food
jstemwedel | January 16, 2009Counter Culture Coffee generously invited us to join us for their regular Friday morning cupping at their Durham, North Carolina headquarters.
Here are the dimensions on which the coffees are evaluated in the cupping:
Fragrance:
smell of coffee when it's dry (undertones, first thing that comes to mind)
Aroma:
smell off coffee just off the boil (under 200 oF)
Break:
Crust forming on top from brewing -- from CO2, unless the beans are stale. After coffee has steeped 4 min, breaking crust of coffee and smelling it.
Brightness:
acidity that bring their own flavor (cf. acids that distinguish…
jstemwedel | January 15, 2009Once again, I'm sitting in my favorite airport with free wifi, bound this time for Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, for ScienceOnline'09. The conference has grown to feature two days of official sessions, plus a third day of semi-official goings on, and the place will be lousy with blogospheric glitterati.
I'm going to be leading a session late Saturday afternoon on "Online science for kids (and parents)". I'll be highlighting a selection of the good content that's out there already, and I'm hoping that there will be some folks at the session interested in talking about how to create…
revere | January 11, 2009We are getting the first hints of a potential foodborne vehicle for the multi-state salmonella outbreak that began in September. We've seen it before:
The source of the outbreak of Salmonella [t]yphimurium that has sickened at least 400 and may have contributed to one death has been identified in Minnesota as King Nut peanut butter. Peanut butter tainted with the genetic fingerprint matching the outbreak was tested by the Minnesota Health Department. The product is suspected as the source of the nation-wide illnesses, which began showing up in September 2008 and have been documented in 42…
revere | January 9, 2009You may be surprised to learn (I was) that the US is having a large (almost 400 people) multistate (42) salmonella outbreak (S. typhimurium, often but not always associated with poultry and dairy products). So far 67 hospitalizations, with patients spanning the age spectrum (ages 1 to 103).DNA fingerprinting has established all cases are related (a common source or sources). Oh, and one more thing. It didn't just begin. Apparently it's been going on since sometime in September.
Like the plat du jour, this is the salmonella outbreak du jour. Last summer we were treated to the tomatoes-cilantro…
clock | January 8, 2009Honey Laundering: A sticky trail of intrigue and crime:
".........He was suspected of trafficking in counterfeit merchandise -- a honey smuggler.
A far cry from the innocent image of Winnie the Pooh with a paw stuck in the honey pot, the international honey trade has become increasingly rife with crime and intrigue.
In the U.S., where bee colonies are dying off and demand for imported honey is soaring, traders of the thick amber liquid are resorting to elaborate schemes to dodge tariffs and health safeguards in order to dump cheap honey on the market, a five-month Seattle P-I investigation…
revere | January 8, 2009Mrs. R. and I tend to favor organic produce, just on general principles. It's a bit more expensive but compared to eating out it's nothing and we aren't such volume consumers that we can't make it up by my buying one less book a month. And while Obama's many of Obama's cabinet picks have gotten good marks, some haven't. One of the most important for consumers (and for public health) is the Secretary of Agriculture, and his nominee, Iowa's tom Vilsack, is a lousy choice. Honest advocates of sustainable agriculture are particularly dismayed, although you might not know it by looking at some…
aardvarchaeology | January 6, 2009
After my November talk at the County Museum in Linköping I was kindly presented with a copy of the third edition of Inga Wallenquists's book Ãstgötamat, "Ãstergötland Food". It's a beautifully illustrated coffee-table book combining recipes from the past three centuries with bits of regional kitchen history. The text is repetitive and should have been more stringently edited, but the contents are nonetheless interesting and inspiring. Excellent archival photos mingle with new ones by the masterly Göran Billesson.
I made Duchess Anna's cake (p. 59) on New Year's Eve, this being a variant…
revere | January 3, 2009Seventeen days left in the Bush administration. With the fiscal crisis it isn't clear some urgent matters will be attended to right away by the Obama folks, but one can hope. Urgent matters like getting the Food and Drug Administration back on track protecting our food supply. Consider this FDA Press Release from yesterday:
FDA Prevents Two Dairies from Adulterating Animal Drugs and Food
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced today that the District Court for the District of New Mexico has enjoined Do-Rene and Clover Knolls Dairies and their owners, Douglas B. Handley and Irene…
jstemwedel | December 24, 2008Blogging has been light for a while owing to the fact that the Free-Ride family was in transit to the wilds of New Jersey in order to celebrate Uncle Fishy and RMD getting hitched.
Amazingly, not only did we arrive in time, but the various airlines seemed to deliver all the other guests without mishap, too.
There was a good bit of snow on the ground, which the Free-Ride offspring loved. The grown-ups ... well, we were more concerned with the hazards it introduced as far as driving and walking. (By our count, in our party there were five falls on the ice. Only a couple required medical…
clock | December 23, 2008Michael Pollan will be on NPR's Talk of the Nation tomorrow to discuss his book Defense of Food.
angrytoxicologist | December 18, 2008Maybe, but you should certainly avoid deli meats for the listeria (If you follow through that link and read you'll know why). This isn't an abstract risk, Listeria out breaks are happening all the time (just ask a Canuck how their year went). Let's not go down that road and get back to the nitrates.
Nitrates can convert to nitrites in your gut if you have high pH. If you're normal almost all of the nitrates are not converted or absorbed into your body. Now, there's no good way to tell if you have a high pH gut so you're going to have to assume that you do. So, these converted nitrites get…
clock | December 17, 2008Michael Pollan will be on NPR's Morning Edition tomorrow:
I'll be on NPR's Morning Edition, talking about the new Secretary of
Agriculture, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack.
What can I say? It's a good day for corn.
Less good for us eaters, perhaps. Perhaps the most disappointing thing
about this morning's press conference is that neither Tom Vilsack nor
President-Elect Obama uttered the words "food" or "eaters." Vilsack
does not have the record of a reformer. He supported the expansion of
CAFO agriculture in Iowa (gutting local control to do it) and is much
loved by the biotech industry, who…
moleculeoftheday | December 15, 2008Methyl anthanilate occurs naturally in grapes, along with a suite of other aroma compounds, which combine to give that complex, earthy, bright grape juice aroma.
If you use it in a prepared food at high concentration, as the lone or primary flavorant, however, you end up with the cloying, floral aroma of grape soda.
clock | December 11, 2008In today's NYTimes:
As Barack Obama ponders whom to pick as agriculture secretary, he should reframe the question. What he needs is actually a bold reformer in a position renamed "secretary of food."
A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat.
Renaming the department would signal that Mr. Obama seeks to move away from a bankrupt structure of factory farming that squanders energy, exacerbates climate change and makes Americans unhealthy -- all while…
clock | December 8, 2008If you agree with this petition, sign it:
Dear President-Elect Obama,
We congratulate you on your historic victory and welcome the change that your election promises to usher in for our nation. As leaders in the sustainable agriculture and rural advocacy community we supported you in record numbers during the caucus, primary and general election because of the family farm-friendly policies that you advocated during your campaign.
As our nation's future president, we hope that you will take our concerns under advisement when nominating our next Secretary of Agriculture because of the crucial…
jstemwedel | November 26, 2008For years, you've heard the tremendous fatigue experienced after an American Thanksgiving dinner laid at the feet of the turkey -- or more precisely, at the tryptophan in that turkey. Trytophan, apparently, is the go-to amino acid for those who want to get sleepy.
But according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, the real story may be more complicated than that:
Turkey does contain a large amino acid called tryptophan. So eating turkey puts some tryptophan into your bloodstream. But there are lots of other large amino acids riding around in there too.
For the tryptophan in turkey to do…
jstemwedel | November 25, 2008Here are the rest of the recipes for dishes that I'm making for Thanksgiving this year (with the exception of pumpkin pie -- I'm still shopping for a pumpkin pie recipe).
I'll mention here (and should have mentioned in the previous post that all the measurements here are U.S. quantities (cups, teaspoons, tablespoons, etc.). Those of you using non-US measuring cups and measuring spoons will want to find a good conversion guide.
PEARL ONIONS IN MUSTARD CREAM SAUCE
You can trim, peel, and boil fresh small onions, but you can also use a bag of frozen pearl onions. Either way, you want to boil…
jstemwedel | November 25, 2008Having posted what I'm making for Thanksgiving, I am happy to accede to your requests for the recipes. Of course, I encourage you to violate the recipes at well (since that's how I was taught to cook).
I'm posting these in two batches, so if you don't see the recipe you were looking for here, it will be posted in the next recipe post, which should be up by tonight.
LINDA'S PICKLED PEARS
12 pears, pared, cored, and cut into quarters (d'anjou work well)
1.5 cups honey
4 cups cranberry juice
1 cup red or white wine vinegar
6 cinnamon sticks
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1 tablespoon ground cloves…
jstemwedel | November 24, 2008Back when I was a college student, Thanksgiving meant getting myself home to Northern New Jersey from metropolitan Boston.
Before my parents entrusted me with the fire engine red '77 Chevy Impala station wagon my junior year, this involved inviting another student who hailed from the West Coast and who had a car on campus to spend the holiday with my family. Once I was in possession of the station wagon, it was an occasion for me to provide a ride home to another denizen of Northern New Jersey who was car-less at school. But once I was home, it was the typical holiday meal with parents…
revere | November 24, 2008Public health scientists and professionals have human health and welfare at the center of our concerns. But we have learned that the human species is part of a tightly connected web of other living species and we are all roaming around in a common environment, the surface of the earth. Avian influenza is a good case in point. The influenza virus is mainly a parasite of birds but some forms also infect humans and some infect both. The influenza/A subtype designated H5N1 ("bird flu") is a case in point. It devastates terrestrial birds, like poultry, and when it infects humans it has a truly…