The Umami of Tomatoes

As most of you know, umami or the savory taste, has only recently been accepted as a basic taste by the scientific community that concerns itself with matters of human neurology. Umami is generally considered to be caused by glutamic acid and it’s salts e.g., monosodium glutamate or MSG (And YOU thought MSG stood for Madison Square Garden. C’mon admit it!:-)

Now that tomatoes are starting to come into season in the Northern Hemisphere, I thought it worth mentioning that they contain quite a bit of glutamic acid, especially in the “jelly” that surrounds and suspends the seeds.

So don’t waste those tomato guts. I don’t want to stir up any trouble but years ago, I heard Julia Child advise throwing out the pulp because it was tasteless. I suspect that she made the remark under pressure and said the opposite of what she meant to say because I can find no such advice in any of her books that I own. However, I am slightly chagrined to admit that at the time I believed her and began to toss out the pulp whenever I made tomato concasse or dice.

I suppose it is never a good idea to suspend disbelief because someone with authority tells you that what you thought was true or false is otherwise.

Source of histogram Umami Information Center

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Bread Starter Test Update no. 2

After 47 hours of incubation the samples were all actively fermenting and beginning to show signs of exhaustion of starch supply. All of them had separated into a mat of gaseous foamy starch on top of a layer of relatively clear water and a layer of stringy, insoluble gluten on the bottom.

None of the samples containing rinsed and not-rinsed red cabbage appeared to be bubbling (evidence of the growth and respiration of yeast and bacteria) any more vigorously than any other. And none of the samples with cabbage were bubbling more vigorously than the control made with only flour and water.

All of the samples with cabbage had an “off” odor suggesting the presence of either bacteria or yeast that is either not desirable in bread starter or a desirable form of yeast that had begun to produce a noxious aroma (e.g. butyric acid). By comparison the control smelled like a typical batch of fermenting (proofing) bread dough.

All, except one of the samples with cabbage were slightly more acidic than the control. Cabbage starter samples ranged in pH from 4.5-4.75 with one sample testing at pH 4.90. By contrast the control tested at pH 4.8.

It is still too early in my investigation to draw any conclusions about the efficacy of making sourdough bread starter with cabbage. Nothing that I have seen so far suggests that the method does or does not work. However, the preliminary results of my little test suggest that adding cabbage to the starter may be introducing a microbe that can produce an “off aroma.”

Since so many people have reported that starter made with a cabbage leaf produces great bread, I suspect that at some point during the build, the colony of microbes that is responsible for the “off” smell dies off.

As I wrote above, I’m a long way away from drawing any conclusions. I still don’t know why or how this method works or, for that matter, if it works any better than more traditional ways of building bread starter.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Bread Starter Update

This morning (8.13.09) at 5:00 I checked the bread starter samples and took a bunch of photos. Unfortunately, I cannot post the pictures because the camera’s battery fizzled out before I could download them to my computer (When is someone going to build a high quality camera that can do direct uploads?). So until the battery is recharged words will have to suffice.

Here is the skinny

• After 35 hours of incubation, all of the samples are showing signs of fermentation.
• No one sample appears to be any gassier than any other. Even the control (flour and water only, no cabbage) is fermenting
• None of the samples stink, which I take as an indication that although there is probably leuconostoc bacteria in all of the samples with cabbage, the bacteria, which is naturally present on cabbage and is responsible for sauerkraut fermentation requires anaerobic conditions to grow well, is not thriving in the open sample glasses.

While it is too early in the game to draw any conclusions, I think that it is pretty obvious that the cabbage is not introducing large numbers of yeast cells into the starter. If the cabbage was adding yeast, the samples with cabbage should be fermenting more rapidly.

I think that if from hereon, we see any increase in the rate of fermentation in the samples with cabbage it is likely that it will be caused by the breakdown of the leaves into sugars to be consumed by the yeast and bacteria. Or it is the partial result of wild yeast introduced by the cabbage undergoing a growth spurt following a reduction in pH (many types of yeast require acidic conditions for optimum growth).

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Bread Starter Test

Way back in July (7/21 to be precise) Michael Ruhlman posted about a method of kick starting sourdough starter. The method, which he learned from Carri Thurman of Two Sisters Bakery in Homer, Alaska called for the addition of a red cabbage leaf to a mixture of flour and water.

Both Ruhlman and Thurman, as well as several of the former’s readers, reported remarkable results. Yet no one could explain why the cabbage had the reported effects.

Some speculated that the cabbage was loaded with wild yeast, while others (myself included) thought that bacteria might be responsible for the uptick in microbial activity and signs of fermentation (gas bubbles). Since no one could provide a plausible explanation for what might be occurring, I decided to test the idea with a series of tests.

Last night I conducted the first test. The purpose of this particular test was to answer the question “Will adding rinsed and un-rinsed organic red cabbage to a mixture of flour and water make any difference in the rate at which the mixtures ferment?”

Test Design

I made up 7 samples. Each sample contained 20 g of unbleached non-organic bread flour (I wanted as little as possible yeast in the flour) and 50 g of unchlorinated tap water.

• In three of the glasses I put 5 g each of red cabbage that had been rinsed (as per Carri’s method) under luke warm water.
• In three glasses I put 5 g each of red cabbage that had not been rinsed
• In one (Control) glass I put only flour and water

Each sample was mixed with a spoon which was washed with hot water and soap to avoid cross-contamination of the samples. The I left the samples uncovered on the counter in my (68 degree F) kitchen overnight before checking them 13 hours later.

By 7 Am this morning, none of the samples, not even the control have shown any signs of fermentation. Even now (almost 14 hours after mixing) there are no obvious signs of fermentation.

Ruhlman and Thurman suggest that additional flour (a “feeding”) and 48 hours of incubation is required to produce vigorous bubbling. I will let my sample go at least that long before drawing any conclusions. (I will not add more flour.) If after 48 hours, two or more of the samples with cabbage appear to be fermenting more rapidly than the control, I will assume that the cabbage is contributing something to the process and move to the next phase of the testing which will be designed to answer the question

“Will limiting the supply of oxygen have an effect on how the flour cabbage mixture ferments?”

This question is designed to begin to get a handle on what (if any) microbe on the cabbage is responsible for the enhanced fermentation reported by Ruhlman, Thurman and others.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

On the Need to Know

I never thought I did an especially good job of leading my students at The Culinary Institute of America to understand that knowing why food behaves in the ways that it does when we manipulate it, is just as important as knowing how to cook. I think at best I probably reinforced the belief that consistently positive outcomes in the kitchen are not possible if you don’t understand the science to a few who already believed it. But I’m sure that my entreaties to question everything that happens and to not take anything for granted was lost on the majority of students who, in all fairness, were mostly of the popular opinion that an Institute was not, like a college or university, supposed to encourage skepticism as much as train them in a specific set of tasks.

However, expectations of the school and my role as a teacher there aside, the truth remains that unless you always cook from carefully vetted recipes in the same place on the same equipment with ingredients that are produced and stored under the same conditions, unexpected things are going to happen. And forget it if you, like most cooks, like to fiddle around with or develop your own recipes.

This point was driven home to me this morning during a reading of a method for making sour dough starter at Michael Ruhlman’s blog. The method he described involved adding a cabbage leaf to a mixture of flour and water, letting sit overnight, dosing it with flour and water again and letting it sit for another night before using it. I don’t doubt for a moment that the method produces the vigorously bubbling starter that he describes, but I’m not sure why it bubbles faster than a simple mixture of flour and water left to ferment for the same period of time.

The obvious answer is that there is yeast on the cabbage leaves that is introduced to the starter. But why would we assume that the yeast that lives on cabbage is capable of colonizing wheat? There are thousands of species of yeast, many of them quite host specific and not all of them capable of digesting starch. There is very little starch in cabbage so why would cabbage host significant number of starch digesting yeast?

Another possibility is that the cabbage is adding in invert sugar which the yeast gobble up. However, neither Ruhlman nor the person he learned the method from (Carri at Two Sister’s Bakery in Homer, Alaska) report crushing the leaves to release sugar from the cells which, I think would be required to extract enough of the cabbages’ measly <3% sugar content to produce the dramatic bubbling they report.

It is possible that what is introduced to the starter by the cabbage is some type of bacteria. Bacteria will produce gas just like yeast, and if the right kind are introduced will drop the pH and make the starter sour. One type of bacterium that is always found on cabbage that has not been cooked or fumigated is Leuconostoc bacteria which produces prodigious amounts of bad smelling gas. However, if Leuconostoc bacteria is present in Ruhlman’s starter culture he reports no off odors. Not yet at least.

Not knowing what the cabbage is doing in his starter is not great. Professional bakers have been making starter in very specific ways from flour only for generations because that is the best way to assure a microflora that be built exclusively of a specific population of yeasts and lactic acid producing bacteria. I would not be at all surprised to find that in a few days he discovers that his starter has a big colony of funky smelling bacteria blooming on its surface. I’ve had that happen to me a few times after I’ve added something unique to my starter.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Acai SuperFood BS

Why are we so willing to believe health claims about foods that are not supported by strong empirical evidence? Is our desire to be healthy without having to think too much about what is required to maintain good health so strong that our innate skepticism buckles whenever an earnest friend, slick salesman or too-eager-to-write-good-copy journalist blathers about some hitherto unknown or overlooked enzyme rich, chock-full-of-antioxidant plant or animal product?

I’ve been seeing products made from Acai berries for awhile now, and I treat them in the same wariness that I’ve always treated the foods and diets that flood into the marketplace tethered to promises of better health. Nothing promotes good health better than a varied diet and lots of rest and exercise.

But never mind. It’s fun to watch the experts who push this stuff on the public squirm when the evidence turns against them. To wit: the words of a celebrity dermatologist who sells an acai supplement

“I certainly think açaí, the fruit, has great health benefits,” he said in an interview. “I would call it a superfood, but I’ve always spoken generically.” [Source: The New York Times]

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Food Science Out of The Box:

If you see marbling in pork you are less likely to buy it

Data from Experiment 1 indicate that an increase in IMF [Intra Muscular Fat or marbling] level is associated with an increase in visual perception of fat and a corresponding decrease in the willingness to eat and purchase the meat, when expressed before tasting.

However, if you eat the marbled pork you are more likely to like it

The latter effect disappeared after the consumers had tasted the meat, probably due to a positive effect of increase IMF, up to 3.5%, on the perception of texture and taste.

How cool is that?

ScienceDirect: Influence of intramuscular fat content on the quality of pig meat — 2. Consumer acceptability of m. longissimus lumborum

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

The Real: Fond blanc de Veau

It was not that long ago that I would have shrugged my shoulders and said something like “Whatever, I should be so lucky” if someone told me that I’d be slaughtering a calf on one day and making veal stock from it’s bones the next. But I don’t dare say that now.

Last Friday we slaughtered a lovely Ayrshire bull calf. The next day, I was making stock with his bones. Talk about getting in touch with the source of your food.

Anyway, this is a shout out to all of you cooks who have ever tried to make white veal stock: look at this stock Holmes! You know you cannot get veal stock to gel like this unless you are lucky enough to get extremely fresh bones. Also check out the color of the congealed fat on the surface. In over three decades of cooking, I’ve never seen veal fat that color -not until last week that is.

Usually, veal fat is white. But the bull calf I used to make this stock was bottle-fed milk and raised on grass which is loaded with fat soluble yellowish carotenoid pigments, thus the fat is yellowish.

And look at that gelatin. This is amazing, especially considering the stock was not reduced more than 5%. All of that gelatin is the natural byproduct of young bones that are full of collagen protein.

The traditional way of making fond blanc de veau calls for cutting the bones into pieces with a bone saw or band saw. Next, to prevent the final product from becoming cloudy, you must blanch the bones to remove insoluble proteins. This is achieved by by putting the bones in a pot, covering them with cold water and heating it all up until the water comes to a simmer and throws up a a gray, proteinaceous foam. Then you dump the foamy water, rinse the bones and cover them with water a second time and cook the new mixture a really long time with mirepoix (celery-carrots-onion) and, in the final 25% of the total cooking time, a sachet d’ epices (herbs and spices bundlen ib cheesecloth or anything that can be use to make an infusion) -usually wrapped bundles of herbs (usually thyme, bay leaf, clove, cracked black peppercorn).

Well, Ahem, I work on a farm. And since I am usually the only cook in the kitchen and cannot justify the expenditure of time on a project like haute cuisine white veal stock, I take short cut at this stage and after crack open the joints with my trusty cleaver, then cover the bones with very warm tap water…

I have to pause here to point out that by using warm water I am admitting to committing a heresy. Every cook who pursues a career in La Grande Cuisine is at some point taught that stock is ALWAYS started with COLD water. This is the way my grandfather and my uncles did it. This is how I was taught by Rene Chardin (my first chef) and it is in the curriculum of the CIA. The rationale for starting the stock in cold water is that it is supposed to be the best way to extract the maximum of flavor from the bones.

For years I knew that this was not right, and had stopped doing it unless someone who could hurt me insisted that it be done. In Molecular Gastronomy, by Herve This, indicates that the practice makes no sense (Introduction; p. 11). The only possible advantage afforded by the use of cold water to begin stock is if you want the stock to take a really long time for it to come up to a simmer. Now why would you want that? Perhaps to allow more time to skim the proteins and other particles that are released during the early stages of heating and that would muddy the stock. But really, I don’t know.

Frankly, I think the practice is a holdover from the days when one did not have warm running water in the kitchen and so it would have been wildly impractical to start a stock with it. I’ll bet I’m right.

Whatever, I use warm water for all my stocks now. They take less time to come up, and since the water in the water heater is usually already warm, it saves energy.

Okay, this post is getting too long. And I have to go to work. Here is the skinny on this stock

There were 40 pounds of bones in 10 gallons (80 pounds) of water. I don’t remember exactly how much mirepoix I used. I brought the stock up to a simmer, did the essential depouillage (skimmed the scum off the surface) and let the stock cook for about 14 hours. No blanching, no cold water; and you tell me if you have ever seen better looking veal stock.

Ciao!

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

The Real: Fond blanc de Veau

It was not that long ago that I would have shrugged my shoulders and said something like “Whatever, I should be so lucky” if someone told me that I’d be slaughtering a calf on one day and making veal stock from it’s bones the next. But I don’t dare say that now.

Last Friday we slaughtered a lovely Ayrshire bull calf. The next day, I was making stock with his bones. Talk about getting in touch with the source of your food.

Anyway, this is a shout out to all of you cooks who have ever tried to make white veal stock: look at this stock Holmes! You know you cannot get veal stock to gel like this unless you are lucky enough to get extremely fresh bones. Also check out the color of the congealed fat on the surface. In over three decades of cooking, I’ve never seen veal fat that color -not until last week that is.

Usually, veal fat is white. But the bull calf I used to make this stock was bottle-fed milk and raised on grass which is loaded with fat soluble yellowish carotenoid pigments, thus the fat is yellowish.

And look at that gelatin. This is amazing, especially considering the stock was not reduced more than 5%. All of that gelatin is the natural byproduct of young bones that are full of collagen protein.

The traditional way of making fond blanc de veau calls for cutting the bones into pieces with a bone saw or band saw. Next, to prevent the final product from becoming cloudy, you must blanch the bones to remove insoluble proteins. This is achieved by by putting the bones in a pot, covering them with cold water and heating it all up until the water comes to a simmer and throws up a a gray, proteinaceous foam. Then you dump the foamy water, rinse the bones and cover them with water a second time and cook the new mixture a really long time with mirepoix (celery-carrots-onion) and, in the final 25% of the total cooking time, a sachet d’ epices (herbs and spices bundlen ib cheesecloth or anything that can be use to make an infusion) -usually wrapped bundles of herbs (usually thyme, bay leaf, clove, cracked black peppercorn).

Well, Ahem, I work on a farm. And since I am usually the only cook in the kitchen and cannot justify the expenditure of time on a project like haute cuisine white veal stock, I take short cut at this stage and after crack open the joints with my trusty cleaver, then cover the bones with very warm tap water…

I have to pause here to point out that by using warm water I am admitting to committing a heresy. Every cook who pursues a career in La Grande Cuisine is at some point taught that stock is ALWAYS started with COLD water. This is the way my grandfather and my uncles did it. This is how I was taught by Rene Chardin (my first chef) and it is in the curriculum of the CIA. The rationale for starting the stock in cold water is that it is supposed to be the best way to extract the maximum of flavor from the bones.

For years I knew that this was not right, and had stopped doing it unless someone who could hurt me insisted that it be done. In Molecular Gastronomy, by Herve This, indicates that the practice makes no sense (Introduction; p. 11). The only possible advantage afforded by the use of cold water to begin stock is if you want the stock to take a really long time for it to come up to a simmer. Now why would you want that? Perhaps to allow more time to skim the proteins and other particles that are released during the early stages of heating and that would muddy the stock. But really, I don’t know.

Frankly, I think the practice is a holdover from the days when one did not have warm running water in the kitchen and so it would have been wildly impractical to start a stock with it. I’ll bet I’m right.

Whatever, I use warm water for all my stocks now. They take less time to come up, and since the water in the water heater is usually already warm, it saves energy.

Okay, this post is getting too long. And I have to go to work. Here is the skinny on this stock

There were 40 pounds of bones in 10 gallons (80 pounds) of water. I don’t remember exactly how much mirepoix I used. I brought the stock up to a simmer, did the essential depouillage (skimmed the scum off the surface) and let the stock cook for about 14 hours. No blanching, no cold water; and you tell me if you have ever seen better looking veal stock.

Ciao!

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Salt this

A few weeks ago a guy stopped by the kitchen while I was making sausage to ask me if there was any salt in one of the dishes I prepared. I told him that, yes, I used a type of sea salt that was pure sodium chloride and occasionally, Kosher salt. The sea salt I used was the same stuff that was used for making brine for cheese. It contained nothing other that sodium chloride.
Ironically, the Kosher salt, which by my limited understanding of the Kosher laws is supposed to be pure and unadulterated, contains an anticaking agent to keep it from clumping up when it becomes humid. I wasn’t sure which one I used, but either way I was very sure that both salts were mostly pure sodium chloride and had no iodine or any other adulterants.

“Oh,” he said “ I can only sea salt. I’m allergic to regular salt .”

I then explained that regular salt or table salt is sea salt that has been mined from areas formerly covered by saltwater. When the sea water evaporated, the salt -and everything else in the water- precipitated, crystallized and formed what are called evaporite deposits. After the salt is mined, the impurities are removed and what’s left is pure sodium chloride. Then I said that since one can only be truly allergic to proteins and that, unlike many of the salts that are made by people who evaporate sea water in cave or tidal flats, there are no proteins in table salt, it is pure sodium chloride, so he should feel safe.

By now the man’s eyes were glazed over as he said “But sea salt is more natural than sodium chloride, right? I mean, sodium chloride is a chemical, isn’t it?”

Obviously, there was nothing more I could or should say other than Yup, I reckin, or what I actually said which was “Yes.”

Afterwards, when he had gone, and I was alone with my sausage, I realized that while he may have been more allergic to one conception of salt than salt itself, he was not at all unusual in one key measure: he was suspicious of ingredients that are described by their chemical names.

I think that a lot of people assume that if an ingredient is described by it’s chemical name that it must be man made and therefore dangerous to consume. So, for many folks sea salt is good because it comes from the sea, but sodium chloride or table salt is bad because they think it is produced by pinheads in lab coats working side-by-side with dweebs who are cooking up dioxin.

There are some larger points to be made here and some big conclusions to be drawn. If you’re up for it, do it. Me, I’m going to cook dinner.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.