiled as they looked at me askance and said hello. I'm never good at introducing myself to a bunch of strangers. None of them looked like Katy Prescott, the sales and marketing manager for New Zealand's Nautilus Estate. I had last seen her two and a half years ago when Melissa and I visited New Zealand. Maybe she had stepped out? Maybe I was misremembering what she looked like?

A minute later, the waitress I had spoken to came over and grabbed me. I was in the wrong private room.

Further inside the restaurant, in a walled-off area, Katy — obviously Katy, a pretty woman with short, dark-brown hair and a telltale New Zealand accent — was waiting for her guests. I was the first arrival. She shook my hand, and we exchanged European-style cheek-kisses. Wine glasses and Nautilus bottles sat on the long table. Each place setting had her business card, a name card, and a DVD of images from Nautilus's 25 years.

"I don't really know what to expect of this," she said. I couldn't help. I had never been to a TasteLive event before.

TasteLive is social media meets wine marketing. We would be tasting wines in one physical location even as other people across the country were tasting the same wines at their locations. Someone more cynical than even I might note that while TasteLive might be a good way to let consumers "directly interact with the producers," it is also a good way for lesser-known bloggers/tweeters to get the samples normally sent to bigger names.

I had seen these events happening in my Twitter feed. Wine bloggers from around the country would be filling up my Twitter client with comments about the flavors in the wine, what they thought of them, price points, and so on. Think of it as the Twitter equivalent of a wine tasting group. Except with bottle variation and shipping issues.

The other guests showed up. The first was Paige Granback, a tall woman with shoulder-length blond hair and a slight rasp in her voice. She obviously knew Katy, and I figured out why: Paige, now the eCommerce and Marketing manager for online wine shop JJ Buckley, was formerly at San Francisco's Jug Shop, one of the main American retailers for New Zealand's wines. Next was Thea Dwelle, an energetic woman who does social media consulting for the wine industry. Paige filled us in on the other guests: Leslie Sbrocco, a wine writer best known locally as the host of Check, Please!, was en route from Napa; Chuck Hayward, formerly the New Zealand buyer for The Jug Shop and now also at JJ Buckley, was in a meeting running late. Paige and Thea were veteran TasteLive participants, so Katy and I figured they'd guide us a bit.

The first wine, Nautilus's Sauvignon Blanc, came to the table, and everyone got ready. I opened my notebook. Everyone else pulled out their iPhones. I reached into my pocket for mine and found that it had just 10 percent battery left. My TasteLive performance was off to a grand start.

Katy's cable plus my laptop solved that problem. I scribbled notes in my notebook — pitch-perfect New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc with great balance and depth, zingy acidity, not too aggressive or green. Our two TasteLive veterans fielded questions from the distributed tasters and gave quick primers (good and bad) about the personalities of the people behind the twitter aliases, both those tasting along and those who were regulars but absent from the stream.

Then we moved on to the Pinot Gris. The Twitter stream commented on the creaminess and what food they were drinking it with. I scribbled notes in my notebook and worried about spamming my followers. Does anyone ever want to see constant updates from TasteLive participants if they themselves are not joining in? (Or, frankly, even if they are?) I never do when I see the events unfolding.

As Paige and Thea talked social media and as Katy poured the Pinot Noir (in addition to the three lots that went into the blend), I began to realize how far behind I am in this world. No matter that I've been blogging here for 7 1/2 years. No matter that I have a number of scalable websites and seventeen years of systems design under my belt. No matter that I have a solid command of a wide variety of programming languages and au courant technologies. When it comes to social media and its role in the modern world, I feel like a dinosaur.

Conversation quickly left the wines — did it ever focus on them? — and moved to the benefits of different Twitter clients, the promises of iPhone OS 4.0, and the upcoming Wine Bloggers Conference. Curious about what a social media consultant does, I asked Thea and got a quick overview: How to effectively communicate across the different networks of your imaginary friends. Is this something people focus on? Does it matter to their sales? Or their brand? (A question I've asked elsewhere.)

Leslie and Chuck finally arrived, and I found a way to retreat into my geekiness. Chuck and Katy were talking about the New Zealand wine industry and the wines in front of us as Leslie, Thea, and Paige discussed social media at large and industry gossip in general. I'm a geek — wine, technology, puzzles, you name it — and so I leaned over to Chuck and Katy and tried to absorb the knowledge of two people deepy enmeshed in New Zealand's wine industry (another topic that I've pondered before).

Melissa and I have noticed, more and more of late, that we don't get the new generation of bloggers. And I think that applies to social media as well. The young bloggers of today seem to be saying, "How do we fit this in the modern world, and how do we make it work for ourselves and others?" My generation of bloggers — and, to be clear, any number of people probably consider me a young blogger — simply wanted to write about our experiences, whether anyone was listening or not. Search engine optimization wasn't a buzzword when we started, though we all know varying things about it now. There was no WordPress: Blogger, LiveJournal, and TypePad were the solutions of the day. Easy access to tools and technologies mean that new bloggers have different concerns. Melissa and I sometimes feel like the young bloggers see their blogs as vehicles to a restaurant or a book deal or a foot in the industry and not as ends in themselves.

But at the same time, the current generation is imagining possibilities we mostly can't. They see opportunities to reach new audiences, to find new communities, to build networks of contacts and associates and friends. They see themselves as agents of change and, realistically, they probably are.

And where does that leave me, who is skeptical of social media and who writes in two increasingly archaic media: print and full-length blogs. I'm not sure. But I feel a sudden urge to change Twitter clients.

Conversion Limbo

2010-03-30T21:43:00.001-07:00

This conversion from Blogger to WordPress isn't going very well. The main problem at this point is that Blogger's export of posts cuts off after about 3 megs, or about one-eighth of my content. Meanwhile, Google has taken away my ability to post via FTP (because I converted to a blogspot blog to help with the WordPress import.) While I'm working on dealing with these issues, I decided to do a temporary hack.

This site, http://www.obsessionwithfood.com, now puts all the content from my temporary site, http://moveowf.blogspot.com, into an iframe. This is not an ideal solution, but it does allow me to post, which my limbo setup did not. It does, however, mean that my RSS feed is probably not updating, and it also means that links on this page will not change your browser's address bar. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm mostly very annoyed at Google and Blogger at this point. If you're going to cut off a bunch of your customers, you should make sure they can cleanly exit the service.

Don't understand my comment about the address bar? Here's a good example: a piece I wrote recently about the Vino-Lok closure for the San Francisco Chronicle. If you click on that link, your browser will still say you're at http://www.obsessionwithfood.com.

I have not subsumed SFGate. Or any other link you might click on.

I'll get this dealt with as soon as humanly possible, but this at least gives me a means to post new content, which I do intend to do.

Thanks for your patience.

Do Wine Blogs Matter?

2010-02-20T16:36:00.000-08:00

I wrote an article for the San Francisco Chronicle about wine blogs and their effect on the market.

I had hoped to make that announcement the new post on the WordPress version of this site, but the conversion looks like it will take a while.

Switching To WordPress

2010-02-19T22:08:00.000-08:00

Just letting you all know that I'm finally moving my blog from Blogger (I know!) to WordPress. So the site may look funky off and on. Bear with me, please. Having programmer-friendly blogging software will be great (and, besides, Blogger is removing support for FTP publishing, which is how I push content to my servers.)

Overnight Chicken Stock

2010-01-31T09:56:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning to the smell of chicken stock.

I stepped out of bed, walked down the hallway, and looped back into the kitchen. A pot sat over a burner turned to very low. In it, thin slices of translucent onion formed a mat on the surface of the liquid. A chicken wing tip poked through the surface. The liquid had dropped about two inches overnight. I placed a chinoise over a bowl and poured the pot's contents through it.

The chicken stock in the bowl was a rich, golden-brown color. Even at room temperature, a shake of the bowl produced a gelatinous jiggle instead of a liquidy splash.

This is my preferred technique for chicken stock now.

The technique came about by accident. I needed chicken stock for a dish the next day, and I only remembered late the night before that I had intended to make some. Having an excellent meal planning app doesn't help you if you forget to look at it.

I set up the chicken stock before going to bed, set the burner to low, and woke up early the next morning. That first batch had reduced down significantly overnight: I ended up with about 2 cups. But the stock was intensely flavored and thick. For the second batch, I planned the overnight steep in advance, re-upped the liquid in the pot before bed, and woke up to perfect stock.

I can't imagine going back to done-in-2-hours stock at this point. My technique may have been an accident, but it's hardly original. Michael Ruhlman, I realized recently, has a post on his blog about turkey stock done in a similar way. He uses the oven; I use the burner. Same difference.

The Technique
I usually start this a couple hours before going to bed so I can adjust the temperature as needed. This usually nets me about one quart of stock, but your mileage may vary.
Assemble your chicken stock the way you normally would. I collect bits and bones from the chicken we get every few weeks in the Soul Food Farms CSA. For a given chicken, I dice one onion and cut one medium carrot and one celery stalk into thick slices. I add the chicken pieces (some weeks, we get feet on our chicken, which is a bonus source of gelatin) and enough water to cover.

I know approximately where I need to set my burner for optimal results, but I keep an eye on it. For normal chicken stock, you want a bubble to appear on the surface every few seconds. For this chicken stock, you want about a 10-second interval. I keep an eye on how fast the liquid is dropping. You want about one quarter of an inch every hour. Just before going to bed, I top up the stock with more cold water.

The next morning, I wake up to heaven.

Bay Area Want Ads

2010-01-24T18:12:00.000-08:00

Vegan/Gluten-Free In Bay Area
My friend Tim sent me a note a while back asking if I knew of any Bay Area wholesalers for vegan and/or gluten-free pastries. He'd like to be able to offer them at Zocalo Coffeehouse in San Leandro. I don't know of any, but perhaps some of you do. Write me or write him if you have suggestions.

Maxis Is Hiring
Maybe this would be better on my programming blog, but OWF has more readers. Maxis is hiring various sorts of online folks to fill some recently vacated slots, and I'd love for you all to have the opportunity to work with one of the best video game studios around. (Note that Maxis is in Emeryville, despite being owned by Electronic Arts in Redwood Shores.)

Here are some of the skills we're looking for. Write me if you're interested:

Database architect/performance/scalability expertise. Maxis isn't exactly a major financial institution, but we do have big, data-and-throughput-heavy systems.
Front-end web skills (JavaScript, HTML, CSS). You should be very comfortable with AJAX.
Outsourcing management - Got experience successfully managing outsourced development teams and getting high-quality work out of them?
General middle-tier web skills. Our most immediate need is for someone well-versed in PHP and MySQL. Again, experience building robust, scalable systems would be useful. As would a proven ability to create maintainable code with well architected public-facing APIs.

Behind the Scenes at The San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition

2010-01-09T14:49:00.001-08:00

Eighty-one glasses of wine at my seat pressed against each other on a white tablecloth. Whites, pinks, and reds spread out in front of me, cupped in glasses like colors in a paint-by-number tray. Each one was best in its class, according to a panel of judges. Around me, a few dozen other judges from throughout the wine industry sat down to identical arrays: the sweepstakes round of the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. Behind the tables, approximately 200 people sat silently watching us, their backs to the curtains that divided us from the rest of the hall in the Cloverdale Citrus Fair. In about an hour, I needed to pick my favorite sparkler, white wine, rosé, red wine, and dessert wine.

By that point in the week, I figured it would be easy.

Two months earlier, Bob Fraser, the main organizer of the competition, wrote to ask if I'd like to judge at it. Jon Bonne, my editor at the Chronicle, had suggested me.

I replied almost before I finished reading the email. I've judged events and gone to comparative tastings before, but the Chronicle Wine Competition is the largest competition in the country for American wines. It spans 4 days and almost 5,000 wines. Who would say no?

The morning of the first day was a reunion for past judges. Wine makers, retailers, and writers made their way around the close-packed tables in the plain dining area, catching up and swapping industry gossip. Newbies like me squeezed into conversations as best we could until Bob stood up and announced each panelist — and his or her 3- or 5-person panel — to a round of applause.

My panel of five made its way to our area in the auditorium, the tall burgundy- and ivory-colored curtains that walled off each area swishing around us as we scooted through the narrow passageways. This would be our home for the next three days. Each area had one panel of judges, two tables, a chalkboard divided with masking tape into a grid, and a small army of volunteers: a coordinator, a clerk, and runners. To ensure double-blind tastings, a mostly invisible staff poured the wine in glasses in the back area before handing them off to our area's runners, who brought them to us. The competition relies on about 185 volunteers to manage the complex logistics of moving 5,000 wines to the judges, tabulating the results of our judging, and double-checking everything.

We introduced ourselves, and the coordinator assigned to our panel, Frances, announced our first category: semi-sweet sparkling wines. No matter how many wines we would taste for any given category (a mere 16 for the off-dry sparkling wines), we'd never have more than 12 in front of us at any given time.

We picked up our glasses and started evaluating. A sniff, a spit-out sip, and some scribbles later, we each assigned an individual score to the wine: no award, bronze, silver, or gold. I revisited wines I was on the fence about. I revisited the first wine in each flight, since the first wine in a tasting almost always scores well. I revisited any wines that were hurt by their placement: a dry wine on the heels of an off-dry one will taste tart and off-balance.

How do you evaluate a wine in about 30 seconds? I look for fruit in a young wine, but not too much. I look for acidity — even a dessert wine requires acidity to carry the flavor and balance the sugar. I look for complexity. I look for balance. Is the finish harsh? Or too hot?

But everything has to be in the context of the wine and the stated goal of the competition: helping consumers find good wines. You don't knock a Grenache for being fruity. You don't complain that a dessert wine isn't dry. I gave high marks to an oaky Chardonnay because it was well-made and balanced: I might not drink it, but lots of the drinking public would. And they'd love it.

We finished the round and the coordinator wrote our individual scores on the chalkboard. From there, she figured out the group's medal by simple majority vote.

For most of our categories, about 70 percent of the group's medals were obvious: four bronzes and a silver is a bronze; three golds, a silver, and a bronze is a gold; four silvers and a bronze is a silver. A double gold happens when every judge awards a gold, which obviously happens less with a five-person panel than a three-person one. But in a majority rules situation, what if you end up with one gold, two silvers, and two bronzes?

You negotiate. Judges who liked the wine talk it up. Sometimes, they educate the other panelists. Jessica Yadegaran from the Contra Costa Times and I, the two first-time judges on our panel, had given a bronze to a one-dimensional bubblegum-y sparkler. The other judges, however, all familiar with Midwestern and East Coast wines, argued that it was a pitch-perfect Concord grape sparkler and gave it a gold.

But mostly one or two judges want to make the case for the wine. One or more of the other judges gets convinced, he or she decides to up the individual score, and the wine gets a medal. The crew takes away the glasses and swaps in new ones. When the category is finished, the volunteers bring back glasses of the golds so that the judges can choose a best of class. This is harder than assigning a bronze, silver, or gold: It's picking your favorite from a single bank of well-made wines. Separately, judges decide if the best of class should go to the sweepstakes.

In the middle of our first two categories, my co-panelist Ellen Landis, co-owner of Half Moon Bay's Landis Shores Oceanfront Inn, noticed a problem. We weren't giving out enough golds.

A medal is like a score: a marketing tool a winery can use to convince a customer to buy the bottle. Facing a wall of $20 Zinfandels at the store, the average drinker looks for some way to know what to buy. A high score or a gold medal — judges seem to equate a gold medal with a 90-point score — suggests that someone somewhere liked it at least once before.

The Chronicle competition doesn't hand out golds like candy — across 45 dry rosés, our panel awarded just two golds — but the organizers urge panels not to be too stingy. Too few golds, and your high silvers might come back for another round. If you're a wine geek, you can find issues with just about any bottle of wine. But if average wine drinkers would love that bottle, a gold medal will help them find it.

There's a financial aspect as well. Entry fees from wineries, ticket sales from the public tasting, and sponsorships fund the competition and help fund enology and wine studies programs at Santa Rosa Junior College and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, among others. Too miserly a set of judges, and fewer wineries would enter. And imagine a $60 public tasting featuring just 12 gold medal winners.

On it went for my panel, for three days, across a range of wines: 16 semi-dry sparklers, 10 sweet sparklers, 76 white blends, eight red wines made from native grapes, 11 red wines from hybrid grapes, 48 Brut sparklers, 69 Chardonnays in the $25-$30 range, 19 white wines made from hybrid grapes, 45 dry rosés, 42 Tempranillos, and nine fruit wines.

We were lucky. Around us, panels struggled with 60+ Syrahs in one price range or 50+ Cabernet Sauvignons in another. Despite our miserable round of rosés, we avoided a talking-to about our overall medal ratio. Our Tempranillos had a high ratio; the rest were the high side of average, from what I gathered when comparing notes with other panels.

Then came the last day: the sweepstakes round. Virtually all the best-of-class wines were sitting on the table. Only 12 had not been sent to the sweepstakes by the judges, though I wondered why some panel had sent the under-$10 Chardonnay and the under-$10 Merlot to the sweepstakes. Best of class simply means better than other wines in the same price point.

I picked up the wines in front of me and started tasting. To get through that many wines in that hour or so, I gave a plus or minus to each wine in the category. I revisited the plusses and looked for anything that would let me knock it out of the running for best among all the ones in front of me. It wasn't easy at all. Three days of practice still hadn't prepared me for the effort of comparing tens of best-of-class wines to one another to find the top three.

Glasses clinked as judges removed wine after wine from the thicket in front of us. I voted on the three sparklers and held up my ballot. A runner took it from me and brought it to the tabulation table. A new ballot in hand, I started on the whites: sip, spit, evaluate. Again and again. Within about 15 minutes I held up that ballot. The rosé ballot was easy: There were only two wines. I started in on the reds. I stopped every dozen wines to swish water through my mouth: The tannins were increasing, and my tongue was drying out. I voted a few minutes before the clock ticked down on the reds. I moved to dessert: just 5 wines. I cast my votes and sat back. Other judges were turning in their ballots. We began to talk about the sweepstakes: At my section of the table, the conversation centered around the two fruit wines, both excellent.

The last ballots went in, and Bob got up to thank everyone involved in the event. As round of applause followed round of applause — the judges almost gave the runners and panel coordinators a standing ovation — the two people at the tabulation table worked and double-checked each other's results. Volunteers handed us the results binder. Only one page was empty: the one listing the sweepstakes winners.

Finally, Bob heard that the tabulation was done. He announced each winner to the room. Best Sparkling Wine: J Vineyards and Winery Brut Rosé. Best White Wine: 2008 Keuka Spring Vineyards Gewurztraminer from New York's Finger Lakes. Best Rosé: 2008 Bray Vineyards Barbera Rosato from California's Shenandoah Valley. Best Red: 2007 Graton Ridge Cellars Pinot Noir from the Russian River Valley. Best Dessert: 2008 Watermill Winery Late Harvest Gewurztraminer from Washington's Walla Walla Valley.

The judges stood up. Old friends and new friends shook hands, traded hugs, and talked about the results. Judges and volunteers began to filter out of the hall, heading to home via cars or planes. "See you next year," was the common refrain.

Chicken Leg Confit

2009-12-23T09:32:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, Melissa and I subscribed to the Soul Food Farms CSA, giving ourselves a regular injection of excellent chickens and eggs. When we signed up, Bonnie, Ethicurean extraordinaire and the CSA organizer, mentioned that Eric Koefoed, the husband half of the Soul Food duo, would be making chicken leg confit at some point in the future.

I didn't feel like waiting.

When we got our second chicken, I broke it down and seasoned the legs with kosher salt ground in the food processor with a 2:2:1 mix of tarragon, thyme, and parsley. I spread the green powder onto a plate, pressed the chicken legs down into it, put them in a container flesh side down, and sprinkled the rest of the cure over the skin. After leaving the legs in the refrigerator for 24 hours, I cooked them for about an hour — until the meat was fork-tender — in a 190° mix of olive oil, butter, and duck fat. (A good sign that your legs are done is that the skin pulls away from the joint where the foot would be, but that's also a bit beyond the ideal.) Then I left the chicken legs buried in the cooking fat for a week in the refrigerator.

When we finally ate the legs, I reheated them in an oven, adjusting the heat and the rack height until the skin became crunchy.

It was one of the best dishes I've ever made. The leg meat was fall-apart tender. The skin had a delicate crunch. The cure had added an herb character to each bite. The salt had worked its way through the meat, seasoning it evenly and enhancing the flavor of the high-quality chickens. I made it a favorite in Mise En Place.

I don't have a recipe for it yet; maybe with the next batch I'll start taking notes. But if you've got access to really good chickens and you know the basics of confiting meat, you can probably figure it out. I like to serve it with rice and steamed carrots. You can serve it with a weighty white wine or a light-bodied red wine, as long as the wine has a high acidity; I love it with Mondeuse from the Bugey region of France.

Announcements: Menu for Hope, Classes

2009-12-21T14:51:00.000-08:00

Menu For Hope
Each year, food and wine bloggers around the world contribute their time and money to feeding the hungry through an event called Menu For Hope. It raises significant amounts of money for the United Nations World Food Programme.

And you can be a part of it. Menu For Hope is a worldwide raffle, and each $10 raffle ticket purchased through December 25 translates directly into funds that help feed people in need. Each $10 raffle ticket also gives you the chance to win one of many kick-ass prizes: dinner for two at the top-notch Bay Area restaurant Manresa, a SousVide Supreme, or a weeklong vacation in Tuscany. There are approximately one zillion prizes to bid on, all donated by the community of food bloggers. You could even buy a ticket (or 20) as Christmas presents. Slip them into stockings on Christmas Eve, and the people on your Nice list could end up with incredible gifts.

If you haven't entered yet, you can use this form to pick your prizes and make your donation.

Melissa and I were lame this year and didn't get our act together to assemble a prize. True, I donate my time for the raffle itself, which means that I can point you to the raffle but can't bid myself (as the person who spends a couple of days cleaning data before the program runs, let me again point you to this form for choosing your tickets). But just because you can't bid on our offering shouldn't stop you from bidding on all the great prizes my fellow food bloggers have contributed.

UCB Classes
While you should buy lots of Menu For Hope tickets as presents, you may want to also give something more concrete. How about a seat in one of my UCB Extension wine classes? I think that would make an awesome gift for a friend, family member, or even yourself.

I'm teaching two classes this semester. One is my normal Fundamentals of Wine Studies II, where I teach students how to describe wine in detail. The other is Wines of Germany and Eastern Europe, which is about … Well, I guess that one's more obvious.

Come on here, Carmenere

2009-12-12T17:15:00.000-08:00

Over the last year, I've fallen out of the habit of writing detailed, professional tasting notes. I still evaluate wines, of course — I don't think I can stop — but I haven't been filling up my small, spiral-bound notebook with half-pages of commentary. I get home, make dinner, plate it, serve it, and then clink glasses with Melissa before we chat about the day. It's a quiet pause together.

It's not the best time to be hunched over a pad of paper, scribbling "delicate" and "hints of" and "intense."

But this in turn means that I've fallen behind on analyzing samples. I prefer to give samples the respect they deserve: a full tasting note and analysis, even if that only goes into my notebook and not to OWF, one of my print articles, or my class.

I'm trying to get back in the habit of writing these. If we open the wine well in advance of dinner, I can write a full note when there's a lull in dinner preparations. If we plan for it, we can open a bunch of wine on weekends to taste through in the afternoon.

That's how we found ourselves drinking through five Chilean Carmenères recently. They had been sent to me a while ago, but, for a variety of reasons, we hadn't gotten to them yet. (Actually, the PR person sent us six, but one was corked.) So take note that these wines are probably a year past release.

Carmenère isn't always an easy grape to like. On its own, it often has strong green notes that overpower anything else. That may be why it has, traditionally, been one of the blending grapes of Bordeaux.

Then Chile entered the world's wine scene. Chile didn't set out to be the new world capital of Carmenère, but 15 years ago they discovered that a lot of the Merlot in their vineyards was actually Carmenère. Oops. (Or, perhaps, (oops)). They now bottle a fair amount as varietal wines.

Here are my tasting notes for the five we managed to taste. Except as noted, the wines are Carmenère varietals:

2007 Casillero del Diablo Reserve, Concha y Toro, Chile
This was, with one caveat, our favorite of the first tasting round (three of the wines), despite a strong green stem character in the nose. Tobacco leaf and cedar managed to struggle out of the green stream. On the palate, it had a juicy fruit character with just a hint of peppermint on the medium-long finish. A bit thin as a wine, it nonetheless had enough acidity and fine-grained tannins to keep me interested. So what's the caveat? After it was open for about 10 minutes, it developed an intense skunk aroma. But after about 10 minutes in that state, it settled back down to the original aroma set, where it stayed as we drank it.

2006 Reserva de Familia Santa Carolina, Valle del Rapel, Chile
This deep, red-black wine has plenty of green stem character with subtle aromas of milk chocolate and cinnamon. It tasted of rich, red fruit, with a bit of vanilla on the medium-long finish. This wine might have been our favorite if its tannins weren't out of balance. Probably the wine will improve with age: There's enough character behind the tannins to make that a reasonable bet.

2006 Apaltagua "Envero", Colchagua Valley, Chile
This ruby-red wine has green stemminess, of course, with some green bell pepper, but it also has a more welcoming strawberry and wild cherry Life-Saver aroma. Thick flavors of ripe red fruit make this seem like a wine you should chew, despite the low acidity and the low tannins. That low acidity was the reason it didn't make it to our favorite spot: It felt like it could have used more. "Thick in flavor, thin in body" was Melissa's comment.

2006 Caliterra "Tribute",Valle de Colchagua, Chile
Forget the green stems you're used to: This ruby red wine smells of raspberries and blackberry jam, and that juicy fruit character extends right to the palate, along with a bright acidity and moderate tannins. Fruity and pleasant, this would probably appeal to a wide range of drinkers.

2005 Carmen Reserva, Valle del Maipo, 60 percent Carmenère, 40 percent Cabernet Sauvignon
This red-black wine was the favorite in our second round, with aromas of tomato sauce and sausage, bright, pretty acidity, and fine-grained tannins. The palate featured ripe red strawberries that lingered through the fairly long finish.

Vinegar Is Coming For Your Children!

2009-11-09T08:21:00.000-08:00

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle says, "Eating just one tablespoon a day of some vinegars can raise a young child's lead level by more than 30 percent, modeling requested by the news service shows."

Which "some vinegars"? According to the article, red wine and balsamic vinegars. But not all of them. The article says, "Lead can vary widely from product to product and from batch to batch." I don't advocate feeding your children lead, of course. But this article sows so much confusion that it's hard to take it seriously.

First of all, where does the lead come from? The article suggests one possible source: higher lead content in the soil in Modena, the area famous for balsamic vinegar. But that wouldn't affect all red wine vinegars or even most commercial balsamic vinegars, which, at the cheap end of the scale, are wine vinegars trucked in from all over Italy and then "finished" in Modena (with caramel coloring and other tricks) so the producers can use the name. The author offers another clue: "Some toxicologists hypothesize that production and storage are the main sources of lead contamination rather than the soil." What parts of the production? What parts of the storage? The author doesn't say.

If the article had limited discussion to authentic balsamic vinegar, it could probably make a good case. That vinegar is produced by fermenting grape must and then letting the vinegar evaporate for 12 years or longer. You could imagine a slightly higher-than-normal lead concentration in the soil getting much stronger as the liquid reduces. You could probably make a similar case for high-end but unauthentic balsamic, which is often evaporated over a long time as well. But if you're talking authentic balsamic vinegar, which costs about $30 per fluid ounce, the number of people who could feed their children one tablespoon per day is probably limited to the upper end of the upper end of income brackets.

Let's recap. Some red wine vinegars from all over the world, balsamic vinegars, and "balsamic red wine vinegars" (a term for industrial balsamic vinegars?) have higher-than-they-should lead levels. The lead might come from the soil in Modena, which would not affect most of the red wine vinegar in the world. It might come from "production and storage." But the lead levels are higher than in white wine vinegar or fruit vinegars, which are produced the same way as red wine vinegar. It's all clear now, right?

The solution is clear, at least: Don't eat vinegar! Or, you know, assume that this article is so vague as to be unhelpful and eat as normal. Of course, my preferred solution is to just make your own.

Black Box Wines

2009-11-08T15:30:00.000-08:00

The carton is tall and black. A gold, Art Deco typeface spells out the wine's name: Black Box. Inside the box, a slick, clear plastic bladder squishes about as you push your finger down on the liquid inside. Is this the future of house wine?

I know boxed wine has a lot of good traits: lower cost, lower environmental impact, lower oxidation rate once the wine is opened. But it faces a tough slog against public perception. Most American wine lovers still expect boxes to contain dreck.

Black Box wants to turn that around: They market their wine, which has been available since 2002, as the first boxed wine in the U.S. to feature a vintage, the first to sport an AVA designation, and the first to be considered "premium."

You'll find my tasting notes about some of them below.

First, however, a word about context. Winemakers aren't putting their high-end wines into boxes. Nor should they: because of the permeability of cardboard and plastic, oxygen enters a boxed wine at a much higher rate than it does a sealed bottle. If a producer puts wine into a box, you should expect an everyday table wine. Not special: Just decent.

2008 Black Box Sauvignon Blanc, New Zealand (~$25 for 3L, which is 4 bottles)
While this is a pleasant, balanced white wine, it lacks a lot of what you expect from Sauvignon Blanc — especially New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. The typical lime zest and gooseberry aromas are present but overshadowed by tropical fruit scents such as mango. The gooseberry shows up more strongly in the mouth, and especially on the short finish, but the wine has only a moderate acidity instead of Sauvignon Blanc's more bracing form.

2007 Black Box Cabernet Sauvignon, California (~$25 for 3L, which is 4 bottles)
This wine has a thick aroma of boysenberries and blackberries — I wrote boysenberry syrup — with only a splash of green bell pepper. The dark fruit continues on the palate with a surprising layer of meatiness. It's the fruit, however, that continues through on the medium finish. Its deep purple-black color and thin pink-purple rim seem at odds with its soft tannins: I expected a grippier wine based on the look and the grape. It has just enough acidity to register. Despite a bit of heat on the finish, this is a well-balanced, if not very complex, wine.

These wines were sent to me as samples.

Cross Post: Well, Which Is It?

2009-11-03T07:52:00.001-08:00

Melissa suggested I re-post this after its arrival on OWEE, even though the post is less about Julia Child and more about odd discrepancies among her biographers.

The other day, I spent some time at the library, researching a particular aspect of Julia Child's career. I had an idea for a piece — which may or may not work out — and I needed to do some initial investigation.

Reading through a number of her biographies, side by side, I was struck by the inconsistencies among them. For instance, Laura Shapiro's slim book Julia Child says that Mastering the Art of French Cooking only sold 16,000 copies in its first year, not taking off until a year after its release. Noel Riley Fitch's detailed Appetite For Life says, "By August, less than a year since publication, Mastering had sold 100,000 copies … and was in its fifth printing."

When writing of Louisette Bertholle's royalty amounts, Fitch says that they were 18 percent (versus 41 percent each for Beck and Child) for conceiving the idea. (She did very little on the book itself.) Joan Reardon, in an article about Mastering for the Summer 2005 issue of Gastronomica, says that they were 10 percent.

These are not books about days of yore, with archivists and researchers piecing together scattered, weathered scraps of data. Some of the participants in the Julia Child story are still alive. Child herself was when Fitch's book came out in 1999. And I imagine Knopf, the publisher, still has records from that time. Shouldn't these biographies be more consistent?

My inclination is to trust Fitch's account, if only because of the extensive detail. (You could make the case that Reardon's 10 percent is a typo; the rest of the piece lines up with Fitch's account, at least for the parts I focused on.) But Shapiro says she used Fitch quite a bit. Does she have new information about initial sales? Or is this an editing issue: Did Shapiro mean that the book only sold 16,000 copies in 1961 (it came out in October of that year)? Or perhaps her note that sales didn't take off until fall of 1962, which might have been before October, actually lines up with Fitch's account, who merely lumps the entire first-year sales together without giving a breakdown.

The Mechanics of Terroir, AoE 82

2009-10-31T09:26:00.000-07:00

I have a piece in the upcoming Art of Eating about the science behind terroir. I skipped past the vague hand-waviness of winemakers and marketing and went straight to the scientific papers that have been written on the subject to try and answer the question: How exactly does terroir feature X translate into wine feature Y?

I spent a lot of time at the UC Berkeley library reading through articles from the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, and many others. And then I translated the scientific results into English. You can think of it as a literature review aimed at consumers.

Call now, and order a copy. Or, better yet, subscribe to the magazine. As I've often said, it is the best English-language food magazine, and it may be the best one, period.

Mise En Place 1.1

2009-10-22T07:24:00.001-07:00

I'll revert back to food posts again soon, I promise.

I'm pleased to announce that Mise En Place 1.1 is out on the App Store. If you've already bought a copy of Mise En Place 1.0, the update should appear in your App Store application. If you haven't bought a copy, now would be a good time, since 1.1 adds some nice features and fixes a few 1.0 bugs.

Mise En Place 1.1 adds the ability to "favorite" a dish. Take an existing dish, tap on the star icon, and it will become a favorite. Then, when you want to make it again, tap Copy from Favorite when you create a dish, choose the favorite, pick a date and time, and all the prep tasks and shopping list items you attached to the favorite will be entered for you. You can freely edit a favorite at any time, changing or adding prep tasks and shopping list items, and the changes will be applied the next time you use it as a template. I have granola as a favorite, and the favorite includes every ingredient in the recipe. When I schedule granola for the week, I copy from the template and then delete the ingredients I already have on hand.

The other major new feature is a better system for scheduling tasks. First, you can define tasks in relative terms instead of absolute terms. If you want to grate cheese 20 minutes before serving pasta, you can define the task that way rather than saying 7:10 pm. Second, you can schedule a task relative to the dish or to another task — "20 minutes before cooking the roast, preheat the oven," for instance. Reschedule the "parent" task, and all the children will reschedule as well.

I fixed one of the more annoying bugs in Mise En Place 1.0, the inability to use diacritical characters. You can now make soufflés, sauté onions, and buy crème fraîche.

If you're using the app, I'd love to hear your thoughts about it. If you like it, it would mean a lot if you wrote a review.

I'd love to say that major updates will always come out every two weeks, as this one seems to have, but this was a bit of fluke. Mise En Place 1.0 sat on the App Store, unavailable, for three months while I dealt with some bureaucracy at work about releasing it. However, I've already started on 1.2, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about what it should do.

If you're a Mise En Place Lite user, your update should show up in about 9 days. I've submitted the build to the App Store, but they're a bit sluggish with approvals at the moment.

Mise En Place Lite

2009-10-07T07:06:00.000-07:00

Mise En Place is now back to its normal price of $2.99.

However, some of you have asked about a "Lite" version, and I'm happy to announce that I've released Mise En Place Lite. This version will only allow you to enter three dishes. That way, you can give it a whirl and, if you think it will work for you, you can buy the full version. As further incentive to download the full version, Lite versions will always trail their full kindred by at least a week.

Mise En Place 1.0: Meal Planning for the iPhone

2009-09-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

Downloading is working again! Please let me know if you have problems: You all have (unfortunately) been great bellwethers for these issues. As a thanks to everyone for your patience, I'm extending the introductory price of $1.99 to go through Monday, October 5.

It's a different problem now, at least, but there is once again a problem downloading the app. I have contacted support at Apple and will work to resolve this problem. And, yes, this is frustrating, but I appreciate you all hanging in there.

I'm pleased to announce the release of Mise En Place 1.0, an iPhone/iPod Touch application I wrote to help cooks like you and me make more interesting, complicated dishes during the week. I describe its purpose as "What do I need to do today to make sure dinner is delicious two days from now?"

My app centers around prep tasks. It's one thing to come home and roast a chicken. But if you remember the night before to salt the bird, the chicken is a lot better. My app helps you remember that step by letting you break a dish into tasks and then showing you which need to be done on each day. Need to take something from the freezer the morning before you cook it? Add a prep task. Need to make stock on the weekend for risotto during the week? Add a prep task.

You should buy it, because then you can support my development efforts and suggest features that would make your meal planning easier. Its normal price is $2.99, but I'm offering a special introductory price of $1.99 through ~~Sunday, October 4~~ Monday, October 5. Save 30 percent by buying now!

I've talked about my meal planning techniques in the past. Once I realized that planning meals for the week is much like planning courses for a dinner party, I developed a system involving outlines and printouts that made sense to me. Once I started carrying an iPhone, I began to wonder how it could be part of my system. Being a programmer, I wrote the app I wanted. (This naturally means that the app can also help you with the logistics for a multi-course dinner party. I've used it to pull off both brunches and dinners in the last few months.)

You can use the app to plan out a schedule of meals and their prep tasks, manage shopping lists, take notes, and chart out your dinner schedule for the week or beyond.

You should buy it. Really. In just a few days, the price will go up, and you'll need an extra dollar to get it.

And let me know what you think of it!

White Wine Vinegar

2009-09-23T07:55:00.000-07:00

Homemade white wine vinegar has always escaped my grasp.

For almost four years, I've been making red wine vinegar. Every few months, I pull a new batch of ruby red, fruity and complex vinegar — better than any commercial product I've had — from the squat oak barrel on our mantel and ladle it gently through cheesecloth into green, 375 ml bottles.

Some people coddle their sourdough starters: I pamper my vinegar. Every few days for the last few years, I have sniffed at my barrel, plunging my nose into the fumes of spoiling wine to gauge the liquid inside. I have sipped vinegar straight from a spoon to evaluate it, describe it, and critique it. I have bought wine solely to replenish my barrel when I feared that bottling would drain too much. I have nurtured my vinegar back to health after it has strayed too far from the acetic acid path. I have read everything I can about this ingredient, digging into folklore, chemical pathways, and ideal conditions for the transforming bacteria. When I tell my wine students that Sherry is made similarly to true balsamic vinegar, I'm always surprised that they don't get the analogy.

I know my vinegar.

But white wine is a tricky beast. Without red wine's protective tannins, it should spoil faster. Wine is, after all, simply one point on the path to vinegar. Winemakers compensate for that defenselessness, however, by adding sulfur dioxide, which inhibits the decline to vinegar. Good for the wine drinker; bad for the vinegar maker.

Each time I've started a batch — and I've probably tried three or four times — it's failed. It goes flat. The aroma dies. Mold forms.

But I knew it was possible. The guys at Oak Barrel, Berkeley's mecca for winemakers, brewers, and vinegar makers, talk as if there is nothing to it. "Oh, yeah, I always have a batch going," one of them said to me. I chat these sages up, trying to divine from their comments the one, obvious thing they're neglecting to tell me. The thing that prevents a bottle of my own white wine vinegar from gracing my pantry.

I decided to try again, armed with years of vinegar experience and research. I started with a bottle of low-sulfite Viognier. I diluted it to 10 percent alcohol, about the maximum the bacteria can handle. I poured it into a glass jar, enshrouding my makeshift crock with a bag to protect the liquid from light damage. I added starter culture from Oak Barrel, not trusting the wine's ability to go to vinegar itself. I whisked it vigorously every day, providing oxygen to the hungry bacteria.

I checked it a few times each day. Sometimes, after its daily whisking, I would get a sense of the vinegar within, a clean scent of acetic acid and wine. But most of the time, it smelled of Parmiggiano cheese and hazelnuts, the smells of oxidation, with mere hints of acetic acid and ethyl acetate.

Two months or so into its production, I sniffed the jar. With no whisking at all, it had the clean vinegar aroma I had only glimpsed before. I tasted it. Definitely white wine vinegar, though still raw and coarse without its six months of bottle age. I let out a little yell, and told Melissa. I tweeted it. I couldn't contain my excitement as I carefully drew off 375 ml and brought it downstairs to mellow.

I have already come up with 2 liters of use for my 375 ml. I want to infuse one bottle with tarragon and other herbs. I want to infuse another with pomegranate. I want to use some to start cider vinegar. Maybe some malt vinegar as well. Red wine vinegar would start those, but it would also tint the liquid.

But vinegar-making has taught me patience. I will try the bottle in March and see how it's developed. I've added more diluted white wine, with normal sulfite levels, to my crock. I whisk it daily. I sniff it daily. It's taken me so long to produce one bottle, I don't trust I'll get a second one.

Boxed Wine

2009-08-29T14:49:00.001-07:00

Recently, Melissa and I offered to bring wine to a casual birthday party. She texted me from The Spanish Table: She had bought a wine we had tasted before, Alandra's simple, fruity, friendly red table wine, but she had bought it in a box. (She also bought the white wine from the same producer.) She thought it would be funny if we, the wine people, brought boxed wine.

It surprises people when I say it, but I'm not bothered by boxed wine. I'm not talking about Franzia products, though. I'm talking about decent wine that happens to come in a box instead of a bottle.

But I felt some trepidation about showing up to a party of food lovers with boxed wine, when only about one-third of the guests knew us well enough to get the joke. It takes a reasonable amount of wine knowledge to understand the benefits of boxed wine.

One of the main ones, especially for the casual drinker, is that you can pour yourself a glass or two and not worry about the rest of the wine. Pull two glasses from a bottle, and you've just added a massive amount of oxygen to the wine that won't go away, though you can combat the effects. Get yourself some wine from a box's spigot, however, and the plastic liner inside collapses in on itself, keeping oxygen out and maintaining the wine's freshness.

It's not a perfect seal; plastic is more permeable than glass. A 1997 article in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry looked at different containers for wine, and found that oxygen enters a boxed wine much more quickly than it does a sealed bottle. Starting at the 6-month mark, a "bag in box" wine gets about 1 g/mL of oxygen in the liquid for every 4 months; glass bottles have barely changed their oxygen levels after two years. In other words, buy new boxes of young wine and don't cellar them.

The guests who knew us saw the box, shrugged their shoulders, and said, "If you brought it, it must be good." But I noticed some arched eyebrows among the other guests. Or I thought I did. Perhaps my self-conscious mind added bogeymen where none existed. Years after I've become comfortable with my wine knowledge, I guess I can still feel a twinge of worry about how strangers might judge me by my wine choices.

The host didn't judge, of course. She even offered a bon mot on the subject when she saw the little cartons: "Oh yeah, I know; boxes are the new screw caps."

It's true that boxes today, just like screw caps a decade ago, have a public relations problem. A few years ago, the arched eyebrows I imagined I saw at the party would have been on my own face. Boxes are common enough in Europe for everyday wines, but here they are too closely linked to cheap wine that seems closer to syrup than to fermented grapes.

As society gets more green-focused, however, boxed wine may become the darling of the sustainable food set. Consider the fuel it takes to shuttle wine about. A bottle's worth of wine, 750 ml, weighs about 750 g by itself. An average wine bottle weighs in the neighborhood of 500 g. The box we brought contained 3,000 ml of wine, and the box added 190 g. In other words, 40 percent of the weight of shipping bottled wine is the bottle while only about 7 percent of the weight of boxed wine is the box.

And bottles are inefficient space fillers. If a bottle was a rectangular prism, it would occupy about 1,500 cubic centimeters for 750 cubic centimeters of liquid. But since bottles don't pack tightly, probably one-third of that is wasted space. Our box's dimensions were about 3,500 cubic centimeters to hold 3,000 cubic centimeters of liquid, and you can, of course, pack boxes right up against each other. You can get a little less than twice the volume of boxed wine in the same space you would need for bottles.

Not that glass is evil. Far from it. The McGraw-Hill Recycling Handbook makes the startling observation that "One 12-ounce glass bottle, melted down and reformed, yields one 12-ounce bottle without any loss of quality." Glass is, the book says, "one of the few manufactured goods that is 100% recyclable." But producing a bottle requires an oven kept between 2,600 F and 2,900 F, a full order of magnitude above temperatures used in paper production. The industry has come up with a lot of tricks for making their processes more energy efficient, but that's still a lot of fuel.

But for a casual party featuring pizza and snacks, or a house wine to drink with dinner, bottles may not be the best choice. At least, that's what I'll say the next time I hear the slight sniff of a wine-loving guest.

New Wineries In The Chronicle

2009-08-29T13:13:00.000-07:00

This last Friday, the Bay Area got a whiff of days of yore, when the last day of the work week featured an entire newspaper section devoted to wine. While those pieces have been rolled in to the Sunday food section, there was a wine-focused insert this week filled with articles about the state of the California wine industry. I wrote one article for it about some new wineries that have cropped up in the last year. You'll also find articles about Lodi's growth as a wine region, the growing use of solar power in vineyards, the state of Rhône varieties in California, and more.

A quick addition. Today marks the 7-year anniversary of this blog, and I'd like to thank you all for reading. Whether you've found OWF recently or have been following along since the beginning, I appreciate your comments, thoughts, and emails. I always tell people that I have one of the smartest batches of readers around.

Backberry Jam

2009-08-09T16:42:00.000-07:00

No, that's not a typo.

We had berries in our backyard this year. Actually, our neighbors had them in their backyard. But branches from their bush flopped over our shared fence like bangs on an emo teenager. You could find me out there each day for a week or so, tugging gently at the little black clusters to see which ones came off easily.

They looked like blackberries, but there are so many blackberry variants and children, each with its own identity, that we decided to just call the fruit backberries.

And I wanted to turn them into jam.

I've never made blackberry jam before, so I turned to the smattering of preserving books that I own. What better way to compare them than to read each one's approach to my simple goal?

The first up was Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It by Karen Solomon. This book has been getting a lot of positive press, in part because Solomon is friends with a number of Bay Area food bloggers. But the positive press also comes from the accessible recipes. They're clearly laid out, written in a friendly tone, and obviously developed by someone who lives in a snug home without a lot of extra space for kitchen gear: Her beef jerky recipe uses a low-heat stove instead of a separate dehydrator, numerous smoking recipes use a stovetop smoker and sawdust instead of a backyard smoker, and so forth.

But it doesn't contain a recipe for blackberry jam. This omission became a theme. When I showed the book to a friend, he was surprised that he couldn't find information about cornichons. Last week, I tried to find advice on making traditional cucumber pickles, the kind that sit in a salt-only brine for 2 weeks and require a daily skimming from the cook. No luck, though she does offer a technique for kimchee. (I should note that the book does include a strawberry jam, but I didn't know if the exact same proportions would work.)

I suspect Solomon simply didn't have space for all these items. You might guess from the title that the book is just about preserving, but Solomon tackles the entire pantry. Alongside recipes for jam, cured meat, and pickles, there are recipes for crackers, chocolate candies, infused spirits, homemade pasta, and other foods that at first seem out of place. Such breadth in a slim book does not allow for much depth. The recipes may inspire cooks to try new things, but they may not provide answers for cooks already inspired to try one specific thing.

From Solomon's book I turned to Putting Food By, the classic, but perhaps hard to find, book on preserving by Janet Greene, Ruth Hertzberg, and Beatrice Vaughan. Every time I rummage through this chunky little paperback, I am charmed by the prose. It's written in a slightly archaic tone — the book was originally published in the early '70s — that evokes a stout Midwestern homesteader teaching a new neighbor the ropes. Consider this text on freezing seafood:

Fish must be cleaned immediately and washed in fresh, running water; ocean fish may be kept alive in sea water, but neither fish nor shellfish should be cleaned or cooked in sea water … You will be meticulous about sanitation and sterilizing surfaces. The packaging materials will be adequate for preventing ice crystals or freezer burn. The seafood will be sharply frozen, stored at minimum temperature, and used relatively soon.

Of course PFB, as the authors refer to their book, has a blackberry jam recipe. In fact, it has two: One is a diet version with less sugar and more gelatin. The one I used has optional extra steps for de-seeding the blackberries — I opted to not de-seed — but emphasizes the important detail: "… you will be adding an amount of sugar equal to the measurement of prepared berry pulp." The proportions mirror the ones in The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard, which friends of ours recommended to us.

Small-Batch Preserving, as its name suggests, gives techniques for the quantities non-homesteaders might deal with. It occupies a space between Jam It and Putting Food By: It has a depth of recipes closer to Putting Food By but without the wrapping prose; like Jam It, it is little more than recipes.

In the end, my tour of preserving books stopped at Putting Food By, but with a twist. I put my "backberries" through the maceration step mentioned in Jam It's strawberry jam recipe.

Maceration simply means letting solid ingredients sit in liquid ones. Winemakers use maceration to extract the color compounds and tannins of grape skins into the clear liquid: It's how you get red wine. In simple terms: the longer the maceration, the more tannins and color in the wine.

But what role does it play when making jam? Winemakers remove the skins and seeds floating on the wine, but a jam maker dumps everything into a pot: The raw source of color and flavor compounds is still there. Solomon doesn't offer an explanation, but The Oxford Companion to Wine notes that maceration, at least in a winery, extracts compounds via diffusion from cells whose walls remain intact during the crush. The Oxford Companion to Food offers a different theoretical rationale for the step, saying that maceration softens the ingredient in question.

Jam It is a good, solid book, despite the gaps in coverage. I'll flip through it often and no doubt make many pantry items from it — crackers, homemade peppermint patties, and more all caught my eye. But my preserving heart still belongs to Putting Food By.

Fundamentals of Wine Studies II: Sensory Evaluation

2009-08-01T17:53:00.000-07:00

Just a note to let you know that my UC Berkeley Extension wine tasting class, Sensory Evaluation, is being offered again this coming fall, in Berkeley. Unlike most wine classes, this one is less focused on regions and more focused on how you describe what's in your glass. The first class covers acidity, sweetness, and tannins; the second, scent; the third, faults and flaws; the fourth, oak; the fifth, terroir; and the sixth, blending and blind tasting.

As I like to say, sign up early and sign up often.

Rescuing A Stuck Vinegar Barrel

2009-07-20T08:18:00.000-07:00

If you make your own wine vinegar, you've probably smelled it: You may describe it as nail polish remover, vinyl, or airplane glue. But you know it doesn't smell like vinegar.

Most of the time, your vinegar may smell like that for a while and then find its way to a more classic vinegar aroma. But in the back of my mind, I have always remembered Ed Behr's commentary in his article "The Best Red-Wine Vinegar You're Likely to Find is the One You Make Yourself": "… some batches I throw out. Those have a strong, unpleasant aroma of nail-polish remover."

And it finally happened to mine. It had smelled like nail polish for too long.

I mentioned it to the staff at Oak Barrel Winecraft. Their response echoed Ed's. "Just toss it out and start over." I sadly mentioned this on Twitter, but Judy Witts Francini stayed my hand and suggested that I look at a book called Lost Arts. By coincidence, I had it on my shelf.

"Occasionally vinegar may develop some 'off' odors, the most common being that of ethyl acetate, the familiar smell of nail polish remover," writes Lynn Alley, the author. "Before you throw your vinegar out, try aerating it." She suggests pouring it back and forth between jugs, but I was able to use a whisk to whip the liquid into a frenzy. Then, just to be safe, I added a fresh batch of starter culture, "mother," into the barrel. I also added in some more wine to give the culture something to eat.

The nail polish smell persisted, but the overall aroma had improved. A few weeks later, I sniffed again and cried out in triumph: My barrel once again smelled like vinegar. I bottled the bulk of it and replenished the barrel with fresh wine.

But how could I avoid this in the future?

There's no way to get rid of ethyl acetate completely. In fact, it's desirable in small amounts. Ethyl acetate is the dominant ester in wine and contributes to its fruit aromas and, by extension, those of the vinegar you make from it. And a vinegar barrel with a between-wine-and-vinegar liquid is the perfect environment for creating it: Ethanol and acetic acid can react to make ethyl acetate. I accepted its inevitability, but I wanted to know how to contain it.

I spent an afternoon poring through journal papers about vinegar, but most of them dealt with industrial vinegar production, which shares only a basic biological fact — Acetobacter converts ethanol to acetic acid in the presence of oxygen — with my little barrel. (In submerged acetification, the preferred industrial technique, oxygen gets sucked into the liquid and shattered into small bubbles by a rotor. This creates a huge air-and-liquid interface, which lets the culture convert a batch of wine into vinegar in a short period of time.)

I turned from the library to Katz and Co., one of the few producers in the United States that makes vinegar via the Orléans method, which is much closer to the home vinegar maker's setup. Albert Katz was understandably reluctant to share the details of research he has done to reliably produce high-quality vinegar for his business, but he did offer some pointers: "The most important thing about making Orléans method vinegar is to make sure you are doing everything right," he says. "By that I mean using the appropriate alcohol with proper acidity levels. The contents must not be too high in SO2, or you will inhibit conversion and the temperatures must stay correct." He added that both the environment and the equipment must be as clean as possible

I looked at his email and then at my little barrel. It sits on the mantel in our living room, where temperature varies often. It receives random glasses and bottles of wine from dinner or from tastings. I doubted that's what Katz meant by a well-controlled setup.

But his advice and my research gave me ideas about how to keep my vinegar happy, and they are the hypotheses I'm working from now.

Aeration is key, as Lost Arts mentions, to a healthy Acetobacter population. In a 2008 review article by Eveline Bartowsky and Paul Henschke about wine spoilage, the authors write, "More recent studies have shown that momentary aeration, such as that introduced by agitation or racking of wine from one barrel into another is sufficient to encourage significant growth of resident AAB [acetic acid bacteria] populations." Now, I whisk my vinegar every few days through the large hatch Melissa made for me on the side of the barrel. If you have the traditional kind with a small bunghole, you can probably aerate it by draining some amount of the liquid into a measuring cup and then pouring it back in through the top. I've thought about adding a pump from a fish tank.

As I thought about Katz's advice to maintain a tight environment, I realized I had become more cavalier about my barrel in the "nail polish" months. In the past I had watered down wine to keep it around 10 percent, which is near the upper end of what Acetobacter can tolerate. But I had begun to just dump leftover wine into the liquid. This probably wasn't a problem in terms of alcohol content — the barrel's liquid gets lower alcohol as it evaporates and gets converted to acetic acid — but I did wonder if I had removed a crucial ingredient: water.

The Fisher-Speier esterification pathway describes a reaction in which ethanol and acetic acid exist in equilibrium with ethyl acetate and water. Remove water from the barrel, and the equilibrium will move to the ethyl acetate side of the fence. Add water, and you shift equilibrium back to the ethanol and acetic acid side. By watering down the wine to 10 percent, I was not only keeping the alcohol levels in check, I was keeping the equilibrum tilted in my favor.

At least, so goes the theory. Testing it is a bit awkward: The results are either "it stuck, so that didn't work" or "well, it's gone long enough without getting stuck that that probably worked." But my current vinegar batch still has that complex aroma of nail polish remover and vinegar that I have for a long time associated with an in-transition batch.

So far, so good.

The Writing In The Margin

2009-07-09T21:01:00.000-07:00

The other night, I made the Buttered Bean, Leek, and Cauliflower Salad from Fergus Henderson's Beyond Nose to Tail. Melissa and I ate it and noticed some things about it that didn't work — it has too much garlic, and you need to reduce the cauliflower to the smallest floret size. So I got out a pen and made a note in the book, overwriting the slim, small, italic type with my large and clumsy penmanship.

I romanticize books as physical objects almost to the point of fetishism. Maybe beyond. If you suggested that I take notes in the margin of, say, my Robertson Davies novels, which are mostly trade paperbacks, I would recoil in shock. Suggest I take notes in the margin of my nice hardcovers, and get the smelling salts ready.

But when it comes time to correct a cookbook, the pen emerges from its container and goes to work with nary a thought. Even nice cookbooks get the ink: My printing of the beautiful French Laundry Cookbook suggests 2 tablespoons of salt for the gnocchi recipe, but you're better off with 2 teaspoons. So noted.

For a long time, I tried to reconcile the urge to correct with the urge to protect. I made mental notes about the recipes and filed them in some corner of my mind: A corner that was almost always irretrievable when I made the recipe again. I tried keeping notes in a notebook, but I never added an index and, at any rate, never thought to look in the notebook when cooking commenced. Index cards bearing the addenda started in the cookbook, but eventually ended up on the floor or behind the butcher block or under the bookcase.

So finally I did the unthinkable. And I've never looked back.

If you still hold out and preserve your books' good looks, I salute your resolve. But if you're on the fence, think of it this way: A cookbook is a tool, and tools need to work for their users. Book artists sharpen their bone folders to get tighter creases in small spaces. Computer users set their layouts and preferences in ways that often frustrate others who sit at the same keyboard. And we should modify cookbooks to suit our needs.

That's how I rationalize it, anyway, when my brain shrieks at my hand to stop its destructive arc.

Baying for Bay

2009-07-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

A couple months ago, I did something that I — and you — have probably done a million times: I opened a jar of bay leaves. I have dutifully done this whenever I make soup, stew, or any other long-cooking dish, but haven't thought much about it.

But when I gave the lid its last turn and lifted it from the glass, a powerful aroma poofed up at me. I had never really smelled bay this potent, and I found it transforming.

Suddenly, I was in love with bay.

And I was in love with it despite the fact that — judging by the long, dark green leaves — I had almost certainly come across a jar of California bay, which many deem inferior to European, or Mediterranean, bay. (The two are not just different species but different genuses.) As usual, a definitive article on the subject can be found in Ed Behr's The Artful Eater. Ed describes California bay with his typical flair: "A freshly dried batch of California bay I once had smelled rudely to me of bay plus particularly rank rocket (arugula) and bold nutmeg. A few weeks later it had subsided to nutmeg alone, distinct enough to recall eggnog."

The leaves in my jar hadn't diminished to pure nutmeg, but nor would you describe them as "subtle and submissive," as Ed says of European bay. They had a strong peppery and camphor character that, now that I was attuned to it, I could detect as a subtle taste throughout the stew I had cooked. Perhaps now that I've opened my nostrils to bay's character, I will appreciate the more delicate European leaf, but for now I'm enjoying the stronger form.

Bay of course shows up in a myriad of slow-cooked dishes, and Ed's essay suggests using it with tomatoes, potatoes, and as a seasoning in bechamel sauce. But in fit of diegogarcity, I've started seeing intriguing uses of it all around me. While interviewing June Taylor for an article, she had me try an in-progress Mediterranean bay-infused syrup that had all the fantastic bay character I had come to love. At a dinner at Eccolo to celebrate the launch of Novella Carpenter's Farm City, I tasted bay risotto and bay ice cream, each made with locally foraged leaves and having a very subtle bay character (just to confuse things, European bay grows here in California as well, so these may have been Mediterranean bay leaves).

Those creative uses have triggered my own creative impulses: Would bay leaf shortbread be good? Should I make my own bay leaf ice cream?

What do you like to do with bay?

Wine And Roommates

2009-06-29T21:12:00.001-07:00

Some of you veteran OWF readers may dimly remember that I write for other publications. Some of you may also remember that I occasionally write for this one. Ha ha. Yesterday, my article about managing roommates and wine tastes appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. I had fun writing it and hearing the different stories of people who have had to wrangle wine interest into the already complicated dynamics of roommates in San Francisco. I also like the juxtaposition of this piece — almost certainly one of my most "wine light" wine articles — with a piece I have coming out in a couple of weeks for a different publication — almost certainly one of my most wine-geek-oriented pieces.

A Guide To Berkeley Wine Stores

2009-06-07T17:26:00.000-07:00

The other day, I mentioned in conversation that I live within a short drive of four excellent wine stores. And while I often assume that every wine lover in the town knows every wine store, I've noticed that even the students in my Berkeley Extension classes — who are obviously passionate about wine — don't always know about all of these. Inspired in part by the "I love this town" vibe at the new In Berkeley blog, I'm offering my guide to these stores.

If you're not in the Bay Area, this post may not interest you. But no matter where you live, I urge you to patronize the small, independent wine stores in your area. This isn't just my normal plea about local businesses and community economies: This is about service. Get to know the staff at your local wine store, and you'll get better wine. You can tell them what you like and don't like, and they'll steer you to wines you'll enjoy and introduce you to new ones you might never have found. Want to drink well? Let a true wine merchant help. A supermarket or Beverages & More employee may also steer you well but it's less likely — s/he probably doesn't love wine the way a wine merchant's staff does — and s/he's not likely to remember anything about you the next time you go.

A lot of people are intimidated by wine stores, because speaking about wine still has a veneer of snobbishness. Here's how to ask for help in a good wine store: Go up to one of the employees and say, "I need some help finding some wine. I typically like <fill in wines you like here>, and I want to learn more about other wines that are out there." That kind of question makes a wine person's day, and any good merchant will take your tastes into account. They won't hand you a barnyardy, earthy Burgundy if you say you like Napa Cabernet. Buy a few of the bottles they suggest, try them, decide what you like, and then go back and say (ideally to the same person), "I bought X, Y, and Z from you last time, and I really liked X but I wasn't very keen on Y. I normally drink <fill in wines you like here>, but I'm curious what else you have that's like X." Do this a few times, and you'll be a regular.

Kermit Lynch, 1605 San Pablo Avenue
Easily the most famous of our wine stores. Kermit made his name in the early 1970s by championing and importing the artisanal wines of France, and to this day he carries French wines made with integrity and care. (There are some Italian wines in the store as well.) Domaine Tempier, and the entire Bandol region, became famous because of Kermit. So did true Beaujolais. So did Chinon. Several top Alsace producers grace his shelves as well. The list goes on and on.

I can barely move in the compactly arranged store without the urge to grab every bottle I spy and put it in my basket. But that brings me to the downside about Kermit's bottles: They tend to be a bit pricey. Not too much so, and there are, as he recently noted in his eloquent newsletter, 80 bottles in the store that sell for less than $20, but I don't have quite the budget to buy as much there as I'd like. That said, the annual "Get the old Burgundy off the shelves to make room for the new inventory" sale should not be missed.

Note that Kermit actively encourages you to develop a relationship with the salespeople in the store, many of whom have worked there for years.

Vintage Berkeley, 2113 Vine St. & 2949 College Ave.
I've been a fan of Vintage Berkeley since I walked through the door the first time. Owner Peter Eastlake focuses on quality wines from around the world that are under $25. He has a fantastic palate (I know this, I tell my students jokingly, because it aligns with mine.) I have never been disappointed with a bottle I bought from him, and even when I don't know the folks who are working, I can pick up any bottle with confidence that it will be a solid, enjoyable wine.

But do ask the staff their opinion: The Vine Street store staff can cheerfully talk about any of the bottles around them (the College store probably can, too, but I've been in there less often.) Or, if you're shy, read Peter's excellent and witty "shelf talkers" for the wines. They're well written and they never mention scores, Robert Parker, or Wine Spectator. He carries the wines because he likes them.

There are only two down sides to Vintage Berkeley for me. One, I don't get the chance to chat with Peter too much since he often seems to be at the College store when we're at the Vine store, and vice versa. Two, he sells his inventory quickly enough that if you find a wine you really like, you have to remember to go back right away and buy it: Otherwise, you risk disappointment.

There are free tastings on Saturday afternoons if you want to try before you buy.

The Spanish Table, 1814 San Pablo Ave
I hear that The Spanish Table carries a wide range of Spanish foodstuffs, cookbooks, and gear in the front part of the store. I wouldn't know: I always walk straight to the wine section in the back. Not surprisingly, the selection is largely Spanish, but Portugal is well represented, too. In general, if it's good and it's from one of those two countries, Kevin (the wine buyer, who's usually working there) carries it. And probably knows a ton about it.

Sure you can find wines from Spain's famous Rioja region. But you can also find cava, Txakolina, Vinho Verde, and more. There's a wall devoted to Madeira and Port. There's a long shelf devoted to different sherries. Right now, he's carrying a Basque cider which is a beautiful summer drink: 4 percent alcohol, $9 and a sherry-like taste. We've also seen Spanish beer there.

Spain is one of the top spots for value wines at the moment, and the store's prices are quite reasonable. Kevin even maintains a "house wine" area in the back where the bottles are $7 each. But even outside of that small section, it's not hard to find wines under $15.

Paul Marcus Wines, 5655 College Avenue
Paul Marcus is not in Berkeley. But it's so close to the border, and it's such an excellent wine store, I couldn't leave it out. It easily has the best Italian selection in the East Bay, but it's also got excellent coverage in Burgundy, Austria, Germany, the Loire, the Southern Rhone, dessert wines, and more. When we lived in Oakland, this was our primary wine store, and we know most of the staff well (they're one of the stores I usually hit up when I'm hunting for corked wines for class). Everyone there has a ton of knowledge and is eager to help you find the right bottle. In fact, they recently added a "staff picks" section where each staff member gets to call out a few favorite bottles.

Here's a quick tip if you're looking for values: Poke around in the front of the store, which is where they keep their more affordable wines.

North Berkeley Wine Imports, 1601 Martin Luther King Jr. Way
A friend of mine who seeks out good Champagne says that North Berkeley is now where he goes for his favorite Champagnes. But the store, which like Kermit Lynch imports its selection, brings in a wide variety of wines. I don't take advantage of this store as often as I should, mostly because it's not near one of our normal shopping destinations, but every time I've been in there, the staff has been helpful and knowledgeable.

Solano Cellars, 1580 Solano Ave
To be honest, I haven't been in this store much since Peter Eastlake, Vintage Berkeley's owner, bought it a couple years ago. But I know he's kept its spirit intact: It's a neighborhood wine store with a broad selection of good wines. Solano isn't on our normal shopping route, either, but the wine store has never had a real personality to me. (It probably has more of one now with Peter at the helm.) Still, for North Berkeley residents it's an excellent resource. Unlike most of the other stores on this list, Solano Cellars offers wine tasting classes that will give you a solid introduction to any given topic, and the store pulls out some nice surprises: I once saw Terry Theise there giving the crowd at the bar a splendid tour of his German wine portfolio.

Vino, various locations
When I speak of a wine store having personality, I often use Vino!, a local chain, as a good counterexample. Each store that I've seen has a good selection and a knowledgeable staff, but I never feel like there's a mission statement or driving passion behind the inventory other than just selling wine. This is no doubt unfair, but even though the one on 4th Street is on a normal shopping route, I rarely do more than just breeze through. It doesn't grab me.

My Granola

2009-05-03T08:56:00.000-07:00

I’ve started making my own granola. Melissa likes to joke that this is a side effect of long hair and a Berkeley address — I hope she doesn’t buy me a tie-dye leotard — but it’s really because I developed a mild addiction to granola at my last job, where it was a common snack in the cupboards, and wanted to make my own.

I started by flipping through books on my bookcase. Surprisingly, given the large number of Bay Area authors and slight tinge of hippiness painted across my kitchen bookcase, I only found a few granola recipes. I started with the Grain-ola recipe in my friend Heidi’s Super Natural Cooking. That recipe also appears, with slight modifications, in my friend David’s The Perfect Scoop. This recipe produces a very good granola, but I wanted something a little different.

I didn’t know what it needed, though, until I tried the Killer Granola recipe in The Cheese Board Collective Works. That recipe produces a granola with deep flavor notes. But there were components of Heidi’s that I really liked (and components of both that I didn’t like: what’s with all the coconut in these recipes?). My favorite granola recipe thus became a hybrid of the two, along with some touches I’ve figured out on my own.

But a word of warning before you read my technique. You may think of granola as a healthy food. You wouldn’t be alone: It was created in 1863 by James Caleb Jackson as part of the “health food and religious purity” movement that would spawn graham flour, corn flakes, and a flood of enemas. If you view granola as a health food, good for you.

My recipe focuses on taste.

I imagine it’s healthy enough, especially compared to most commercial granolas, but that’s a side effect. A stick of butter, 3/4 cup brown sugar, etc. You get the idea.

Giving a recipe for granola is a bit like giving a recipe for salad, since you can vary it endlessly without much problem, but this is the template I use. Let me know your own recipes and ideas in the comments.

Granola Recipe

Preheat oven to 325° Place a silicone baking sheet into a jelly roll pan.
Combine 3 cups of rolled oats, a handful or two of shelled sunflower seeds, and thin slices of crystallized ginger in a large bowl. Do not use quick oats: I did that once and the result was horrible. I add the seeds and ginger until they look right, so I can’t give precise amounts. Use your hands to mix the ingredients so you get an even distribution.
Chop nuts coarsely to end up with a pile that fits between your two hands. I usually use almonds, but pecans work as well and one of these days I plan to use hazelnuts.
In a medium-sized pot, melt a stick of butter over a medium-high flame. Add the chopped nuts and stir until lightly toasted. While most of the butter will coat the nuts, I like to see a thin layer of butter on the bottom of the pan. If I don’t, I add more butter.
Add 3/4 cup brown sugar and 2 tablespoons of honey to the butter and nuts, and stir until well integrated. Remove from the heat, add a splash of vanilla extract, and stir again to mix the ingredients.
Add the hot nut mixture to the oats and seeds in the large bowl. Use a wooden spoon to stir the mixture until it’s cool enough to use your hands. You want to spread the butter and sugar evenly through the oats and seeds.
Spread the granola onto the silicone-lined baking sheet, and place in the oven for 15 minutes. Stir the mixture to bring oats from the bottom up to the top, and cook for another 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and set the jelly roll pan on a rack to cool.
While the granola is cooking and cooling, thinly slice a mix of dried fruit. (For you Berkeley farmers’ market shoppers, Blossom Bluff’s dried fruit is markedly better than Frog Hollow’s.) You can use anything you like — we favor dried peaches and plums — as long as you slice them into inch-long, matchstick-sized slices. Dried fruit pieces that are too big create an unpleasant clash in textures. As with the nuts, I like to chop about two handfuls’ worth.
Add the dried fruit to the warm granola, and stir to evenly distribute. (If you add the dried fruit before the granola goes into the oven, it becomes too dry.)
Serve with yogurt. We’re fans of Redwood Hill’s goat yogurt at the moment.

I know I have a few programmers among my readers, so you may also like my new blog, An Obsession with Programming. It’s definitely aimed at a technical audience, but everyone is welcome.

Wine And Roommates

2009-04-12T10:36:00.000-07:00

Hey, everyone. I'm working on an article about Bay Area folks who have to deal with disparate wine tastes among their roommates, and I'd love to hear your stories on the subject. Know a wine drinker who lives with beer fans? A wine snob who lives with White Zinfandel fans? How do they share their beverages? Do they hoard their wine or share it with roommates to enlighten them? How do wine drinkers — who often drink half a bottle with dinner and after — manage with light drinkers or teetotallers?

You can write me privately, and I'm happy to protect your anonymity if you want to talk about your current roommates but don’t want months of fights.

The Bookcase in the Pantry

2009-03-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

I recently moved a bookcase into our kitchen. It’s a tall, skinny thing, all white. The friend who handed it down to me no doubt bought it from Scandinavian Designs or IKEA. It fits in a space about one foot wide next to the monstrous metal shelves that fill one wall of the pantry space off our main kitchen area. (It fits now, anyway; those shelves were about 11 1/2 inches away from the wall until I moved most of their contents to the floor, pulled them over about an inch, and then replaced everything I had taken off them.)

Once I moved the bookcase in, I had to figure out what to put in it. Books, of course, and food books at that. But which ones? My collection of food books sprawls far beyond what one slim little bookcase can hold, even with the books grouped by height and squished together for maximum efficiency.

Part of the answer was simple practicality. Certain books show up often when I’m planning meals, and it makes sense to keep them close by. Super Natural Cooking, which guides gourmets through a world of interesting grains and veggie dishes. The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, perhaps my very favorite cookbook, with its long essays about the simplest dishes. Slow Mediterranean Kitchen, the perfect book for slow cooker owners. Kitchen Sense, a good reference for all those classic dishes that I mostly know how to make but sometimes need a refresher for. The Art of Simple Food, which reminds me that sometimes a souffle or pizza is a great dinner.

Others are books that I use often, but less often than the ones above. The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion serves my needs when I need to look up a simple baked good. Bouchon occasionally scratches a food craving itch, and The French Laundry Cookbook provides inspiration for fancier meals. The Perfect Scoop gives me ice cream ideas. The River Cottage Meat Book provides a nice reference for uncommon meat cooking tasks. Mediterranean Street Food has a stellar collection of recipes that give variety during the week. The Cheese Board Collective Works has a smattering of bread recipes and, at the moment, my favorite granola recipe.

There are, of course, reference books scattered about the shelves. I almost never look at these books, but I like to think that I do, and so onto the bookcase they go. On Food and Cooking, the must-have encyclopedia of food science for laypeople (and lapsed science nerds like myself). The Elements of Cooking, a handy pocket guide to unfamiliar kitchen terms and proportions for common preparations. Culinary Artistry, a collection of voluminous lists of flavor pairings. Putting Food By, the classic book about preserving foods. Sauces, with its no-nonsense title and thick spine.

But there is a final category to the books I fit in to the little white case: guilt-inducing. These are the books I feel like I should be cooking from, but almost never do. Perhaps I hope that by placing them next to my kitchen staples, I will finally pluck them from their shelves and give them the attention they deserve.

Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes came out ahead in an illuminating survey of bread books done by James Macguire in The Art of Eating a couple years back (though “came out ahead” hides the fact that he skewered every bread book on the market). I’d like to make my own bread more. But we live so close to Acme Bakery that making my own seems silly.

Madhur Jaffrey’s World of the East Vegetarian Cookbook is a thick sheaf of interesting vegetarian dishes from cuisines I rarely explore, and yet I haven’t cracked it open in years. The dishes are unfamiliar enough that I don't get a “Oooh, I want to make that” rush like I do when I flip through Zuni’s familiar French/Italian/California ideas.

Similarly, The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking promises to give me the basics of a cuisine I enjoy when I eat it, but know very little about cooking. I know it’s not hard. I know I could start with one or two simple dishes and add them to an otherwise European meal. Maybe I could make steamed pork buns for lunch. All good ideas that never happen.

The Whole Beast and Beyond Nose to Tail are witty, charming cookbooks that everyone should own. And yet I no longer make a point of keeping offal — the mainstay of the two books — in my freezer, and the meat vendors at the market don’t usually bring any. I know I could put in a special request, but that takes layers of planning that even I haven’t gotten around to yet. And so Fergus’s warm prose stays folded in the covers.

Charcuterie lives in this category. One of these days, I plan to set up a corner of my basement as a meat-curing area. I have everything I need, except a free few hours to plan it all out and set it up. And since I rarely have the extra meat on hand that would steer me to salumis and hams, I never get up the inspiration to set up my meat cave downstairs.

I’d really like to use Cooking By Hand more. The sprawling, in-depth look at making pasta is reason enough to pull it off the shelf. But I hate making pasta by hand. Its conserva technique is good, but I’ve done it enough times now that I don’t need to reference the book anymore. I’m probably missing yet more fascinating ideas simply because I never look to it for pasta suggestions.

But you know, I might start opening these books. Maybe I'll plan a vegetarian week that forces me to open Jaffrey’s book. Maybe I’ll make potstickers. Maybe, for real, I’ll make myself some pasta.

Or, you know, maybe not. But the books will sit there, right where I’m bound to see them, making me feel guilty for neglect.

Got any books you feel you should cook from more? Share your guilt-inducing cookbooks in the comments.

Almond Butter. What's Up With That?

2009-02-25T19:29:00.000-08:00

At the Ferry Plaza market recently, I counted four vendors selling almond butter. At the Berkeley market, where we usually shop, I counted three. At the Temescal market, I counted two.

I bought some out of curiosity; now I’m a convert to its deep almond flavor. Melissa and I frequently have almond butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, and I made almond butter cookies recently by swapping it one-for-one with the recipe’s peanut butter.

Have I just been blind to this before?

In part, yes. Lagier Ranches has sold a range of almond butters for 10 years now, says Casey Havre, who manages the company’s livestock and the company’s subsidiary, Loulou’s Garden. Of the three types of almonds they grow, Lagier uses one, the Butte, only for almond butter. They use whole almonds, since broken almonds turn rancid more quickly. They know their almond butter.

But there has been a surge in almond butter at local markets. Massa Organics, best known among foodies for their flavorful, locally-grown rice, started making almond butter within the last year, says owner Greg Massa. And a quick look through Riverdog Farm’s newsletters shows that they started selling it at about the same time.

Probably everyone is selling it for the same reason: product diversity. Small farms succeed when they can sell a range of items. One crop pays the bills even while the market for another one tanks; one crop in season covers costs while another one lies dormant. “Almond butter for us was just a natural extension of getting into the almond business,” says Massa. “ In 2004, commodity rice prices were so low that we planted our first-ever almond orchard in an attempt to diversify our farming operation.”

It’s surprising that more farmers haven’t started selling almond butter before now. Almonds are everywhere here. California’s $2 billion almond industry is the only commercial one in North America, producing 75 percent of the world’s almond supply, according to the California Almond Board. Almond butter plays straight to our locavore crowd as a peanut butter substitute sourced from nearby. It plays straight to our gourmet crowd as an interesting, flavorful ingredient. And It plays straight to our health nut crowd as a “superfood,” a concentrated nutrition source.

But it doesn’t play to our budget-watching crowd, unfortunately. Almond prices are higher than peanut prices — though they’ve dropped off sharply this year — and almond butter reflects that cost. Most of the jars of organic almond butter I’ve seen cost about $1 per ounce, although non-organic brands seem to cost about two-thirds of that.

If you’ve got the budget, you can find Massa’s at the Berkeley market and the Ferry Plaza market. You can find Lagier at the Ferry Plaza, Grand Lake, Marin Civic Center, and Temescal markets. Any vendor will give you other ideas for using it beyond AB&Js and cookies. Massa likes his almond butter on toast with honey, but he also uses it in peanut sauce recipes. Havre likes it with her oatmeal, but she suggested a combination so odd I just have to try it: almond butter and homemade sauerkraut sandwiches.

Add your suggestions for almond butter in the comments.

1984 Terrebrune, Bandol

2009-02-04T20:41:00.000-08:00

Two years ago and some change, Melissa and I went to Provence. Before we left, I booked us winery appointments in Bandol, saying that I was a wine writer but that I wasn’t on assignment. While the town itself is a checklist of Riviera requirements — a cycle of bedroom-sized creperies, souvenir stands, and Egyptian cotton sellers repeated a million times along the beach — the wine region is probably the best of Provence’s appellations outside of the Southern Rhône.

It would be hard to pick our favorite winery visit. At Domaine Tempier, the darling of Richard Olney, Alice Waters, and Kermit Lynch (who imports the bottles), the wine maker played "guess the age" with a bottle of Tempier from the early 80s (I guessed early 90s). At Chateau Pradeaux, we met the seemingly endless stream of dogs and walked in among the foudres in the old cellar. At Chateau St.-Anne, Bandol’s biodynamic estate, the wine maker drove us to a remote vineyard in the forest and then to a vantage point — complete with an old ruin — where he explained the different terroirs of Bandol by pointing to the streaks of color in the hills across the valley.

But our visit to Domaine de Terrebrune (also a Kermit Lynch import) may top them all.

Once we arrived, the wine maker’s assistant took us around the winery, explaining in slowed-down French how the winery works. She took us downstairs to show us the gravity-fed system, which was busy with staff handling the harvest. The owner came down and chatted with us about his farming philosophy and his thoughts on Mourvedre, the dominant grape of Bandol. He then suggested we eat at the restaurant on the grounds (he tried to pick up our tab, but I explained my rules about such things).

I will never forget that meal. A heavy drizzle of rain plopped and pitter-pattered just outside the restaurant. It was open to the elements at one end, but the crackling fire for cooking all the food warmed the room. The first course was a plate of mushrooms with thyme and a hardened streak of grilled ham. The second course was an arc of steak cooked rare.

I don’t mean rare the way Americans think of rare. It was arranged by doneness, and the most well-done piece on the plate was what a good American restaurant would call rare. (And many restaurants can’t even deliver on that: A “rare” order often comes out medium-rare.) I can still picture the plate and conjure the taste of each piece of that meat. We ordered a bottle of a decade-old Terrebrune to go with it.

After lunch, we stopped at the front desk to buy some wine. We’ve found that European wineries often have good prices on library wines. We had brought shipping boxes on the trip, knowing that we’d be buying wine, so we still had plenty of room for two bottles of the 1984 Terrebrune. Like most premium Bandol wines, this one is 95 percent Mourvedre, a tannic grape that benefits from a bit of age: Seven years seems about right for the wine to start opening up, but it will last much longer.

We opened the first bottle earlier this year. We took our friend Sean-Michael to dinner at Jojo as thanks for getting me the Maxis job. We knew he’d appreciate it. We opened the second bottle the other night, just because. I made a pot roast, mashed potatoes, and braised greens. We burrowed our noses into the glasses, inhaling the smell of lush violets and leather. The tannins had dissolved into nothingness, but the acidity and the fruit were still lively and invigorating. A decade from now, we still would have loved this wine.

But it almost didn’t matter what the wine tasted like. Every sip and every sniff brought us back to that meal, that tour, the wine maker, and his staff.

Yes, yes, I have once again been neglecting OWF. Let me give a word of advice to you relatively new bloggers: Don't stop blogging, because you'll find it hard to start up again. Nonetheless, I intend to get myself back in this habit.

UCB Extension Wine Class: Fundamentals of Wine Studies II

2009-01-10T13:29:00.000-08:00

The latest UC Berkeley Extension catalog is out, and I am once again teaching Fundamentals of Wine Studies II, a class about the sensory analysis of wine. Unlike most classes, which talk about the regions, this one talks about the guts of describing wine. I love this class, and my students always get a lot out of it.

Here are my descriptions of an earlier incarnation of this class: Session 1, Sessions 2-4, Session 5, and Session 6.

Real World Wine Pairing

2009-01-06T21:42:00.001-08:00

My mom called me early on December 24th to brainstorm about wines for that night’s dinner. As I’ve said before, she and I have similar cooking styles, and she had planned a stunning feast. Fortunately, we were invited.

We were starting with a vintage Champagne, but then she asked about the crab bisque she had made. Crab is one of the few dishes that sends me hunting for the rich Chardonnays that we produce in California. You don’t want a lot of oak character for this pairing, because the tannins will smother your tongue and prevent you from enjoying the delicate crab. However, a little of the butter character that comes from malolactic fermentation (converting apple-crisp malic acid to creamy-soft lactic) goes nicely with the crab meat. After all, we dunk cracked crab into little pots of melted butter. But you still want some acidity: Avoid the flabby Chardonnays that winemakers so often produce here in the land of overripe fruit.

My mom had a slightly older California Chardonnay, and we pondered its potential over the phone. She read the label, which said that it had been made in the Burgundian style. Lots of people say that, of course, but the rest of the label, which at least implied that it had been aged in neutral oak, sounded promising. In the end, it proved to be exactly what we hoped. The age gave it an extra creaminess, but its Russian River origins gave it the acidity we wanted.

Then we talked about the main course. She was cooking Muscovy duck breast — rich meat even when it’s not magret, the fat-filled breast of a foie gras duck — and garnishing it with a pomegranate wine sauce. I like a jammy, opulent Syrah with this combination of rich meat and syrupy sauce, and I had just the bottle: Melissa and I had visited Ridge Vineyards during our Manresa weekend, and we had bought one Zinfandel and one Syrah. I don’t actually like jammy Syrahs in general, so this one still had a lot of acidity to combat the sharp tang of the pomegranate and cut through the fat of the duck breast. But, again, California wineries tend to produce heavier, jammier wines that can stand up to the weight of this meat.

Part of the challenge of real world wine pairing is that we don’t actually have a large wine store in our basement. We have to make do with what we have. But in this case, by combining my mom’s bottles and mine, we came up bottles that worked nicely with the dishes she served.

Chunks Have Returned!

2008-12-27T14:47:00.000-08:00

Sam and I work for the same large corporation — albeit in different divisions — and we are both on the Foodies list. In a recent email thread about tempering chocolate and the chips one can buy for the purpose, she casually suggested the new Scharffen Berger chocolate chunks she was snacking on.

My breath caught, and I clicked the link. Could it be? It could.

Because these are not a new product. Scharffen Berger made these chunks a few years ago, but the process was too expensive given the demand. As I remember it, they had to stop their normal chocolate production, switch the factory over to a new mode, and then make chunks for a while before undoing all the effort to make normal chocolate again. I guess all that Hershey money has empowered them to start up again.

You can snack on these, as Sam was doing, or melt them down for tempering, as she suggested. But the baking chunks are perfect in the thick, chewy chocolate chip cookies I prefer. They become gooey pockets in the cakey mass, bigger (and better) than chocolate chips. They are also, it turns out, ideal for the “chocolate things” recipe in The Cheese Board Collective Works (a buttery yeast dough filled with chocolate bits). The recipe even calls for six ounces, which is the exact weight of one package of chocolate chunks.

So far, I've only seen them at the Scharffen Berger stores (at the factory and at the Ferry Building), but you can order them online. Here’s hoping they stay around this time so that I don’t have to go on another hoarding run when I hear they’re being discontinued.

A Diminutive Dinner Party

2008-12-15T19:36:00.000-08:00

We have begun to entertain again.

Not, I should add, in earnest. We are rusty at the dinner party game, and so we are swinging our foot along the surface of the water, pushing wavelets about before we jump in.

But nonetheless, some people other than us have sat at our dining room table. Some people other than us have eaten more than a course or two at that table. Some people other than us have sipped our wine.

The other night, we had some friends over. One was celebrating a birthday — like me, she is on some repeat of her 29th birthday — and the others were there to wish her well and catch up. I greeted everyone with a platter of salt-roasted chestnuts, radishes, and balsamic-roasted figs to nibble on while we poured glasses of Champagne.

Regular readers may be about to call me out. I recently claimed that I only peel chestnuts once a year. That’s true, but I have no problem letting my guests peel some, which is the presentation suggested in the original recipe. As it happens, these chestnuts peeled more easily than my tear-wrenching batch, but they still engaged our guests. I like a tactile appetizer platter. There is something immediately leveling and companionable about eating from a common plate, even when the guests are already good friends.

While our guests snacked, I plated a cauliflower panna cotta (mostly the recipe from The French Laundry Cookbook) with a spoonful of gremolata on top and a green salad on the side. I paired it with a 2002 Sherwood House Chardonnay from Long Island because I wanted a wine that was somewhat creamy and weighty with age for the panna cotta but also acidic enough for the salad dressing and gremolata.

Our main course — already we have arrived at the entrée, so you can tell this was casual — was a roast leg of lamb on a rosemary risotto garnished with small dice of root vegetables that had been blanched, shocked, and reheated in duck fat. I pulled a 2002 Ceja Cabernet Sauvignon, a rich, robust wine capable of standing up to the red-rare lamb, from our downstairs rack.

The course I fretted over the most, however, was dessert. Yes, you’re shocked: There was no cheese course. As I said, we are still regaining our stride. I called my dessert “Taste of December.” Eggnog ice cream garnished with nutmeg, pomegranate sorbet topped with ruby-red pomegranate seeds, and spiced cider sorbet, garnished with an apple slice. All served in tuile cups. I was eager to try the freeform sorbet recipes suggested by Harold McGee's The Curious Cook, a recent discovery at a local used book store. He offers proportions for scoopable sorbets of many kinds in tables that promise the ability to create wildly and still score. My first attempt was not exactly what I wanted: Scoopable, yes, but unevenly so, so I couldn’t make perfect little balls. Perhaps some alcohol would have done the trick. I didn’t serve a dessert wine because I feel that frozen desserts blunt the palate and remove the pleasure that a dessert wine can afford.

Real-World Wine Pairing

2008-11-25T07:58:00.000-08:00

I’m going to use you all as guinea pigs. I want to start posting more about the connections between food and wine. It occurred to me that I have a perfect bag of material: dinner. I don’t cook every night, but even when we get take-out, we almost always have wine or beer to drink.

And since I invest a tiny amount of effort in thinking about that beverage, I thought I’d post occasional glimpses at my thought process.

First, some caveats. I believe that most wine goes with most food. I’ve had a few stellar matches; I’ve had some clunkers. But for the most part, it’s hard to go too far astray. I steer by a few guidelines, but mostly I follow my mood and work with what I have available at the house. Don’t look at these posts as absolute guides; look at them as a glimpse at my thought process. Also, I probably won’t write up every meal. You may have noticed that I’m not so much with the daily posts. But I’ll try to do these with some regularity.

The Dish: Pasta with Roasted Chestnuts and Bitter Greens
Once a year, some recipe inspires me to peel my own chestnuts. Once a year, the chestnuts reduce me to tears with their clinging flesh. This year, the agent of my despair was the recipe for salt-roasted chestnuts in Paula Wolfert’s Slow Mediterranean Cooking (a book I heartily recommend, by the way, despite some editorial lapses). I decided to put her chestnuts onto pasta and mix in wilted arugula and mache.

The Drink: 1997 Stéphane Tissot Vin Jaune, Arbois
I like oxidized wines when I have a strong nut component in a dish. Actually, as my students could tell you, I like oxidized wines with just about anything, and vin jaune is an unusual member of the species. A winery makes it by filling a barrel partway with wine and letting a native population of yeast form a mat on top of the wine. The Arbois region of France, in the Alpine foothills on the east side of the country, is one of the few places where you’ll find a yeast population that can do this: Jerez is another — fino sherries are made this way — and Tokaji is one more, though I’ve never seen a Tokaji Szamorodni here in the United States. Ed describes the flavor of vin jaune as “rancid walnuts,” which is as good a description as any for this funky wine. They age forever: Jack of Fork & Bottle recently let me taste a 1967 Chateau Chalon vin jaune, and it was still fresh and vibrant.

How’d It Work?
Because I so seldom suffer the agony of chestnuts, I forget that they’re more sweet than nutty. I expected the rich flavor of slow-roasted almonds, but I got a delicately sweet nut. The bitter greens mellowed quite a bit, and so the wine ended up overpowering the dish. A gentle, lightly sweet Riesling or Scheurebe might have been a better choice.

Go To Jojo

2008-11-22T12:20:00.000-08:00

Over the years, I have urged my Bay Area readers to go to Jojo in Oakland. Sometimes I’ve done so overtly, but I have always kept a link to it on the right side of this blog. Melissa and I have many happy memories tied to the restaurant and its owners — among others, it’s where we chose to have our rehearsal dinner — and it is simply some of the best food in the East Bay. Curt’s duck confit trumps all the other versions I’ve tried, and I’ve tried many, many versions. And I have always held up their wine list as a paradigm: Not because it’s big, but in fact because it is small, incredibly focused, and closely tied to the restaurant’s food.

We just got word that they’re closing, and it breaks our hearts. They’ve had a good run for a restaurant — nine years — but we still feel like we’ve lost a family member.

So let me urge you, one last time, to go to Jojo before the end of 2008. Don’t miss the chance to experience this rare gem of a restaurant. Don’t be left out when all your foodie friends reminisce about it in years to come.

Wine Writing Cliches

2008-11-20T22:35:00.000-08:00

John McIntyre, whose copyediting blog You Don’t Say is one of the few sites I read every day, has recently been covering cliches. First he discussed crime story cliches, then the seasonal cliches of the winter holidays.

I thought that the wine writing community should join in the fun and point out the clunkers in our field. This isn’t about outright errors, such as using varietal when you mean variety, but phrases we’ve grown tired of reading. Though not ones we’ve grown tired of writing, it would seem. (Just to be clear, I’ve been guilty of these in the past.)

Here are some I thought of. Post your favorites in the comments, and I’ll incorporate some into this post (with attribution, of course).

We believe great wine is made in the vineyard
“At least until we get it to the cellar, where we use a cultivated yeast designed to bring out different flavors; stuff the juice into new, heavily toasted barriques to add a lot of oak; and then use reverse osmosis on it to get the alcohol in balance.” This phrase is practically guaranteed to be on the label of the next midlevel wine you buy. Or on the website. Or in an interview. No one means it: They just want to pander to wine as a lifestyle choice.

pairs perfectly with (or variants)
Really stunning pairings do happen, but far less often than most recipe/wine writers would have you believe. Most wine goes with most food reasonably well. (And as an aside, if you’re going to suggest a wine pairing for a dish, the wine educator in me implores you to explain your choice.)

hedonistic
This Parkerism has spread to much of the wine press, and we have overused it.

rosés aren’t just White Zinfandel
This well-trodden theme about dry rosés crops up every May in what seems like every wine publication. Is there anyone with a passing interest in wine who has not heard this by now? (I assume that those with no interest in wine other than drinking it are not reading the publications that have these articles.)

rascally or rogueish as adjectives for Terry Theise
It’s not that these are incorrect descriptions of Terry, but they seem to always crop up. Reading articles about him begins to feel like reading Homer: “Prudent Penelope” and “clever Odysseus” skitter through The Iliad and The Odyssey. Find new adjectives, or give a richer portrait.

eccentric or maverick as adjectives for Randall Grahm
Ditto for Bonny Doon’s winemaker.

“pop the cork” or “uncork” when referring to anything other than opening a bottle
I often see this as a catchy bon mot — or so the author thinks — in press releases announcing some new product. Too bad that many other PR people used it first.

Katie seconds "we believe great wine is made in the vineyard and adds …

"Fruit bomb" drives me nuts (we can thank the grand poo-bah of wine, Parker, for that one). "Sideways Effect" is another...some of us want to go back to being quiet pinot-obsessed junkies w/o the hoopla!

Tete de Cuvee Rose Tasting

2008-11-12T07:33:00.000-08:00

As a wine writer, I get invited to a lot of tastings. As a person with a full-time job, I don’t go to all of them. I disregard some, hope to make some — and then can’t — and occasionally find myself at one. Then there are the tastings that get me to take time off so I can attend.

When I got a note from Schramsberg, America’s prestigious sparkling wine maker, inviting me to a tasting between Schramsberg’s wines and comparable wines from around the world, I jumped at the chance. And that was when I expected it to be a small but standard press tasting: Too many people in too small a space, industry friends chattering away while blocking the spit bucket, and a line-up of interesting wines.

When I showed up on Monday morning, after an hour and a half of hungover driving, I was one of nine people in the room, most of whom were in the winemaking business. A line of 12 glasses — it was a blind tasting — had been arrayed in front of each seat. We even had individual spit buckets.

As Hugh Davies, the company’s president, explained, we were there to taste wines from a similar class and see how they fared against each other. He and his staff do this periodically. I had signed up for the Tête de Cuvée Rosé tasting, which meant we were tasting some very nice brands indeed: Bollinger, Cristal, Taittinger, Dom Perignon, and of course the J. Schram sparkling rosés. Most were vintage bottles.

Pencils scratched out notes and glasses went up and down — and sometimes up and down again — as we quietly evaluated these prestigious pink wines. Then we gave our rankings and discussed them.

I consider myself knowledgeable about wine. I have that obsessive geek thing, and I put a lot of research into my articles, which I generally consider to be worthwhile contributions to the wine press. (Indeed, one of those pieces, about efforts to combat urban sprawl in wine regions, had made enough of an impression to get me to this tasting.) But seated among winemaking veterans, I felt like a wine novice. Adjectives poured out, fine points of balance and herbaceousness and bitterness were bandied about, and winemaking techniques were guessed at.

It was fantastic. I love this industry because I’m always learning. I jumped in as best as I could (I will say that I introduced some of them to the term petrichor) and listened to Hugh talk about the sparkling wine industry, his winery’s changes over the years, and more.

As an aside, I always urge students in my wine class to be honest about their opinions, because I can’t tell them what to think. People disagree, and it’s okay. Indeed, wines that I loved came in last place for other tasters. Wines with low marks from me came in first for others, and not always the same ones. And all those tasters disagreed with each other as well. Everyone has a unique palate and sensibility.

Except that there was one clear winner, a complex, well-balanced wine with a rich, fragrant nose and a great taste. As I said to the group, I could have waffled on 2 and 3, and 4,5, and 6 overlapped, and so forth, but number 1 was an easy choice. Most of us put it in the first or second spot. When they pulled off its bag, it was the 2000 J. Schram Rosé.

The Problem With Cabernet Sauvignon

2008-10-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

If you were to gauge our wine tastes by our wine rack, you might think we have an inordinate fondness for Cabernet Sauvignon. When I went downstairs to get a bottle last night, a cursory glance took in a Ceja Cab, a Mondavi, a Silverado, and a Judd’s Hill. And I can only get wines onto the top half of our big wine rack. And one of the shelves is half full of class wines. There were no Rieslings. There were no Sauvignon Blancs. There were no Southern Rhônes. There were no Piemontese wines. And yet these wines are among my favorites.

Why don’t I have any on my rack? Because we drink them all. (We do have a bunch in off-site storage.) But Cabernets sit for a few years before they get pulled out. My abundance of Cabernet doesn’t come from liking it: It comes from never drinking it.

The tannin-heavy, weighty grape has its place, but that place is next to heavy meats, and I just don’t have the budget for steak or rack of lamb every night. Even if I did, I like more variety in my food. To my mind, Cabernet Sauvignon does not.

On the other hand, this means that my Cabs end up sitting on the rack for a while, accruing a few of the years they need to mellow out and develop. Last night, when I made steak for dinner, we drank a 2003 Judd’s Hill Napa Cab, and its fine-grained tannins had settled down to allow the fruit — red raspberry jam and strawberries — to gush out. And there were the first hints of older Cabernet in our glasses: a thin rim of red that was more orange than purple, a whiff of tobacco and earth.

It will probably be a while before I drink another Cab, and so they will continue to pile up. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing, after all.

Manresa

2008-10-19T20:47:00.000-07:00

We may be among the very last Bay Area foodies to eat at Manresa, David Kinch’s well-sung Los Gatos restaurant.

We’ve known about it for a long time: Food bloggers everywhere raved about it even before one of our own started dating the chef. But the last time we thought about going, we bought a new house with a repair list that made Santa Claus’ naughty-and-nice list look like a quick read. We had to wait another year, and our eagerness grew as we read each new glowing report.

We worried that we had heard too much hype. Could the restaurant live up to the gushing praise we had read? Yes, in fact, it could.

In our 15-dish tasting menu, virtually every dish was a little gem: Intense flavors, flawless technique, and elegant presentation. It’s the kind of meal that inspires me, a good cook by most accounts, to improve and stretch my abilities. It wasn’t just good: It was revelatory.

From the starting amuse of red pepper gelée with black olive madeleines (cleverly mirrored with a mignardise of strawberry gelée and chocolate madeleines) to the “Autumn Tidal Pool” (uni and foie gras in a rich broth) to the pork belly with soubise (an onion bechamel) to the banana crème with chocolate fondant and meringue kisses, we had little transcendent moments with each dish. A waiter would describe each course as it appeared at the table, and our anticipation rose to such a pitch that we stopped talking entirely when, after the amuses, a waiter arrived with a basket, which he boldly presented to our adoring eyes as “unsalted butter with sea salt and house made bread.”

One can opt for a wine pairing with the tasting menu, but we decided to pluck bottles from the restaurant’s extensive list. We started with a 2005 Stéphane Tissot Chardonnay from the Arbois, moved to a 2005 Tablas Creek Esprit de Beaucastel Blanc from Paso Robles, and finished with a 2004 Dönnhoff Schlossbockelheimer Kupfergrube Riesling Spätlese from the Nahe (as someone with a high regard for Terry Theise, though, I was sad to see that the wine buyer had opted for a grey market import of this bottle instead of Terry’s). A dinner of white wines might seem odd, but in fact only one course in the menu, the slow-roasted lamb, might have preferred a red wine.

We walked back to our hotel that night, warmed by the company of friends — meriko joined us; I had two dates for the evening — and the memory of the meal we had just eaten. Every so often on that walk home and at breakfast the next morning, one of us would speak the name of a dish from the menu, and we would all take a moment to remember and sigh.

So let us add our voices to the chorus: If by any chance you haven’t already eaten at Manresa, make your reservation as soon as you can.

Pork Scratchings, A Version Of

2008-10-12T15:55:00.000-07:00

What do you do with leftover pig skin?

I recently decided to make my own lardo, salt-cured fatback, using a large piece of pig that my friend Bonnie got for me. Misremembering the details of lardo, I asked for a piece of fat with the skin on.

Bad idea. You want only the fat for lardo, and so I spent hours cutting the creamy white fat away from the pink, leathery skin: I understand now why they used to make footballs from this stuff. With the fat tucked away under weights in the refrigerator, I turned my attention to the square foot or so of skin I had left.

By chance, I had been flipping through Fergus Henderson’s Beyond Nose to Tail. (Also by chance, shuna had been, too.) If you have not yet discovered Henderson, run to the nearest independent bookstore to fix this gap. It’s not just that he writes recipes for offal, the “off cuts” of an animal: He writes those recipes in a warm, humorous, thoughtful voice that is as charming as it is knowledgeable. Of the snails you need for a nettle and snail soup, he writes, “24 fresh English snails, picked by your fair hands (you will need to put them in a bucket and let them poo all their poo out for a few days before cooking …); or there is Tony the Snail Man, who breeds snails.”

One of the first recipes in Beyond Nose to Tail is “Pork Scratchings, A Version Of,” which Henderson describes as “A most steadying nibble.” I describe it as pig skin confit. Pluck stray hairs from the skin; salt it; let it sit for five days; soak overnight in cold water; cook, covered, in duck fat for 2½ hours; and store in duck fat until you need it.

No one considers me shy about serving odd food to guests, but even I might hesitate before serving pig skin confit on toast to most diners. Fortunately, David Lebovitz was in town, and a few food bloggers gathered in San Francisco to pay homage to the master of chocolate and ice cream.

Most food bloggers will put anything edible into their mouths. And sure enough, the guests reached out without hesitation for my crostini, which held reheated, crisped, and chopped pig skin — a gummy, gluey texture — along with an apple-onion marmalade. I watched tentatively as the bloggers’ teeth sank in: I was prepared for disaster. Instead, I heard mmmms and saw eyes rolling back. The pig skin confit was a hit.

I still had some left a week later when I decided to make a variant of the classic French salad of frisée, lardons, and poached egg. Instead of lardons, I reheated the pig skin and chopped it into bits. Instead of frisée, I used Little Gems lettuce tossed in a bacon grease/red wine vinegar vinaigrette. The pig skin bits ranged in texture from teeth-shattering crunchy to teeth-gluing chewy. But they were still delicious. My one regret was that the chunks, even when chopped, glommed together: I wanted them to spread through the salad more.

Peanut Butter Truffles

2008-10-09T23:21:00.000-07:00

I have been on a peanut-butter-and-chocolate kick.

Sitting near our office vending machine hasn’t helped. It is always stocked with at least one Reese’s product: Sticks, Cups, or — for one heavenly week — Pieces. I know these are crap foods, except for Reese’s Pieces, which are wonderful, but they’re close and cheap when I need a snack at work.

But as I chewed my way through these unsatisfying bites, I remembered a peanut-butter-and-chocolate recipe in my cookbook collection: the Peanut Butter Truffles in the back of The French Laundry Cookbook.

As French Laundry recipes go, this one is fairly easy: Make a ganache by puréeing peanut butter, butter, sugar, and melted chocolate; chill; coat in melted chocolate; chill; dust in cocoa powder. It’s also astonishingly delicious. I brought them into work for a “pollinated pairing, ” our team’s occasional Friday celebration of food and drink, and my coworkers slurped them down. Our community manager asked, with hand poised over the plate, if she could take some home and then asked, on Monday, if any were left in the refrigerator. Our group’s designer left early, but I slipped her a truffle before she headed out: She said on the Monday after that it didn’t even make it to the car.

So consider us fans.

I’m not, however, a fan of the truffle dipping fork. I decided to give one of these delicate little forks a try, and I am far from a natural with it. I put the ganache ball into the room temperature chocolate, and then plucked it out with the fork. But the chocolate formed an uneven coat, and if I missed or the fork turned while buried in the chocolate, I ended up plunging the fork into the ganache and turning it into a malformed mess. Only at the end, when I switched to using my fingers, did I get the coating I wanted. I’ve made lots of truffles, but the dipping fork added nothing to the process except frustration.

Renewing America's Food Traditions

2008-09-25T07:41:00.001-07:00

A casual look around our country’s food supply reveals little more than a mix of sprawling, commercialized monocultures. Plants are grown and animals are raised with an eye to efficiency and profit. The nation’s highways swarm with worker-ant trucks that shuttle our agricultural products 1400 miles, on average, between the farm and the plate.

But take a close look, and you’ll see something different on the edges: The last remnants of America’s native foodstuffs and our pre-factory-farm agriculture. These are foods with real flavor, not the stripped-down blandness of food raised more for shippability than taste. Heritage turkeys have enjoyed the spotlight of the food press, but these are only the beginning if you know where to look.

If you don't know where to look, however, Renewing America’s Food Traditions is a good place to start. The book divides the United States into “food nations” (a practice already in place at Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) the organization, which birthed the book). A large swatch of California, for instance, is Acorn Nation — a name that rings true to someone like me who learned about acorn grinding holes at summer camp in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Alaska, not surprisingly, is Salmon Nation. The southeastern coast is Crab Nation. And so on. The names evoke the food patterns of the cultures who lived off the native bounty long before semis and trains connected every point in the U.S. with every other point.

Each of the book’s small and well-written vignettes focuses on one particular “heritage” food from the food nation that defines each section, focusing on one or two people deeply involved in preserving that food. Some, such as Honey Drip Cane Sorghum, I had never heard of. Some, such as the Olympia Oyster, are treats that I already seek out. Lovely photos and simple recipes accompany each piece. And — you other research-happy food writers will appreciate this — each two-page essay gives a list of resources where you can learn more about the food.

But not where to buy it. This is my only complaint about this book, which could live on your reference shelf or your coffee table with equal ease. I can understand why there aren’t instructions for poaching leatherback sea turtles. But where do I buy a Silver Fox rabbit?

It could be that the authors don’t want to contribute to the shuttling of food around the country — the editor is locavore founding father Gary Paul Nabhan, after all — but it seems unfair to build up interest in these foods and then snatch away the chance to find them.

But this is a must-have book for any food lover who cares about the more interesting ingredients available throughout our country.

This book was sent to me for review.

Hey all, there’s still room in my upcoming UCB Extension wine class. Sign up soon!

Really Perfect Roast Potatoes

2008-09-15T19:32:00.001-07:00

I’ve written about my roast potatoes before, but after making some last night, I thought it was time to resurface the technique. They’re dead simple and super delicious.

Preheat the oven to 425°. Cut waxy fingerling potatoes — say a generous handful per person — into halves or quarters. Chunks of onions make a nice addition. Place on a metal cookie sheet. Sprinkle generously with kosher salt and a woody herb: Rosemary is an obvious choice. Drizzle with a generous helping of olive oil, and use your hands to toss the potatoes with the salt, herbs and oil. Using your hands ensures an even coating. Cook until the cut surfaces of the potatoes are light to dark brown, 20-40 minutes. Don’t stir more than once, as the sides touching the metal sheet will get an extra thick crust if left undisturbed.

Serve with a thick, rare steak. And if you’re going to eat that, you should also serve a luxurious Cabernet Sauvignon or Bordeaux (a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc): The tannins and intense flavors of the wine will stand up to the flavorful meat. I poured a 2002 Volker Eisele Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, and though its fine-grained tannins had softened a bit, the deep fruit and remaining tannins still held their own against the meat.

The Genius Of Zuni's Bread Salad

2008-09-10T20:51:00.000-07:00

On a recent rare day-off — a short calm before the twin storms of Spore’s launch and the re-release of spore.com — I decided to make a dinner of roast chicken and bread salad. I thought it a spontaneous idea, but any Bay Area foodie knows that it is Zuni Cafe’s most famous dish. And, like many of the restaurant’s biggest hits, the recipe appears in the must-have Zuni Cafe Cookbook.

Judy Rodgers’ detailed bread salad recipe, modified to embrace seasonal ingredients, makes a delicious dish. But that’s not what struck me about it.

The bread salad pairs so well with the chicken because of the texture contrast. Even a good roast chicken has only two textures: tender flesh and crispy skin. The bread salad covers the whole spectrum between soft and crunchy. Her technique has you toast a few big chunks of bread and then tear them into pieces from bite-size to bread crumbs. Then she has you toss your 4 cups of bread with 1/4 cup vinaigrette: a scant amount. The result, as she says, is “a mixture of soft, moist wads, crispy-on-the-outside-but-moist-in-the-middle wads, and a few downright crispy ones.”

Cooking with texture seems like graduate-level cooking technique, but in fact we all know texture combinations that work well: crispy cones with smooth ice cream, crunchy cole slaw with tender barbecue, and crackling crust around creamy risotto in a rice cake. By triggering different sensations, these pairings keep our mouths interested in each bite. Still, it’s one thing to follow established traditions and another to pursue and explore this interplay. I wouldn’t say that I had incorporated texture at a conscious level, but now I plan to and see where it takes me.

Spore has shipped! Our new website is live. That means I may be able to return to life as a writer: I spent today researching an Art of Eating article, and I hope to get back into the blogging habit. Thanks for hanging on.

Fried Rice Cakes

2008-08-23T15:08:00.000-07:00

I still remember the risotto cake.

I ordered it 12 years ago while having lunch with a friend. A golden brown, perfectly shaped hockey puck of warm risotto arrived at our table, resting on a bed of greens. The outside was crunchy and just thick enough; the inside was creamy and melting.

I have chased that memory throughout the years. Even at the time, I made risotto cakes — it’s the best way to use up leftover risotto — but mine were always sloppy and unevenly cooked. That lunch gave me a goal.

And I think, over time, that I have reached that goal. By now, my technique is almost mindless, though it can be derailed by taking away my customary tools. If you find yourself with leftover rice, you should give these a try.

Starting
The easiest rice to use for fried cakes is leftover risotto. The starch that leaches into the cooking liquid makes for a creamy dinner but transforms into glue overnight in the refrigerator. You can shape this rice into cakes without even trying.

But with some extra work, you can even use regular rice. I made a pot of Massa rice last week, and the next night I mixed in an egg and a tablespoon or so of flour: Add enough so that the rice holds together when you squeeze a bit into a ball.

Shaping
One of the turning points in my rice-cake explorations came when I decided to use a circle mold — a round cookie cutter — to shape the patties. Before that moment, my patties still had ragged edges that marred the aesthetics and varying thicknesses that created irregular cooking times. After that moment, I made perfect disks of goodness.

Take a cookie cutter, put it on one edge of a plate, and smush your rice in. Push it into the corners, pack it down, and scrape any extra off the top. Remove the mold, repeat around the plate, and then put the plate in the refrigerator: You want to keep that starch gluey.

Cooking
What better way to reheat buttery, cheese-soaked risotto then frying? You’ll end up with a crusty exterior and a creamy interior, just like that risotto cake I had so many years ago. (You can bread them before frying, but usually I don’t.)

You can use any fat for frying, but I prefer butter. As the butter heats up, I skim the foam off the top to make it semi-clarified. Clarified butter can go to higher temperatures without burning. You want enough butter to come halfway up the cake. Any more and you get a dark band around the middle; any less and you get a light band of cooler rice.

Once the butter reaches the right temperature — a water drop flicked in should sputter loudly — I add the rice cake. I let the butter bubble and pop around the edges until the bottom half has formed a nice crust, and then I gently flip the cake with a spatula. When that half has formed its harder exterior, I pull the cake from the pan and place it on a paper-towel-lined plate to drain for a few minutes.

Serving
A simple salad of crunchy greens is a nice complement to this rich dish. I like to serve this as a light dinner, but smaller rice cakes make for a nice appetizer.

A crisp, aromatic white wine with a bit of weight — an Austrian Riesling, perhaps, or a white Rhône; — is usually my choice for the accompanying drink. The acidity cuts through the fat, while the weight and aromas weather the onslaught of rich flavor. But you would probably do just as well with a lighter red such as a Cru Beaujolais.

Only two or three more weeks until my life returns to what passes for normal around here. Thanks for your patience with the long lags between posts.

UC Berkeley Wine Studies II, Fall

2008-07-18T14:34:00.001-07:00

I’m once again teaching Fundamentals of Wine Studies II: Sensory Evaluation of Wines and their Components for UC Berkeley Extension, and I’d love to see some of you in the class. If you’ve ever wanted to see if I can actually babble about wine for 2 1/2 hours, now’s your chance. It starts on October 9 and continues for six weeks. By the end, you’ll have a great vocabulary for articulating what you taste in the glass, and you’ll be able to communicate your likes and dislikes with confidence. The class is less about regions (though some of that sneaks in) and much more about analysis. You can read my detailed description of the classes in earlier posts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

This semester, given that I live and work in the East Bay, I’ve arranged to teach the class in Berkeley. I hope that means that some of you can take it who couldn’t make it into SF in the past. Let me know if you have any questions, and I hope to see you in class.

Some Recent Food/Wine Books

2008-07-13T09:49:00.000-07:00

In March, Alder wrote a vinography.com post titled “Food And Wine Pairing Is Just A Big Scam.” The resulting comment thread surprised me: I didn’t think it was a particularly novel revelation that there’s never one and only one perfect wine for a meal. Some of the best wine writers in the industry — Karen MacNeil and Ed Behr to name two — have been arguing this point for years.

I disagree with Alder’s absolute stance about food and wine pairing — I have some basic guidelines that work well — but I don’t disagree that a major industry has formed around convincing people that they can only pick out a wine for dinner with an expert’s help.

How could I? I’ve been sent three food-and-wine-pairing books for review, and there are probably a dozen others out there. That gives me the chance to compare them instead of doing a full post for each.

He Said Beer, She Said Wine, Calagione & Old
Maybe you can’t judge a book by its cover, but its title is fair game. She’s an urbanely dressed sommelier; he’s a “guy’s guy” brewer. Together, they’re a couple that bickers about what to drink with dinner while maintaining outdated gender stereotypes. There’s even a photo of her standing with crossed arms and her back to him looking at the camera. I guess if they ever make a romantic comedy movie out of the book, they’re all set for the poster shot.

The frustrating thing about this book is that the eye-rolling gimmick hides decent information. It’s nice to see a food-pairing book give equal footing to beer — which in many ways is more food-friendly than wine — though it feels a little wrong that many of the recommended beers come from Calagione’s brewery. The two authors present wine and beer as a series of characteristics that expand your ability to find similar drinks: levels of oak in wine, for instance, and levels of hops in beer. The book encourages its readers to make their own judgment, though only after it has pre-biased them to the results. If someone says a wine smells like lemon zest, you’re likely to smell lemon zest on your next sniff. If a book says beer is the better choice for a dish, are you really going to be objective when you try it yourself?

But the information isn’t worth the cutesy dialog. Pick out a book that’s useful and not condescending. You’re an adult, and you deserve to be treated like one.

What To Drink With What You Eat, Dornenburg & Page
In the year and a half since I first reviewed this book, a mild annoyance of mine has become a full-blown rant: If you just tell a reader which wine goes with which food rather than explain why, you’ve abandoned that reader to ignorance. What To Drink is guilty of that sin, but it’s hard to argue with its voluminous lists, culled from the opinions of sommeliers around the country. If nothing else, it has the potential to introduce readers to new wines (and the book is mostly about wine, though there are other drinks in there) and provide brainstorming opportunities for jaded, cynical wine geeks like myself.

But I find it interesting that while I recommend it — even still — I almost never consult it. So why recommend it? I think the bulky lists offer something, even without an explanation as to why the wines work. They offer a wealth of possibilities and a reassurance that, in fact, there isn’t one wine for any food. There are tons. While it never says so, it underlines my basic food and wine premise: Most wines go with most foods. And that’s a lesson in its own right.

Williams-Sonoma Wine & Food, Joshua Wesson
I don’t look to the Williams-Sonoma books for the kind of cookbook I like. The ones I’ve seen are simple collections of recipes; I look for more technique in my tomes. So I listened politely but skeptically at a book launch party as the executive editor of the series told me how good their food and wine book is.

Then she sent me a copy.

The book organizes its sections by style of wine — Crisp Whites and Juicy Reds, for instance — just like the better modern wine lists. Each section describes the flavors and characteristics of the wine style. It then talks about how those traits affect the wine and food pairing. Finally, it gives several recipes that exemplify the kind of dish that suits the wine. Each of those recipes offers guidelines about the New World and Old World wines to seek out. It doesn’t give specific labels. It gives you terms you could use in a wine store: an Alsace Riesling, a Merlot-based Bordeaux. And for each of those recommendations, it offers a reason.

It educates and illustrates. It lets the reader understand what the author was thinking. What more can I ask for in a wine-and-food-pairing book?

Until It Looks Right

2008-06-21T20:16:00.000-07:00

I was speaking with a friend of mine last week who wanted ideas for a dinner party. She’s in New York now (*sniff*), and she told me what was in season there: She was still seeing lots of springtime produce. I suggested a strawberry-asparagus salad and explained the basic process (blanch 2-inch chunks of asparagus, slice strawberries into wedges, dress with red wine vinaigrette, serve) and then told her I garnished with mint. “How much mint?” she asked. I answered with my normal response to such questions: until it looks right. Get the food to look the way you want, and it will be close to the way you want it to taste.

This insight may be one of the many things my friend Tom taught me. Or we may have arrived there independently. I forget. Certainly, “until it looks right” was a common direction of his.

It’s the rule I use for salads of various kinds and salsa. Probably other dishes as well, but those are the ones where I do it consciously. Come to think of it, I add chocolate chips to cookies until the mix looks right.

Consider my friend’s strawberry-asparagus-mint salad. If you looked at a bite and saw the dark green of minced mint, what would you expect it to taste like? What if you looked at a bite and saw chunks of strawberry and asparagus gilded with little flecks of green?

How you, as a cook, choose the look is up to you, of course.

Tonight I made myself (Melissa is away) a pasta salad with figs, tomatoes, and basil. I added the chopped figs and tomatoes and mixed. I looked in the bowl and saw a sea of creamy yellow pasta with islands of red and purple. I added more figs and tomatoes until there were equals amounts of each color. Then I added minced basil until each bite had 5 or 6 flecks of green, which looked about right. Then I tasted. It needed salt, a little lemon oil, and nothing more: The ingredients were balanced.

Maybe this is obvious: I don’t know. But in my quest to cook from technique and not from a set of instructions, it’s been one of my most valuable guides.

Some other notes on salads that may be helpful as the mercury climbs up the thermometer’s tube. Mix with your hands: You won’t damage the ingredients, and you’ll end up with a better mix. Cut ingredients into similar shapes: Don’t do horizontal slices of strawberries with wands of asparagus. Finally, taste is the final decider: Cooking by look just gets you most of the way there.

Incidentally, I would have loved a figgy Semillon or a crisp rosé with my tomato-fig salad. The Semillon would have complemented the figs in the dish and contributed acidity, while the rosé would have done the same for the tomatoes. But I had a simple Greek red in the refrigerator, so I drank that instead.

Learning To Grill

2008-06-20T07:31:00.000-07:00

I remember the first time I tried to grill. I was just learning to cook well — about 13 years ago — and I decided to make a grilled something-or-other as dinner for a friend. I thought I knew the basics of grilling — it’s called cooking over fire, right? — but the flame on my charcoal kept going out. I kept adding lighter fluid.

When you find yourself battling with your girlfriend about whether the food tastes too much like lighter fluid, you’ve already lost the war.

Since then, I’ve learned more about grilling theory: You want an ambient heat, not roaring flames. But I have almost no grilling practice under my belt. Melissa and I have always lived in apartments, and a potential grill has faced the same problem as our smoker: No outdoor space. Not even a tiny deck because, believe me, I’d have used it.

But now we have a modest backyard, and on Memorial Day weekend we took advantage of my one day off and signed ourselves up for Americana 101 by buying our very own grill. I asked meriko what I should buy, and she told me all the things she loved about her large Weber kettle-style grill with the ashcan below, the vent above, and the liftable wings on the grill itself. Other foodies have confirmed that it’s the one to get.

But many have asked why I didn’t get a gas grill. I have a gas stove. If I wanted to cook over gas I would use that. No, I want the experience of hot charcoal, the taste of fire and smoke, and the variable temperature.

Plus, a gas grill is too easy.

If you’ve never learned to grill, how do you give yourself a crash course? I started with Cook’s Illustrated’s How to Grill. (As an aside, of the magazine’s many attempts at repackaging their recipes, I have always liked their first, the diminutive How Tos, the best.) It gave me pointers on fuel (hardwood charcoal), fire starting (use a chimney), getting the heat up, and setting up a grilling environment (high stack of coals on one side for high heat, one layer on the other side for lower heat). Within half an hour, my grill was fired up.

I am by no means a grilling master — our thin, lean porterhouse steaks came out medium instead of the more flavorful rare — but the grill is a permanent fixture now, and, assuming I’ll have a less hectic schedule this summer, we plan to use it often.

Remember me? I used to blog here. I’ve missed writing for OWF, but I’ve been very busy at work. I wasn’t joking about having one day off Memorial Day weekend. If you haven’t done so yet, visit spore.com and see what I’ve been up to. And while I didn’t work on Creature Creator, you should check out the trial version of this truly fascinating toy. You can find my creatures by looking for MaxisPuzzle in our “Sporepedia”.

Root Beer Floats

2008-05-24T10:19:00.000-07:00

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

On Fridays, my company has a TGIF gathering: They bring in beer and food, and we play the latest video games on the HD television nearby. It’s a descendant of the “beer bashes” that technology companies had in the boom period of the mid-90s, company-sponsored thank-yous for the hard work the staff had put in during the week. Those parties ended as funds dried up in the bust cycle of the late 90s and early 2000s, but Maxis has kept a modest version.

At some point in the past, my new team started its own Friday event. One member of the team brings in a pairing of a beverage — usually alcoholic — and food. This week, I volunteered to bring in root beer floats.

Melissa went shopping for ingredients — I haven’t been getting home in time to make it to the store — and I dug the Glace-A-Tron 6000 from its hiding spot in the basement. Thursday morning, I woke up early to make the custard base; Thursday night, I made the ice cream so that it would firm up overnight.

Everyone loved the throwback to their childhoods: digging spoons into the ice cream and then guzzling down the creamy root beer. Next time, I joked, I’ll make the root beer, too.

1998 Michele Chiarlo "Cerequio" Barolo

2008-05-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

Photo by Melissa Schneider

I planned the meal for five years.

Actually, it only took me an hour or so. We had just bought a bottle of Barolo, the tannic wine of Italy's Piemonte, at a wine shop in La Morra. We knew precisely when we would drink it: April 25, 2008. Though it ended up being April 26. The wine would be 10 years old by then — just about coming into drinkability &mdash and we’d be celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary.

Barolo is the Piedmont’s greatest wine. Osso buco is one of its greatest dishes. I couldn’t resist pairing them: The wine’s tannins and complex flavors could stand up to the braised veal shanks and the risotto milanese I planned to serve with it.

I conveniently forgot that late April can be scorching hot in the Bay Area. After all, it had rained on our wedding day.

So how appropriate that the weather was, once again, all wrong for the plans we had made. Fortunately, our part of Berkeley cools down quickly with the evening breeze off the Bay: Even if it wasn’t the dead of winter, we could enjoy the tender meat, creamy risotto, and rich sauce.

Any time you hoard a truly special bottle of wine, you fret about how it will be when you open it. And it turns out we had good reason to be nervous. At some point in the bottle’s life — presumably before we tucked it into its temperature-and-humidity-controlled storage unit — the cork had pushed out slightly. The cork was also soaking wet.

That’s not a good sign. It suggests that large amounts of oxygen have wormed their way into the bottle, probably ruining it.

But Barolo is a tannic wine, and tannins act as a preservative. Though we prepared for the worst, the wine had a heady aroma of spicy fruit and a rich flavor. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a lot better than it could have been.

A warm day for osso buco and a special wine that went awry. So what went right about our fifth-anniversary dinner? The only thing that really matters: my date. Before we ate, we clinked glasses, and I said, “To five years I wouldn’t have spent any other way.” Melissa and I have eaten together, drunk together, bought a new house together, traveled together, and more in the last 5 years, and I still say today what I said three years ago: She is the person I always want to see on the other side of the table.

Post Slackage

2008-05-06T07:40:00.000-07:00

I apologize for the slack in posting. I’m working a lot at my new job, which has not one but two looming deadlines. And Maxis has reawakened my videogame love, since the latest games are my office’s water cooler chatter. (In fact, if you’re on XBox Live, I’m oenoscribe.) So bear with me as I adjust to the new routine, and, as always, thanks for reading.

Technique: Chicken Rillettes

2008-04-19T15:03:00.000-07:00

I often buy a whole chicken for a week’s worth of dinners. The first two meals are easy: something with the legs and then something with the breasts. But what about the wings?

There’s not much meat on them; certainly not enough for a main course. In the past, I’ve picked the meager flesh from the bones and added it to omelettes or soufflés, dishes where you don’t want a big hunk of meat with rich eggs. But for a few recent chickens, I’ve made the wings into rillettes, a spread of shredded meat and fat.

I think I got the idea after making rabbit rillettes from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. While many books suggest treating rabbit rillettes just like pork rillettes — cook the meat slowly in fat — Rodgers takes a more complicated route that gives the delicate meat a chance to shine: Poach in water with mirepoix and white wine, add a pig’s foot for body, pound in a mortar and pestle, and dribble in fat in tiny amounts.

What had worked so well for rabbit might also work well with chicken, I thought. I modified the recipe — I don’t have pigs’ feet in my freezer on a regular basis, no matter what you think — but the results were still delicious, and the dish has been a recurring favorite.

Except I make them in an ad hoc way. You could argue that Rodgers’ recipe has little in common with my technique, but they share key kinships.

First, salt the wings. Sprinkle a handful of kosher salt onto a plate, press the wings (both sides) into the salt and set them on a dish in the refrigerator for 24 hours or so. The first time I made the dish, I tried to skin the wings: I urge you not to do this; it is time-consuming and ineffective.

The next day, poach the wings in a stick of butter and just enough water to cover them. (If you want to add a little dry white wine or white wine vinegar, please do. If you want to add spices and aromatics, please do.) Cook them at barely a simmer until the meat falls off the bone with even the glancing blow of a fork, about an hour to an hour and a half. Pull the wings from the liquid and let them cool briefly, and remove the liquid from the heat. Using your fingers, strip the bones of the meat and skin and put them into a mortar. Pound the meat with the pestle until it begins to flatten. Now dribble in a tiny bit of the fat from the pot — it will have risen to the top. Pound the meat some more. Dribble in a little more fat, and continue to pound. I probably add two or three teaspoons of fat over five or six doses. You want a spreadable paste of shredded meat, but you also want the flavor front and center: Too much fat will mute it. Season with pepper, smush into a ramekin, cover, and refrigerate. If you won’t use the rillettes that day, you can let the fat continue to cool and then spoon it over the rillettes to seal them in.

Then what? I smear rillettes onto bread or put it into dumplings. Two chicken wings do not yield a lot of rillettes, but two people can get a decent dinner out of them. The other night for a potluck, I smeared a dollop of rillettes and butter onto baguette slices and topped the smear with sliced radishes to make 18 bites of finger food. The rillettes added flavor, while the butter added richness and volume.

San Francisco Chronicle: Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc At A Crossroads

2008-04-12T07:55:00.001-07:00

When Melissa and I visited wineries in Marlborough, I was struck by the number of winemakers who said something along the lines of “Well, Sauvignon Blanc is kind of boring.” or “Sauvy keeps the accountants happy, I guess.” I was also surprised by the wide array of other grapes that wineries were bottling. Other than the occasional Pinot Noir, we rarely see anything other than Sauvignon Blanc here. It struck me that Marlborough has been so successful with the grape that it’s become difficult to get drinkers to buy anything else.

I wrote about these observations for the lead story in the Chronicle’s Wine section. And while you all may have gotten used to these announcements, this article has a special OWF bonus: Melissa took one of the pictures they used for the piece.

Food/Wine Pairing Tasting Notes

2008-04-11T15:34:00.000-07:00

Here is a question I often ponder. If you are going to suggest a wine to go with a particular dish (or vice versa), why would you just write a regular tasting note and not reference the dish? That thought crept into my mind again as I noticed this post on Personal Wine Buyer, whose author will be suggesting wine pairings for Design*Sponge. (And I only single him out because I just read his tasting note; I can’t think of the number of times I’ve seen this.)

Here is his write-up of the wine he chose to go with Matt Armendariz’s Sautéed Beet Greens with Sun-Dried Tomatoes and Pancetta:

Beautiful golden straw in color. Not extremely forward or exotic on the aromatics — a bit subdued on the nose. On the palate, this wine shows beautiful grapefruit and citrus, nice apple with some butter and almonds. Really nice minerality with great weight, balance and acidity with a nice crisp finish. This is a good value at about $18 a bottle — and just a really nice wine. Recommended.

Sounds like a wine I would like. But why, exactly, did he choose it to go with Matt’s dish? It doesn’t matter if you agree with him: Why that wine?

In my wine writing, I try to also be a wine educator. I want people to finish my pieces and think, “Hmm. I learned a little something.” I can and do write adjective-heavy tasting notes, but I don’t kid myself about the number of people who actually read them: very few, I think.

To me, his tasting note and its siblings in the bulk of the wine press are wasted opportunities. The author could have talked about how structure, weight, acidity, and flavor led him down that road. He could have given readers something to think about: a better way to think about wine than as a bag of descriptions. He could have empowered them in the wine shop. What happens when the average reader goes to their local hooch supplier and can’t find the wine? He’s stranded them: They have no way to articulate what they want. Furthermore, he hasn’t given them a language they can use in the future. He has described a wine and failed to give it any context. I, too, have done this in my professional writing. That doesn’t make it right.

Give a man a fish, the saying goes, and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and feed him for a lifetime. As wine writers, we owe it to our readers to teach them to fish.

Two-Part Hominy

2008-04-11T11:26:00.000-07:00

As I cleaned out my pantry at the apartment, I rediscovered a small bag of large, dried corn kernels, brown at the tips and expanding into dusky yellow balloons. Melissa quickly spotted their resemblance to Corn Nuts.

But the label on the Rancho Gordo bag said hominy. I had bought it one Saturday on a lark; it beckoned to me, challenging me to discover its charms and challenges. I brought it home, put it in our pantry, stacked some pasta boxes in front of it, and forgot about it. Its rediscovery seven or eight months later prompted a slight frenzy of research as I tried to remind myself what it was and how to cook it.

Hominy is corn that’s been de-hulled by being cooked or soaked in an alkaline solution, a process called nixtamalization. It is the precursor to grits and masa, staples of Southern cuisine and Central American cuisine, respectively.

But I would not be grinding my hominy into grain: I wanted to cook the kernels whole for posole, a stew or soup that showcases the yellow nuggets. You can find posole recipes on the Rancho Gordo site, and from them you can extract a simple cooking technique: Soak the kernels overnight or don’t, but simmer for 3 hours.

First Attempt
The first time I cooked my corn, I skipped the pre-soaking step, though perhaps, “I forgot about it” is more correct. I opened a can of diced tomatoes, sautéed sliced shallots, added the kernels to the pot, and then poured in the liquid from the tomatoes plus enough water to cover the hominy by about an inch. I brought the water to a boil, then reduced it to a simmer for 3 hours. Every half hour or so, I checked the hominy and added water as needed. About 2 hours in, I added the tomatoes and some fresh oregano from our yard. (You can use dried oregano — indeed I rummaged through boxes in vain looking for my bag of Sonoran oregano — in which case you should add it at the beginning of the cooking time.)

Harold McGee, in On Food and Cooking, describes hominy as having a “dense, chewy consistency.” Certainly this first batch did: We exercised our jaws and worked the kernels to the pulpish state we needed before we could swallow. It wasn’t bad, just a lot of work. I imagined adding crispy bits of fried tortilla to create a texture beyond tough.

Second Chance
A week later, I decided to give hominy another try. This time, I ~~remembered~~ chose to soak the kernels for 6 hours before they went into the pot. I used a similar recipe, substituting green garlic for shallots, adding Spanish-style chorizo, and soaking sun-dried tomatoes in boiling water to create both ingredients and cooking liquid.

Melissa and I tentatively took bites, prepared for another chew-a-thon. But the soaking time had softened the kernels and reduced the chewiness to simply pleasant.

Like dried beans, hominy can handle a wide range of stew-y ingredients. You can probably slow-cooker it — I haven’t tried yet — but even without a slow cooker you can leave it simmering gently on your stove as you attend to other things. Just check it periodically in case the water has evaporated. It reheated well the next day for lunch.

Both times I made this, we drank beer with it. Both times, in fact, we drank Cantillon: once the gueuze and once the Rose de Gambrinus. I like the beer, and I figured its body was comparable to the dish’s weight. The acidity would carry the flavor despite the high-acid tomatoes in the dish, and the beer’s strong flavor would still be present despite the chorizo.

Not About Food: New Job

2008-04-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

Since so many of you were so kind with your thoughts and comments about my layoff, I wanted to let you know that after a flurry of interviews and leads, I have accepted an offer for a new job. Technically, I’m jumping the gun a tiny bit, but I’ve got the offer letter in my hands and I plan to sign it.

So barring any disasters, I will be doing server-side work for Spore, the upcoming game from Maxis. If you’re a video gamer, you’ve probably heard of the game. If you’re not, just think of it as the iPhone of video games. The Wikipedia page gives a good overview of the real information and rumors.

I’m super excited to be on the team: I meshed well with everyone I met, and they thought the same of me. The game is slick, the challenges will be really interesting, and my new commute is about 10 minutes by car. And several of my new teammates are serious foodies. (I should note, however, that I will probably have to cut back on my freelance writing for a bit, as I’ll be arriving right at the beginning of the crunch cycle.)

Thank you again for all your kind words (and, in a couple of cases, the leads you sent me).

Judging The American Wine Blog Awards

2008-03-31T23:08:00.000-07:00

After Tom Wark announced the finalists for the American Wine Blog Awards, there was a lot of grumbling about who made the cut and who didn’t. This is inevitable; I judge the relevance of any award by the amount of controversy it causes. Few people care that they didn’t get an award they didn’t know about. But as bloggers and their readers grouse, I thought I’d offer my perspective as a judge.

The judging process was straightforward: Anyone could nominate a blog in any of the categories, and when nominations closed, Tom sent each of the judges a spreadsheet with all the nominees. As far as I know, every nominated blog was on the spreadsheet, except for the ones written by the judges and the ones that didn’t meet Tom’s eligibility requirements. Each of the six judges ranked five finalists in each category, and then Tom combined all those to come up with the top four finalists he presented to readers.

My Judging
Judges could use any criteria we wanted for deciding our top five. I gave 50 points for the “so what?” factor, which varied based on the category. For the Single Subject category, for instance, my “so what?” translated into a simple question: If I wanted to learn about your subject, would your blog be a good way to do it? Then I gave 40 points for writing ability: Can the blogger communicate in a logical way? Does s/he demonstrate good knowledge rather than knee-jerk, poorly considered opinions? Finally, I gave 10 points for mechanics: Does the blogger know that it’s and its are separate words? Does s/he drop words from sentences? I gave this little weight in the total because most blogs don’t have copy editors. (For the graphics awards, I just gave a single score.)

I read the front page of entries for each site, and then all the posts from last September — sometimes people beef up their posts at awards time. I took notes on each blog. Brutal notes, too: I summed up one site with “blah blah blah” and another with “who nominated this site?” It didn’t matter if the site’s author was a real-life friend, a social-networking “friend,” or a total stranger. I tried to be as objective as one can be in a subjective context.

Is This The Best We Can Do?
Tom wrote of the finalists, “The collection of finalists … is a stellar example of all the things that are outstanding about the wine blogosphere.” As someone who pored through all the nominees, I had the opposite view: Is this the best we can do? There were one or two categories where I wished I could submit just three finalists, not five. In my scheme, not one site scored above 90 points (though there was at least one 89).

I am guilty of many of the sins I noticed on other blogs. I’m not sure how I would grade OWF if I were looking at it through the objective lens I turned on the WBA nominees. So I used my Web-wide jaunt as a reminder about what I could do to improve this site.

Some of you may find these little discoveries interesting. Some of you may tell me to take a hike (or, you know, some other phrase). That’s fine, because I want to preface these comments with one bit of advice: Write your blog for yourself. Writing for rewards and recognition is a sucker’s game. I have felt the sting of being overlooked for awards, but I finally remembered that I write OWF for my own benefit; my readers seem to keep coming back, so who cares if I don’t have a little badge in my sidebar?

What I Learned From The AWBA Nominees
Context matters. If I want to read page after page of "berries-cherries-flowers" tasting notes and irrelevant scores, I’ll pick up one of the big wine magazines. If I want to read uneducated, fawning press about some new health effect of wine, I’ll turn to newspapers. As bloggers, we can tell our readers why a given wine matters (or doesn’t) and where it fits in the world. We have the ability to talk about how it moves us (or doesn’t). We can wrap news stories in our own opinions and research. We can take a reader farther than the magazines can. We can teach and inform.

Personality matters. As bloggers, we don’t have to adhere to a dry, third-person editorial voice. We can be ourselves. We can use the first-person perspective that few feature wells allow. Of course, too much personality can grate on the reader, but too much is better than none at all. When I read a blog post, I want to get a sense of the person who wrote it. I want to care enough to click on the “About” link at the top of your page. We should let ourselves shine through a bit more.

Writing matters. I’m not a prescriptivist about grammar, despite what you may think. But you don’t need to memorize Strunk & White to communicate ideas in a useful way. Writing is a craft before it’s an art, and almost anyone can learn the craft. Magazines and newspapers have hard-working editors who clean up a writer’s prose: We have to rely on ourselves. I gave some advice about this in an earlier post — and I would add A Writer’s Coach to my list of recommended books — but I think many blogs would benefit from a few hours between writing and posting and one last careful read before the author hits Publish.

We have the opportunity to transform the way people look at wine. Our readers bond with us, learn about our lives, and trust our recommendations in ways most wine writers can’t imagine. We can introduce our readers to something beyond the mass-market bottles and the everyday grapes. We can show them that high quality doesn’t only come from a big magazine.

Relying On Tools

2008-03-28T10:39:00.000-07:00

I like to believe, despite the many boxes our friends packed and moved, that I am a minimalist about kitchen gadgets. A good knife, a solid whisk, a handful of wooden spoons, a few bowls, and a couple pots and pans are all a cook needs for most tasks. At least, that’s what I tell myself and anyone who asks.

It turns out that I take my gadgets for granted.

I can finally cook simple food in the kitchen: There are still drop cloths everywhere, but there is now a small work area next to our recently-uncovered refrigerator and stove. I was able to make a simple dinner of pan-seared sausage atop rice that had been cooked in Champagne and beef stock with carrots, celery, and onion.

The problem came the next night.

I had leftover rice, so I decided to fry up rice cakes and serve them atop a simple salad. When I’ve done this before, I’ve puréed some of the rice in my food processor to release the starch left in the grain — this is regular rice, not risotto rice, which hemorrhages starch into its cooking liquid. Where is the food processor? That I know: In an open box. But where are all its parts? I don’t know. I could combat the problem, I figured, by using my other trick: packing the rice into a circle mold. Where are my circle molds? I don’t know. Where is the large spatula I needed to flip the cakes? I don’t know. Where are my whisks so that I could make a vinaigrette? I don’t know: I used the “shake oil and acid in a bowl” approach. Where are my bowls so that I could dress the greens? I don’t know. (Though I did find a ginormous bowl that sufficed.)

I stressed and fumed and ranted as my rice cakes fell apart, all because I couldn’t find the gear that I quietly rely on in the kitchen. Maybe I’m not such a minimalist, after all.

Dine For A Change, April 3, 2008

2008-03-27T10:42:00.000-07:00

On April 3, have a good meal while donating to a worthy cause. Twenty-five Bay Area restaurants and stores will donate a portion of that day’s till to San Francisco Women Against Rape, an organization that educates about sexual assault and helps women who are victims of that horrible trauma. From Bi-Rite Market to our old neighborhood restaurant Pho 84, you have a wide range of options for donating. Take the opportunity to try a new restaurant, or visit an old favorite. Either way, you’ll be doing a good thing.

Berkeley Bites

2008-03-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

Our new house doesn’t have a kitchen. It did when we bought it, but before we moved in we turned that room into a miniature Christo installation, using plastic drop cloths to enshroud every surface while we sand down our smurf-blue walls and ceilings, prime them, and paint them — we’re just beginning to emerge from that process. This has been a glimpse into our lives when we remodel the kitchen in the next few years.

In the meantime, we’ve spent dinnertime exploring the restaurants in our neighborhood. Here are my thoughts on them, but I’d love to hear yours about good, inexpensive spots in our area. (As a related aside, Melissa discovered this sprawling list, a website that predates blogging, of restaurant reviews compiled by a few dedicated souls.)

Breads Of India
Our closest restaurant is a revered spot in this neck of Berkeley’s woods. The ever-changing menu offers a diverse spread of delicious Indian food, but the real treat is the naan. Each day, the restaurant makes four or five different kinds. The menu suggests naan pairings with the main courses. Garlic naan is always on the list, but the others change every day. Each naan is the size of a dinner plate: One naan and one samosa for each of us makes a filling (though not well-balanced) meal.

Picante
This always-busy Mexican restaurant is a popular weeknight stop for us. (And yes, for you purists, its cuisine is more Americanized than authentic.) The food’s good and filling, and the prices are cheap.

Fellini’s
I didn’t have high hopes for our little neighborhood Italian restaurant, especially since they trumpet their “Best Vegan Brunch” award. But they not only use dairy and meat in their non-vegan dishes, the restaurant turned out to be pretty decent. Their steamed kale was intriguing, though I feel like I can make it with more balanced flavors, and the pasta was good. The small wine list featured some esoteric Kermit Lynch bottles, including at least one of his very few Italian imports and his Cuvée Kermit Lynch wine. And Tuesday nights are No Corkage nights, which I support.

Sea Salt
Though the prices prevent this from being an everyday restaurant, it was perfect for Melissa after she spent a grueling day sanding our kitchen walls to prep them for painting. A nice selection of oysters, great seafood, and an excellent wine list make this a top choice, but you pay for what you get.

Barney’s
Every now and then, we get a real craving for Barney’s sloppy hamburgers, only to be disappointed when the reality doesn’t live up to our memory. But when you have only a mild craving, the Bay Area chain cooks up a decent burger.

Lanesplitter Pizza
We rarely ordered pizza to be delivered to our apartment, so ordering from Lanesplitter was sort of a novelty. But the pizza was so-so, and I don’t think we’ll order from them all that often.

Gioia
Gioia, on the other hand, is worth the 5-minute drive to pick up a pie for ourselves. Though the pizza slices were floppier than I might like, the toppings had a deep flavor. (The sausage on ours was from top-flight charcuterie — and friends of OWF — Fatted Calf.)

Not About Food: The Other Kind Of Java

2008-03-19T21:51:00.001-07:00

On Tuesday, our company’s president came all the way from Chicago to pay us a surprise visit.

Many of you are probably thinking the same thing we all did: Uh oh. And sure enough, headquarters is shutting down our office and laying all of us off at the end of May.

A few of you remember that this has happened to me before. That time, I took a month or so off, cooked a lot, made bread everyday, and generally loafed around. Now, I have a mortgage; my attitude has changed.

I already have a few promising job leads, but I decided to cast my net further out to sea: to all of you, in fact. If you’re hiring senior Java programmers — full-time writing probably isn’t realistic — and you’re in the San Francisco-East Bay area, I’d love to chat with you about a possible fit. Just drop me a line, and I’ll send you my resume. I’m pretty open to possibilities: I’ve worked in very small companies and very large ones in several different domains. I like in-the-trenches programming work that gets problems solved.

And if you’re not hiring, think good thoughts for me. I’m not panicked at all; I’m getting a good severance and I have always kept a large chunk of savings on hand because layoffs are a natural part of the modern-day technology industry. Still, tapping into that reserve isn’t my first choice.

Class Update: Flying Blind/Going On A Blender

2008-03-17T10:36:00.000-07:00

The last night of Fundamentals II is always fun. I start the night with a “guess the wine” exercise. As I told my class, being able to deduce a wine from its aromas and flavors is little more than a neat party trick for most people. But focusing on a glass and bringing your experience and memory to bear forces you to think about the wine and take time with it. Too often, we scarf our dinners and gulp our wine: There is value in giving your senses a chance to do their jobs.

I tried to pour wines that were similar but different compared with wines I had poured before. A California Sauvignon Blanc instead of a Sancerre. An Austrian Riesling instead of a German version. After they put forth their thoughts and their guesses, I told them the right answer and told them what could have served as clues. Those grassy, cat pee notes are Sauvignon Blanc, but the riper fruit suggested the New World. The fact that the Riesling wasn’t sweet suggested a country other than Germany. This kind of thing takes practice: As I said, “You’ll be able to impress your friends but your liver will be shot.”

For the second part of the class, I let the students blend their own wines. Rubicon’s winemaker generously donated barrel samples of three Bordeaux varieties: Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Cabernet Franc. (This was a connection set up a year and a half ago when the class’s former instructor was Rubicon’s estate ambassador.) Each student got a generous pour of each; they had to come up with a blend, explain why they chose the proportions they did, give it a name, and figure out a marketing strategy. Some found that their blends didn’t work well; some found that their blends were great. Some emphasized the fruit character and went for a “drink it now” appeal. Others layered in the tannic Cabernet Sauvignon for a bottle that would age well and develop complexity. They were almost all able to articulate the qualities of the wine they made, in better terms, I think, than they would have used at the beginning of the class.

Finally, of course, I poured the soon-to-be-released 2005 Rubicon Cabernet Sauvignon, a very nice treat from the winemaker. With their own blending experiments fresh in their minds, they appreciated the subtlety, smoothness, and complexity of the official wine.

Because we had talked about botrytis, I poured everyone a little Tokaji Aszu, the famous Hungarian dessert wine, as they filled out their evaluation forms. Even in the last fifteen minutes of the course, I didn’t let up on them: I asked for an explanation for the rich orange color, and someone guessed (correctly) that it was from oxidation. I talked about the puttonyos classification for Tokaji (these days, a measure of residual sugar, but in the past an indicator of the number of baskets — puttonyos — of botrytized grapes that had been poured in to the press) and mentioned Tokaji Eszencia and dry Tokaji.

I always have a mix of sadness and relief when class ends. The class is a lot of work, but you can’t spend six nights with the same group of people without feeling closer to them. I know what people like, where they shop, and their favorite foods. They know my preferences and quirks, and they were all excited to hear that I would have the Wine section’s lead story the Friday after class ended.

Best of all, I can hear in their comments that they are more confident about their wine knowledge. They now talk about balance, complexity, oak, tannins, brettanomyces, and more.

SF Chronicle: Vineyard Nurseries

2008-03-14T07:56:00.000-07:00

If you’ve already seen the lead story in the Chronicle’s Wine section, I know what you must be thinking: “Geez, Derrick, how cliched can you get? A story about vineyard nurseries?”

No, wait. I’m thinking of a different topic. In fact, the small-but-crucial nursery industry rarely gets coverage in the consumer press; I’m not sure how much coverage it gets in the trade press. But just about any vine you see in a vineyard comes from one of the handful of nurseries in the state, and lots of their stock comes from a small department at UC Davis.

I guess I have a thing for geeky wine topics — reverse osmosis, barrel alternatives, heritage cabernet clones — and I eagerly said yes when my editor asked if I wanted to cover this topic. I got a more in-depth look at how vineyards get vines, and I hope I conveyed that to the readers (by the way, be sure to check out the pictures as well). Along the way, I realized, more than ever, that plants are just crazy weird. You lop them into bits, glue them onto some other plant, and they start growing just like normal. Weird.

Book Review: A Geography Of Oysters

2008-03-12T12:22:00.000-07:00

I consider myself pretty oyster savvy, but the other night I looked at a restaurant’s oyster selection with new eyes. The names gave me clues they hadn’t before, and I had enough knowledge to comment on the presence of Olympias and Belons (these from Maine, I think), both unusual fare.

The secret to my new awareness? Rowan Jacobsen’s A Geography Of Oysters, an exhaustive look at the North American oyster industry. (Like all modern books, it has a companion website; unlike most such sites, this one is deep and useful.) Rowan was the managing editor at The Art of Eating for a time, but this is such a good reference that I have to recommend it, even though our former working relationship straddles my “know too well to review” line.

Rowan has that Art of Eating passion for extensive research. You will learn about the life cycle of an oyster, the history of oyster cultivation, and the many different farming techniques. And that’s all before he gives you a detailed tour of oyster regions, breaking them down further into the individual oysters that come from them. You’ll learn that a Malpeque can come from anywhere on Prince Edwards Island, while a Colville Bay comes from one tiny point. You’ll learn that the original Wellfleets and Bluepoints no longer exist: Each has been replaced by oyster seed brought from somewhere else. His detailed surveys include taste profiles of each different oyster type. And, of course, he has practical information for the oyster shopper, from shucking to recipes.

As good as the information is, the writing is the pearl in its shell. Rowan is one of the writers I look to as a model; he has a knack for colorful prose with a snappy tone and wit. Of life as an adult oyster, he writes, “You find a nice spot, settle into the lotus posture, and do nothing but eat, breathe, and periodically blow off a third of your body mass in one titanic ejaculation.” He ponders the use of the word terroir in reference to an oyster’s unparalleled ability to reflect its environment, writing, “Terroir, after all, refers to terra firma, and oysters’ terra isn’t very firma. But it’s a term already familiar to most readers, and speaking of meroir would get you laughed out of most restaurants …” It’s rare to find such pretty prose, and I feel like sending snippets to all the crappy writers out there.

Oysters are the ultimate foodie food; A Geography Of Oysters is the ultimate guide to them.

Class Update: A Night Of Terroir!

2008-03-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

I started class the other night by asking how many of my students had heard the term terroir: Most had. Then I asked them what it meant, and the room quieted down. Tentatively, they began to mention the definitions they had heard while I scribbled them on the board. “Of the earth.” “The effects of soil on the vine.” “That a wine tastes like where it came from.” And so on.

As I told them, there’s no right answer. What, exactly, defines terroir is one of the most-debated topics in the ivory tower of wine geekdom. I gave them Matt Kramer’s clever definition — somewhereness — and my favorite description — a sense of place. I told them that some people say it’s whatever nature gives to the grape, but I have a more inclusive description: I don’t feel that you can separate the culture so easily. The way a vintner trains a vine. The traditional mindsets about winemaking. A Bordeaux must taste the way it does in part because the English were such a strong market for hundreds of years.

So how do you teach something that has no definition? You pour a lot of wine and talk about the factors that shaped each one.

I started the class by pouring a traditional Chablis (which is made with Chardonnay) and a rich, though unoaked, California Chardonnay. The descriptions overlapped to some extent (lemon zest, for instance) but the California Chardonnay evoked tropical fruits and had a heavy weight, while the Chablis prompted descriptions of stones and seemed more acidic. That, I told them, was the broadest stroke of terroir. Here in California, we get hot temperatures that saturate the grapes with fruit flavors and lower the acid. In Chablis, the cold temperatures and chalky soil tend to produce leaner wines with less fruit and more minerals.

After that, I poured a Sancerre and a Pouilly-Fumé. The two villages practically face each other across the Loire river, and both white wines are made with Sauvignon Blanc. The wines were similar, my students decided, but they did call out differences. This is terroir on a smaller scale and still, to some extent, in broad strokes. Sancerre has more south-facing slopes, but the chalky soil and steep slope drain water away from the thirsty vines, yielding more acidity despite the greater sun exposure. Pouilly-Fumé is flatter, and the flinty soil can leave a taste in the wine (though not in this one). (As a digression, we talked about Fumé Blanc, the California term, coined by Robert Mondavi, for Sauvignon Blanc made in a Loire-esque style.)

Next, I poured three Premier Cru Burgundies from 2005: Morot’s Cent-Vignes and his Toussaints and Xavier Monnot’s Toussaints. This is terroir at a more intimate level: different vineyards within a single region. Oftentimes in this class, students pick the vineyard bottlings as more similar than the ones from the same producer, but most of the class called the two Morots as the most similar. That didn’t exactly make a good illustration of the Burgundian fascination with terroir, but I would have sided with them: The Morots had more extraction and heavier flavors.

We closed the night with two Spätlese Rieslings from Kerpen in the Mosel. Same ripeness level, same region, but, again, different vineyards close by each other (and, I believe, on the same side of the river.) We talked about the differences and how the Mosel, along with Burgundy, is one of the few places where terroir is at its most obvious.

This week, we’ll be talking about blending and blind tasting.

Beer Glasses (Not Goggles), SF Chronicle

2008-03-07T06:51:00.000-08:00

Delve into wine even a little bit, and you'll quickly discover the fetishistic appreciation of glassware. Crystal companies have made serious bank convincing the world that it needs a different wine glass for every style of wine, a marketing message that I find dubious at best, as it often reeks of pseudoscience.

But the wine world has nothing on the beer world, where it sometimes seems like every beer has a unique glass. I dug into that world a little bit for an article in today’s Chronicle. The subject is far richer than anyone can fit into 800 words, but I had a great time researching the history of beer glasses. (And related subjects: I found an interesting journal article arguing that George Ravenscroft at best funded lead crystal and didn’t develop it himself.)

For those who enjoy systems as much as I do, I found a couple of guides to beer glass shapes while working on this: one at beeradvocate.com and another at johnsgrocery.com, which is also a good retail source for esoteric glassware.

Class Update

2008-02-29T13:53:00.000-08:00

I meant to provide weekly “behind the podium” updates from my wine class, but the move to the house consumed a lot of time. Instead, I'll catch you all up on the last few weeks.

Class 2: Your Nose Knows
This class is a lot of work for the teacher, but I know — as someone who took this class several years ago — that it gives the students good tools for identifying aromas in wines. I spent the afternoon chopping a wide range of ingredients and putting them in little Dixie cups with foil covers. Lemon wedges, lemon zest, canned peas, liver, salumi, bacon, steak, chalk, and many more — I think I ended up with 70 samples. I write the name of the ingredient on the bottom of the cup. Students sniff the cup, try to guess the aroma, and then check their answer on the bottom of the cup. For those aromas that are limited to white or red wines, I put the sample into a cup and pour in a neutral white or red wine. It’s easy to recall an aroma when a person says its name — if I say, “vanilla,” you can probably conjure up its odor — but much harder to go from an aroma to its name. This is one of the hardest parts about articulating what’s in a glass, and of course the subject of infinite amusement to non-connoisseurs. “Flutter of Edam and soupçon of asparagus,” indeed.

As I told my students, I’m of two minds about the push to standardize wine descriptions (perhaps best personified by Dr. Ann Noble’s Aroma Wheel). On one hand, I encourage my students to develop their own tasting vocabularies: This helps them remember wines and draws from their own experience. On the other hand, a standard vocabulary allows you to read someone else’s tasting note and make sense of it, and it allows you to articulate something meaningful to a sommelier or wine merchant.

Either way, you have to train yourself to map scents to names, and this exercise gives students a chance to start that re-education. After we smelled the samples — a chaotic flow of cups around the room — I poured a number of aromatic and typical wines and asked for descriptions. Starting from that moment, my class couldn’t get away with “citrus” or “berry” as descriptions: They had to drill down and tell me which citrus and which berry. They had to tell me if a wine smells more like citrus zest or the fruit as a whole. (The other night, one student said a wine smelled like shoe polish, and another one quipped, “brown shoe polish,” which gave the class a good laugh.)

Class 3: Faults And Flaws
“Next week,” I told them at the end of the second class, “we’ll be smelling all sorts of stinky wines.” Hardly a good sales tactic. But I think this class is one of the most educational for one main reason: I scrounge up corked bottles from local wine shops, and then I pour (hopefully) uncorked glasses of the same wine. (Because of a cold, I couldn’t smell that night, and I passed around a “good” bottle that was corked as well, which everyone thought was amusing.) Naturally, I talked about how cork taint gets into a bottle, alternate closures, what to do when you get a corked bottle at a restaurant, and so forth.

I also poured samples of flaws that might not be flaws in the right context. A brown color and nutty aroma — signs of oxidation — are flaws in a recent Chardonnay but features of oloroso sherry. A hint of nail polish is a flaw in most wines, but not in an Amarone or Valpolicella. Brettanomyces, the yeast that gives wines a leathery, sweaty, “barnyard” aroma, is a flaw to a UC Davis graduate but not to a vigneron in the Southern Rhône or Burgundy.

Class 4: Oak
From a shopping perspective, this is probably the hardest class in the entire course. I went to the store and asked for wines with varying oak profiles: neutral, lots of American, lots of French, light toast, heavy toast. This isn’t how wine merchants categorize their inventory, so they had to do some thinking. But I found a good selection.

In my lecture, I tried to emphasize that oak is analogous to spice in cooking. You can overdo it, but a little can add complexity to a wine. I talked about barrels (and printed out my article on barrel alternatives) and the different variables that could affect the wine: the wood, the toasting, the size, and the age. I talked about New World versus Old World philosophies (more oak versus less, to paint in broad strokes) and increasing shifts to an “international” palate, which tends to have more oak character.

Rather than give the students a list of oak aromas — there are tons — I told them to look for umami scents — toasted bread, caramel, molasses, soy, chocolate, coffee — and different types of spices and nuts. The class called out descriptions and I wrote them down, and then we talked about which aromas were from the oak. By the end, I think they had a good sense of whether a wine had seen a lot of oak or if it was well-integrated: They could describe wines as oaky or not even before they knew what had happened to it in the cellar. (I pour the wines blind.)

The Glass Pantry

2008-02-26T22:08:00.000-08:00

Packing, moving, and unpacking have been time-consuming and stress-inducing. But there is an upside: Long-lost treasures have re-emerged.

I had been looking for Georgeanne Brennan’s The Glass Pantry in my bookcases for a while, but I hadn’t found it. I worried that I had gotten rid of it.

But the other day, as I cleared off the magazines on our bedroom’s bookcase, I found the book buried in a stack of Wine Spectators. As soon as Melissa got home, I gleefully showed it to her.

The book was much as I remembered it: pretty preserves held in glass jars, mapped to seasons. Relishes and mustards. Vinegars and oils. Jams and jellies. These aren’t large batches but small lots.

As I look through it now, I realize that I have a sense for how to make many of the treats; indeed, I have ideas for how I might improve some. But each page provides new inspiration as I imagine a productive garden in the backyard (instead of the bamboo infestation we have right now). I want this life of glittering glass goodies tucked away in my chilly basement and summoned later to liven a dish.

My interest in preserving has flared up of late. I think our first house has brought out the nesting urge in both of us, but I think its physical layout — a big kitchen and storage space — moves me to freeze flavor in time the way Brennan suggests. Even before the garden takes off, I plan to use her book as a launching point for experiments. After all, our most common farmers’ market, Berkeley’s Saturday market, is mere minutes away. Perhaps the next time we go there, I’ll buy an excess of shallots and preserve them in brine, as she suggests. Rediscovering this lost book has awakened my slumbering still room chef.

A curious side note: When I looked at her recipe for Nectarine Mustard, I was surprised to see her reference Curt Clingman, “longtime chef at Oliveto.” I didn’t know him when I last looked through the book, but Curt has become a friend of ours, though we think of him as the co-owner of Jojo, our favorite Oakland restaurant.

American Wine Blog Awards

2008-02-22T12:37:00.000-08:00

Last year, Tom Wark at Fermentation hosted the American Wine Blog Awards, and they proved popular enough to do a second time. If you read wine blogs — I consider OWF a food and wine blog, which means it doesn’t quite fit in either category — you should go to his site and nominate some of your favorites. Nominations close on February 27, so you have time to think about it. Right now he’s only taking nominations, so if a wine blog is mentioned you don’t need to nominate it again. You’ll get a chance to vote on the finalists in a few weeks.

Remember That Survey? Here Are The Results

2008-02-20T11:23:00.000-08:00

Back in September, I asked you to participate in a survey to help me better understand my readers. I had 135 responses, which I estimated to be 2.7 percent of my readership at the time. (My readership is a larger number than my daily visitor count, because many people read me occasionally. Of course that means I can’t tell you how many distinct readers I have; I know it’s more than my daily visitor count, and my weekly/monthly visitor counts just add up all the daily numbers.) That response rate probably doesn’t give a meaningful result, but I have kept your comments in mind since then.

Only in mind, in fact. Some of you have written and asked me to publish the results. I apologize for dragging my heels on this. Here, at last, are the results, livened up with the Google Chart API. (Note that those charts might not show up in your RSS reader.)

How Do You Read OWF?
RSS/Site is for people who see the update in their RSS reader and then click through to the site.

These data didn’t surprise me because I see which browsers people use to visit this site. In addition to the obvious clients, I also see lots of RSS readers of various stripes. For those who don’t use an RSS reader, it doesn’t make sense to come here every day; I only update once or twice a week.

Do You Read An Obsession With Everything Else?

I used to say that I could count OWEE readers on one hand, but clearly I was wrong. Still, I’m not surprised to see so few OWEE readers: My rants about silly editing issues and my links to mechanical puzzle sites probably have a more limited audience.

Do You Ever Follow The Snacks Links On The Right?

One person pointed out that those who read the site via RSS don’t see the sidebar. I posted about the feature when I first implemented it, but I agree that most RSS readers have probably forgotten about it. (Of course, Snacks has its own feed, but the links that make it in are even more eclectic than the ones that show up on OWEE.

What Do You Like About OWF?
Fifty-five of you left comments here, and I was happy to see that you all like the facets I’m proudest of: the writing style (thanks!), the strong opinions, the deep knowledge, the “from scratch” mentality, the focus on techniques, and of course Melissa’s photos. I appreciated all the kind words you left.

What Don’t You Like About OWF?
(I rolled the next question — Other Comments? — into this one.) Forty-three of you offered suggestions for things I could improve. Many of you wrote something along the lines of “Do you ever cook anymore? Maybe you should write about that.” Here’s one typical comment in that vein:

… lately you've veered much more in the direction of writing more about food politics, the food blog community, etc. and have had less frequent posts about actual cooking, which were what drew me to the blog originally. It seems like the blog is less focused on actual food lately and more focused on talking about food, if that makes sense. I'd love to see more technique-focused posts, like the ones you've done in the past on rendering lard and making gravlax, for example.

I may have corrected this a bit since then, but once we’re settled in the house, you’ll find lots more cooking posts. I promise. A number of you gloss over the wine posts — “I tend to read the food posts more closely than the wine posts... but that's my habit in all my reading,” says one commenter — and the book reviews — “Honestly, your book reviews are usually pretty boring and I'm almost never interested in buying the books,” writes another. Others mentioned some design issues, which I hope to focus on soon. And, of course, many of you mentioned my low-frequency posting schedule, which I’m sure has only gotten worse as I’ve done more writing for other venues.

I’m constantly trying to improve my wine descriptions, and at least one person commented that my wine tasting notes read more or less like Wine Spectator’s: in other words, yawn-inducing. So I’ll keep experimenting to find a nice balance. My book reviews are another experiment in form, so I hope that you’ll bear with me on those.

How Did You Find OWF?
As I quickly realized, this wasn’t a very fair question. Could I tell you how I found most of the sites in my blogroll? No. And most of you couldn’t really remember either, though “from another blog” was a popular guess. I guess this makes sense: Search engine referrals usually make up a pretty small piece of my traffic, and my mentions in the mainstream press usually give me spikes that disappear after a day.

How Long Have You Been Reading OWF?

With five years of blogging under my belt, I wanted to know how many of you have been here since the beginning. More than I would have guessed, though maybe you’re more likely to have taken this poll. My readership went through a period of linear growth (albeit with a low slope) and now it stair-steps: I go up by 100 readers or so every few months. I don’t check my stats all that often these days, but that’s my sense of what happened.

Name Five Other Food Sites You Read
I asked this question for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to hear about interesting sites from you all. Second, I wanted to know if there was some correlation between OWF’s readership and the readership of other blogs. Some of the results suggest surprising overlaps, but I think my graph may just prove that people who read food blogs tend to read the popular ones. Here are all the sites that 5 or more of you mentioned (sub-blogs within the New York Times or Chronicle went into those totals):

Do You Have A Blog?

A big thanks to everyone who participated; it really helped me understand what you like and don’t like in your food blog reading habits. If you missed this survey, stick around until 2012, when I post one for my 10-year anniversary.

Keep Or Don't Keep: Magazines Worth Moving

2008-02-18T21:23:00.000-08:00

So here it is: The final countdown (cue the Europe song). In two weeks, we will have no claim to our apartment; we will want nothing to do with our apartment. Ever again.

Today, I culled magazines from my shelves in an attempt to reduce the amount of clutter we’re moving. Looking back through my archives of various publications, I had to decide which would end up in the new house and which would end up in the recycling bin.

I’ve tried to be harsh, but some magazines make for good research material — I didn’t save any because of recipes. Which food magazines made the cut? (I assume most of you do not care that I discarded Opera News and kept Cubism For Fun).

Keep

The Art of Eating — You’re shocked, I know. The magazine that informs my writing and my eating philosophy has encyclopedic articles that are usually the best in the business for the given topic. That’s why it’s the best food magazine in the country. My subscription dates back to issue 53, though I have some earlier issues that Ed sent me when I needed them for research.
Saveur — This magazine has the most in-depth food articles of the mainstream glossies. My subscription dates back to issue 13 or so, and I do find myself referring back to older issues on occasion.
Gastronomica — Though the poems and paintings rarely move me, this scholarly journal has articles that get researchers like me off to a good start. They’re not as comprehensive as AoE’s, as a rule, but they’re more eclectic. I started my subscription with issue 1, and I believe it has never lapsed.
Carafe — I learned of Todd Wernstrom’s terroir-focused newsletter from AoE. When I started writing for his magazine The Wine News, we corresponded often, and I expressed my sorrow when he closed up shop. He sent me one of each issue, so I have the whole library.
The Wine News — Speaking of The Wine News, my small collection survived the cut. The magazine has the most in-depth articles of the wine glossies, and I could see myself referring to them in the future. My subscription started when I started writing for them.

Don’t Keep

Wine Spectator — There was a time — when I was a wine newbie — when I read these religously. Even after I stopped, I kept up my subscription because I wanted to see what the 800-pound gorilla of wine writing was saying. Except that the news pieces lagged behind the blogosphere by a few months, and the feature pieces seemed to repeat each year.
Food & Wine — At best, I glanced at these a few times.
Bon Appétit — Forget wondering about moving them; I wondered why I still had them. Bon Appétit served me well when I was first learning to make gourmet food, but is there any content there besides ads anymore?
Cook’s Illustrated — I have a website account; I have several years’ worth of the annual hardbound collections. I don’t need the magazines; at any rate, the quality of the magazine has fallen off in recent years. I let my subscription lapse in 2005, but I had given up on it by early 2004.
Slow — The publication of the Slow Food movement has interesting articles, but they’re not quite research-library-worthy.

Which of your magazines would survive a major cleaning?

The Art Of Simple Food

2008-02-17T10:27:00.000-08:00

In Mouth Wide Open, John Thorne admits that he often reviews cookbooks without testing the recipes. Heresy, he says. So many cookbooks don’t have reliable recipes; shouldn’t you check a few before suggesting the book?

Probably. But taking a page from Thorne, I find myself willing to recommend Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food despite the fact that I have yet to explicitly make one recipe in it. I’ve come closest with the winter version of minestrone soup and the grapefruit-avocado salad — less a recipe than a shopping list to begin with — but in each of those cases I put my own spin on the dishes.

But the book keeps resurfacing in my weekly meal planning sessions. I flip through it and think, “Hm. Soufflés. That sounds good.” I scribble soufflé on my list and assemble one on the right night. Or a bean dish catches my eye, or a meat dish, and I make that, more or less. I know how to make soufflés, soups, salads, and the other dishes she includes: The book just reminds me that those dishes are out there, waiting to be made. Often, they use ingredients that pique my interest, though few will surprise devotees of California cuisine: goat cheese, chard, salt-packed anchovies, Meyer lemons, fennel, and arugula (Waters prefers the term rocket).

If you don’t have a casual knowledge of these dishes, you’ll quickly gain it. Waters has aimed the book at the unconfident cook, laying out recipes à la The Joy of Cooking: List an ingredient or three, add a paragraph about what you’re supposed to do with them, list the next ingredients and their steps. She also includes solid explanations of cooking equipment and ingredients. Use this book enough, and you’ll find yourself with a good grounding in cooking basics.

You’ll also have no doubt about Waters’ position on sustainable, organic, local, and ethical foods. She trumpets them at every possible moment in a focused beam of Watersness that can become oppressive as it repeats, page after page. I say this despite sharing her stance. Will the average reader tire of it even more quickly?

Perhaps. But they won’t tire of the straightforward, delicious dishes that appear on the dining room table, reminders that sometimes simple food is just fine.

Celebrating Tom's Life

2008-02-10T20:10:00.000-08:00

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

I haven’t had the motivation to post something new, and it’s been hard to figure out what I should post next. It’s hard to go from the last one to something breezy about house wines or meal planning or whatever. But Saturday was a transition of sorts.

Tom’s service was Saturday, and 200-300 people showed up to remember him. Some got up to talk about what he had meant to us: Not just friends and relatives but co-workers he had touched in small but meaningful ways. Melissa and I learned things about our friend we had never known: He was an Eagle Scout, he was Apple’s best bug screener, he used to walk in his sleep. People told funny stories, people told sad stories, people told bittersweet stories.

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

A couple of days before the service, his old kitchen crew sent a flurry of emails to each other and decided to cook for the 40 or so people who attended a small post-service gathering at Tom’s girlfriend’s house. It seemed like the right thing to do. We made some of the “best of” dishes from summer and winter parties. William, Tom’s main sous chef — his second-in-command — printed out menus and prep lists, just as Tom had always done. We assembled in an unfamiliar kitchen (though a well-equipped one: Anne matched Tom’s food passion), donned our chef whites, and once again moved as a team, hollering out warnings, questions, and answers. One person would finish a task and dive to someone else’s aid. Oil sizzled, knives chopped, and we cooks dodged and swerved around each other. For a moment, at times, one could pretend that this was just a normal party. Then the reality would come crushing back: There was one fewer person in the kitchen. People came up and thanked us for our efforts, but really, what else could we do?

Traditionally, just before guests arrived at the party, the kitchen crew would have a Champagne toast with each other, a way of taking a deep breath and enjoying the moment of quiet after the prep and before service. William broke the tradition that day; we shared the Champagne toast with the entire group and toasted Tom. People talked, remembered, and ate. I think it’s what Tom would have wanted us to do. And William voiced what the whole kitchen crew was thinking: “We should do this again.”

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

See more photos on meriko’s Flickr stream.

Menu for “a poubelle tribute”
tomato and bocconcini salad
broiled shrimp with blood-orange beurre blanc
buffalo monkfish and maytag blue cheese celery root salad
warm lentil salad
chocolate rosemary fraternals - puff style

The Cook I Always Wanted To Be

2008-02-04T21:33:00.000-08:00

Photo by Melissa Schneider

A lot of people have influenced my cooking: from close-to-home guides such as my parents to distant idols such as Alice Waters and Judy Rodgers. But one person transformed my cooking more than anyone else: my friend Tom Dowdy, whom many of you know as the writer behind Butter Pig. He introduced me to The Art of Eating. He told me about On Food And Cooking when it was still a cult book. He inspired me to try daunting dishes at home and host extensive dinner parties. He taught me to lean on techniques rather than recipes. He even taught me those techniques.

Despite his culinary wisdom, he was only five years older than I when he passed away the other night.

Photo by Melissa Schneider

Memories of him and his food have consumed my mind since then. I remember his quick-paced pop culture references, flying faster than I could catch. I remember talking puzzles and programming with him; we had more than cooking in common. I remember the pièce montée he made one year, a towering pyramid of cream puffs and spun sugar. I remember the deep-fried chocolate truffles, liquid chocolate in a hard crust. I remember terrines of foie gras, a pink, truffle-studded slab he taught me to make. I remember wild mushroom cassoulet, an original recipe of his that even cassoulet purists would love. I remember his sauce Foyot, a rich hollandaise mixed with glace de viande that had my wife ready to leave me for him. I remember a puzzle cake he made in my honor.

But what I really remember is his unfaltering generosity. He and his then-girlfriend Carol gave us not just a smoker but a smoker brimming with supplies and accessories. He treated us to dinner and half the wine at Santa Monica’s stunning Capo restaurant so that I would choose a wine priced above my normal comfort level. He answered random cooking questions whenever I had them, despite being a busy engineer at Apple.

Photo by Melissa Schneider

And then there were his parties, his ultimate displays of generosity. His annual winter party made our 6-course dinner parties look like amateur hour. Imagine hosting 40 or more people for an 18-course gourmet meal where everything — everything — is made from scratch. He auditioned dishes and ideas for a year in advance. He prepped ingredients in the month leading up to it. He stayed home the day before to get everything done. He even had a kitchen staff, drawn from his foodie friends, who helped on the day, turning vegetables, making sauces, prepping ingredients, and cooking dishes. One of my proudest moments as a cook was when he asked me to join the kitchen crew. I called it the Tom Dowdy Cooking School, because, as accomplished as all of us are behind the stove, we always learned something when we worked at his parties.

Last night I made meatballs, and I thought of when I first learned to make patés: both the mousse kind and the ground-meat kind. Even then, he told me that my instinctual salt proportion wouldn’t be enough, and even yesterday my meatballs needed more salt than I originally added. Whenever I make a detailed list with dinner party prep steps, I think of his multi-page lists, the direct ancestors of mine. When I smoke a chunk of meat, I remember his comment that the less I check it, the better it will be.

That voice, at least, will always be with me, even if my friend and mentor isn’t. I can’t count all the things that I learned from him. I am the cook I am today because of him.

Photo by Melissa Schneider

Other odes
William's
The Blog That Ate Manhattan's
Pablo's

What Is Bimbo Break?

2008-01-31T22:45:00.000-08:00

I was trying to solve a puzzle in the latest issue of The Enigma, the monthly publication of The National Puzzlers’ League, and I decided the answer might be one of the Coca-Cola brands. I haven’t memorized them, of course, so I looked them up. Holy cats! They own everything. This isn’t a surprise — America’s favorite soft drink company is a sprawling mass of a corporation — but the list en masse is quite a sight.

Here’s one to ponder: What is Bimbo Break? It’s listed in their brands, but I’ve never seen it. Maybe I just don’t shop in the right stores. Or maybe, you know, Coca-Cola decided that that brand isn’t quite ready for market yet.

I’ll tell you what Bimbo Break isn’t: the answer to the puzzle. I did manage to figure it out, though.

32 Students!

2008-01-31T11:34:00.001-08:00

My wine classes have typically had a dozen or so students. So imagine my surprise when my dean wrote to tell me that I had 29 students for my current course. And then imagine it when I showed up last night and found that I had 32. And only two of them were students from my Fundamentals I course, though a fair number had taken the other Fundamentals I section that happened last semester.

I kept thinking during class that they should give us a bigger room. Everyone fit, but it’s a tight squeeze, especially because the students occupy more space than they would in an accounting class: There's a line of glasses in front of every student. I doubt a bigger room exists, though. I looked at the list of other Berkeley Extension courses meeting on that floor, and I think we all filled it up.

It’s always interesting to hear about the wine drinking backgrounds of my students. Some are longtime drinkers, some are new. Some have a lot of knowledge, some know barely anything. Some are in the industry, some are just enthusiasts. I try to foster a good environment for asking questions, but there’s always one or two shy people: I hope they’re learning what they need.

I also find that my classes give me a good gauge on the average wine consumer’s view of the world, which is always useful for a writer. One person asked the question I often hear: How do you know that a Sancerre is Sauvignon Blanc or that a Burgundy is Pinot Noir? Unfortunately, the answer is that you just have to know it; this is the big problem that European wines have here in the United States. We’ve come to expect varietals, bottles marketed as being from a single grape, because that’s how the American wine industry, under the urging of Frank Schoonmaker, differentiated itself from Europe’s. I also hear questions about high alcohol levels, French appellation rules versus American rules, corks versus screwcaps, and more.

Last night’s class focused on the taste of wine: acidity, sugar, tannins, alcohol, weight, and so forth. I bought five bottles of Woodbridge Pinot Grigio and left one untouched while doctoring the others: citric acid in one, sugar in another, tannins in yet another, and almost-pure ethanol into the last. That way the students could compare the exaggerated attributes to the basic wine and learn how each registers on the tongue and affects the wine. Then I poured our “real” wines: a 2006 Sancerre, a 1990 Vouvray, a 1997 Kabinett Riesling from the Mosel, a 2004 Marsannay, and a 2004 (I think) Napa Cabernet. We talked about how the grapes and climate affected the final wine, how wines age, and so forth. Though this class isn’t focused on educating students about wine regions, I always try to give a little information about the region that produced the wine they’re drinking.

Serendipity: A Bit Of Esoteric Wine History

2008-01-21T12:20:00.000-08:00

I was searching the Government Printing Office’s site while researching an article, and I stumbled across the record for this 1986 document titled “Imported wines : identifying and removing wines contaminated with diethylene glycol.”

Sadly, the document’s not available online: Maybe I’ll look it up the next time I’m at the library. Because the reason why there’s a 1986 report about diethylene glycol in wine is that the year before, the international press went ballistic upon learning that a few Austrian producers in the Thermenregion had been adding that chemical to their wine. At the time, Austria followed Germany’s lead and made tankfuls of cloying wine. Diethylene glycol allowed wine makers to sweeten wine even when the grapes didn’t have enough sugar. This might not be a problem, except that diethylene glycol is related to ethylene glycol, an ingredient in antifreeze. (Diethylene glycol is significantly less toxic.)

When the additive was discovered, it obliterated the Austrian wine industry’s international presence. No one would touch the wines for years. But that event shaped the modern-day industry: It wiped out the large producers who had relied on voluminous sales and cleared the way for small producers with integrity to enter the spotlight. It also reversed the trend toward sweeter wines: Today, Austria’s non-dessert whites are bone-dry, in contrast to Germany’s. The incident also spawned every joke about antifreeze in the wine, including the one in the first season of The Simpsons.

What We Had For Dinner This Week

2008-01-20T10:45:00.000-08:00

Since my meal-planning post struck a chord with a lot of you, I thought it might be fun to post one of these lists. Let me know what you think; this is how I structure the list now, and this is how it looked this week, with lunch, dinner, shopping, and prep steps for each day.

As I’ve said before, you’ll have to do without pictures for the time being. Melissa is pouring all her energy into the house renovation, and has none left for nighttime camera work. Once we’re settled, I hope to offer more of her gorgeous photos.

Saturday

General Strategy: Saturdays are our main market days: Our three favorite markets — Berkeley, Grand Lake, and Ferry Plaza — all occur on Saturdays. Weekends are also our main house days. (Melissa does it during the week as well.) That means that I can include dinners that require a bit more work, but not a lot. It also means that I can’t yet cook tons of food on the weekend for use later in the week.
Lunch: Bakesale Betty’s Fried Chicken Sandwiches - Melissa’s mom brought us lunch as a treat. If you live in this area, try this sandwich, which features fried chicken and cole slaw on a deli roll. The slaw is spicy, but this sandwich is a stroke of genius. She told us in advance she’d bring them, so I noted it for lunch.
Dinner: Dopo - My friend Amy gave me a gift certificate to Dopo, an Italian restaurant in Oakland. While I had decided on Friday to use it for Saturday night, the timing ended up being fortuitous. We had a rough day, and delicious food — cooked by someone else — was the remedy. Dopo used to annoy me because they charged standard restaurant markups for wine, but then served it in crappy little tumblers. If you’re going to double or triple the price of a bottle of wine, at least serve it in decent glasses. If you want to be a casual trattoria, don’t double or triple your wine prices. I’m happy to say that they now have real wine glasses, and they still have fantastic food.
Shopping: Shallots, sausage, greens, lentils(?), arugula, mirepoix, deli rolls, radishes, orange, turnips, potatoes, cabbage, pears - When I’m writing my lists, I’m in one room surrounded by books, and the kitchen is in another. So I put ? next to ingredients that I may already have. It reminds me to look in the kitchen before I head to the market. I write “mirepoix” when I want equal amounts of carrot, celery, and onion for stock or stews. It doesn’t save much space, but I like the word: It is my nom de plume in the National Puzzlers’ League.
Prep: Hard-cook eggs, make bagna cauda, (a.m.) soak anchovies

Sunday

Lunch: Bagna cauda sandwiches (hard-boiled eggs, radish, arugula) - This sounds very exotic, but in truth I made a small amount of bagna cauda (a warm bath of oil, garlic, and anchovies) and used it as a spread on sandwich rolls. I added all the ingredients to the sandwich. We told my mom, who helped me strip paint that day, that it was a good thing her husband was out of town: The sandwich was pungent.
Dinner: Lentils braised in red wine with sausage, and greens - The lentil technique came from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, and it’s one I’ll use again. She has you cook the lentils sort of like risotto, keeping minimal liquid in the pot with the beans. I seared the Fatted Calf sausage, but I daydreamed about grilling them in the future.
Shopping: baguette, kale/chard from house - Even with just a few pots in the backyard, we’re reaping the benefits of a garden. Bonnie gave us some potted greens, and they have persevered — flourished, even — despite sharing the yard with a substantial amount of construction effluvia.
Prep: soak beans for minestrone

Monday

General Strategy: On weekdays, I can shop at Rainbow Grocery, a natural-foods, vegetarian co-op near my work. Oddly, they have a weak produce section, but I dare you to find a better bulk section. I decided to try Heidi’s Do-It-Yourself Power Bars, and Rainbow had all the exotic ingredients I needed.
Dinner: Minestrone - But with cabbage, turnips, and potatoes instead of the normal ingredients.
Lunch: honey, pear, goat cheese sandwich
Shopping: Bread for mussels, dried fava beans, cumin?, lemon, dried figs, bay leaves, 1 ¼ c. rolled oats 1 ¼ c. hazelnuts, ½ c. oat bran, 1 ½ c. crisped brown rice cereal, dried cranberries, crystallized ginger, brown rice syrup, ¼ c. natural cane sugar
Prep: Soak dried figs in leftover wine,(a.m.) beans,power bars - Having used half a bottle of wine for the lentils the night before, I used the other half to rehydrate some figs for Friday (another Zuni technique).

Tuesday

Dinner: library night - I had to do some research at the library, so I left each of us to our own devices for the night. In the end, we both ate leftover minestrone.
Lunch: On our own. I fell down a bit on planning lunches this week, but usually we had good leftovers from the night before.

Wednesday

Dinner: Mussels - Few things are worse than waking up the morning you plan to make moules marinières and realizing that you didn’t make plans for french fries. The way I make them, they require a fair amount of prep, and without potatoes on hand I couldn’t include them.
Shopping: mussels - One of the best parts of the house is its proximity to lots of our favorite food stores. Monterey Fish Market, one of the Bay Area’s best seafood sources, is just up the road a bit, so Melissa went and bought us mussels.

Thursday

Dinner: Ful sandwiches - This isn’t the full name of the fava bean salad from Mediterranean Street Food, but it’s how I abbreviated it. I decided to cook the dried fava beans in a slow cooker I’m reviewing, and they came out well, though they could have used a bit more time, I think. I cooked them for almost 3 hours, but I think in the future I would cook them for 3 ½.
Shopping: scallions, parsley, persimmons?, pita bread - Rainbow didn’t have persimmons — the original recipe calls for way-out-of-season tomatoes — so I used avocado instead.

Friday

Dinner: cheese course with condiments (dried figs with red wine) - This revived an old tradition of ours. When we wanted to learn about cheese, we would buy three cheeses each week and eat them (with bread and salami and whatnot) and read about them. I thought it might be a fun treat to bring that back from time to time. We got to the cheese counter and asked the vendor which cheeses she liked at the moment. We bought Brebiou, Cone de Port Aubry, and Cabot’s bandage-wrapped cheddar.

2006 Movia "Gredic" Tocai Friuliano, Brda, Slovenia

2008-01-16T22:58:00.000-08:00

Friuli, just to be clear, sits at the northeastern edge of Italy. The region surrounds the ancient city of Trieste, which balances on the tip-top of the Adriatic Sea. In the 1960s, Mario Schiopetto, whose name is about as Italian as you can find, imported German winemaking techniques to create the “super whites” that define the modern Italian style: clean, fruity, refreshing. I know where Friuli is; I’ve passed through Trieste on my way to Croatia.

So knowing all that, you might wonder why I picked a Slovenian wine for this edition of Wine Blogging Wednesday, the monthly Internet-wide tasting event that this month asked us to find Friuli whites.

Borders are a funny thing. We can hope that Italy’s borders will remain stable for a long time, since wars tend to be the events that move them, but not that long ago surveyors needed to decide where Italy ended and other countries began. Working in the hills that straddle Collio, an Italian wine region, and Brda, a Slovenian one, some engineer had to make a long series of decisions about which ground belonged to which country. And one of those decisions put the line through a vineyard owned by the Kristancic family, then and now the proprietors of the Movia estate. So some — maybe all — of the grapes in my bottle of Slovenian wine are actually from Italy.

That may be the most mild of the stories surrounding Movia, today the property of the charismatic and passionate Ales Kristancic. I’ve heard that Movia, alone in Slovenia, stayed private under Tito’s Communist rule because Ales’s father or grandfather was a friend of Tito’s. To get around the problem of a privately owned winery, Tito bought up all of Movia’s inventory each year. I’ve heard that American presidents have wandered through the vineyard.

And then you get to the cellar. The standard (and useless) definition of biodynamic viticulture is “organic plus.” Movia sometimes seems like “biodynamic plus.” I’ve heard that Ales records his fermenting yeast and plays their own song back to them. He uses the atmospheric pressure of the new moon to clarify his wines. He leaves some of his whites in Slovenian oak barrels and on their lees, the dead yeast cells that drop from the wine during fermentation, for 2 years. He ages his reds for 3 to 7 years.

Clearly, Ales flouts modern winemaking. But he also makes some killer wines. I have tasted a number of them, either at wine dinners or at Jack and Joanne’s house. I have never been disappointed.

His 2006 Gredic ($19), a well-balanced Tocai Friuliano, has light, buoyant aromas of honey and flowers, wax and cheese. It spanks your palate with searing acidity but then kisses the pain away with rich flavors of peach and wax. And if you ask Jack, who drinks them often, this is the least of Movia’s wines. If you ever get the chance to order a bottle of Movia wine, do so.

Art of Eating, Number 76

2008-01-16T09:41:00.000-08:00

Ed Behr’s quarterly, The Art of Eating, distinguishes itself from other food and wine publications in a number of ways: quality of writing/editing, depth of research, and lack of ads. But perhaps the most unusual aspect is a seeming lack of word count requirements. Ed, like Cheryl at Edible East Bay, feels that stories have a natural length, and he clearly doesn’t want a writer to leave something out because it doesn’t fit in some arbitrary box. I don’t think I’ve ever had Ed tell me anything more than a very rough number, and I ignore, with him, my usual rule of hitting within one percent of a publisher’s word limits. (Though I recognize the value of self-editing a 1,300-word draft down to 800 words.)

As a result of this quirky editorial philosophy, articles in The Art of Eating can sprawl across tens of pages if Ed feels they should. His feature about Beaujolais, which came out about four or five years ago, is a great example. I think I once heard him say that it’s 20,000 words, 7-10 times the size of a standard magazine feature.

I consider myself fairly geeky about wine, but if you had asked me about Aglianico del Vulture, I probably would have guessed that it’s from southern Italy, and I might have remembered that it’s a red. Even in Saveur, the closest glossy mag you can find to AoE, you might — might — find three pages about the wine. Compare that to this issue of AoE, which devotes 24 pages to the area: the wine, the food, the culture, and more.

This is why you should be subscribing to The Art of Eating.

As an aside, I have a small feature in this issue about rabbit. I really came to appreciate this meat as I researched the article. I used to only eat it at restaurants, but now I cook it at home when I can. To accompany the article, Melissa took pictures of Taylor, from Fatted Calf, breaking down a bunny, since few cookbooks show you the process: They just describe it. James MacGuire contributed most of the recipes.

Yuck

2008-01-14T14:50:00.000-08:00

I lifted the spoon, with its drab, brown pile, into my mouth, and I bit down. Well, no. I didn’t bite down. My teeth squished through a mouthful of cotton balls. My tongue curled away from the sticky, coating mass, which tasted and felt like soggy, slightly toasted cardboard.

Melissa labored through her bowl for a dozen bites or so, but she dodged the wretched part and instead dug for the edamame and carrots, which emerged covered in a brown, felty pelt. I threw mine out after just two bites.

The dinner seemed like a good idea. I had an open-for-interpretation “grain salad” on the evening’s menu, a way to mesh spontaneity and meal planning. I stood in the bulk grain section at Rainbow Grocery and spied toasted buckwheat, which I had never made before. I didn’t read the instructions too carefully, but I thought it said to combine 1 cup of buckwheat with 2 1/2 cups of water and simmer for 20 minutes.

On the stove, the buckwheat expanded into a thick sludge as soon as the water hit it. It kept expanding, like some horror-movie blob, as I added more water. And the texture skipped past fluffy straight to furry.

I’m sure I did something wrong: Lots of people like buckwheat, and no one would if they tasted what I made. If you have suggestions for cooking it, let me know, but I won’t be touching that grain for a while.

Food blogs provide us with a fantasy life. I would like to have time to make all the gorgeous dishes I see on other sites, and I hope that some of my pretty plates have inspired you.

But, you know, sometimes things just don’t work. And it’s good to remember that even simple fantasies sometimes smack against hard reality.

Got any culinary disasters of your own you want to share? Add a comment or write a post on your own blog and send me the link. Help me feel better after making such a wretched dish.

Franconian Beers, San Francisco Chronicle

2008-01-11T07:04:00.000-08:00

When I interviewed beer importer Dan Shelton for my Cantillon article, he threw out a tangent about the interesting world of Franconian beers. Franconia, a small region of Bavaria, contains one-fourth of Germany’s breweries, many of which are local pubs that produce just enough beer for the local villagers. I researched it a bit more, and today my article about the region appears in the Chronicle.

On another note, have you signed up for my Berkeley Extension wine class yet? No? Well, you’re in luck: There’s still time. Go sign up now before you forget.

Meal Planning

2008-01-07T14:21:00.000-08:00

When I was a child, my family planned out our meals for the coming week. I was involved in this to varying degrees: For a stretch of my youth, each of us made breakfast for the other family members on a rotating schedule; at other times, I just had to take the chicken out of the freezer when I got home from school. But big shopping trips and weekly menus were a part of our lives.

I continued this in college. My first year out of the dorms, and well before I became the obsessive cook I am today, my roommate and I would pick recipes from the Better Homes & Gardens New Cook Book (“new” despite being published in 1930), go to Safeway on the weekends, and cook dinner on weeknights.

But as time went on, I lost the habit. I lived further from the bone, with enough income to go out for lunch and decide on a whim what I would make for dinner. And who wants to meal-plan on Friday night when movies and take-out beckon?

Then we bought a house.

As we adjust to our new budget, meal planning has re-entered my life. On Friday nights, I curl up on the couch with a stack of cookbooks — old favorites, new favorites, and books sent to me for review — and plot out my strategy for the week. What sounds good? What will make use of a seasonal ingredient? What will use up the rest of an ingredient I buy for a different dish?

It became a pleasure rather than a chore when I realized that meal planning is just the same as dinner party planning. Instead of five or six courses over a few hours — our normal dinner party — I’m serving 13 or 14 courses — lunch and dinner — over one week. I figure out what will work and what won’t. I figure out how the meals will fit into the week’s work schedule. I even make a list, with daily shopping and prep tasks, analogous to the one I use for parties. Yesterday, for instance, I had to buy polenta, ricotta, and Parmiggiano for a few dishes: I grouped the ingredients based on our ability to go to Oakland’s Market Hall, a small collection of gourmet stores. Tonight, I have to soak beans for tomorrow’s dinner and roast vegetables for tomorrow’s lunch.

I worried about losing spontaneity. There is no more, “What do I feel like making tonight?” though I leave slots on Saturday nights for “market inspiration.” In fact, I have more flexibility now, not less. It’s hard to decide at 6:00 pm that you’d like to make a stew for dinner. But if you plan for it over the weekend, you can set up the stew in the morning. A whole range of dishes has become available, including every fifteen-part recipe in The Zuni Cafe Cookbook.

I’ve also come to realize that planning out meals creates anticipation for each one. This weekend I bought a petit jambon from Fatted Calf, and Melissa keeps wanting to know when I’m using it (tonight, in part, for the polenta). She says that I should have a chalkboard and write out, brasserie-style, the week’s meals.

Finally, meal planning has put me back in touch with old cookbook favorites. I’ve rediscovered new sources of inspiration in the cookbooks that have been on my shelf for years. Some that I had lost interest in, such as Nancy Silverton’s Sandwich Book, are now frequent guests in my pile of books. Others that I had forgotten about, such as Anissa Helou’s Mediterranean Street Food, have come back onto my radar.

I’m sure, at some point, that we’ll adjust to our new budget and return to our former lives. But I think that now I’ll keep meal planning, even when I don’t have to.

Smoked Pork Shoulder

2007-12-31T09:20:00.000-08:00

We realized a small dream the other day.

Longtime readers may remember that I own a smoker, which I dubbed the Battle Droid for its black, tall, cylindrical body and its three squat legs. It was a wedding present from our friends Tom and Carol, but our friends Tim and Mitch have baby-sat it for the 4 ½ years since then. We lack any sort of outdoor area where we can set up a device that streams out clouds of smoke.

At least we did.

A few weeks back, we moved the smoker to the house. The other day, I practically skipped home with a pork shoulder. I cured it overnight with a dry rub of salt, dried oregano, pepper, and caraway, and smoked it the next day on our back deck. As we stripped bright blue paint from our kitchen walls, the Battle Droid puffed away, slow-cooking the meat in a cloud of light gray applewood smoke.

That night, I carved slices from the tender shoulder. Each had a deep pork flavor infused with a hearty smokiness. I served it simply, placing braised Brussels sprouts and carrots to the side. With a glass of wine in my hand (Dover Canyon’s “Alto Pomar,” a Rhône blend), I daydreamed about all the food our smoker will produce. (This week, I’ll be putting the shoulder on sandwiches with a persillade spread: parsley, lemon, and garlic.)

“No pictures?” you ask. My photographer is currently the general contractor on a major house renovation, so we’ll have to make do with me flying solo for a bit.

UPS Ruined My Christmas Eve Dinner

2007-12-25T08:45:00.000-08:00

“The rabbit died,” wrote my mom’s husband. So much for that last hope, I thought. Three days of miscommunication and stress, and one rabbit’s life, all for naught.

A month ago, my mom and I brainstormed ideas for Christmas Eve dinner. I suggested rabbit — the soon-to-arrive issue of The Art of Eating has my article on the subject — and my mom lit up. It was something new, and it was a dish that her husband ate as a child: He loves rabbit. In fact, his memories of eating it prompted me to pitch my article.

I told my mom that I would hunt down Devil’s Gulch rabbit. Mark Pasternak breeds the bunnies you find on just about every Bay Area menu, and he raises them with care and atttention. But he also seems to turn the supply spigot on and off at whim. Taylor, at Fatted Calf, couldn’t get them. Bi-Rite Market, the upscale grocer in San Francisco, couldn’t get them. Even Berkeley’s Cafe Rouge, which uses a different, high-quality source, couldn’t get me rabbit for Christmas. Industrially-raised rabbits are available, but, as the meat buyer at Bi-Rite said, “Once you’ve had Mark’s, there’s no substitute.”

We decided to call D’Artagnan, the famous specialty-meat provider. The rabbit wouldn’t be local, but it would be delicious.

The calamity began on Friday, when my mom looked up the tracking number. Because of volume overflow, UPS had delayed the package. Don’t ask me why an item that requires refrigeration was held back, but that was the source of every subsequent problem. I called D’Artagnan and asked them to re-route the box to my mom’s loft because no one would be at the original shipping address on Saturday. The rabbit arrived in Oakland on Friday afternoon but sat at the warehouse until the next day, when UPS tried to deliver it to the old address. Had it arrived at my mom’s on Saturday, it might have been okay. But UPS held it through the weekend, and delivered it on Monday, three full days after it was supposed to arrive. The ice packs had thawed, and the rabbit’s internal temperature was 54°: well above the safety limit. My mom’s husband, who received the box, sent out the email we had all feared. I called D’Artagnan, and they resignedly reversed the charges: UPS messed up many of their orders this holiday season.

Of course, my mom put together a delicious dinner, but there was still a melancholy moment when her husband described the bunny as, “the prettiest rabbit I’ve ever seen.”

Sens And Super Natural Cooking

2007-12-17T10:29:00.000-08:00

I don’t like to review anything whose creators are my good acquaintances or friends, though you could find counterexamples. If I don’t like something, I have to choose between damaging a friendship or being dishonest with you. If I like something too much, you may think I’m being overzealous to support a friend. So consider these next paragraphs idle thoughts instead of reviews.

I have a stack of books I use for meal planning for the week. Some of the books come and go depending on my mood, while some have taken up permanent residence. One of those is Heidi’s Super Natural Cooking. I’ve yet to explicitly follow one of her recipes, but her ideas inspire my creations. I don’t know how easy it is to find the less common ingredients in her book, but the closest good grocery store to my work is the same one she alludes to in her introduction.

Melissa and I can’t go out to fancy restaurants on our own, thanks to being house poor, but my mom took us to a knockout meal at Sens for my birthday. Shuna is the executive pastry chef, and her desserts were stellar, as was the rest of the food. And mad props to their wine director for his wine list, which features a tantalizing diversity of wines at reasonable prices.

2004 Parducci "True Grit" Petite Sirah, Mendocino, California

2007-12-12T13:09:00.000-08:00

If you don’t read many other food and wine blogs, you may have forgotten about Wine Blogging Wednesday, the monthly, Internet-wide tasting event. I typically forget about the event until I see everyone else’s posts, at which point it’s too late for me to join in.

But this month, one of the wines I drank lined up with Sonadora’s “Que Sirah Sirah” theme, an homage to Petite Sirah; I’d have no excuse for not posting.

Parducci’s “True Grit” Petite Sirah from Mendocino ($25) has the intense black color and blueberry aromas I associate with this grape, but the strong whiff of star anise and toast smells more like the wine’s barrel. That star anise flavor continues on the palate, with a deep black cherry taste that finishes with a hint of cough syrup on the medium finish, perhaps a by-product of the 14.5 percent alcohol. Since I normally think of Petite Sirah as a tannic, robust grape — small grapes give a higher skin-to-juice ratio — I was surprised to find a lightweight wine with subtle, fine-grained tannins and a mouth-gripping acidity. This is a wine I’d serve with grilled magret de canard, the fatty breast of a foie gras duck, especially if I had garnished it with a dark-fruit sauce.

This wine was sent to me as a sample.

Next Berkeley Extension Class: Fundamentals Of Wine Studies II

2007-12-07T10:37:00.000-08:00

I finished teaching my Fundamentals of Wine Studies I class just last night, but the new Berkeley Extension catalogs are out, which means you can sign up for my Fundamentals Of Wine Studies II class. You don’t need Fundamentals I to take Fundamentals II: In fact, there’s often debate about which should come first.

While Fundamentals I focuses on regions, so that students know what to expect from an Austrian white or a Southern Rhône red, Fundamentals II focuses on describing wine. The first of the six classes talks about acidity, sugar, tannins, and alcohol; the second helps you articulate the smells in a wine; and so forth. Here’s the syllabus I made for the last time I taught the class. Class starts in San Francisco on January 30 and meets six times, with no class on February 20.

Recent Drinks Of Note

2007-12-06T10:51:00.000-08:00

Martini & Rossi Prosecco IGT, Italy
When I covered Champagne in my wine class, one of my students asked why you don’t see crown caps — the toothed metal hats you see on beer bottles — on sparkling wine. (You do, incidentally, if you visit a Champagne cellar. The bubble-causing secondary fermentation happens in bottle, and Champagne producers put crown caps on the bottles during the riddling process that collects the spent yeast cells in the neck.) Another student theorized that the pressure in a sealed Champagne bottle — 88 pounds per square inch, according to The Oxford Companion to Wine — might make crown caps a risky venture. A slight flick of your bottle opener, he suggested, and the vented pressure might send the sharp metal disc flying through the air like a tiny throwing star.

I didn’t have a better answer, so when Martini & Rossi offered to send me a bottle of their Prosecco, sealed with a crown cap, a week before my class on Italy, I jumped at the chance to pour it for my students. How dangerous was popping the top? Not very: The wine lacked the voluptuous foam of a sparkling wine, showing instead a light fizz and leaving the class’s larger question unanswered. My students described the simple taste as “Martinell’s apple cider,” and we agreed that it would be a pleasant enough picnic wine. This is not a Prosecco di Valdobbiadene, the ne plus ultra of this simple sparkler, but a Prosecco IGT, which means — as I hope my students can now explain — that either it’s made from grapes from a wider area, or the winemaking varied from what the Valdobbiadene rules require. ($11, I think)

2007 Georges DuBoeuf Beaujolais Nouveau, France
Similarly, I couldn’t resist getting a press sample of Beaujolais Nouveau to pour in class on the day it released. We had covered the Beaujolais region, at the southern end of Burgundy, two weeks earlier, but I had focused on Cru Beaujolais, wine from the villages that act as subregions within Beaujolais: Morgon, Fleurie, Moulin-le-Vent, and so forth. Georges DuBoeuf singlehandedly transformed Nouveau from a quaffing wine meant to celebrate a successful harvest into a media event that dominates wine stores in the third week of November. He has given publicity to the region, but at the cost of associating it with a mediocre, industrial wine made from high-yield vines. My students quickly picked up the telltale aromas of fried banana that dominate DuBoeuf’s Nouveau, and some tried to figure out why anyone cares anything about this wine. (They enjoyed the better Beaujolais I poured earlier.) ($8-$10)

2004 Lassègue, Saint-Émilion Grand Cru, Bordeaux, France
This is a surprisingly floral and light Bordeaux, but it packs a lot of complexity into the glass. I picked up barbecued beef and bread aromas alongside the bell pepper I get off of most Bordeaux, and I kept writing down new flavors as I continued to taste the wine: mushrooms, plums, dark berry, smoke, and a splash of milk chocolate on the finish. Light tannins and mild acidity make this a wine to serve with light, lean meat dishes: The tongue and tail terrine from The River Cottage Meat Book comes to mind, as do brisket, beef sausage, and rabbit stew. ($50, sent to me as a sample)

2006 Pattiana Sauvignon Blanc, Mendocino, California
This wine divides my loyalties: I want to encourage you to support biodynamic wineries, where the grapes are raised in a holistic fashion. But biodynamic farming is more laborious than industrial farming, thus adding expense to the wine. Can I encourage you to pay $18 for this wine, which is at heart a straightforward Sauvignon Blanc, when it probably costs more because the winery isn’t relying on industrial cost-cutting techniques? The wine is delicious — refreshing grassy aromas and searing acidity mixed with light peach and guava aromas — but not very complex. I would encourage you to buy more expensive grass-fed beef and produce from careful growers, but there you’re getting extra flavor for your extra money. I love this wine for what it is, but I wish it were a little cheaper. ($18, sent to me as a sample)

Food Blog Awards

2007-11-30T20:55:00.001-08:00

Menu For Hope is one end-of-year tradition in the food blogosphere; the Food Blog Awards are another. Go nominate your favorite sites for awards and virtual glory at Well Fed. As a former judge, I can tell you that this is a tough chore for the folks behind the scenes, so give a big thanks to Cate and all the judges for their efforts in keeping this annual rite alive.

Menu For Hope Approaches

2007-11-30T12:30:00.001-08:00

Menu For Hope, the end-of-year food blogger charity drive started by Pim, is about to start. Bloggers around the world contribute gifts, and everyone buys raffle tickets for the prizes they’d like to win. The money — over $60,000 last year — all goes to the UN’s World Food Program. If you’re a food blogger and you’d like to contribute a gift, contact the appropriate regional host. Bidding begins on December 10, and I will once again be writing the program that does the raffle drawing, so enter your bribes as soon as possible — uh, which I will ignore, of course. Did I say that out loud? (Technically, I’ll just run the program I wrote last year, but I have some features to add.)

White Bean Hummus Crostini

2007-11-26T18:51:00.000-08:00

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

This last summer, when we first entered negotiations for the house, I envisioned us hosting Thanksgiving in our new dining room. I pictured our friends and family warmed by our new-owner glow and an abundance of good food and wine.

Have I mentioned that our house needs some work? Or that the negotiations took longer than we expected? Scrap my vision of dinner, and picture instead the two of us driving to my mom’s house. (This is no hardship: I inherit my love of cooking from my parents.)

But I did cook for Thanksgiving. My mom asked me to bring an appetizer, and the result was one of those lucky combinations of simple ingredients and creativity that can produce memorable dishes.

I started with “white bean hummus,” which I've been pondering as a way to use leftover beans. I cooked cannelini beans until they were very tender and then scooped them into a food processor. I drizzled in olive oil as the high-speed blade pulverized the beans, which went from chunky and coarse to smooth and fluffy. (Though not as much so as regular hummus. I suspect the difference comes from garbanzo beans’ oil content — twice the amount of other legumes, according to On Food And Cooking.)

I seasoned the bean purée with salt and coarsely chopped sage from our “garden” — a few pots squatting in the new backyard. Salt gave the beans depth and sage balanced the earthy beans with a zingy, vegetal spice.

I thought that the salt-packed capers in my pantry, once desalted in a bowl of water for an hour, would add a complementary flavor, a visual focus, and a punchy little morsel to each serving. It just wouldn’t change the palette of the dish: an olive green caper on a beige bean paste that was flecked with gray-green sage, all sitting atop a brown slice of toasted baguette. The dish needed color.

It also needed acid, a mouthwatering component that would bring the eater back for more. I weighed the idea of pomegranate seeds sitting next to the caper, but then I discovered the last of the red onion quick pickles I made for our last dinner party.

At my mom’s house, I toasted the baguette slices — in small amounts in the toaster when I should have used the already-running oven — spread a bit of bean purée on them, fished thin onions from their sweet-and-sour brine, lay them on top in a rough circle, and finally dropped a succulent caper into the middle.

In a way, it’s probably a good thing that I took the slow approach to toasting the baguette. We scarfed down the bites so quickly that, had I made more at once, we would have had no appetite left for turkey.