(It's About Time!) Ruhlman Wins A Beard Award!

Finally! After At least nine food and cooking related books , countless articles and blog posts Michael Rulhman nails a James Beard Award for Ruhlman's Twenty! He should have gotten one for Ratio and Charcuterie, but hell, one is sure better than nothing!

CONGRATULATIONS MICHAEL & DONNA!

Sugar Mountain Farm Needs a Kickstart

Anyone who has ever raised animals and sent them to a slaughterhouse understands the anxiety that comes along with not knowing how your stock is going to be treated once it leaves your sight. I've personally seen and butchered the carcasses of animals that shipped off-farm in perfect good health come back from the slaughterhouse with broken bones and bruises. And although I never had to personally transport and the animals to the slaughterhouse, I know it was big pain in the neck for the guy who did. So I have a lot of empathy for farmers who want to take charge of what undeniably one of the most difficult stages in meat production and do the slaughter themselves.

Now, I don't personally know the people at Sugar Mountain Farm in Vermont. Their quest to raise money to build out a USDA inspected abbatoir on their farm was brought to my attention by a virtual friend on Facebook. But I think that I know enough about what they must be going through to offer them a hand by publishing their Kickstarter page on AHA. Check it out



Sugar Mountain Farm | Stories of Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids in the mountains of Vermont:

Your Food is Wrong

Taking pot shots at food believed to be inauthentic probably feels good because it appears to validate the way the shooter believes the food should be prepared.  But I doubt there has even been a single example of a claim of culinary "inauthenticity" that can withstand more than a few minutes of scrutiny. 

Take the sentiment expressed in the manifesto (above) which was posted on FaceBook by a representative of a restaurant in Mexico. The manifesto shows a plate of traditionally prepared tacos above an American version of the kind you might find at Taco Bell or a high school cafeteria. But instead of labeling them "American Tacos" the author describes them as "bulls**t." (see Chingadera)

Taken at face value, the message can be politely interpreted to mean "the tacos at the top are authentic while the version at the bottom is not." I disagree. 

I'm sure there was a period in North American history where the concoction in the bottom photo would not be recognized by anyone as tacos (and therefore not tacos). But nowadays, chances are that  if you order tacos in North America in anyplace other than a restaurant owned and operated by Mexicans or Non-Mexicans who are devoted to preparing "authentic" Mexican food, you will get something that looks like that. And I think that most  N.Americans who eat tacos eat those kind of tacos and would probably be surprised to learn that Mexican tacos are prepared differently. In other words, for the majority of Non-Mexican taco-eaters in the US, the stuff on the bottom are authentic tacos and the dish at top is not. 

I think both dishes are tacos and so the message of the manifesto is wrong. 

Once a large group of people agree to call something by a specific name that is it's name,  and unless you can show that some harm has resulted from the naming, I don't think there is much reason to complain about what they are called. To call something someone made "bulls**t" because it doesn't conform to the way that you think it should be made seems silly at best and at worst,  nasty and pedantic. 

People adopting food concepts from other people, changing or not changing them, while keeping or changing the name is what people do. It's something to accept and study, and not to be derided as bulls**t. 

Okay, okay. I admit that when I pick up a restaurant menu and read "Napoleon of Sole" or order a ravioli and end up with something that looks like a 3D Frank Gehry doodle I cringe a little. But honestly, I don't care what the food is called as long as it "works." 

Now getting back to those tacos in the bottom half of the manifesto; I'll bet they suck. 

Are Recipes Necessary?

So  Scotty Harris posted a tweet on Facebook by chef and prolific cookbook author Sara Moulton citing a question (s) - first posed during a panel discussion by respected food-blogger Carol Blymire- that I've been turning over in my mind for at least twenty years:

 "are recipes really necessary? do we need all that detail?"

It's pretty obvious to me now that the answer to these questions is "it depends." However, it was not always so obvious.

For the longest time I believed that recipes were only for novices and those who were too insecure to trust their memories and cooking skills. I believed that if you had a solid command of technique, a sound understanding of the physical properties of food and an ability to imagine how a dish will taste before you cook it, you could do away with written recipes and cook extemporaneously. Of course, I still believe this and, most of the time, that's exactly how I approach the process of cooking. I rarely look at recipes and don't buy or own very many cookbooks.*

However, there are many occasions when highly detailed written recipes are indispensable.

Recipes are essential in virtually any commercial context you can name. This is especially true in situations where the food is going to be mass-produced and where small variations in weight/color/shape/flavor can have big impacts on profits and customer experience. Imagine trying to produce 1000lbs of  hot dogs everyday, 5 days a week without a recipe and someone to check the quality of the output against the recipe template. Nuts. Even at the "artisan" level of commercial production it's important to work from recipes. Whenever I make a batch of sausage, I write a recipe for the batch -even if I have made the same thing a hundred times before. That way if I make any changes I'll be sure to remember what I did.

Perhaps it is needless to say that highly detailed recipes are EXTREMELY important to me in my consulting business.  I mean clients hire me to create products that they can reproduce. How is that going to happen if I don't give them an accurate recipe?

Anyone who puts together a restaurant menu without codifying the recipes for every dish is going to have serious problems controlling quality and costs. Unless you have a recipe for each menu item, you cannot calculate what it costs to produce the item nor can you accurately determine what to charge.  It's not necessary to have all your line cooks looking at recipes before they prep for service however, it is much tougher to train new hires if they don't have a recipe to guide them.

So yeah, there are most definitely times when recipes are absolutely essential. But yet I think that some of us would do well  to cook extemporaneously without bothering to look at a recipe or measure ingredients.  If you are at the point where you feel you know how most ingredients taste and change as they cook. And if you know how to all of the basic cook's tools and know all the basic cooking techniques, there really is no reason why you need to be anywhere near a recipe during most casual cooking activities.








 *I've been cooking since the age of 15 and have only managed to collect about sixty cookbooks in the intervening four decades.

The Meat Market

Jeremy Stanton
owner of The Meat Market

This past weekend I was up in Great Barrington, Ma with Mike Pardus on a much needed break from routine. One of the places we visited was a meat market that specializes in meat from locally raised animals. The meat looked great, but what really impressed me was how nicely the place was laid out and the vibe from the owner and staff. These are genuinely nice people who take a lot of pride in their work.

The business is a "no stone unturned" operation with lots of "value added" products derived from the animals they butcher. They also do VERY cool catering menus with stuff like spit-roasted steamship rounds (whole hind legs of beef) and whole fish baked in salt.

There's lots of great looking and tasting charcuterie and salumi and frankly I'm envious. I'm also thrilled to have seen tangible proof that there really are people out there reinventing the American butcher shop.

The Meat Market 389 Stockbridge Road Great Barrington MA 01230 | The Meat Market | The Meat Market 389 Stockbridge Road Great Barrington MA 01230:

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