I have just made a purchase that gives me great pleasure: a shredder. (That's a paper shredder; no culinary implications.)
From tequila buzzes to home makeovers, most of life's perks are transitory. That new kitchen will eventually grow dated; your well-toned abs will soften or expand with age. But shredding the reams of unwanted documents that have taken over your closet is forever.
I have seen the future and it is dressed up with far too many adjectives.
At a recent James Beard Foundation Dinner, described in the Chicago Tribune as "culinary alchemy" and a "food revolution," items included a hollow sphere of watermelon and saffron frozen in liquid nitrogen (basically a hollow popsicle without the stick) and
Chino Farms Carrots and Venezuelan Chocolate with chocolate crepe, milk jam sauce, Indonesian long pepper ice cream, chocolate caramel sauce, cherry vinegar, and microbasil.
Is that a dish or a list of ingredients? It's not complexity I'm opposed to, but the flaunting of complexity itself as a feature. Indonesian long pepper ice cream is really just ice cream flavored with long Indonesian peppers, no more exotic in principle than vanilla. I'm not against naming your sources, but there are more subtle ways to do it. Chefs, like writers, need to learn the value of brevity. If anything, food should be more complicated than it looks rather than the other way around.
My 2 year-old son uses a French fry as a utensil for eating ketchup. He dips a fry, sucks off the ketchup, then goes back to the well again with the same fry, repeating as needed until nothing is left but an inedible mess of slimed potato. Then he grabs a new fry and starts again.
And you thought food blogs were supposed to be appetizing.
I bring this up not to dissuade you from ever having children—that's your call—but to make a point. I'll give you a hint -- it's not the authentic tomato flavor he's after. Like most of us, what he really craves is sweet.
That's right, though cleverly disguised with just enough vinegar, ketchup is loaded with sugar, more dessert than dinner as far as nutrition is concerned. From barbecue sauce, to honey mustard dressing, to sweet and sour pork, to the French gastriche, the idea of mixing sugar and acid is not new. What is new is the habit of pouring it over everything we eat, made easier than ever by the introduction of the squeezable bottle. (Once upon a time you had to wait for your ketchup, but not anymore. Sales must have skyrocketed. )
So next time you pick up that red bottle, take a pause. It might not be your burger that's making you fat. It might be your ketchup.
This week at Tuesday breakfast we served real sourdough pancakes made from my homegrown starter, leavened by the natural yeast that grows in my own kitchen. Strange as that may sound, let me assure you there's yeast in your kitchen, too. And while the whole sourdough process may sound like some bad sixth-grade science experiment, it's actually the oldest way to make yeast-leavened bread. (Unless you managed to scam some yeast from your local brewery, it was the only way until commercial yeast became available in the 19th century.) For all I know it was a sixth-grader who discovered on some pre-biblical hearth that if you started each new baking with a bit of last week's dough, your bread would rise magically in the oven, and would have a more interesting flavor and crumb. But whoever it was, they were on to something, and thousands of years later, this is still the best way to make bread. Or in this case, pancakes. (I'm betting they were just trying to find a way to recycle their leftovers, but it paid off.)
Update 4/1/05 — The grits were a big hit at breakfast. A creamy texture but with some bite left in them, and they actually taste like corn. Everybody who tasted them was struck by the flavor. To say they taste better than supermarket grits would miss the point; they are an entirely different product. The only shame is these grits, now considered an "artisan" or speciality item, were once commonplace. Makes me wonder what else those of us raised on modern, industrialized foodstuffs have been missing.
One of the common complaints at Tuesday breakfast is that nobody gets the grits right. So I ordered some stone ground grits from Anson Mills in South Carolina. I'm going to try them out this Tuesday.
So what are grits? Ground corn. Like corn meal, but with a coarser texture. But unlike most grits sold these days, Anson Mills grits are made with organically-grown corn, and are made from the whole kernal, including the germ. That makes them highly perishable (the germ doesn't last), which is why the man on the phone told me he would ship my order on the day it was ground. (But not until they got around to grinding some more, which he said would be a few days. I didn't mind waiting.) Their antebellum-style grits are stone ground, much coarser than supermarket grits, and may need up to 2 hours to cook. I may soak them overnight to speed things up.
I'm writing all this like I know it, but truth be told, I just read it. I'm a white boy from the north. I don't have a classic family recipe or story of how my Grandma used to make them. I plan to keep it simple, using the basic recipe that came in the package from Anson Mills, which can be paraphrased as follows:
2 1/2 cups milk
1 cup Anson grits
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
Salt and black pepper to taste
Scald the milk in a medium saucepan (I'll probably use a stainless steel bain set in a double-boiler), add the grits, stir three minutes, cook 1-2 hours until tender but not mushy, and add the butter.
I'd be tempted to stir in a bit of bacon fat (or better yet, fatback) but if so I'll reserve a few portions beforehand so I can offer a vegetarian option as well.
And cheese. White cheddar and parmesan grated and melted right into the grits (rather than on top). Now that I think about it, I think I'll offer three types: plain grits(vegetarian), bacon grits, and cheese grits.
For toppings, I'll offer sauteed greens (collards, kale, chard), and more cheese. I'll also offer bacon and sausage or country ham, which can be served on the side or cut up and stirred right into the grits if desired.
There's also shrimp and grits, of course, but that's a separate dish to be tried on a different day. And it might be a bit complicated for a breakfast, though I doubt anybody would complain. But for now I'll keep it simple.
