Salon.com > The Art of Eating

Consider the prune

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:01:00 +0000

The most famous prune in the world, the pruneau d'Agen, has been a celebrated product of southwest France since at least the 1500s, outliving -- and even thriving because of -- several nearly existential threats.

The variety of plum grown to be dried into these prunes is the Prune d'Ente, chosen after the winter of 1709 killed many trees, requiring widespread replanting. Its taste was superior to that of previous varieties, its fruit was larger and higher yielding, and it was well-adapted to the region. Agen prunes were a huge success, heavily exported, until the two world wars of the 20th century devastated production, creating another chance for selecting and propagating especially fine specimens. From 1943 to 1949, French government researchers on bicycles, knowing that the variety embraces many clones, selected 60 outstanding trees and reduced those to the six best. One of them, assigned the number 707, now makes up roughly three-quarters of all the Prune d'Ente planted in France, which under the Indication Géographique Protégée, awarded by the EU in 2002, is the only variety permitted.

The pleasures of truly wild wild rice

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:01:00 +0000

In the 1960s — and in an odd contradiction — cultivated wild rice began to be grown in California in paddies, like regular rice, and harvested by machine. But northern, truly wild wild rice, or "manoomin" in Ojibway, grows in the shallow waters of ponds, lakes and rivers in the north-central United States and adjacent Canada. It isn't rice at all, of course, but the seed of a tall, annual aquatic grass, Zizania palustris (sometimes still called by the earlier name Zizania aquatica). The wild grain continues to be gathered by hand, often by Indians, as a commercial crop. Gathered from nature and processed in the traditional way — heated and stirred in an iron pot or washtub over a fire — wild rice is olive green to brown mixed with tan. It tastes nutty, toasted, slightly grassy and, as one writer puts it, like tea.

How to buy, hold, and sharpen a good knife

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:01:00 +0000

Before you buy a knife, hold it. Think about its weight and balance and how comfortable it feels. A good knife is balanced, which makes it a little easier and less tiring to use. If you suspend the knife between thumb and forefinger, holding the top of the blade at its widest point next to the handle, the blade won’t tip much up or down. For ease and control, the best way to hold a chef’s knife is to grip the widest part of the blade itself between your thumb and curled forefinger, with three fingers firmly around the handle. You have the most leverage and again the most ease and control, if you cut with the wide part of the blade close to your hand.

What you really need in a knife: A sharp blade

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:01:00 +0000

If you were going to have any kitchen tool beyond a hot plate, a pot, and a spoon, it would be a really sharp knife. A dull knife crushes and tears rather than slices. It requires more strength, and if it takes real force it may slip dangerously. A blunt edge doesn't cut crisp vegetables so much as wedge them apart; it mashes tomatoes; it presses out juices from meat. You can test the sharpness of a knife by pulling your thumb across the blade at a right angle to it and without pressure. A dull edge feels smooth; a sharp edge catches at your skin.

Almost all the knives I use, above all the ten-inch chef's knife I use most often, are forged -- hammered -- from a single piece of hot steel. Forged knives are typically more three-dimensional than the other, dominant kind, which is stamped out of a thin rolled sheet. But a forged knife doesn't cut automatically better than a good stamped knife. (An excellent one is the Forschner Victorinox ten-inch chef's knife, sold online for as little as $21, one of the great knife bargains.) And even the cheapest knife can be made extremely sharp. The knives at a low-price chain store are all stainless-steel, like nearly every knife today, but the metal is nearly always thin, most of the cutting edges are coarsely ground and slightly uneven, and the handles may be small and uncomfortable. Yet they may cut well enough at first, and the price is under $10. A staining ten-inch chef's knife forged by the French maker Thiers-Issard, among those that can call its knives Sabatier, was recently $120. Some stainless versions from other producers run much higher. A made-to-order ten-inch chef's knife from the Master Bladesmith Bob Kramer, by reputation as high as quality gets, now costs $1500, if you're lucky enough to get on the waiting list. And you can spend a few thousand dollars or more for a great Japanese knife.

A call for a new term beyond organic: “Authentic”

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 23:01:00 +0000

Some things -- asparagus, summer turnips, green beans, peas, lettuce, plums, certain apples -- taste obviously different when they are taken directly from the tree or soil rather than purchased in a supermarket. Yet very few of us know that from harvesting our own plants and trees. The closest we come is buying such produce at a farm stand or farmer's market. The supporters of small-scale growers and farmers' markets, which were once few and cheap and are now so much more plentiful and expensive, are sometimes accused of impracticality and elitism. But there's no reason to deprive anyone of a choice between higher and lower quality. And small-scale producers sometimes show the way for mass-producers, as they did and continue do in the case of organic production.

Idealistic market gardeners came first, but of course large corporations have dominated the U.S. supply of organic food for years. The federal government's much-negotiated definition of "organic," when it came into force in 2002, was strong evidence of the big money to be made. At first, the small-scale growers were worried that it would be hard to compete.

The new chocolate, made in ancient style

Mon, 31 May 2010 13:01:00 +0000

Working in rented space in an industrial building near chop shops in Somerville, Massachusetts, Taza Chocolate is not a remelter of purchased chocolate -- a high craft of its own as practiced by certain celebrated chocolatiers. Rather, it is one of a handful of superior new U.S. producers of chocolate who work in small batches, starting with cocoa beans. Taza, which sold its first bar in 2007, processes minimally; it aims at maximum aroma. Above all, what sets it apart is that it doesn't conch.

Conching gives most chocolate its characteristic smooth texture, and it has an important influence on taste. Low-end chocolate is conched for a day or less; a high-end European bar might be conched for as long as five days. The conching machine -- the original, designed by Rudolphe Lindt in 1874, was shell-shaped, hence "conch" -- repeatedly works the soft mass of ground cocoa transforming it through heat, movement, and exposure to air. The chocolate gains a creamy smoothness, while some of its inherent acidity evaporates. Yet the exposure to air also takes away some desirable aromas. Taza works outside the European tradition. Instead Alex Whitmore, one of the two Taza partners, was inspired by the chocolate he encountered in southern Mexico. Taza's texture remains slightly coarse, because of the cocoa itself and because spread throughout is a fine sand of sugar. (Similar chocolate is made in Modica in Sicily.) In your mouth, the sugar is the last part of the chocolate to melt, leaving an unusually sweet aftertaste. Even Taza's strongest bar, at 80 percent chocolate, tastes sweeter than most other dark chocolate. The large compensation is an unusually intense, especially fruity flavor.

My big, expensive, heartbreaking yuppie stove

Mon, 17 May 2010 12:01:00 +0000

A few years ago, my white White-Westinghouse stove was down to two and a half burners -- one of the four burners was dead, another dying -- and a demanding chef friend was due in a few weeks to prepare a wedding dinner for 80 (my wedding). The White-Westinghouse had been a local deal, and back then I hadn't worried much about the quality of a stove, because I planned to do a lot of fireplace cooking, something that hasn't happened for reasons unrelated to stoves. I was proud of my three fading burners in a Luddite way, proud of not owning a "yuppie" stove. But we badly needed a new stove. I did some quick research, and we bought a brand-new, pricy, six-burner, stainless-steel range with oven. The new stove did its job and the wedding meal went beautifully. The old stove had been no miracle of design in any sense. But of course you don't need a great stove to cook well, and it certainly won't do much to help you cook better. Really, it just helps you cook more food faster. When we still had that old stove, I could put a cast-iron frying pan on a burner, turn the meager heat to high, wait 10 minutes, add fat and a steak, and the meat would brown deeply, gorgeously -- quickly; it could be cooked beautifully. When I wanted to braise on the old stove, having only a little ring of low flames was an advantage.