Mouthing Off

There are so many reasons to anticipate tomorrow's release of The Hunger Games movie, which is based on the first book in a trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Here's what we'd like to know: Will 16-year-old heroine Katniss Everdeen emerge as a poster child for sustainability?

Book-fair nerds (what, you don't remember the most exciting part of elementary school?) will be psyched about a Food BookFair launching in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on May 4. The three-day event will feature panel discussions with celebrated authors, including food-science writer Harold McGee, Lucky Peach co-editor (with chef David Chang) Peter Meehan and nutrition expert Dr. Marion Nestle. Read more about the Food Book Fair >

One of this fall’s most interesting beer books, The Craft of Stone Brewing Co., tells the story of how Stone’s founders, Steve Wagner and Greg Koch, created the aggressively hopped, intensely flavored beers that turned their San Diego company into one of America’s iconic craft breweries. But before Stone launched in 1996, Wagner was just an ambitious home brewer. Here, he reveals the five biggest home-brewing flubs, and why sometimes it’s good to make mistakes.  
 
1. Forget to take notes. When you like the results of a home brew, you’ll want to re-create it—and that means having kept track of not only ingredients but also boiling times and fermentation temperatures. “To me, keeping detailed records is one of the signs of a really good home brewer,” says Wagner.
 
2. Try all your ideas at once. “When you use too many ingredients,” Wagner says, “they cancel each other out and make for a muddy, indistinct beer.” Instead, stick with simple recipes until you really feel like you’ve gotten it right. Wagner points out that though Stone’s beers are aggressively flavored, they have short lists of ingredients. The company’s flagship beer, Arrogant Bastard Ale, for example, calls for just one type of hop.
 
3. Underestimate the importance of yeast. “A lot of times, home brewers will be thinking about the water and the hops and the malt,” says Wagner. “When it comes to yeast they say ‘Well, I've got this old package in my pantry.’” Getting a healthy fermentation started—as quickly as possible—will help you avoid all kinds of problems. Use a fresh yeast starter.
 
4. Pull the plug on mistakes. One of Wagner’s greatest successes started as a mistake. As the book details, Stone's flagship Arrogant Bastard Ale was the result of a massive ingredient miscalculation. “We debated dumping it down the drain,” says Wagner. “But we let it finish, and when we tasted it, we were like ‘Nobody's going to like it, but it's really cool.’” (The brew was so intense that the founders weren't sure it could find a market.) Wagner advocates finishing any brew you start. If you do wind up with a flawed beer, keep in mind that bottle aging will often temper rough edges.
 
5. Add too much sugar and blow up your beer. Of all the ways a home brew can go wrong, this is the most dramatic. If you’re carbonating the beer without any special equipment you’ll do so via “bottle conditioning,” inducing a secondary fermentation in the bottle by adding some form of sugar to react with the still-active yeast. “It’s better to start out with too little priming sugar,” says Wagner. “If the carbonation isn't good enough, build it up a little next time.” Alternatively, if you overdo it with sugar, you'll get what’s known to home brewers as a bottle bomb—a bottle that explodes from excessive pressure.

Related: Great American Ales
Ultimate Beer Guide
Craft Beer Trends

Interior designer to the Obamas at the White House, Michael S. Smith, will release his third book next month: Kitchens & Baths. In it, Smith shares design inspiration for "the busiest and most personal rooms in the home." For a sneak preview, we asked Smith for his top kitchen decorating tips.

What are some easy ways to update your kitchen?
I think paint is the number one thing. If you have a kitchen that can be repainted, you can do that yourself. You can paint the ceiling a beautiful color. It's a bit more work, but if you have a wood floor, you can stain it, either in a pattern or one color. And many stores sell inexpensive hardware that you can install yourself, or you could change out the front of your cabinets.

How do you optimize space in a small kitchen?
Think about what you really need. If you live in an apartment and have a small kitchen, but don't cook that often, maybe refrigerator drawers instead of a whole refrigerator would be best. Make it charming and utilitarian. Like a boat: very efficient with no space left unused.

How do you approach giant kitchens?
Big kitchens tend to be filled with too much. Do you need a huge refrigeration space? I'd rather have a great bookcase with glass doors to store and protect cookbooks. Or a great niche with a sofa and ottoman so someone can hang out and talk with you while you cook.

What's your favorite kitchen trend?
Reusing things: refurbished stoves, old St. Charles cabinets, and lighting being reused. It is great environmentally and it gives the space charm.

What design elements are you obsessed with?
I really am obsessed with countertops. I think there are so many good options. People get into really expensive marbles. There are some pretty and really inexpensive stones, though keep in mind care issues. Butcher blocks can be inexpensive. CaesarStone is impervious to stains and is terrific. In my own kitchen, I have zinc countertops.

What are some kitchen decorating mistakes?
Trying to give your kitchen an entirely different look than the rest of the house—like if you walk into a fairly traditional house and the kitchen is Tuscan-style, and filled with sunflowers. That's wacky. Know what your house is like and what works. The things that come out of the kitchen, the food and conversations and all of those things matter—the look is important and should be attractive and cheerful.

More Kitchen Design Ideas:
Six Ways to Personalize a Kitchen
F&W Editors Kitchen Wish List
Food Bloggers' Best Kitchen Design Ideas

The September issue reveals some of the best new shops for food-obsessed readers.

Charleston, SC: Heirloom Book Company
For people who want to eat their food and read about it too, this new shop has books on food and wine and out-of-print cookbooks, alongside antique kitchen tools and seeds from local chef Sean Brock of McCrady's. After-hours, the homey Heirloom hosts small in-store dinners cooked by chefs from all around the South.

London: V&A Reading Rooms
This stand-alone shop run by the Victoria and Albert Museum lures in readers with its books on design and art. It gets them to stay with a small menu of snacks (olives, lemon almonds) and organic wines chosen by Duncan Ackery to drink while (carefully) perusing the stacks.

Related:
Marvel Superheroes' Cookbook and More Comics
Healthy Italian Recipes from Cookbook Author Jessica Theroux

 

The countless hours I spent shaping vegetables, cleaning lettuce and picking parsley in New York City restaurants were an exhaustive blur, but after reading Four Kitchens by Lauren Shockey, my memories of hard-knock kitchen work have resurfaced and I’m excitedly cheering on and almost missing that world I left behind.
 
In Four Kitchens, Lauren recounts heartfelt, funny stories of the grueling but invaluable time she spent cooking at Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50 in NYC and at restaurants in Hanoi, Tel Aviv and Paris. She chats about learning everything (often the hard way), from kitchen hierarchy—like the type of beverage a cook was able to consume at the end of a shift—to the incredible importance of wearing non-skid shoes. And get this: Her book also includes recipes for “almost-Michelin-starred meals.” Lauren has gracefully adapted recipes from the famed Paris restaurant, Senderens, and I was more than thrilled to find a recipe for one of my all-time favorites—pickled mushrooms! I’m going to take a stab at her adaptation this weekend. Truth be told, while I’m cheering for the kitchens, I’m grateful there isn’t a power-hungry executive chef at home ready to critique my every slice.

You know the rest of that line, right? Well, it's with some small amount of sadness that I am saying that about this blog: It must come to an end. I've had a terrific time writing it, but we've decided that in the end it's a bit strange, for a magazine that's all about bringing together food and wine, to have separate blogs on those topics.

So, from here on out, any wine blogging that I (and Megan Krigbaum, Kristin Donnelly, and various other stalwart folks) do will instead appear in F&W's primary blog, Mouthing Off. No less wine coverage, just a different venue. See you there.

Ray Isle

 

It’s hard not to geek out on beer this summer with the explosion of beer gardens and radical new micro (and nano) brews. Beer expert Christian DeBenedetti urges beer enthusiasts to take things to the next level and start brewing at home.
 
“Give a person a six pack, they'll drink for a day," says DeBenedetti. "Teach them to brew…" OK, you know the rest. These days, what was once a messy affair has gotten simpler and way more fun with the advent of smarter books and equipment. Suffice it to say that the joy of tasting your first successful home brew isn't easily put into words. If you can follow a recipe, you can make your own beer, and it's cheaper in the long run, too. If you get really good, you might even show off your skills in cool New York City bars like The Diamond, where, in addition to a Shuffleboard Biathlon, there is the Brew 'n’ Chew, a home-brew and home-cooking competition.
 
Start with the new book Beer Craft: Six Packs From Scratch by William Bostwick and Jessi Rymill. "Home brewing is easy—you probably already have most of the equipment at home," says Bostwick. "But it's also something you can geek out over and get a gallon of great beer in the process (and mess up the kitchen a little)." The genius of this book is that it takes an incredibly complex topic and boils it down to quaffable parts without dumbing down the key points of becoming a serious homebrew honcho. You've got everything from basic definitions of beer ingredients to detailed yeast strain recommendations and an incredibly helpful primer on off flavors and insights into genre-bending sour beers.
 
Once you have the book, find a local home-brew shop (some Whole Foods stores carry equipment) or order a home-brew kit and you're ready to go.

We know, this sounds suspiciously like an internet ad that tells you how to make money by selling prescription drugs online. No, this might be even easier. Some cookbooks that you just might have sitting on your shelves are going for quite a bit of money on Amazon.
 
We’re not talking about super-specialized books like Modernist Cuisine, the recently released, $625, 46-pound compendium by Nathan Myhrvold, nor a first-edition copy of Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food, which went for $1583. (Although if you have either of those books on hand, you’re lucky, and potentially rich.) We’re talking specifically about The Last Course, by pastry goddess Claudia Fleming. Published in 2001, the book ranks just above the 783,000 mark on Amazon’s best-seller list and originally cost $40.  Now, a first edition of The Last Course is on sale for $800 on Amazon, with used copies going for $142.
 
Why is the book, as good as it is, so expensive? Because it was only reprinted in limited quantities. (Maybe also because gilttaste.com marked the book at $400 when Dave Chang recently named it on his curated cookbook list for the website.)
 
“People always want what they can’t get,” says The Last Course’s co-author, Melissa Clark. “Once a cookbook goes from utilitarian—as in, something to cook from—to cult—as in, something to own—that’s when you get crazy prices. The funny thing is, I recently bought a copy at a thrift shop for $20. Then the price skyrocketed. So now I have two copies, and I’m wishing I’d saved more from my original case of books.” Alright everyone, go check your shelves for The Last Course. Of course we recommend that you cook from it. But whatever you do, don’t put it on the giveaway pile. 
 
Related Links
 
Amazing David Chang Recipes

10 Recipes from Cookbook Legends

Best Cookbook Authors’ Best Recipes

15 Cheap and Delicious Recipes

Great Cookbook Gifts

You’ve got to love a book party that features the Ace Hotel’s DJ Huggy Bear (his card says, “I accept hugs, not requests”). So Phaidon’s fall preview party, at its Soho store, had excellent music. And following the success of Noma by René Redzepi, it's no surprise that they have a terrific fall cookbook lineup as well. That includes a new edition of the best-selling Silver Spoon book and The Art of French Baking, with adorable illustrations by Chocolate & Zucchini blogger Clotilde Dusoulier. Best of all, in my world, is The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adrià. The book will feature 31 staff meals from Spain’s El Bulli (Meal 7: Waldorf Salad, Noodle Soup with Mussels and Melon Soup with Pink Grapefruit). I plan to cook my way through all of them, especially because these meals average out to about $5 per person (which is about one-tenth of the cost of a cab ride to El Bulli from the nearest town). I’ve especially got my eye on Meal 4, wherein I’ll learn the secrets to Adrià’s Caesar salad and cheeseburger with potato crisps.