The chum bucket of new food

“For a moment, there’s the sense that you’re traveling out on some rusty-bottomed trawler with the alcoholic fishermen of Asheville, chugging rotgut until one of you (maybe you. Why not you? You’re a smart person) strikes upon the idea of dredging up kelp and Irish moss to add to the chum bucket and then drinking the mixture by the mugful for nutrition’s sake.”

Submitted to McSweeney’s New Food by Jake Ruiter. Wot, not heard of McSweeney’s? Boy (Dave Eggers) writes best selling autobiographical novel. Boy starts imprint, literary magazine and website. Zadie Smith likes it.

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The green beer that isn’t and the goat that is

Mountain Goat has established an enviable reputation for being green. Staff are incentivised to cycle to work. There are solar panels on the roof. Oh, and the beer is pretty good too.

It must be irksome when brewing giant Fosters comes along with Cascade Green, as reported in The Age by beer writer Willie Simpson:

“[Cascade Green] claims to be preservative-free and to use glass that is “the lightest weight, highest recycled content currently available in Australia”. Both are probably true but they neglect important qualifications – namely, that the beer is still presumably made with stabilisers and other additives, commonly used by mainstream breweries, and is both heat-pasteurised and filtered. Both these processes use a lot of energy and Cascade Green is then packaged in a slim 330-millilitre bottle that requires proportionately more energy to fill than something larger.”

The fat of the media

Never trust a skinny chef? What about a stick-thin food writer? Are there any? I must admit that a year ago I piled on the pounds reviewing food and that I’ve learnt to leave food on my plate. I know Melbourne food critic Stephen Downes swims while The Age’s John Lethlean is cycling.

Super-sizing is a hazard for us all but what about Jason Perlow, the founder of egullet? According to the New York Times:

“In October, Mr. Perlow was in Denver on business for his day job as a systems integration expert. He fell ill, and what seemed like a case of altitude sickness turned into a three-day hospital visit. There he heard the grim truth: He was diabetic. Read more

Truffle salt is from Mars

Maldon salt, Murray River salt, pink salt. have you noticed the weird varieties of volcanic salt on menus. At Per Se in New York the numbers of salts offered to guests isin double figures. Now the New York Times reports there is truffle salt (and speculates on salt from Mars):

Like the absurdly expensive balsamic vinegars of years past, the plainest of kitchen staples has been elevated to a luxury good. At Williams-Sonoma’s Web site, customers can now spend up to $28 on a 3.5-ounce jar of salt.

AA Gill: The one star review

The wicked one star review that also lays into bottled water (and bottled fermented grape juice). As AA Gill says:

“Your starter for 10: since the beginning of the industrial revolution, how much water has mankind irreplaceably used up? Is it one gallon per head, 100 gallons per head or 1,000 gallons per head? And how much of that figure do you think is due to bottled water? The answer is, of course, none. All the water that ever was, every ice-age glacier, every princess’s tear, every rill, gill, brook, beck and burn, each and every drop of monsoon, all scattered showers, every old man’s prostate dribble and teenager’s salivay snog is still here. The world is as soggy as the Garden of Eden.”

The little brown restaurant review

Yes, AA Gill has been to India and done the usual squatting over a bowl – and a restaurant back in London:

“Somehow, I picked something up. I’d had enough pebble-dashing amoeba and slurry with the fringe on top to insist on drugs, so I took it straight round to my doctor. “I’ll need a specimen,” he said, without any discernible note of excited inquiry. The thing with specimens is, well, everything. And they never find anything in them. I mean, would you? How hard are you going to look? Can I suggest you give me the most powerful antibiotics known to botty world, and let God pick through the corpses? He handed me a plastic container the size of a film canister, with a little spatula attached.”

Back eating out again it doesn’t get much better:

“The walls are brick, the tables zinc and the room full of locals talking and eating. Suggs from Madness lurched back and forth to the street for fags. Inside, the menu is short and replete with those dishes that have become young England classics, or clichés, depending on how your digestion’s feeling. I started with mushroom soup, which was a thick, grey custard of underseasoned field mushrooms and not much else.”

The little brown book

As little books go, this is one is living larger than one might expect. The Little Brown Book aka “What’s Your Poo Telling You?” is a field guide to human stools. Writing in Salon, Leslie Crawford:

“…discovered that mine had an ideal shape, sinking nicely to the bottom of the bowl. Read more

No dilemma for Michael Pollan’s omnivores

“There’s something pathetic in that very American question, because the answer is already implicit in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and it should have been apparent even before readers discovered Pollan’s scintillating book — except, clearly, it wasn’t,” writes Salon.

“But then America is a gullible nation with a long-standing thirst for snake oil. How could we have resisted the blandishments of marketing departments and their lab-coated allies? We couldn’t, and as a result, Pollan writes, “Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished.”

Japanese knives: cool for chefs

Since beforeKill Bill Japanese knives have been cool. Hell, I’m obsessed with Japanese cabinet-making tools. They are very beautiful and sharp.
Now everything Japanese is going mainstream with chefs. As Harris Salat says in Salon:

“And not just those of the cooks. Since the mid-’90s, Japanese knives have become de rigueur in professional kitchens of all stripes — edging out, so to speak, German and French blades. Read more

Grenada’s fair chocolate

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