Another tempest in a teapot

Embedded video from CNN Video

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

The Real: Rendered Veal Fat

Last week we sent two Ayrshire/Limousin crossbred bull calves out to the USDA slaughterhouse. Each was a little over two months old and had been raised on milk. The calves got to follow their mothers around the farm, learn to be cows and enjoy their, albeit brief, lives.

I’ll post more detailed photos showing how I butchered them later on. But for now I’d like you to see how I treated the kidney fat (Note the kidney fat around the kidney which is located mid-left in the carcass;left).

Kidney fat makes superb shortening for baking, and has a sweet, umami taste, and a highly nuanced aroma that is brilliant with roasted and fried foods. Like all highly saturated fats kidney fat that is not really hot while it is in your mouth can have a “greasy” mouthfeel because of its high melting point (any fat that has a melt-point higher than body temperature is going to feel greasy if it’s temperature is close to the temperature of your mouth).

However, considerations of texture and flavor aside for the moment, it is this high-melt point that in large part makes kidney fat ideal for baked preparations like short-breads -or anything that tends to spread during baking- and for frying. See, the longer a fat takes to melt in the oven, the more time the proteins in the dough have time to coagulate. Also the starches have more time to gel and stiffen before the dough spreads too far. So when you use fat with a higher melt point than say, butter, you almost always see less spreading and greater retention of the original (unbaked) shape of the dough -and kidney fat is no exception.

As for frying, well consider this: The same physical and chemical properties that give saturated fat it’s high melt-point also give it a high smoke point. So kidney fat is great for frying because it takes a long time for it to smoke (creating bitter and potentially carcinogenic by-products) and burn. And people, if you have never eaten french fries cooked in highly saturated fat like kidney fat you are missing something real.

In my first restaurant job (a NYTimes Two-Star) I learned to make pommes frites (and chateau potatoes, pommes Pont Neuf, pommes souffle) in fat that we rendered from veal and pork kidney fat in almost exactly the same way that you see me doing it here in the slideshow below. We did not receive whole animals larger than lambs at Rene Chardin Restaurant, neither did we butcher and cook any animal while we listened to it’s mother calling for it as I did last week.

Yeah, you read that right. Hearing that cow calling to it’s calf as it lay on the table in my kitchen being cut up was sobering. Anyway…

I’m learning more about cooking in this job than I ever thought possible. I’ve got this whole other set of considerations regarding the ethical nature of what we chefs do staring me right in the face every day. It has not made my work any harder, but it sure as hell has made it different.

Look, I’m not going to start preaching about how important it is for every meat eater to raise, kill and butcher and cook his own food at least once. But it’s working wonders for me.

If you need clarification beyond what is provided in the slide show, you know where to find me.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

[Hunger Art]Total Utilization of a Duck

by Mike Pardus

In keeping with our inter-blog discussion on consomme and total utility of food products, I offer this video series in 3 parts (again, YouTube limitations).

The action moves pretty quickly and assumes that you already know how to “break down” a bird. If there’s interest, I’ll shoot a “Poultry Butchering 101” video later this week.

Oh, before you watch, I’d better explain something.

This demo came out of a discussion about the immorality of wasting food – specifically food that an animal has died to give us. In the video, I talk a lot about total utility and avoidance of waste from a purely financial perspective. Some of my students are at the cutting edge of the sustainable food movement and understand the morality perfectly well while others haven’t yet gotten that far yet: they like to cook, it’s fun, it’s on TV, it’s cool, that’s it.

Whether they are from one camp or the other, if they make it to the next level, they’re going to have to survive in the restaurant business for a long time before they can hope to make an impact on the morality of their peers and the public.

I’m telling you all of this because my monologue mostly addresses the business end of the chain and I wanted you to be sure that you were aware of its primary intent.

Oh, and one more thing, I can already hear some of you asking “But what about the morality of charging $200 for a few duck scraps?” That’s like asking an artist to justify the price tag on a painting relative to the cost of the paint. You’re not paying for the paint – you’re paying for the work created from the paint using years of hard earned, accumulated skill.

Wow, that took more words than I wanted to use…start the video, Bob.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Bad News for Aspiring Moral Eaters

Eating is not easy for those who want to eat in a manner that leaves a soft footprint, and for some who choose to eat Kosher meat, things just got tougher.

Officials from the state’s Labor Commissioner’s Office… uncovered 57 cases of child labor law violations at the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, where nearly 400 workers were arrested this spring in the largest immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history. [Source]

Unfortunately, this year kosher meat has become a different type of symbol, one not of mourning and spiritual devotion but of ridicule, embarrassment and hypocrisy. In May in Postville, Iowa, immigration officials raided Agriprocessors Inc., the largest kosher meatpacking plant in the country. OP Ed: The NY Times

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

The Other Grey Meat

In a Guardian article titled The ultimate ethical meal Caroline Davies reports that some folks in Great Britain are eating themselves stupid on gray squirrel which, she says, tastes like a cross between duck and lamb (Too bad they don’t look like crosses between ducks and sheep. Now that’d be amusing.) Having eaten gray squirrel myself, I agree with her partial description of their flavor. However, if she wrote the article to encourage people to eat gray squirrel in an effort to reduce Britain’s population of this American import she may be disappointed. Most people quail at the thought of eating rodents.

But then on the other hand, perhaps if a gifted British chef does a bang up job on presenting dishes of gray squirrel to the public they will go for it. As these photos of cooked rat and guinea pig show, presentation is very critical to a diner’s acceptance of food proffered

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Woman Can Keep Frozen Cats

Whew! Just when I was beginning to think that I’d have to start worrying about the government telling me what I’m allowed to keep in my freezer, the court steps in with some common sense.

Woman Can Keep Frozen Cats

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

National Socialist Soup Sop

The National Socialist Party of Germany threw sops to the German people in the form of cheap public housing and “Strength through Joy”cruises and a range of other hand-outs (often funded by looting and grave robbing, of course). The Cuban government doles out free medical care and, in addition to cheap heating oil and gasoline, the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez is giving away soup to demonstrate it’s beneficence.

Judging from the masks these cooks are wearing as they prepare this almost 4000 gallon batch of “Sancocho” stew, their customers might not be any better off if they filled their bowls with gasoline.

Venezuela serves up record breaking stew

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Another September 18th

I may be running the risk of being charged with outright plagiarism by posting this newsletter from The Old Foodie, but this one was so affecting that I had to put it up. I’ll take my lumps if they come. Bob dG

Today, September 18^th …

On this day in 1942, the Reich Minister for Nutrition and Agriculture, issued a Decree Concerning Food Supply for Jews. This is an extract from it:

Decree Concerning Food Supply for Jews.

Jews will no longer receive the following foods … meat, meat products, eggs, wheat products (cake, white bread, wheat rolls, wheat flour, etc) whole milk fresh skimmed milk, as well as such foods are distributed not on food ration cards issued uniformly throughout the Reich but on local supply certificates or by special announcement of the nutrition offices on extra coupons of the food cards. Jewish children and young people over 10 years of age will receive the bread ration of the normal consumer. Jewish children and young people over 6 years of age will receive the fat ration of the normal consumer, no honey substitute and no cocoa powder, and they will not receive the supplement of marmalade accorded the age classes of 6 to 14 years. Jewish children up to 6 years receive ½ liter of fresh skimmed milk daily.

Accordingly no meat, egg or milk cards and no local supply certificates shall be issued to Jews. Jewish children and young people over 10 years of age will receive the bread cards and those over 6 years of age the fat cards of the normal consumer. The bread cards issued to Jews will entitle them to rye flour products only. Jewish children under 6 years of age shall be issued the supply certificate for fresh skimmed milk. “Good for ½ liter daily” shall be noted on it.

For the purchase of non-rationed food the Jews are not subject to restrictions as long as these products are available to the Aryan population in sufficient quantities. Ration-free foods which are distributed only from time to time and in limited quantities, such as vegetable and herring salad, fish paste, etc., are not to be given to Jews. The nutrition offices are authorized to permit Jews to purchase turnips, plain kind of cabbage etc.

From amidst this whole, awful list, for some reason I cant explain, the most poignant image for me was the idea of little children without “honey substitute”. Not “no honey” – not even “honey substitute”. I don’t even know what constitutes a honey substitute. Do you? In a Quotation for the Day in a previous post, I used a comment by Judith Olney, and it bears repeating here:

“Once in a young lifetime one should be allowed to have as much sweetness as one can possibly want and hold.”

In recognition of a whole generation of little children who never had an opportunity to experience such a moment of sweetness, here is a recipe from an English newspaper of 1942 – a time when, in England, due to sugar rationing, honey was often used as a substitute.

Honey Chocolate.
Private bee-keepers may be glad of the following recipe for home-made honey chocolate:
¼ lb honey, ¼ lb sugar, three tablespoonsful cocoa, ½ lb chopped home-grown nuts (hazel, cob, walnut &c.), three tablespoonsful stale plain cake crumbs. Put the honey and sugar in a saucepan over very low heat and allow the sugar to dissolve. Boil up, stir in the cake crumbs and cocoa, heating until smooth, add the chopped nuts and mix well. Spread on greased flat tin, leave to dry, cut into squares.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Would you like some fresh Kashrut on your salad?

Longtime readers of my blog will probably not be surprised to hear me say that I don’t take a very serious approach to ethical questions relating to cooking and eating at A Hunger Artist. It’s not that I do not believe there are serious questions to be addressed or ponder them with a serious mien from time to time -far from it. But my treatment of them here is usually salted with irony and -okay, I’ll admit it- sometimes puerile humor, because I see this blog as more of a form of entertainment than a serious forum for discussion. (I am also very much an Italian-American, which means that my psyche is ofttimes powerfully motivated by either pragmatic-fatalism or prudish-utopianism. More on that later perhaps.)

Still, there are moments like now when I like to toss in something into the blog-pot without following it with a joke or an ironic aside.

Yesterday, I discovered the blog of a remarkable group of people who write The Jew & The Carrot. The blog was linked in a story in The New York Times about eating religiously (Sorry!) and my post-click impression left me impressed.

The skinny on The Jew & The Carrot is that it is run by people who engaged in trying to reconcile Jewish dietary laws and ethical guidelines to contemporary environmental concerns while having a good time in the process. I’m not going to pretend that I understand much of anything about Kosher dietary laws (Kashrut) other than what I have read and indirectly learned from watching my grandmother’s orthodox neighbors in Flushing, NY, and during a brief tenure as a teenaged cook at a kosher catering hall in 1970. But my sense of the Kashrut is that they are as much about the need to eat in a manner that minimizes the act’s impact on the self and others, as they are a device designed to define the envelope of and essence of Jewish identity.

I also know that following Kashrut in the spirit in which it was promulgated is not a trivial pursuit. Especially in a globalized culture where the appetite for once arcane or inaccessible foods and drink is being increasingly supplemented with difficult to digest questions about how all this neo-fodder is being produced. So my hat’s off to the minds behind The Jew&The Carrot for their cheerfully serious attempt to make sense of it all.

If you decide to click through to The Jew & The Carrot you might also want to check out the precis for the upcoming 2nd annual Hazon Food Conference to be held at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, CT (Holy Mollie! I used to live in Falls Village!) where, among other activities, they will slaughter and cook a lamb.

The Jew & the Carrot

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Odering! 10 Million Dollars, Hold the cheese

So a guy orders two quarter-pounders from a McDonald’s in Star City, Va and tells them to hold the cheese because he is allergic to cheese. They don’t hold the cheese, he takes a bite and goes into anaphylactic shock, survives and sues for 10 million dollars.

I’m of two minds on this sort of thing. In one mind I think the guy should have opened the burger and checked to make sure that there was no cheese before he bit the thing. He’s an adult (early 20’s) and should know better. But my other mind, the one that has a close relative with serious allergy to peanuts that could express itself in exactly the same way says, teach McDonald’s a lesson. No cheese, should mean no cheese.

Charleston Daily Mail

Star City, SC has been changed to Star City, Va thanks to a gentle chiding from a proud citizen of SC named surprisingly, CarolinaGirl. Who’da thunk she’s from SC?

The best sauce in the world is hunger.