Mouthing Off

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.

When American Craft Beer Week concludes on May 22, events will have taken place in every state for the first time in the celebration’s six-year history. No one understands the rise of local beer better than Garrett Oliver. The Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster and award-winning author of The Brewmaster’s Table (2005) is finishing up his latest feat as editor-in-chief of The Oxford Companion to Beer. Considering the honor attached to a first edition in the food reference series, it's funny to hear Oliver's take on the publisher's pitch three years ago. "I went quickly sprinting in the opposite direction. The project seemed so overwhelmingly huge, and obviously I already have a job over here as brewmaster," he remembers. With the encouragement of friends who knew he'd regret the lost opportunity, Oliver embarked on the work over a year ago with a preliminary list of 500 topics;1,120 references and 160 additional writers later, the tome will drop in October. Here, Oliver reveals some of the groundbreaking subjects that will be covered and what he thinks you should be drinking (and eating) now.

What convinced you to sign on? There are a lot of subjects that we in the craft-brewing community might use every day that are literally not written down. So if you want to know about, say, dry-hopping—adding hops after fermentation for extra flavor and aroma, which is done by 80 to 95 percent of all the breweries in the United States—there is precisely nothing to read.

What other categories are you breaking ground in? Sour beers. Barrel aging:There's a huge movement all over the world now interested in deriving flavors from wooden barrels. You will read about Amarillo, a hop variety: where it comes from, how it developed, what its genetic parents are, how it grows in a field, and how people tend to use it. But then, right before that, you'd read [an entry called] Ale House, about the history of the ale house from Roman times to its development into the modern pub. So it really covers not only things scientific and technical, but also cultural and historic things.

What's the most surprising country making beer? Of course when we think of Italy, we think of wine. But Italy has 350 breweries, and Italian brewers are really excited, creative and using a lot of their background in food to inform what they do on the beer side. Scandinavia is also a big story. We might think of one or two beers, like Carlsberg, but there are many dozens of breweries in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, etc.

Do you cover foods to eat with beer? What's your favorite pairing? There are sections on food-and-beer pairing. I've done about 700 beer dinners in 12 countries, and I wrote a 360-page book on beer-and-food pairings. But this time of year, for example, I love saison, which is a Belgian-style wheat beer. [At Brooklyn Brewery] we have a new one coming out called Sorachi Ace, based on a particular hop variety of that name, and I think it's really great with grilled salmon and shrimp dishes—lighter dishes you might grill in summertime.

How much has beer culture evolved in the last decade? It's really pretty incredible. When I first started traveling, I would go overseas and say, "Oh, I'm an American brewer," and people would just be dripping with disdain: "Oh, yes, we have heard of your American beer." Because they were thinking about just the mass-market beer. We now have over 1,700 breweries in the United States, and we have the most vibrant beer culture in the world, bar none. What's amazing is that now, we go to Germany and Belgium and Italy and, to a large extent, brewers all over the world look up to the United States. Twenty years ago it was exactly the opposite.

I wrote about these super-excellent beer journals last June because I think the idea is just so great—they fit in your pocket, and each page has a spot for all the tasting notes you could ever possibly come up with. I was elated to hear that 33 Books has come up with books for wine notes (and cheese and coffee ), too, because I’m always writing notes on gum wrappers or magazine insert cards that I dig out of the depths of my bag when I’m out. These are a smart way to keep it all in one place. Plus, the wine-colored ink on the covers actually contains some wine from the Walla Walla Valley. These little books would make excellent stocking stuffers or accompaniments to a bottle of wine.

If you’re looking for a gift for someone brand new to the wine world, Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl's new Drink This: Wine Made Simple does just that, and provides a useful survey of who’s who in today’s wine world with her many “Conversations with Bigwigs,” quick conversational snippets from everyone from Robert M. Parker, Jr. to Paul Greico. After the jump, Grumdahl lists the Top 5 things those bigwigs taught her.

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Over on Mouthing Off, I've just posted about why Slate wine columnist Michael Steinberger's new book, Au Revoir to All That, is required reading for anyone who cares about food, wine or France (as an added bonus, it's well-written enough to qualify as fun summer reading, too.) The abridged version: Steinberger compiles devastating details on, among other obstacles, France's crippling appelation system, to show why we're looking, well, anywhere but France for culinary innovation. But he also offers a few glimmers of hope. In honor of Bastille Day, after the jump, Steinberger offers a cheat sheet on four maverick French winemakers worth watching.

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I spent the past weekend in Portland, Maine, which quickly earned my respect as one of the best food towns around—especially if you weigh the number of terrific restaurants there against the actual population, which is about 230,000 (greater metro area). A couple of chefs there have won F&W Best New Chef awards—Steve Corry at Five Fifty-Five, Rob Evans at Hugo's (where I had a terrific meal, and whose duck fat-fried French Fries at the appropriately named Duckfat are worth a pilgrimage unto themselves). There's also Sam Hayward of Fore Street, kind of the godfather of New England locally sourced cuisine—I stopped in for a bowl of wood-roasted thumb-sized mussels that were just sublime. And there's Browne Trading, which has the unique status of being both a terrific fish purveyor (Le Bernardin uses fish from Brown, as do a host of other top restaurants) as well as the best wine store in town.

On top of all that, there's Rabelais Books, where I spent a very cheerful half hour or so chatting with owner Don Lindgren, and on another day an equally cheerful few minutes chatting with co-owner Samantha Hoyt Lindgren (they're married). Don knows the used & rare food/wine book world inside out and Samantha knows the Portland food scene equally well, though for all I know they're both equally knowledgeable about both subjects. Along with that, they're charming, smart and funny, and the shop's pleasantly spacious and is great fun to poke around in. First edition of Evelyn Waugh's Wine in Peace and War? Sure. First American edition of the Savoy Cocktail Book? Righto (for $350, a bargain in relative terms). Plus it's got every new release wine or food book you might want, too. Check out the website, but make doubly sure to stop in if you ever get to Portland. 

And it's only about 200 feet from a large order of those duck fat french fries...