An Obsession with Food

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.