This blog is about the intersection between evolutionary biology and food. But also about practical applications, sustainable agriculture, and general tasty things. I originally started eating this way to heal from chronic health problems and...it worked!
Melissa McEwen
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08/27/2012 - 23:40
My friends have put up their recipe for these amazing gluten-free egg baos with pork belly and pickled ramp aioli. Yeah, the bao bread here is really just egg yolk and baking soda! I keep telling them that they could make it big if they had a egg bao food truck.
Sadly, I had a less exciting dinner, but some people have asked me to share this method I use for post-workout or other meals in which I need a lot of calories at once. It's simply cooking haiga rice with some sausages (or fish if you want a lower calorie meal) on top.
My favorite sausages to use used to be the Banh Mi ones from the Meat Hook because of all the rich flavors contained in them. But these are lamb merguez from Smoking Goose. I also like some of the Butcher and Larder Sausages. The aim is to find a sausage that is full of goodness because it will hopefully drip into the rice when you put it in the steamer. I also have found that this method will cook frozen sausages perfectly fine, just make sure to check the middle to make sure it is cooked and if it's not you can throw it in the frying pan, but I've never had that happen. You can also add any kind of vegetables you would normally steam.
Meanwhile, I grease the bottom part of the rice cooker with ghee and add in my .25-.5 cup of rice and some ice cubes of frozen stock. I turn the rice cooker on and leave it to cook. When it's done, the rice has a nice crispy buttery bottom resembling the Persian "tahdig" delicacy. The rice is seasoned by the sausage, but I also add garlic-pepper relish, an egg yolk, a few drops of Red Boat fish sauce, a bit of rice vinegar, and tamari. I mix that all together, slice up the sausage, and top with vegetables, fresh herbs, or seaweed.
Not very pretty, but delicious and filling... and quick and easy.
08/26/2012 - 23:13
I've noticed a few people tweeting this new paper, titled Hunter-Gatherer Energetics and Human Obesity, but I haven't seen many blog posts about it. Some of the tweets are to the effect of "haha, total proof that eat less, move more is a farce."
The paper is open-access, but the researchers published an editorial in the New York Times
We found that despite all this physical activity, the number of calories that the Hadza burned per day was indistinguishable from that of typical adults in Europe and the United States. We ran a number of statistical tests, accounting for body mass, lean body mass, age, sex and fat mass, and still found no difference in daily energy expenditure between the Hadza and their Western counterparts.
Unfortunately, the applicability to the average dieter in the United States might be limited. Notice "typical adults in Europe and the United States." I don't know, but last time I was in Europe, it seemed like people biked and walked places a lot more than in the US. As a non-driver, when I lived in Europe I was hardly the oddity I am here. In many places in the United States it is not even possible to walk to the grocery store. One study showed that the average American takes 5,117 steps a day, whereas the average Swiss person takes 9,650 steps a day. That's another issue with the Kitavan study, in that it also compares activity levels with a non-US group of people, the Swedish.
There is also the possibility that the Hadza are not expending as much energy as expected because of nutritional stress. Whether or not certain hunter-gatherer groups are naturally small or if they are exhibiting stunting is an important question. A paper that came out last year about a similar group of hunter-gatherers, the !Kung, re-opened this debate, speculating that the !Kung are somewhat malnourished:
Given the adverse conditions of life in the Mexican refugee camp, and the similar pattern of growth of the Maya and !Kung, the most reasonable interpretation of the growth of the !Kung infants and children is that it is due to inadequate food intake, disease, or a combination of both. Small size of !Kung infants and children sets the pattern of growth for older ages, as !Kung adults remain relatively short and light throughout their lives...
People with energy deficiency, or living at a delicate energy balance, do practice an economy of effort. Some examples are studies by George B. Spurr and colleagues of marginally undernourished boys and girls, ages 6–16 years old, in the city of Cali, Colombia. These boys and girls adjust their energy expenditure according to energy intake. In one quasi-experiment (Spurr & Reina 1988), normal and undernourished boys were observed at a summer day camp. They were encouraged to increase their physical activity by playing sports and other games. The undernourished boys were not able to keep up with the normally nourished boys during the morning session. At mid-day both groups received a meal and the undernourished boys received an extra 760 kcal of food, all of which was consumed. During the afternoon play session the undernourished boys were able to keep up with the normal group for about 2 hours, which is about the time they expended the extra 760 kcal eaten at lunch.
I would like to see similar data for the Hadza. And other foraging cultures, especially those with access to higher quality game. And it's worth remembering that even if the Khosian hunter-gatherer lifestyle is of continuous antiquity, it is the tip of the iceberg in terms of foraging. There were many very diverse paleolithic foraging cultures and so few of them are represented in the tiny remnants of this lifestyle available to study today.
Some books about the paleo diet reference the impressive height of paleolithic hunter-gatherers, comparing them to stunted agriculturalists. However, the archeological record is full of shorter hunter-gatherers and almost all modern foragers would be considered tiny. The average Hadza man is only 161.3 cm tall (5.3 feet). Is this stunting or is it genetic? Either way, some see their height as a feature, not a bug, contending that shorter people have certain metabolic advantages that are protective against many diseases of civilization. Hilariously, that paper I just linked to is posted along with many others on the website Short Support, which is all about how awesome short people are. At five feet two inches tall, I approve of this site.
Furthermore, it would be interesting to explore the genetic uniqueness of the Hadza. Another recent study showed evidence for genetic adaptations to local environmental conditions. The authors of this paper note that more research in this area is needed:
And indeed, studies reporting differences in metabolic-hormone profiles between traditional and Western populations support this idea (though more work is needed).
Also it's worth noting that physical activity has many known benefits beyond just burning calories.
Furthermore, it is quite funny to see how popular this study is with people promoting a low-carb diet because one of the reasons some of them have said foraging people can tolerate starch/sugar is because of their high activity levels. Though conveniently Rosedale has recently switched to saying it's because they are short, just in time for this study. Because honestly, the Hadza diet has quite a bit of sugar in the form of honey, berries, and baobab:
Dr. Lustig should come and tell them not to eat so much sugar. That humans aren't evolved to eat so much sugar and didn't have access to it in our natural evolutionary environment. Especially the honey. It's really appalling how sugary that stuff is.
Don't get me wrong, this is an interesting paper, but grouping Europeans together and then those Europeans with the particularly sedentary Americans means we can't use this paper to say that food is the main thing that matters in determining weight.
I'm sure you have your own take on this, since the paper is open access, I recommend reading it.
08/24/2012 - 17:34
Someone asked me if I could please update my What's on the Menu page, but it's hard because I've been eating out a lot. Like way too much. Partially because of moving and partially because I still do not have my furniture delivered to my new place and can't have anyone over. I also stopped telecommuting and now have a separate office, which I felt I had to do for productivity reasons, but now I've ended up in an apartment that has an extra room. Wow, that is a sentence I never could have written in NYC. Yikes.
Anyway, I also got a lot of questions about this cocktail I posted on instagram:
It is from the amazingly talented bartenders at BellyQ on Randolph. It's a Sudachi Sochu, coconut vinegar plum infusion, and cucumber cocktail called the Serpentine. Later I had their drinking vinegar, which is so much better than it sounds and was very similar to the Som drinking vinegar from Seattle.
I ate there on opening day and I was sufficiently impressed. They told me there are one of only two restaurants in the US that have infrared tabletop grills. The other one is in NYC and it happens to be my old favorite, Takashi. Unfortunately BellyQ, unlike Takashi, doesn't have any offal on the menu.
But I can't complain though. My rice puff and spinach salad was very good and my grilled BellyQ beef was fantastic. The space is also just amazing, with the sparse industrial naturalistic aesthetic that characterizes the neighborhood.
If you are in Chicago and you are gluten-free/paleo/whatever, another interesting development is that there is a new gluten-free restaurant called Senza. I bet you thinking "Ugh, great, so I can have sandwiches made with overpriced inferior gluten-free breads and pastas made with crap processed ingredients." Because honestly, that seems to be the gist of most gluten-free restaurants, which is frustrating since I have some friends who can't have any gluten at all and can't go to regular restaurants, but the menu seems to actually contain real food. I'll report back when I've eaten there.
Chicago also has Cassava, which makes fairly delicious gluten-free cassava puffs called Pão de Queijo. If you read Perfect Health Diet you might remember they blogged a recipe for them there, but these are nice because you can buy them frozen and have them on hand to heat up in the oven.
But my latest haunt has been Green Grocer, which is a small grocery store right down the street from me that stocks all kinds of great local stuff. They roasted a pig from Gunthrop Farms last week and that was a blast.
Also if you are in the West Loop, there is a small new cafe called Fulton Market Cafe on Racine & Fulton that seems to have some good lunch options
08/23/2012 - 13:18
I think referring to conventional feedlot cattle as "grain fed" is unfortunate. I think it's an insult on small local family farmers who raise their cows mainly on pasture, but supplement a little grain here and there. Sometimes I buy this kind of beef. It's not terribly different nutrient-wise from completely 100% grass-fed beef. And many people prefer the taste. Furthermore, it's often very affordable, as low as $2-$4 a lb if you buy in bulk.
Such cattle might also have received antibiotics, but for sicknesses, not to promote growth or to make up for unsanitary conditions like in a feedlot. If you have a sick cow and only a few cows in your herd...you are going to want to give the cow the medicine it needs.
Conventional feedlot cattle receive much more than just grains, they often receive antibiotics, hormones, antimicrobials, and nasty industrial byproducts. Just like my post on how Americans aren't eating meat, they are eating sugar-coated soybean-oil drenched garbage, industrial cows aren't eating grains, as much as they are eating crap.
The difference between these cattle and the cattle that receive a little supplemental whole grain is like the difference between someone eating a standard American diet and someone who eats a "paleo" diet and has tacos a couple of times a week.
I was reminded of this today when I saw the headline "Farmer feeds candy to cows to cope with high corn prices"
The worst drought in decades has destroyed more than half the U.S. corn crop, pushing prices to record levels and squeezing livestock owners as they struggle to feed their herds.
To cope, one Kentucky cattle farmer has turned to a child-tested way to fatten his 1,400 cows: candy...
The chocolate and other sweet stuff was rejected by retailers. It makes up 5% to 8% of the cattle's feed ration, Smith said. The rest includes roughage and distillers grain, an ethanol byproduct.
Yum? I'm not crazy about ethanol byproducts in feed either.
But it gets worse. They also feed cattle chicken waste under the euphemism "chicken litter":
Now, meat and bone meal from cows is explicitly banned from cow diets. But it ends up in chicken feed; a significant amount of it spills into bedding and ends up in poultry litter; and poultry litter gets fed back to cows.
Official numbers on just how much poultry litter ends up in bovine diets is hard to come by. But with corn and soy prices at heightened levels in recent years, feedlot operators are always looking for cheaper alternatives, and poultry litter is very much in the mix. Consumer Union's Michael Hansen claims that 2 billion pounds of chicken litter are consumed by cows each year—as much as a third of which consists of spilled feed, including bovine meat and bone meal.
So much for "grain fed" beef.
It does raise the question of what exactly should be done with America's massive amount of chicken waste? Maybe we should eat less chicken? Or as much as I hate to think about, pigs are at least better equipped biologically to eat such "food."
So if you are having a hard time affording good beef, considering buying from a local farmer that is not 100% grass-fed, but who doesn't finish on a conventional feedlot. It can be hard to find such farmers though since a lot of them tend to be older and not think of promoting their product in the many online directories that exist like Local Harvest or Local Dirt. Often such cattle are sold word of mouth to family friends and through old-fashioned social networks like churches.
But if you have a freezer, you should stock up ASAP because cattle prices are on the rise thanks to the aforementioned droughts.
08/05/2012 - 22:12
The internet is full of vegetarian and vegan websites claiming meat is bad because it "rots" in your colon. This is actually a very old idea, tracing back in the United States to neo-puritan vegetarian movements obsessed with the uncleanliness of the colon. According to folks like John Harvey Kellogg, the colon, like the genitalia, was a source of uncleanliness, so it must be bombarded by as much harsh fiber as possible and regular enemas to keep it "clean."
But his philosophy, which seems quite dysfunctional today, was a reaction to another idea that was popular during this time: that the colon was a useless vestigial remnant used to store garbage before clearance. Taken to its extreme, it led to a brief fancy by surgeons like Sir William Arbuthnot Lane to simply just remove the colons of people who suffered from constipation, believing it was nearly useless anyway. Colon removals are still performed today, but mainly in truly serious cases of damage such as severe inflammatory bowel disease.
Kellogg also believed it was a garbage dispenser, but he thought it was very important to keep it as clear and clean as possible, ideally eliminating after every single meal.
The truth is that the colon is not a garbage dispenser, it is a rich and biodiverse ecosystem in which much of the intestinal microbiota resides. And nature abhors a waste, so if a food makes it into the colon, there will probably be something eager to eat it. I suppose "rot" could be an uncharitable way to view it, as these remnants are degraded by bacteria, producing a variety of harmful, harmless, and beneficial byproducts that can play important roles in human health. If we are going to view things in such a negative light, it's worth thinking about how when you die and your immune system flat-lines forever, this bacteria will be on the front lines for rotting you. But for now, it's our very own internal composting system.
our colon is more like a composting bin than a trash can
Being a rich, full ecosystem, some bacteria in the colon even feed primarily on the byproducts of other bacteria in the colon, which is known as cross-feeding.
These bacteria will consume basically anything that the small intestine does not absorb. In humans compared to other primates, the small intestine is enlarged and the colon is diminished, indicating that humans evolved to consume more foods that are readily absorbed by the small intestine. In other primates, like the gorilla for example, the small intestine is much smaller and the colon is much much larger. Gorillas, who eat a diet of mainly rough leaves and pith that the small intestine would not be able to absorb, get most of their energy (around 60%) from bacterial degradation to short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) in the colon.
Humans can also get energy from SCFA, probably as much as 9%, though this data suffers from the fact that most of it comes from Western populations. Recent studies on more diverse populations shows that other groups of people have very different gut bacterial populations, which might allow them to extract more energy from colonic fermentation. Overall, in humans SCFA are less important as an energy source, but retain an important role in controlling inflammation and gut integrity.
In the opposite circles of the "meat will rot in your colon" crowd, there is the idea that if you remove carbohydrates, particularly complex carbohydrates, from the diet you can avoid some of the more noxious types of fermentation in the colon that may produce flatulence and diarrhea.
This works for some people, but fails for others, particularly over time. This is a testament to the plucky nature of our microbiome. There are plenty of bacteria in the colon more than eager to chomp on excess dietary iron and amino acids, among many other things which are present on low-carb diets as well.
This problem can be exacerbated when the small intestine is damaged, allowing nutrients that should be absorbed mainly by the small intestine into the colon. This seems to be a reason that iron supplementation sometimes fails to improve anemia and instead causes gastrointestinal problems. It is also perhaps the mechanism in which heme iron could lead to inflammation that is connected with colon cancer.
Small intestine dysfunction can also be caused by the overgrowth of bacteria that really belong in the large intestine and colon, known as Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO).
On the other side, there is a worry that low-carb will lead to inflammation due to lowered SCFA production. Lucas Tafur has written that perhaps these studies did not last long enough for the ecosystem to adjust and cross-feed in order to produce SCFA.
There is also a need for more studies on different people from different cultures in order to fully capture the full capacities of the human microbiome. For example, some people have cellulose-degrading bacteria, others do not. In the future, perhaps a scan of individual gut biomes could help people figure out what diet is best for them.
So yeah, lots of things "rot" in your colon. And that's not a bad thing at all. That's exactly how the colon is supposed to work. It's not supposed to be squeaky clean and scoured with wheat bran, it's supposed to be a jungle. It's controlling the "bad" bacteria and their byproducts, as well as selecting for good bacteria and maintaining the integrity of the gut lining and the "gut brain" (our second brain) that really matters.
If you enjoyed this post, you'd probably like my series on the colon.
07/25/2012 - 22:29
I've seen a lot on social media the past week about boycotting Chick-Fil-A because they support organizations that aim to restrict gay rights. This is amusing for me because I grew up in Marietta, Georgia, eating Chick-Fil-A all the time. And I even went to Camp Winshape, which was started by Truett Cathy, Chick-Fil-As founder. Back then I was a fast-food-fried chicken Southern Evangelical. My life has changed since then, but I admit my mouth still waters a little when I think about the Chick-Fil-A fried chicken breakfast biscuit with tater tots. Oh, and the light as air lemon meringue pie. When my family moved north when I was 15, I missed such things sorely and ate at Chick-Fil-A whenever I went back South. But the love affair fell flat when I started cleaning up my diet. I remember I planned on making some exceptions when a Chick-Fil-A opened on the University of Illinois campus. I eagerly devoured my sandwich one bright Illinois morning. And felt absolutely awful for the entire rest of the day. It felt a lot like a hangover. I fell asleep in economics class. I told myself that wouldn't happen again. It wasn't worth it.
But a craving struck when I lived in Sweden. Obviously, it's impossible to get Chick-Fil-A there. So I hit the internet hoping to recreate it in my own kitchen. By then I was a lot more educated about nutrition, so the "top secret" recipe seemed a little horrifying to me. I wasn't about to coat chicken in sugar and flour and fry it in omega-6 garbage peanut oil. Of all the oils to chose, peanut is one of the worst. Extremely high in omega-6, which Americans consume in excessive amounts, it has a more unfavorable fat profile than even canola or soy oil, and is highly allergenic. Omega-6 is also not particularly heat stable and Chick-Fil-A is using it on fried chicken.
The real recipe also contains a form of MSG called autolyzed yeast extract, making it a super-palatable addictive monster, probably why it still makes my mouth water a decade later. I've written before about how so much meat that Americans eat contains sugar and inflammatory oils. I ended up using almond flour, honey, and lard to make my chicken and it was pretty damn good. But that recipe meant I was never seriously tempted by Chick-Fil-A again.
Also, god knows where their chicken comes from. I'm pretty sure it's not free-range or even organic. For a company whose ads involve animals pleading to not being eaten, it seems a little sad to think that their meat comes from an industry known for poor animal welfare, as well as community and environmental destruction.
Considering that chickens are excluded from almost all animal welfare legislation, it should be the chickens pleading to be spared. Besides, I'd prefer to not consume arsenic. Or production methods that encourage antibiotic resistance.
So I don't need to boycott Chick-Fil-A for its current stance on gay rights. I already was boycotting it for serving garbage. I mean, nothing says family values like abusing animals, destroying the environment, and addicting people to fast food...right?
It's really disappointing to me to see friends and family members saying they are going to eat Chick-Fil-A to support "family values" and "business freedom." Go to your local farmers market and you will find plenty of farmers with good old-fashioned Christian values. I'm sure Joel Salatin and Cathy would find much to agree on, except Salatin is against using the government to enforce his values while Cathy uses his business to funnel money into groups that lobby the government to shape laws that restrict other people's rights.
As for Chick-Fil-A being a "clean" fast food option, thanks to HACCP (Hazard Analysis & Critical Control Points) plans, food poisoning is pretty rare at any major fast food restaurants. Killing people with acute illness leads to lawsuits, it's perfectly OK to damage their health by serving food linked to chronic long-term health problems.
06/21/2012 - 14:36
A week or so ago I got an email advertising a new "paleo" product. I've written several times about various products parasitically riding the "paleo" bandwagon. Most of them suck.
We are about to launch a AMRAP Nutrition Paleo Refuel Bar and would LOVE it if you guys would help us out by being a taste tester and possibly write up a review in your blog regarding your thoughts about the bar. Our bars are completely raw and and in our opinion, the most nutritious and delicious paleo bar available:) The ingredients include the following: almond butter, egg whites, almonds, coconut, honey, sesame seeds, flax seeds cinnamon and sea salt.
I was genuinely curious, but I also have a troll streak and so I responded
Thanks for the offer. I have a few questions. Are the egg whites raw too? Are they sourced from pastured hens?
No reply so far.
Just because I'm not a vegan anymore doesn't mean I don't care about what happens to animals. In fact I care about it even more because I need good animal products for my diet.
In Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, he notes that the egg industry is definitely one of the worse of all the industrialized forms of animal agriculture. Feedlot cattle at least enjoy some of their lives outside, whereas the average factory laying hen will never see the light of day, crammed into a tiny cage. Male chicks are discarded, often ground up while still alive. Animal factory farms also often do not discard waste properly, polluting their local landscapes. I don't like supporting this. I don't think it's a good way to produce animals and I sincerely doubt the finished product is as good as a true free range egg.
Who knows where they get their eggs. Even if they are from truly pastured hens, I would wonder how they keep them fresh in bar format. The form of a product often can determine food sensitivities. I react to powdered milk, but not to fresh milk, for example.
Flax is a hilarious example of what happens when people demonize specific foods. Soy is soooo bad because it has phytoestrogens. Man boobz amirite? Turns out flax seed has even higher levels of phytoestrogens than soy! Also would you like an enormous amount of omega-6 fat? Because you will get them from the almond butter.
Either way, I'm sure this company would say that some people need a bar because people are so busy and would you rather have them eating McDonalds. Luckily there are already plenty of good products on the market. Even if some aren't completely transparent with their sourcing (baby steps, I suppose), they at least are using grass-fed and/or organic animal ingredients. Nearly every locality has a grass-fed jerky company at this point. In NYC I sometimes bought from Kings County Jerky. In the Midwest we have Grassfed Gourmet (and several others). You can get pastured bison Tanka bars at a lot of places. Lara Bars are a decent on the go snack, though carrying a fair amount of sugar and sometimes omega-6. Same goes for delicious Hail Merry pies and macaroons.
But I do think there is definitely room for innovation. There are lots of things I'd love to see in the grocery store for when I'm traveling or busy. There isn't really a good non soy/canola mayo on the market right now for example. What would you like to see at the grocery store?
06/18/2012 - 22:13
I've had some incredible meals lately, despite being very busy. I have a bunch of books I need to review, but you know how that goes. I think things will calm down for me after my work gets a real office and I also move into a new apartment. And stop traveling so much.
I have a bunch of new cookbooks I've been trying out. The first is April Bloomfield's A Girl and Her Pig. I only ate at her famous restaurant, The Spotted Pig, once. It was quite an ordeal since they don't take reservations. I remember waiting for four hours and being very very very hungry. Luckily she is known for her fatty British-style food. Later she opened up the Breslin. Back then I wasn't exactly rolling in money, so I lurked outside at the Ace Hotel and ate the snacks at the coffee shop there, which included homemade pork rinds and fried lamb belly.
The most memorable dish I had at the Spotted Pig was a parmesan custard with asparagus and prosciutto. I was thrilled to find this in her book. I had only made custard once and that was probably two years ago when I was an idiot and didn't understand that there was a reason for cooking it in a hot water bath/double boiler. I was unfortunately making frozen custard. What resulted was a terrible ice cream with bits of scrambled egg throughout. If you ever want to make ice cream that you aren't in danger of overeating, this is an excellent method of food unreward.
This time I actually followed the instructions. The result was delicious and it tasted good on everything I put it on.
Farm egg + parmesan custard + grilled asparagus
I also used another of her recipes as a complement to one of my own. I've been in love with fresh pork belly for several years, ever since having it at Momofuku. I think I love it more than I love bacon. When the Momofuku cookbook came out, I started cooking it at home, riffing off their recipe. I use less sugar than Chang and more umami. I'm now quite happy with my method, which involves just putting a cube of it in my crock pot, drizzling it with a little honey + lots of tamari + a few drops Red Boat fish sauce + a bit of lime juice and leaving it on low overnight. Then I chill it and slice it (it is easier to slice when chilled). Because it's pork belly you get fat to sear it with accumulating at the bottom of the crock pot. I sweat some chilies in that and sear the belly a little. Then I season to taste with salt and pepper.
It is rich though, so it's nice to have something to cut it. This night I used a crispy and bright radish salad from April's book, which involved a nice technique of rubbing the radishes with herbs and flaking parmesan on top + some delicious pickles that my guest brought me. Pork Belly's bonus, which is the rendered pork fat and jelly, is absolutely fantastic for cooking everything. So I cooked some fingerling potatoes in it and dressed them with little tiny lumps of farm butter and freshly ground black pepper.
The fun doesn't stop there, because what doesn't taste better with the flavored pork fat? These shrimp that I cooked in it were incredible.
Another cookbook I bought recently was Beginnings by Chris Cosentino. I first encountered him in college when I was writing about food law. He was an ardent critic of the foie gras ban in Chicago (which was later overturned) and received death threats from animal rights activists. He is also known as "Offal Chris" because he promotes the use of offal. I credit him for piquing my interest in the subject. So when I heard he was coming to one of my local favorite restaurants, the Publican, to cook for a night, I took out reservations immediately. The meal did not disappoint.
Every dish was really really good, but a standout was the spaghetti. When it came to the table I was not very happy because to be honest it looks like it was pasta made out of onions. And to be honest I don't like spaghetti very much and never have. But our waiter told us it was actually pasta made out of pork skin! Don't ask me how he does it, the recipe is not in the book. The sauce was amazing, it had some kind of oceanic element in there that worked really well with the briny olive flavor and the bright tomato. Chris needs to perform a valuable public service and tell the world how to make this.
Another dish I really want to learn how to make is his pork belly with clams. The sauce tasted very much of egg yolks, but I have no idea how to make it. Maybe some kind of light bearnaise-like sauce with stock?
The next day I tried my hand at one of his recipes for a sardine "iron chef" party. This required fresh sardines, which I got at Issacson and Stein, an excellent place to get cheap fish. The cost is that they are not going to baby you and help you with things. And while I sometimes fry smelt, which is a whole fish, this recipe called for fileting the fish, which I had never done in my life. I had some help, but he didn't know anything either. We followed some instructions from youtube and the result was some mangled, but passable, filets. Cosentino's recipe calls for just marinating them in olive oil and serving them raw, but this isn't San Francisco, and we pan seared them. And then layered them on sourdough crostini with Cosentino's Boccalone nduja, which is a delicious rich spicy sausage that spreads quite luxuriously. I don't know if I will be doing fresh sardines again for awhile, since I live in a studio apartment that reeked for days, but I definitely could stand to have some more nduja, which can be found at Publican Quality Meats.
But one of the most innovative dishes at the party was from my friends Nick and Shannon. I told Nick he could make a zillion dollars if he had a stand selling this. Nick made his own katsuobushi from sardines. I can't explain how, but they have their own blog and hopefully they will post on it. But katsuobushi is a umami flavor goldmine, which he grated on to braised pork belly and spread on pickled ramp aioli. But the amazing thing was that the bao bread here was made with just baking soda + bright yellow farm fresh egg yolks (from Paulie's Pasture), which is somehow steamed in a pressure cooker. The original method is described here.
I was at Belly Shack and I noticed they have gluten-free items, but they are all also vegetarian and somewhat miserly considering the rest of the menu is so decadently fatty. I definitely did not order them. I notice this pattern at other restaurants, where anything non-standard, vegan/XYZ-free/etc, is relegated to some low-fat bland "healthy" ghetto. How much awesome would it be to be able to get something that normal people want to eat, like these delicious bao?
Apparently if I wear almost no makeup and a cute ruffled shirt, I look very young. At a party the day before my birthday, two people told me I looked 12-13, which I thought was hilarious. I turned 26 the next day and went out to the last night of One Sister, an underground supper club. It was the last night because chef Iliana Regan is opening up a restaurant called Elizabeth in Lincoln Square. I'm very much looking forward to that, because I love her style of cooking. It reminds me a lot of the New Nordic movement. Lots of foraged goods and naturalistic presentations.
Where else can you get a cured Alaskan wild bear wild rice crispy treat with Wisconsin cheddar?
Or chocolate covered chicken liver mousse? If only I could eat such things every day. You can see much better photos of her menus at Jen Moran's photography page.
It was an amazing birthday dinner. As I've written before, Iliana is a chef to watch.
Unfortunately the weather here in Chicago has been quite hot lately, which coupled with low air quality ratings I have trouble tolerating due to lung damage that occurred when I was younger. Perhaps I need to move away from the city (or at least far away from anywhere with a real summer), but for now I am heading to visit my cousin in CA, to read and eat oranges. Food recs in the South Bay area are welcome!
06/06/2012 - 23:29
If you are really into healthy eating, a trip to the grocery store can be kind of depressing. It often seems like most of the food they sell isn't even really food. A couple of weeks, in a lazy mood, I combed the grocery stores shelves for a mayonnaise that didn't have high omega-6 vegetable oil. I even would have accepted an oil with high-oleic vegetable oil, but none of the mayos fit the bill. My time already wasted in that futile search, I cracked open Ferran Adria's Family Meal cookbook and made my oil aioli with an immersion blender, finally managing to hit the emulsification without splattering the walls and my hair with olive oil and egg.
I find these days I get some raw ingredients from the grocery store, but increasingly I find myself purchasing from the food underground, tiny businesses that could never find their way through the monolith of regulations. They are foods, god forbid, cooked in people's kitchens. You know, kind of like the food mom made, but for some reason it's OK if mom does it, but not OK to sell it to other people. It seems kind of strange to me that the bagged raw chickens that a farmer slaughtered in his backyard are legal for me to buy (small farm poultry exemption), but not the craft beer or the kombucha made in someone's kitchen. Raw chicken is way more dangerous than beer could possibly be and what if I don't cook it right? With the craft beer, even if it's made in a licensed kitchen, there are all kinds of weird licensing loopholes to jump through. I thought it was hilarious when in NYC some native Wisconsinites were busted for selling New Glarus beer because it's not licensed for sale in NYC. What is the purpose of busting people for that? Is New Glarus beer more dangerous than Six Point beer? I don't think the government even pretends it's protecting people from anything anymore. Once something is a law and a bureaucrat is on the payroll, it tends to stick around.
Some people have tried to come up with creative solutions for complying with government regulations, like shared licensed kitchen spaces, but not surprisingly, the government often isn't terribly supportive. That's what happened with Logan Square Kitchen in Chicago. Some people have focused on the food safety regulations that LSK struggled with and there are legitimate arguments about that, but the fact that they had to deal with business licensing, which often doesn't have anything to do with even pretending to protect people, surely compounded these struggles. Maybe you should need a license to operate some kind of dangerous machinery, but why does anyone need a license to have a business?
Over and over we heard, “you did everything right.” See the Alderman before building purchase. All City Depts approve us through Green Building Permit Program. Go to BACP in advance of applying for license, completely disclosing the business model. Spend 3 months talking about what licenses we needed. Apply as directed. Told we ‘misrepresented’ our business. Told we can’t have license caused we’ve failed our “furniture inspection.” Correct that, and get licenses contingent on conditions we can’t meet. Then the Zoning folks try to shut us down. 20 health inspections. 18 months wrapped in red tape. Enduring intimidation and harassment, the resources we set aside to ramp up the business were instead used to pay lawyers and our mortgage while we were denied the right to operate.
It's not about safety, it's about control. Another depressing case has been in the news lately, that of noted tea expert David Lee Hoffman, who is possibly going to lose his farm and home because the buildings he has on his properly are "unapproved."
Life is always so full of strange twists and turns and usually happen with unpredictable spontaneity. Forty years of labor on my property have left me with a tired back, two bad shoulders, and thirty or so unpermitted structures. The finish of my laboring career was so close I was even pondering the location for a hammock that I’ve been keeping for just that occasion. But rather than living out days of leisure retirement in the garden, I find myself in another realm, something akin to a tragic Greek Fable when I’m told after four decades of hard labor, rather than receiving an award for accomplishment, I am ordered by the Great Power to now tear it all down!
I remember a farm I worked on that had "unapproved" buildings. They were gorgeous and innovative experimental structures. They couldn't get permits for them because codes didn't exist for strawbale buildings or composting toilets. In a rental building perhaps I am happy to have some building codes, but experimenting on your own property in buildings you live in should not be illegal.
Some localities are trying to put into place "cottage food" ordinances that would allow for some exceptions. I actually don't think this is a good idea because it draws the attention of bureaucrats who will want to extract their "rents" somehow. Or as in Illinois the local cronies can decide they just don't like the law and tie you up in paperwork forever.
Thank god for the internet, where people are just not bothering trying to get legit in the first place. These days you can find cottage businesses through social networking sites, send an email, and have your homemade kombucha/raw milk yogurt/home-brewed beer delivered to your apartment. I have to admit here that at this point I buy much of my food this way. It's immensely freeing in so many ways. I get to know each producer personally and can interact with them in a way that allows me to get the best products possible. I can even custom order things to my liking. It requires I be somewhat engaged with my food buying and probably takes more time than going to Trader Joes, but sometimes it's cheaper and the food is always better in every way possible.
The best meal I've ever had? It was at an underground supper club here in Chicago. And let's be honest here, I felt more comfortable eating that food, out of a kitchen I could clearly see, than I do eating food from most restaurants. Restaurants get inspected maybe once a year? How is that supposed to even pretend to enforce safety? And what is safety anyway? Why is it OK for a restaurant to re-use frying oil containing trans fats, which slowly kill people? But not OK to use beef slaughtered by the chef on a local farm in full-view of customers?
How do I find these things? Twitter, Facebook, going to food events and networking with people. Crossfit gyms have also becoming powerful networks for this.
Wild boar tacos at Nite Market
Last week I went to a rather large underground market organized by a grad student that featured unlicensed food vendors. It was wonderful to see the variety of microbusinesses featured there. You could get all kinds of delicious things from kiwi kombucha to liver pate to kale chips.
But I suffer from this fear that the small underground businesses I enjoy so much will go the way of the Greenpoint Food Market, a vibrant little fair full of delicious and innovative foods. I've seen increasingly sneaky entrapment-like methods being used against buying clubs, specifically raw dairy sellers. Will there come a day when I have to wrap myself behind three proxies to send an email about picking up homemade yogurt?
I also think sometimes about the situation Americans are in health-wise. I probably wouldn't eat some of the things I eat (the raw meat and dairy in particular) if I were still sick because I was on immune-system suppressing medications like proton pump inhibitors and corticosteroids. Millions of Americans are on these kind of medications.
Whenever there is a food poisoning outbreak we hear so much about people getting sick, but what about the people who eat that same food and don't get sick? Shouldn't we be thinking a little more about them? What does it mean that they didn't get sick? Seth Roberts posted a few days ago about how we are approaching the antibiotic resistance problem the wrong way. Instead of fretting about antibiotics being overused for sicknesses, why aren't we thinking about why Americans are so sick all the time? Why aren't we focusing on boosting immune systems?
Recommended reading:
The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements
Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front
The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America's Emerging Battle Over Food Rights
04/18/2012 - 19:54
You know, it's kind of amazing to realize that you can get pretty good craft beer at nearly any convenience store in a city. You can even get it at a random mediocre bar your friend dragged you to for a birthday party or something. It's pretty much everywhere at this point. I wasn't allowed to drink when I was 5, but I hear that twenty years ago it definitely wasn't that way. I've often mused about what it would be like if you could get good grass-fed meat so easily.
But imagine if you went to a good bar and you asked what was on tap and they said "craft beer." You've heard good things about it. You ask what kind and they are like "well, it's artisan and it's certified craft beer." You order a pint and it's really really bitter. You decide to order a Corona next time.
Unfortunately that's kind of where grass-fed meat is now. It's a premium product, people are interested in buying it, but it's stuck in some kind of commodity purgatory. I'm often torn between thinking that it's great that some jerky in the store says "grass-fed" on the label and that there are "grass-fed" burger bars across Chicago, and kind of disappointed in them. Most of the time if you contact the companies that make those products or talk to the burger bar owners, they won't even tell you what farms the animals are from.
This is bad. I recall a conversion I had a few months ago with a guy at the gym. I told him I mainly buy grass-fed meat from local farmers and he said "yeah, I tried that, but it tasted so awful that I don't think I'll buy it again." I asked him where it came from and he had no idea.
Honestly, I've bought some positively awful grass-fed meat. It sucks to spend that kind of money on something that you end up having to drown in spices. Luckily I know that not all meat is the same. "Grass-fed" is a minimum premium standard that has nothing to do with taste quality. Taste is affected by diet, breed, age of animal, and butchering skill, among many other things. Yes, consumers buying these products often need to learn a few basic cooking skills, but that won't save them from meat that's just not very good (a meat tenderizer, added fat, tons of spices can sometimes save mediocre meat).
So the whole commodity attitude damages the product's reputation. I also think it stifles producer innovation (of course there are tons of things doing that, like regulation, this is just one of them). I was drinking some excellent Rockmill beer this weekend and I thought, what if niche meat were more like craft beer? What if people knew of certain producers and knew their product tasted different? What if stores stocked meat from multiple producers and labeled it as such?
I'm happy to say there are already some places in Chicago I know of that treat meat like this. The Butcher and the Burger is one of them. If you have been to the other burger bars in Chicago and didn't like them, definitely try this place. My main complaint is that they don't always get my order right (medium when I said rare) and they use peanut oil in the fryer, but the meat itself is very good and some of it is even from one of the owner's own farms. There are some exceptions on the menu, so I'd stick with the meat from specific farms, such as the Q7 beef, which is very silky and has a good amount of fat, and the La Pryor pork.
The good butcher shops I've been to are also pretty good about this. In NYC you have The Meat Hook and Dickson's Farmstand. In Chicago you have The Butcher & The Larder and Publican Quality Meats. Of course farmer's markets seem like a good option, but few allow consumers to taste before buying, which is an obstacle because why should I buy extremely expensive meat if I don't know what it tastes like? With craft beers, tastings are common. I had Mint Creek Farms lamb at a restaurant before, so that's how I started buying from them. With Meatshare I often worked with farmers new to selling to urban markets and they offered their meat at lower prices or offered tastings in order to gain a foothold. The cool thing about that is I can tell you exactly what their products tasted like. And they all tasted different. The pork from Spring Lake Farm, for example, had a high percentage of hay in the diet, giving the pork a delicious almost-beefy savory flavor. B&Y farms, a producer that later moved on to the farmer's market after working with us, produced Tunis lamb that had these fatty wonderful tails that braised up very nicely. The goat I would buy from Glynwood was the best goat I've ever had, not too fatty and not too lean.*
I've followed Carrie Oliver on Twitter for awhile and she does some events with beef tasting that seem like a promising model. I think we definitely need more of this- more emphasis on meat as a diverse producer-oriented product.
*that's the problem I have with Whole Food's lamb. The NZ stuff is grass-fed, but often is so terribly lean and gamey. The US lamb is usually too fatty and a little flavorless. I like balance.
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