Mouthing Off

F&W's ever-curious test kitchen assistant, Brian Malik, discovered a new way to make the best of supermarket peaches. He writes:

When I discovered peaches on sale at my grocery store for 88 cents a pound, I bought nearly three pounds. Unfortunately, they were hard as rocks and tasted like, well, rocks. I scoured the Web for advice on how to ripen the fruit quickly. Some sites said to put the fruit in a paper bag to trap the ethylene gases, which would speed ripening; other sites warned that moisture would collect inside the bag and rot the fruit. I improvised. I laid the peaches on a kitchen towel and covered them with another towel. I figured the towels would contain enough of the fruit’s gases to ripen them, while still allowing any moisture to evaporate. After two days, when the unmistakable scent of peaches permeated my apartment, I felt it was safe to check on them. They were perfectly soft without being mushy and wonderfully peachy tasting—not a rotten spot in sight.

Hot on the heels of F&W’s roundup of America’s best new pizza artisans, GQ magazine’s Alan Richman just released his list of the 25 best pizzas in America. After eating almost 400 pies at over 100 pizzerias in 10 cities, Richman concludes that “great pizzas aren’t made by great ovens; they’re made by great cooks.”

I couldn’t agree with him more. I’ve eaten my share of restaurant pizza but I have to say that my favorite pizza comes, without fail, from one of the greatest cooks I know—my grandmother. The dough is fragrant and yeasty; baked in a battered old pan, it turns crisp yet pleasantly chewy. 

Recently, my grandmother upgraded from supermarket flour to slightly more expensive King Arthur Flour. The rest is intuition. I don’t have that intuition—at least, not yet—but I do have access to some amazing recipes from F&W: 

Mushroom-and-Goat Cheese Béchamel Pizza

Pizza with Charred Cherry Tomatoes and Pesto

Grilled Pizza with Asparagus, Scallions and Fontina

Shrimp-and-Chorizo Pizza with Escarole and Manchego 

To give cooks more lean, quick, affordable options, the National Pork Board is introducing four new cuts that they hope will be available soon in supermarkets nationwide. Perhaps inspired by the beef industry’s success with steaks like the flatiron, which is cut from the inexpensive beef chuck, food scientists have isolated new cuts from the pig’s shoulder and leg—two parts of the animal that command a much lower price than the loin cuts.

There’s the cap steak, a thin piece from the hind leg, that reminds me of skirt steak, with its long, visible grain. (Like skirt steak, it’s great on tacos.) The petite tender is like a mini-tenderloin but with more flavor, much like beef’s teres major steak—a cut they sell at Fleisher’s butcher shop in upstate New York as “faux filet.” I recently took home the pocket roast, a two-pound chunk from the upper portion of the leg. Unfortunately, the meat was prebrined—no lovingly-raised, heirloom-breed stuff here. Besides that chemically salty taste that masked any flavor the meat might have had, I really liked the cut: It’s easy to roast in a 10-inch skillet (I browned it on the stovetop first, then transferred it to a 400° oven) and would easily serve a family of four, most likely with leftovers for sandwiches. The Pork Board hopes to turn the pocket roast (great name, by the way) into the next rotisserie chicken, since it’s easy for stores to roast on a small spit. As long as I can find versions made with better quality pork, I raise a Cubano sandwich to that.

Despite a rocky start (breakouts, low energy, cravings for texture of any kind), I felt amazing the morning of my final day on the cleanse. My skin was suddenly glowing (or so I was told by friends), and I was freakishly energetic. My first green juice of the day tasted strangely delicious, and again, I wasn’t hungry at all. I cheated slightly, caving to a small black coffee in the morning, but other than that I stuck to the rules.

The Blueprint Cleanse founders, Erica Huss (a former producer on Lidia Bastianich’s Italian-American Kitchen) and Zoe Sakoutis (a raw-foodist who likes to indulge every so often), are actually foodies at heart, which is perhaps why this cleanse was so doable for someone who likes to eat.

Luckily, I did the cleanse with a friend. The moral support helped a lot, but she sadistically suggested we meet in NYC’s Madison Square Park to drink our last cashew-nut juice together. There was something utterly wrong about drinking a juice steps from Shake Shack, and if the line had been any shorter, I might have broken down. But we toasted ourselves and actually both confessed that we felt pretty fantastic. I’m sure my body needed the time out, and now that it’s cleansed, I’m ready to retox (and just in time to taste Jacques Torres’s new ice creams, too).

I’m not going to lie: Day one of my three-day cleanse was pretty rough. The cleanse guidelines said it was OK to exercise (“Absolutely!! Can we please finally put to rest the myth that if you don’t eat a lot, you’ll lack energy?”), but I’m not sold. I’m one of those crazy people who wakes up at 5:30 a.m., runs five miles at a pretty decent pace, lifts weights and does some yoga before walking 30-odd blocks to work. I toned it down the day I started my cleanse, but those 1,100 calories weren't powering me through the day. By the time I walked home from work I was exhausted and a bit dizzy; I fell asleep at 9 p.m. and slept nearly 10 hours.

So, lesson one: workouts + juice cleanse = bad idea. That said, I was surprised that I wasn’t really hungry throughout the day. I actually could barely finish all six of my juices. Three of the six juices are a mix of greens (romaine, celery, cucumber, kale, parsley, green apple, spinach and lemon). Not being able to start my day with coffee (and now exercise) was hard enough, but starting it with a liquid salad was a lot to handle. Some hot water with lemon helped me get those three green juices down. On the positive side, the juices I got to drink in between the greens were really tasty. It was like I had something to look forward to after drinking my green stuff.

Juice number two, a pineapple-apple-mint, was sweet and refreshing, and the midday lemon-cayenne-agave tasted like a spicy lemonade. But the highlight was my last juice of the day, a blend of raw cashews, agave nectar, vanilla bean and cinnamon (which, unfortunately, had to be finished before 8 p.m., which is usually when I’m sitting down to dinner). It was like dessert and actually had some texture to it. It also had seven grams of protein that I think my body was craving (the others had at most, two grams).

I survived day one and day two (thank goodness for that cashew-nut juice), despite feeling a bit lethargic and cranky. One more day to go. My biggest problem so far is that I miss texture. I'm thinking of freezing my spicy lemonade and turning it into a slushy, just to mix things up.

 

John T. Edge's fascinating New York Times piece on the Sriracha chile sauce brand Tuong Ot Sriracha details its humble roots—founder David Tran used to grind the peppers from his brother's farm in Vietnam himself—to its now seemingly ubiquitous appeal. (It's sold at Wal-Mart and can be found in all types of restaurant kitchens, from those of superstar chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten and current Best New Chef Bryan Caswell to those of national chains like Applebee's.) Clearly, the article resonates with the F&W online team: Several of us have the bright red bottles at our desks (our web designer Jinny Kim even gave online executive editor Rebecca Bauer a 28-ounce bottle as a gift recently). Here, three great recipes that call for the fiery, garlicky, slightly sweet sauce:

Spicy Sriracha Chicken Wings “We always have a couple of extra bottles at home, because my stepson blows right through the stuff,” says F&W Best New Chef 1998 Michael Symon of the chile paste.

Soy-Glazed Chicken Yakitori Chef Dean Fearing's take on the delicious skewered meats he ate in a yakitori bar in Tokyo has a hint of heat from Sriracha.

Zee Spotted Pig Bloody Mary Anna Vanderzee's Bloody Mary for New York City's Spotted Pig gets extra heat from the chile puree.

Plus, more dishes prepared with Sriracha can be found here.

 

 

 

I’ve never bought into fad diets. Why would I want to subject myself to a diet of grapefruits or no carbs when I could just run a few extra miles to counter my splurges? But lately, I’ve been hearing whispers about something called the Blueprint Cleanse (a.k.a. “the cleanse for foodies”). Some chef friends I know have tried it. Even the F&W marketing team has some fans. I’m not looking to lose weight, but after a week of nonstop late-night eating and drinking, I decided that my body might benefit from a spring detox.  So I signed up for a three-day “foundation” cleanse (one and five-day cleanses are also available).

For three days, I will be eating nothing and drinking nothing but juice. No morning coffee, no wine, no solid food. I had planned a last hurrah dinner at Convivio the night before starting my cleanse, but upon reading the fine print (“NO farewell-to-solid-foods-with-a-steak-and-martini dinner the night before you start. You will NOT be a happy camper by the end of Day One. And that's a promise.”), I decided Michael White’s sinfully good pastas would have to wait.

My three days worth of juices were conveniently delivered to my office yesterday. I get to drink six per day, and the bottles are numbered in the order I’m supposed to drink them and are packed in cute little individual coolers. My daily calories will come out to about 1,100, comprised of the following: green juice, pineapple-apple-mint juice, green juice, spicy lemonade, green juice, cashew nut milk.  I’ll be blogging the next few days about my progress. My friends are all betting that I don’t last one full day.

Before I just looked up the definition of cattails, I didn’t know exactly what they were. Now I can tell you that they’re long-stemmed plants that grow in swampy places; the tender, meaty peeled stems are what you want to eat (to see what they look like, check out this ancient commercial of natural food expert Euell Gibbons for Grape-Nuts). In New York City, we don’t hear about them—but if you’re dining out at in Chicago, you are no doubt ahead of me, because they’re showing up on cool menus there all over the place. At Mado, the market-driven Wicker Park restaurant, they serve cattail shoots with house-cured smelts. At the Midwestern gastropub The Bristol, they offer cattails shoots with halibut and preserved lemon. And at the excellent Blackbird, chef Mike Sheerin says he gets his cattails from Spence farms in Indiana. He describes them as “like eating a young cucumber without the skin, and with a cooling effect like mint.” He keeps his cattails very simple: He slices them up and tosses them with olive oil.

Anne Nylander comes by her coffee fanaticism honestly, having grown up in Seattle during the golden age of Starbucks. She eventually left the Pacific Northwest to crisscross the country, seeking out amazing coffee shops and even becoming a certified U.S. Barista Championship judge. She now channels this knowledge into her company TampTamp, which consults for coffee cafés around New York and even offers barista classes called TampCamp. With so much experience drinking joe, I asked Anne how to spot the best coffee shop in town. Below, her top tips:

Long Lines: “Typically, if there is a line, it means the coffee is worth waiting for, and that the baristas are taking their time making each cup.”

Cleanliness: “Do people clean the windows, dust the shelves? If those things are clean, then the crew is likely also cleaning and taking care of the equipment, and that is the number one thing that can affect the taste of coffee.”

Grinding: “How frequently do they grind the coffee? They should grind for each order, so the grinder should be constantly going, or at least going every minute. That is a sign that your coffee will be fresh.”

Knowledge: “If you ask the barista a question, like where the coffee was roasted or what it tastes like, they should know. A good coffee shop educates its staff.”

Latte Art: “High-quality cafés use latte art as a training standard. The art doesn’t mean the drink will be great, but it indicates that they pay attention to the small things, and therefore the chances of it being a good cup of coffee are better.”

Anyone who knows me knows that I get headaches. I tried massage and acupuncture without much success. Then I found Dr. Mark Green, a neurologist who runs the headache medicine practice at Columbia University. He’s taught me that a big part of pain management is learning to eat properly to maintain what he calls “constancy of environment” (my body = the environment).

He had two key food-related lessons. The first: Graze. Eating frequent small meals keeps blood-sugar levels constant. For me, that means keeping a supply of fruit-and-nut bars in my handbag, like these cranberry-walnut bars. 

The second lesson: Eat lots of complex carbohydrates, which keep me full longer and also maintain steady blood-sugar levels. That’s translated into hearty salads made with brown rice, wheat berries and barley.

Only recently did I find out that while I’m eating all these fruit-and-nut bars and brown-rice salads, Dr. Green—who is not only a headache genius but also a foodie—is dining his way headache-free all around New York City. He loves seafood at Taverna Kyclades in Astoria, Queens, dim sum at Golden Unicorn in Chinatown and the Latin pollo (rotisserie chicken) spots near Columbia's Medical Center in Washington Heights.