An Obsession with Food

Vinegar Is Coming For Your Children!

2009-11-09T08:21:00.000-08:00

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle says, "Eating just one tablespoon a day of some vinegars can raise a young child's lead level by more than 30 percent, modeling requested by the news service shows."

Which "some vinegars"? According to the article, red wine and balsamic vinegars. But not all of them. The article says, "Lead can vary widely from product to product and from batch to batch." I don't advocate feeding your children lead, of course. But this article sows so much confusion that it's hard to take it seriously.

First of all, where does the lead come from? The article suggests one possible source: higher lead content in the soil in Modena, the area famous for balsamic vinegar. But that wouldn't affect all red wine vinegars or even most commercial balsamic vinegars, which, at the cheap end of the scale, are wine vinegars trucked in from all over Italy and then "finished" in Modena (with caramel coloring and other tricks) so the producers can use the name. The author offers another clue: "Some toxicologists hypothesize that production and storage are the main sources of lead contamination rather than the soil." What parts of the production? What parts of the storage? The author doesn't say.

If the article had limited discussion to authentic balsamic vinegar, it could probably make a good case. That vinegar is produced by fermenting grape must and then letting the vinegar evaporate for 12 years or longer. You could imagine a slightly higher-than-normal lead concentration in the soil getting much stronger as the liquid reduces. You could probably make a similar case for high-end but unauthentic balsamic, which is often evaporated over a long time as well. But if you're talking authentic balsamic vinegar, which costs about $30 per fluid ounce, the number of people who could feed their children one tablespoon per day is probably limited to the upper end of the upper end of income brackets.

Let's recap. Some red wine vinegars from all over the world, balsamic vinegars, and "balsamic red wine vinegars" (a term for industrial balsamic vinegars?) have higher-than-they-should lead levels. The lead might come from the soil in Modena, which would not affect most of the red wine vinegar in the world. It might come from "production and storage." But the lead levels are higher than in white wine vinegar or fruit vinegars, which are produced the same way as red wine vinegar. It's all clear now, right?

The solution is clear, at least: Don't eat vinegar! Or, you know, assume that this article is so vague as to be unhelpful and eat as normal. Of course, my preferred solution is to just make your own.

Black Box Wines

2009-11-08T15:30:00.000-08:00

The carton is tall and black. A gold, Art Deco typeface spells out the wine's name: Black Box. Inside the box, a slick, clear plastic bladder squishes about as you push your finger down on the liquid inside. Is this the future of house wine?

I know boxed wine has a lot of good traits: lower cost, lower environmental impact, lower oxidation rate once the wine is opened. But it faces a tough slog against public perception. Most American wine lovers still expect boxes to contain dreck.

Black Box wants to turn that around: They market their wine, which has been available since 2002, as the first boxed wine in the U.S. to feature a vintage, the first to sport an AVA designation, and the first to be considered "premium."

You'll find my tasting notes about some of them below.

First, however, a word about context. Winemakers aren't putting their high-end wines into boxes. Nor should they: because of the permeability of cardboard and plastic, oxygen enters a boxed wine at a much higher rate than it does a sealed bottle. If a producer puts wine into a box, you should expect an everyday table wine. Not special: Just decent.

2008 Black Box Sauvignon Blanc, New Zealand (~$25 for 3L, which is 4 bottles)
While this is a pleasant, balanced white wine, it lacks a lot of what you expect from Sauvignon Blanc — especially New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. The typical lime zest and gooseberry aromas are present but overshadowed by tropical fruit scents such as mango. The gooseberry shows up more strongly in the mouth, and especially on the short finish, but the wine has only a moderate acidity instead of Sauvignon Blanc's more bracing form.

2007 Black Box Cabernet Sauvignon, California (~$25 for 3L, which is 4 bottles)
This wine has a thick aroma of boysenberries and blackberries — I wrote boysenberry syrup — with only a splash of green bell pepper. The dark fruit continues on the palate with a surprising layer of meatiness. It's the fruit, however, that continues through on the medium finish. Its deep purple-black color and thin pink-purple rim seem at odds with its soft tannins: I expected a grippier wine based on the look and the grape. It has just enough acidity to register. Despite a bit of heat on the finish, this is a well-balanced, if not very complex, wine.

These wines were sent to me as samples.

Cross Post: Well, Which Is It?

2009-11-03T07:52:00.001-08:00

Melissa suggested I re-post this after its arrival on OWEE, even though the post is less about Julia Child and more about odd discrepancies among her biographers.

The other day, I spent some time at the library, researching a particular aspect of Julia Child's career. I had an idea for a piece — which may or may not work out — and I needed to do some initial investigation.

Reading through a number of her biographies, side by side, I was struck by the inconsistencies among them. For instance, Laura Shapiro's slim book Julia Child says that Mastering the Art of French Cooking only sold 16,000 copies in its first year, not taking off until a year after its release. Noel Riley Fitch's detailed Appetite For Life says, "By August, less than a year since publication, Mastering had sold 100,000 copies … and was in its fifth printing."

When writing of Louisette Bertholle's royalty amounts, Fitch says that they were 18 percent (versus 41 percent each for Beck and Child) for conceiving the idea. (She did very little on the book itself.) Joan Reardon, in an article about Mastering for the Summer 2005 issue of Gastronomica, says that they were 10 percent.

These are not books about days of yore, with archivists and researchers piecing together scattered, weathered scraps of data. Some of the participants in the Julia Child story are still alive. Child herself was when Fitch's book came out in 1999. And I imagine Knopf, the publisher, still has records from that time. Shouldn't these biographies be more consistent?

My inclination is to trust Fitch's account, if only because of the extensive detail. (You could make the case that Reardon's 10 percent is a typo; the rest of the piece lines up with Fitch's account, at least for the parts I focused on.) But Shapiro says she used Fitch quite a bit. Does she have new information about initial sales? Or is this an editing issue: Did Shapiro mean that the book only sold 16,000 copies in 1961 (it came out in October of that year)? Or perhaps her note that sales didn't take off until fall of 1962, which might have been before October, actually lines up with Fitch's account, who merely lumps the entire first-year sales together without giving a breakdown.

The Mechanics of Terroir, AoE 82

2009-10-31T09:26:00.000-07:00

I have a piece in the upcoming Art of Eating about the science behind terroir. I skipped past the vague hand-waviness of winemakers and marketing and went straight to the scientific papers that have been written on the subject to try and answer the question: How exactly does terroir feature X translate into wine feature Y?

I spent a lot of time at the UC Berkeley library reading through articles from the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, and many others. And then I translated the scientific results into English. You can think of it as a literature review aimed at consumers.

Call now, and order a copy. Or, better yet, subscribe to the magazine. As I've often said, it is the best English-language food magazine, and it may be the best one, period.

Mise En Place 1.1

2009-10-22T07:24:00.001-07:00

I'll revert back to food posts again soon, I promise.

I'm pleased to announce that Mise En Place 1.1 is out on the App Store. If you've already bought a copy of Mise En Place 1.0, the update should appear in your App Store application. If you haven't bought a copy, now would be a good time, since 1.1 adds some nice features and fixes a few 1.0 bugs.

Mise En Place 1.1 adds the ability to "favorite" a dish. Take an existing dish, tap on the star icon, and it will become a favorite. Then, when you want to make it again, tap Copy from Favorite when you create a dish, choose the favorite, pick a date and time, and all the prep tasks and shopping list items you attached to the favorite will be entered for you. You can freely edit a favorite at any time, changing or adding prep tasks and shopping list items, and the changes will be applied the next time you use it as a template. I have granola as a favorite, and the favorite includes every ingredient in the recipe. When I schedule granola for the week, I copy from the template and then delete the ingredients I already have on hand.

The other major new feature is a better system for scheduling tasks. First, you can define tasks in relative terms instead of absolute terms. If you want to grate cheese 20 minutes before serving pasta, you can define the task that way rather than saying 7:10 pm. Second, you can schedule a task relative to the dish or to another task — "20 minutes before cooking the roast, preheat the oven," for instance. Reschedule the "parent" task, and all the children will reschedule as well.

I fixed one of the more annoying bugs in Mise En Place 1.0, the inability to use diacritical characters. You can now make soufflés, sauté onions, and buy crème fraîche.

If you're using the app, I'd love to hear your thoughts about it. If you like it, it would mean a lot if you wrote a review.

I'd love to say that major updates will always come out every two weeks, as this one seems to have, but this was a bit of fluke. Mise En Place 1.0 sat on the App Store, unavailable, for three months while I dealt with some bureaucracy at work about releasing it. However, I've already started on 1.2, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about what it should do.

If you're a Mise En Place Lite user, your update should show up in about 9 days. I've submitted the build to the App Store, but they're a bit sluggish with approvals at the moment.

Mise En Place Lite

2009-10-07T07:06:00.000-07:00

Mise En Place is now back to its normal price of $2.99.

However, some of you have asked about a "Lite" version, and I'm happy to announce that I've released Mise En Place Lite. This version will only allow you to enter three dishes. That way, you can give it a whirl and, if you think it will work for you, you can buy the full version. As further incentive to download the full version, Lite versions will always trail their full kindred by at least a week.

Mise En Place 1.0: Meal Planning for the iPhone

2009-09-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

Downloading is working again! Please let me know if you have problems: You all have (unfortunately) been great bellwethers for these issues. As a thanks to everyone for your patience, I'm extending the introductory price of $1.99 to go through Monday, October 5.

It's a different problem now, at least, but there is once again a problem downloading the app. I have contacted support at Apple and will work to resolve this problem. And, yes, this is frustrating, but I appreciate you all hanging in there.

I'm pleased to announce the release of Mise En Place 1.0, an iPhone/iPod Touch application I wrote to help cooks like you and me make more interesting, complicated dishes during the week. I describe its purpose as "What do I need to do today to make sure dinner is delicious two days from now?"

My app centers around prep tasks. It's one thing to come home and roast a chicken. But if you remember the night before to salt the bird, the chicken is a lot better. My app helps you remember that step by letting you break a dish into tasks and then showing you which need to be done on each day. Need to take something from the freezer the morning before you cook it? Add a prep task. Need to make stock on the weekend for risotto during the week? Add a prep task.

You should buy it, because then you can support my development efforts and suggest features that would make your meal planning easier. Its normal price is $2.99, but I'm offering a special introductory price of $1.99 through ~~Sunday, October 4~~ Monday, October 5. Save 30 percent by buying now!

I've talked about my meal planning techniques in the past. Once I realized that planning meals for the week is much like planning courses for a dinner party, I developed a system involving outlines and printouts that made sense to me. Once I started carrying an iPhone, I began to wonder how it could be part of my system. Being a programmer, I wrote the app I wanted. (This naturally means that the app can also help you with the logistics for a multi-course dinner party. I've used it to pull off both brunches and dinners in the last few months.)

You can use the app to plan out a schedule of meals and their prep tasks, manage shopping lists, take notes, and chart out your dinner schedule for the week or beyond.

You should buy it. Really. In just a few days, the price will go up, and you'll need an extra dollar to get it.

And let me know what you think of it!

White Wine Vinegar

2009-09-23T07:55:00.000-07:00

Homemade white wine vinegar has always escaped my grasp.

For almost four years, I've been making red wine vinegar. Every few months, I pull a new batch of ruby red, fruity and complex vinegar — better than any commercial product I've had — from the squat oak barrel on our mantel and ladle it gently through cheesecloth into green, 375 ml bottles.

Some people coddle their sourdough starters: I pamper my vinegar. Every few days for the last few years, I have sniffed at my barrel, plunging my nose into the fumes of spoiling wine to gauge the liquid inside. I have sipped vinegar straight from a spoon to evaluate it, describe it, and critique it. I have bought wine solely to replenish my barrel when I feared that bottling would drain too much. I have nurtured my vinegar back to health after it has strayed too far from the acetic acid path. I have read everything I can about this ingredient, digging into folklore, chemical pathways, and ideal conditions for the transforming bacteria. When I tell my wine students that Sherry is made similarly to true balsamic vinegar, I'm always surprised that they don't get the analogy.

I know my vinegar.

But white wine is a tricky beast. Without red wine's protective tannins, it should spoil faster. Wine is, after all, simply one point on the path to vinegar. Winemakers compensate for that defenselessness, however, by adding sulfur dioxide, which inhibits the decline to vinegar. Good for the wine drinker; bad for the vinegar maker.

Each time I've started a batch — and I've probably tried three or four times — it's failed. It goes flat. The aroma dies. Mold forms.

But I knew it was possible. The guys at Oak Barrel, Berkeley's mecca for winemakers, brewers, and vinegar makers, talk as if there is nothing to it. "Oh, yeah, I always have a batch going," one of them said to me. I chat these sages up, trying to divine from their comments the one, obvious thing they're neglecting to tell me. The thing that prevents a bottle of my own white wine vinegar from gracing my pantry.

I decided to try again, armed with years of vinegar experience and research. I started with a bottle of low-sulfite Viognier. I diluted it to 10 percent alcohol, about the maximum the bacteria can handle. I poured it into a glass jar, enshrouding my makeshift crock with a bag to protect the liquid from light damage. I added starter culture from Oak Barrel, not trusting the wine's ability to go to vinegar itself. I whisked it vigorously every day, providing oxygen to the hungry bacteria.

I checked it a few times each day. Sometimes, after its daily whisking, I would get a sense of the vinegar within, a clean scent of acetic acid and wine. But most of the time, it smelled of Parmiggiano cheese and hazelnuts, the smells of oxidation, with mere hints of acetic acid and ethyl acetate.

Two months or so into its production, I sniffed the jar. With no whisking at all, it had the clean vinegar aroma I had only glimpsed before. I tasted it. Definitely white wine vinegar, though still raw and coarse without its six months of bottle age. I let out a little yell, and told Melissa. I tweeted it. I couldn't contain my excitement as I carefully drew off 375 ml and brought it downstairs to mellow.

I have already come up with 2 liters of use for my 375 ml. I want to infuse one bottle with tarragon and other herbs. I want to infuse another with pomegranate. I want to use some to start cider vinegar. Maybe some malt vinegar as well. Red wine vinegar would start those, but it would also tint the liquid.

But vinegar-making has taught me patience. I will try the bottle in March and see how it's developed. I've added more diluted white wine, with normal sulfite levels, to my crock. I whisk it daily. I sniff it daily. It's taken me so long to produce one bottle, I don't trust I'll get a second one.

Boxed Wine

2009-08-29T14:49:00.001-07:00

Recently, Melissa and I offered to bring wine to a casual birthday party. She texted me from The Spanish Table: She had bought a wine we had tasted before, Alandra's simple, fruity, friendly red table wine, but she had bought it in a box. (She also bought the white wine from the same producer.) She thought it would be funny if we, the wine people, brought boxed wine.

It surprises people when I say it, but I'm not bothered by boxed wine. I'm not talking about Franzia products, though. I'm talking about decent wine that happens to come in a box instead of a bottle.

But I felt some trepidation about showing up to a party of food lovers with boxed wine, when only about one-third of the guests knew us well enough to get the joke. It takes a reasonable amount of wine knowledge to understand the benefits of boxed wine.

One of the main ones, especially for the casual drinker, is that you can pour yourself a glass or two and not worry about the rest of the wine. Pull two glasses from a bottle, and you've just added a massive amount of oxygen to the wine that won't go away, though you can combat the effects. Get yourself some wine from a box's spigot, however, and the plastic liner inside collapses in on itself, keeping oxygen out and maintaining the wine's freshness.

It's not a perfect seal; plastic is more permeable than glass. A 1997 article in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry looked at different containers for wine, and found that oxygen enters a boxed wine much more quickly than it does a sealed bottle. Starting at the 6-month mark, a "bag in box" wine gets about 1 g/mL of oxygen in the liquid for every 4 months; glass bottles have barely changed their oxygen levels after two years. In other words, buy new boxes of young wine and don't cellar them.

The guests who knew us saw the box, shrugged their shoulders, and said, "If you brought it, it must be good." But I noticed some arched eyebrows among the other guests. Or I thought I did. Perhaps my self-conscious mind added bogeymen where none existed. Years after I've become comfortable with my wine knowledge, I guess I can still feel a twinge of worry about how strangers might judge me by my wine choices.

The host didn't judge, of course. She even offered a bon mot on the subject when she saw the little cartons: "Oh yeah, I know; boxes are the new screw caps."

It's true that boxes today, just like screw caps a decade ago, have a public relations problem. A few years ago, the arched eyebrows I imagined I saw at the party would have been on my own face. Boxes are common enough in Europe for everyday wines, but here they are too closely linked to cheap wine that seems closer to syrup than to fermented grapes.

As society gets more green-focused, however, boxed wine may become the darling of the sustainable food set. Consider the fuel it takes to shuttle wine about. A bottle's worth of wine, 750 ml, weighs about 750 g by itself. An average wine bottle weighs in the neighborhood of 500 g. The box we brought contained 3,000 ml of wine, and the box added 190 g. In other words, 40 percent of the weight of shipping bottled wine is the bottle while only about 7 percent of the weight of boxed wine is the box.

And bottles are inefficient space fillers. If a bottle was a rectangular prism, it would occupy about 1,500 cubic centimeters for 750 cubic centimeters of liquid. But since bottles don't pack tightly, probably one-third of that is wasted space. Our box's dimensions were about 3,500 cubic centimeters to hold 3,000 cubic centimeters of liquid, and you can, of course, pack boxes right up against each other. You can get a little less than twice the volume of boxed wine in the same space you would need for bottles.

Not that glass is evil. Far from it. The McGraw-Hill Recycling Handbook makes the startling observation that "One 12-ounce glass bottle, melted down and reformed, yields one 12-ounce bottle without any loss of quality." Glass is, the book says, "one of the few manufactured goods that is 100% recyclable." But producing a bottle requires an oven kept between 2,600 F and 2,900 F, a full order of magnitude above temperatures used in paper production. The industry has come up with a lot of tricks for making their processes more energy efficient, but that's still a lot of fuel.

But for a casual party featuring pizza and snacks, or a house wine to drink with dinner, bottles may not be the best choice. At least, that's what I'll say the next time I hear the slight sniff of a wine-loving guest.

New Wineries In The Chronicle

2009-08-29T13:13:00.000-07:00

This last Friday, the Bay Area got a whiff of days of yore, when the last day of the work week featured an entire newspaper section devoted to wine. While those pieces have been rolled in to the Sunday food section, there was a wine-focused insert this week filled with articles about the state of the California wine industry. I wrote one article for it about some new wineries that have cropped up in the last year. You'll also find articles about Lodi's growth as a wine region, the growing use of solar power in vineyards, the state of Rhône varieties in California, and more.

A quick addition. Today marks the 7-year anniversary of this blog, and I'd like to thank you all for reading. Whether you've found OWF recently or have been following along since the beginning, I appreciate your comments, thoughts, and emails. I always tell people that I have one of the smartest batches of readers around.

Backberry Jam

2009-08-09T16:42:00.000-07:00

No, that's not a typo.

We had berries in our backyard this year. Actually, our neighbors had them in their backyard. But branches from their bush flopped over our shared fence like bangs on an emo teenager. You could find me out there each day for a week or so, tugging gently at the little black clusters to see which ones came off easily.

They looked like blackberries, but there are so many blackberry variants and children, each with its own identity, that we decided to just call the fruit backberries.

And I wanted to turn them into jam.

I've never made blackberry jam before, so I turned to the smattering of preserving books that I own. What better way to compare them than to read each one's approach to my simple goal?

The first up was Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It by Karen Solomon. This book has been getting a lot of positive press, in part because Solomon is friends with a number of Bay Area food bloggers. But the positive press also comes from the accessible recipes. They're clearly laid out, written in a friendly tone, and obviously developed by someone who lives in a snug home without a lot of extra space for kitchen gear: Her beef jerky recipe uses a low-heat stove instead of a separate dehydrator, numerous smoking recipes use a stovetop smoker and sawdust instead of a backyard smoker, and so forth.

But it doesn't contain a recipe for blackberry jam. This omission became a theme. When I showed the book to a friend, he was surprised that he couldn't find information about cornichons. Last week, I tried to find advice on making traditional cucumber pickles, the kind that sit in a salt-only brine for 2 weeks and require a daily skimming from the cook. No luck, though she does offer a technique for kimchee. (I should note that the book does include a strawberry jam, but I didn't know if the exact same proportions would work.)

I suspect Solomon simply didn't have space for all these items. You might guess from the title that the book is just about preserving, but Solomon tackles the entire pantry. Alongside recipes for jam, cured meat, and pickles, there are recipes for crackers, chocolate candies, infused spirits, homemade pasta, and other foods that at first seem out of place. Such breadth in a slim book does not allow for much depth. The recipes may inspire cooks to try new things, but they may not provide answers for cooks already inspired to try one specific thing.

From Solomon's book I turned to Putting Food By, the classic, but perhaps hard to find, book on preserving by Janet Greene, Ruth Hertzberg, and Beatrice Vaughan. Every time I rummage through this chunky little paperback, I am charmed by the prose. It's written in a slightly archaic tone — the book was originally published in the early '70s — that evokes a stout Midwestern homesteader teaching a new neighbor the ropes. Consider this text on freezing seafood:

Fish must be cleaned immediately and washed in fresh, running water; ocean fish may be kept alive in sea water, but neither fish nor shellfish should be cleaned or cooked in sea water … You will be meticulous about sanitation and sterilizing surfaces. The packaging materials will be adequate for preventing ice crystals or freezer burn. The seafood will be sharply frozen, stored at minimum temperature, and used relatively soon.

Of course PFB, as the authors refer to their book, has a blackberry jam recipe. In fact, it has two: One is a diet version with less sugar and more gelatin. The one I used has optional extra steps for de-seeding the blackberries — I opted to not de-seed — but emphasizes the important detail: "… you will be adding an amount of sugar equal to the measurement of prepared berry pulp." The proportions mirror the ones in The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard, which friends of ours recommended to us.

Small-Batch Preserving, as its name suggests, gives techniques for the quantities non-homesteaders might deal with. It occupies a space between Jam It and Putting Food By: It has a depth of recipes closer to Putting Food By but without the wrapping prose; like Jam It, it is little more than recipes.

In the end, my tour of preserving books stopped at Putting Food By, but with a twist. I put my "backberries" through the maceration step mentioned in Jam It's strawberry jam recipe.

Maceration simply means letting solid ingredients sit in liquid ones. Winemakers use maceration to extract the color compounds and tannins of grape skins into the clear liquid: It's how you get red wine. In simple terms: the longer the maceration, the more tannins and color in the wine.

But what role does it play when making jam? Winemakers remove the skins and seeds floating on the wine, but a jam maker dumps everything into a pot: The raw source of color and flavor compounds is still there. Solomon doesn't offer an explanation, but The Oxford Companion to Wine notes that maceration, at least in a winery, extracts compounds via diffusion from cells whose walls remain intact during the crush. The Oxford Companion to Food offers a different theoretical rationale for the step, saying that maceration softens the ingredient in question.

Jam It is a good, solid book, despite the gaps in coverage. I'll flip through it often and no doubt make many pantry items from it — crackers, homemade peppermint patties, and more all caught my eye. But my preserving heart still belongs to Putting Food By.

Fundamentals of Wine Studies II: Sensory Evaluation

2009-08-01T17:53:00.000-07:00

Just a note to let you know that my UC Berkeley Extension wine tasting class, Sensory Evaluation, is being offered again this coming fall, in Berkeley. Unlike most wine classes, this one is less focused on regions and more focused on how you describe what's in your glass. The first class covers acidity, sweetness, and tannins; the second, scent; the third, faults and flaws; the fourth, oak; the fifth, terroir; and the sixth, blending and blind tasting.

As I like to say, sign up early and sign up often.

Rescuing A Stuck Vinegar Barrel

2009-07-20T08:18:00.000-07:00

If you make your own wine vinegar, you've probably smelled it: You may describe it as nail polish remover, vinyl, or airplane glue. But you know it doesn't smell like vinegar.

Most of the time, your vinegar may smell like that for a while and then find its way to a more classic vinegar aroma. But in the back of my mind, I have always remembered Ed Behr's commentary in his article "The Best Red-Wine Vinegar You're Likely to Find is the One You Make Yourself": "… some batches I throw out. Those have a strong, unpleasant aroma of nail-polish remover."

And it finally happened to mine. It had smelled like nail polish for too long.

I mentioned it to the staff at Oak Barrel Winecraft. Their response echoed Ed's. "Just toss it out and start over." I sadly mentioned this on Twitter, but Judy Witts Francini stayed my hand and suggested that I look at a book called Lost Arts. By coincidence, I had it on my shelf.

"Occasionally vinegar may develop some 'off' odors, the most common being that of ethyl acetate, the familiar smell of nail polish remover," writes Lynn Alley, the author. "Before you throw your vinegar out, try aerating it." She suggests pouring it back and forth between jugs, but I was able to use a whisk to whip the liquid into a frenzy. Then, just to be safe, I added a fresh batch of starter culture, "mother," into the barrel. I also added in some more wine to give the culture something to eat.

The nail polish smell persisted, but the overall aroma had improved. A few weeks later, I sniffed again and cried out in triumph: My barrel once again smelled like vinegar. I bottled the bulk of it and replenished the barrel with fresh wine.

But how could I avoid this in the future?

There's no way to get rid of ethyl acetate completely. In fact, it's desirable in small amounts. Ethyl acetate is the dominant ester in wine and contributes to its fruit aromas and, by extension, those of the vinegar you make from it. And a vinegar barrel with a between-wine-and-vinegar liquid is the perfect environment for creating it: Ethanol and acetic acid can react to make ethyl acetate. I accepted its inevitability, but I wanted to know how to contain it.

I spent an afternoon poring through journal papers about vinegar, but most of them dealt with industrial vinegar production, which shares only a basic biological fact — Acetobacter converts ethanol to acetic acid in the presence of oxygen — with my little barrel. (In submerged acetification, the preferred industrial technique, oxygen gets sucked into the liquid and shattered into small bubbles by a rotor. This creates a huge air-and-liquid interface, which lets the culture convert a batch of wine into vinegar in a short period of time.)

I turned from the library to Katz and Co., one of the few producers in the United States that makes vinegar via the Orléans method, which is much closer to the home vinegar maker's setup. Albert Katz was understandably reluctant to share the details of research he has done to reliably produce high-quality vinegar for his business, but he did offer some pointers: "The most important thing about making Orléans method vinegar is to make sure you are doing everything right," he says. "By that I mean using the appropriate alcohol with proper acidity levels. The contents must not be too high in SO2, or you will inhibit conversion and the temperatures must stay correct." He added that both the environment and the equipment must be as clean as possible

I looked at his email and then at my little barrel. It sits on the mantel in our living room, where temperature varies often. It receives random glasses and bottles of wine from dinner or from tastings. I doubted that's what Katz meant by a well-controlled setup.

But his advice and my research gave me ideas about how to keep my vinegar happy, and they are the hypotheses I'm working from now.

Aeration is key, as Lost Arts mentions, to a healthy Acetobacter population. In a 2008 review article by Eveline Bartowsky and Paul Henschke about wine spoilage, the authors write, "More recent studies have shown that momentary aeration, such as that introduced by agitation or racking of wine from one barrel into another is sufficient to encourage significant growth of resident AAB [acetic acid bacteria] populations." Now, I whisk my vinegar every few days through the large hatch Melissa made for me on the side of the barrel. If you have the traditional kind with a small bunghole, you can probably aerate it by draining some amount of the liquid into a measuring cup and then pouring it back in through the top. I've thought about adding a pump from a fish tank.

As I thought about Katz's advice to maintain a tight environment, I realized I had become more cavalier about my barrel in the "nail polish" months. In the past I had watered down wine to keep it around 10 percent, which is near the upper end of what Acetobacter can tolerate. But I had begun to just dump leftover wine into the liquid. This probably wasn't a problem in terms of alcohol content — the barrel's liquid gets lower alcohol as it evaporates and gets converted to acetic acid — but I did wonder if I had removed a crucial ingredient: water.

The Fisher-Speier esterification pathway describes a reaction in which ethanol and acetic acid exist in equilibrium with ethyl acetate and water. Remove water from the barrel, and the equilibrium will move to the ethyl acetate side of the fence. Add water, and you shift equilibrium back to the ethanol and acetic acid side. By watering down the wine to 10 percent, I was not only keeping the alcohol levels in check, I was keeping the equilibrum tilted in my favor.

At least, so goes the theory. Testing it is a bit awkward: The results are either "it stuck, so that didn't work" or "well, it's gone long enough without getting stuck that that probably worked." But my current vinegar batch still has that complex aroma of nail polish remover and vinegar that I have for a long time associated with an in-transition batch.

So far, so good.

The Writing In The Margin

2009-07-09T21:01:00.000-07:00

The other night, I made the Buttered Bean, Leek, and Cauliflower Salad from Fergus Henderson's Beyond Nose to Tail. Melissa and I ate it and noticed some things about it that didn't work — it has too much garlic, and you need to reduce the cauliflower to the smallest floret size. So I got out a pen and made a note in the book, overwriting the slim, small, italic type with my large and clumsy penmanship.

I romanticize books as physical objects almost to the point of fetishism. Maybe beyond. If you suggested that I take notes in the margin of, say, my Robertson Davies novels, which are mostly trade paperbacks, I would recoil in shock. Suggest I take notes in the margin of my nice hardcovers, and get the smelling salts ready.

But when it comes time to correct a cookbook, the pen emerges from its container and goes to work with nary a thought. Even nice cookbooks get the ink: My printing of the beautiful French Laundry Cookbook suggests 2 tablespoons of salt for the gnocchi recipe, but you're better off with 2 teaspoons. So noted.

For a long time, I tried to reconcile the urge to correct with the urge to protect. I made mental notes about the recipes and filed them in some corner of my mind: A corner that was almost always irretrievable when I made the recipe again. I tried keeping notes in a notebook, but I never added an index and, at any rate, never thought to look in the notebook when cooking commenced. Index cards bearing the addenda started in the cookbook, but eventually ended up on the floor or behind the butcher block or under the bookcase.

So finally I did the unthinkable. And I've never looked back.

If you still hold out and preserve your books' good looks, I salute your resolve. But if you're on the fence, think of it this way: A cookbook is a tool, and tools need to work for their users. Book artists sharpen their bone folders to get tighter creases in small spaces. Computer users set their layouts and preferences in ways that often frustrate others who sit at the same keyboard. And we should modify cookbooks to suit our needs.

That's how I rationalize it, anyway, when my brain shrieks at my hand to stop its destructive arc.

Baying for Bay

2009-07-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

A couple months ago, I did something that I — and you — have probably done a million times: I opened a jar of bay leaves. I have dutifully done this whenever I make soup, stew, or any other long-cooking dish, but haven't thought much about it.

But when I gave the lid its last turn and lifted it from the glass, a powerful aroma poofed up at me. I had never really smelled bay this potent, and I found it transforming.

Suddenly, I was in love with bay.

And I was in love with it despite the fact that — judging by the long, dark green leaves — I had almost certainly come across a jar of California bay, which many deem inferior to European, or Mediterranean, bay. (The two are not just different species but different genuses.) As usual, a definitive article on the subject can be found in Ed Behr's The Artful Eater. Ed describes California bay with his typical flair: "A freshly dried batch of California bay I once had smelled rudely to me of bay plus particularly rank rocket (arugula) and bold nutmeg. A few weeks later it had subsided to nutmeg alone, distinct enough to recall eggnog."

The leaves in my jar hadn't diminished to pure nutmeg, but nor would you describe them as "subtle and submissive," as Ed says of European bay. They had a strong peppery and camphor character that, now that I was attuned to it, I could detect as a subtle taste throughout the stew I had cooked. Perhaps now that I've opened my nostrils to bay's character, I will appreciate the more delicate European leaf, but for now I'm enjoying the stronger form.

Bay of course shows up in a myriad of slow-cooked dishes, and Ed's essay suggests using it with tomatoes, potatoes, and as a seasoning in bechamel sauce. But in fit of diegogarcity, I've started seeing intriguing uses of it all around me. While interviewing June Taylor for an article, she had me try an in-progress Mediterranean bay-infused syrup that had all the fantastic bay character I had come to love. At a dinner at Eccolo to celebrate the launch of Novella Carpenter's Farm City, I tasted bay risotto and bay ice cream, each made with locally foraged leaves and having a very subtle bay character (just to confuse things, European bay grows here in California as well, so these may have been Mediterranean bay leaves).

Those creative uses have triggered my own creative impulses: Would bay leaf shortbread be good? Should I make my own bay leaf ice cream?

What do you like to do with bay?

Wine And Roommates

2009-06-29T21:12:00.001-07:00

Some of you veteran OWF readers may dimly remember that I write for other publications. Some of you may also remember that I occasionally write for this one. Ha ha. Yesterday, my article about managing roommates and wine tastes appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. I had fun writing it and hearing the different stories of people who have had to wrangle wine interest into the already complicated dynamics of roommates in San Francisco. I also like the juxtaposition of this piece — almost certainly one of my most "wine light" wine articles — with a piece I have coming out in a couple of weeks for a different publication — almost certainly one of my most wine-geek-oriented pieces.

A Guide To Berkeley Wine Stores

2009-06-07T17:26:00.000-07:00

The other day, I mentioned in conversation that I live within a short drive of four excellent wine stores. And while I often assume that every wine lover in the town knows every wine store, I've noticed that even the students in my Berkeley Extension classes — who are obviously passionate about wine — don't always know about all of these. Inspired in part by the "I love this town" vibe at the new In Berkeley blog, I'm offering my guide to these stores.

If you're not in the Bay Area, this post may not interest you. But no matter where you live, I urge you to patronize the small, independent wine stores in your area. This isn't just my normal plea about local businesses and community economies: This is about service. Get to know the staff at your local wine store, and you'll get better wine. You can tell them what you like and don't like, and they'll steer you to wines you'll enjoy and introduce you to new ones you might never have found. Want to drink well? Let a true wine merchant help. A supermarket or Beverages & More employee may also steer you well but it's less likely — s/he probably doesn't love wine the way a wine merchant's staff does — and s/he's not likely to remember anything about you the next time you go.

A lot of people are intimidated by wine stores, because speaking about wine still has a veneer of snobbishness. Here's how to ask for help in a good wine store: Go up to one of the employees and say, "I need some help finding some wine. I typically like <fill in wines you like here>, and I want to learn more about other wines that are out there." That kind of question makes a wine person's day, and any good merchant will take your tastes into account. They won't hand you a barnyardy, earthy Burgundy if you say you like Napa Cabernet. Buy a few of the bottles they suggest, try them, decide what you like, and then go back and say (ideally to the same person), "I bought X, Y, and Z from you last time, and I really liked X but I wasn't very keen on Y. I normally drink <fill in wines you like here>, but I'm curious what else you have that's like X." Do this a few times, and you'll be a regular.

Kermit Lynch, 1605 San Pablo Avenue
Easily the most famous of our wine stores. Kermit made his name in the early 1970s by championing and importing the artisanal wines of France, and to this day he carries French wines made with integrity and care. (There are some Italian wines in the store as well.) Domaine Tempier, and the entire Bandol region, became famous because of Kermit. So did true Beaujolais. So did Chinon. Several top Alsace producers grace his shelves as well. The list goes on and on.

I can barely move in the compactly arranged store without the urge to grab every bottle I spy and put it in my basket. But that brings me to the downside about Kermit's bottles: They tend to be a bit pricey. Not too much so, and there are, as he recently noted in his eloquent newsletter, 80 bottles in the store that sell for less than $20, but I don't have quite the budget to buy as much there as I'd like. That said, the annual "Get the old Burgundy off the shelves to make room for the new inventory" sale should not be missed.

Note that Kermit actively encourages you to develop a relationship with the salespeople in the store, many of whom have worked there for years.

Vintage Berkeley, 2113 Vine St. & 2949 College Ave.
I've been a fan of Vintage Berkeley since I walked through the door the first time. Owner Peter Eastlake focuses on quality wines from around the world that are under $25. He has a fantastic palate (I know this, I tell my students jokingly, because it aligns with mine.) I have never been disappointed with a bottle I bought from him, and even when I don't know the folks who are working, I can pick up any bottle with confidence that it will be a solid, enjoyable wine.

But do ask the staff their opinion: The Vine Street store staff can cheerfully talk about any of the bottles around them (the College store probably can, too, but I've been in there less often.) Or, if you're shy, read Peter's excellent and witty "shelf talkers" for the wines. They're well written and they never mention scores, Robert Parker, or Wine Spectator. He carries the wines because he likes them.

There are only two down sides to Vintage Berkeley for me. One, I don't get the chance to chat with Peter too much since he often seems to be at the College store when we're at the Vine store, and vice versa. Two, he sells his inventory quickly enough that if you find a wine you really like, you have to remember to go back right away and buy it: Otherwise, you risk disappointment.

There are free tastings on Saturday afternoons if you want to try before you buy.

The Spanish Table, 1814 San Pablo Ave
I hear that The Spanish Table carries a wide range of Spanish foodstuffs, cookbooks, and gear in the front part of the store. I wouldn't know: I always walk straight to the wine section in the back. Not surprisingly, the selection is largely Spanish, but Portugal is well represented, too. In general, if it's good and it's from one of those two countries, Kevin (the wine buyer, who's usually working there) carries it. And probably knows a ton about it.

Sure you can find wines from Spain's famous Rioja region. But you can also find cava, Txakolina, Vinho Verde, and more. There's a wall devoted to Madeira and Port. There's a long shelf devoted to different sherries. Right now, he's carrying a Basque cider which is a beautiful summer drink: 4 percent alcohol, $9 and a sherry-like taste. We've also seen Spanish beer there.

Spain is one of the top spots for value wines at the moment, and the store's prices are quite reasonable. Kevin even maintains a "house wine" area in the back where the bottles are $7 each. But even outside of that small section, it's not hard to find wines under $15.

Paul Marcus Wines, 5655 College Avenue
Paul Marcus is not in Berkeley. But it's so close to the border, and it's such an excellent wine store, I couldn't leave it out. It easily has the best Italian selection in the East Bay, but it's also got excellent coverage in Burgundy, Austria, Germany, the Loire, the Southern Rhone, dessert wines, and more. When we lived in Oakland, this was our primary wine store, and we know most of the staff well (they're one of the stores I usually hit up when I'm hunting for corked wines for class). Everyone there has a ton of knowledge and is eager to help you find the right bottle. In fact, they recently added a "staff picks" section where each staff member gets to call out a few favorite bottles.

Here's a quick tip if you're looking for values: Poke around in the front of the store, which is where they keep their more affordable wines.

North Berkeley Wine Imports, 1601 Martin Luther King Jr. Way
A friend of mine who seeks out good Champagne says that North Berkeley is now where he goes for his favorite Champagnes. But the store, which like Kermit Lynch imports its selection, brings in a wide variety of wines. I don't take advantage of this store as often as I should, mostly because it's not near one of our normal shopping destinations, but every time I've been in there, the staff has been helpful and knowledgeable.

Solano Cellars, 1580 Solano Ave
To be honest, I haven't been in this store much since Peter Eastlake, Vintage Berkeley's owner, bought it a couple years ago. But I know he's kept its spirit intact: It's a neighborhood wine store with a broad selection of good wines. Solano isn't on our normal shopping route, either, but the wine store has never had a real personality to me. (It probably has more of one now with Peter at the helm.) Still, for North Berkeley residents it's an excellent resource. Unlike most of the other stores on this list, Solano Cellars offers wine tasting classes that will give you a solid introduction to any given topic, and the store pulls out some nice surprises: I once saw Terry Theise there giving the crowd at the bar a splendid tour of his German wine portfolio.

Vino, various locations
When I speak of a wine store having personality, I often use Vino!, a local chain, as a good counterexample. Each store that I've seen has a good selection and a knowledgeable staff, but I never feel like there's a mission statement or driving passion behind the inventory other than just selling wine. This is no doubt unfair, but even though the one on 4th Street is on a normal shopping route, I rarely do more than just breeze through. It doesn't grab me.

My Granola

2009-05-03T08:56:00.000-07:00

I’ve started making my own granola. Melissa likes to joke that this is a side effect of long hair and a Berkeley address — I hope she doesn’t buy me a tie-dye leotard — but it’s really because I developed a mild addiction to granola at my last job, where it was a common snack in the cupboards, and wanted to make my own.

I started by flipping through books on my bookcase. Surprisingly, given the large number of Bay Area authors and slight tinge of hippiness painted across my kitchen bookcase, I only found a few granola recipes. I started with the Grain-ola recipe in my friend Heidi’s Super Natural Cooking. That recipe also appears, with slight modifications, in my friend David’s The Perfect Scoop. This recipe produces a very good granola, but I wanted something a little different.

I didn’t know what it needed, though, until I tried the Killer Granola recipe in The Cheese Board Collective Works. That recipe produces a granola with deep flavor notes. But there were components of Heidi’s that I really liked (and components of both that I didn’t like: what’s with all the coconut in these recipes?). My favorite granola recipe thus became a hybrid of the two, along with some touches I’ve figured out on my own.

But a word of warning before you read my technique. You may think of granola as a healthy food. You wouldn’t be alone: It was created in 1863 by James Caleb Jackson as part of the “health food and religious purity” movement that would spawn graham flour, corn flakes, and a flood of enemas. If you view granola as a health food, good for you.

My recipe focuses on taste.

I imagine it’s healthy enough, especially compared to most commercial granolas, but that’s a side effect. A stick of butter, 3/4 cup brown sugar, etc. You get the idea.

Giving a recipe for granola is a bit like giving a recipe for salad, since you can vary it endlessly without much problem, but this is the template I use. Let me know your own recipes and ideas in the comments.

Granola Recipe

Preheat oven to 325° Place a silicone baking sheet into a jelly roll pan.
Combine 3 cups of rolled oats, a handful or two of shelled sunflower seeds, and thin slices of crystallized ginger in a large bowl. Do not use quick oats: I did that once and the result was horrible. I add the seeds and ginger until they look right, so I can’t give precise amounts. Use your hands to mix the ingredients so you get an even distribution.
Chop nuts coarsely to end up with a pile that fits between your two hands. I usually use almonds, but pecans work as well and one of these days I plan to use hazelnuts.
In a medium-sized pot, melt a stick of butter over a medium-high flame. Add the chopped nuts and stir until lightly toasted. While most of the butter will coat the nuts, I like to see a thin layer of butter on the bottom of the pan. If I don’t, I add more butter.
Add 3/4 cup brown sugar and 2 tablespoons of honey to the butter and nuts, and stir until well integrated. Remove from the heat, add a splash of vanilla extract, and stir again to mix the ingredients.
Add the hot nut mixture to the oats and seeds in the large bowl. Use a wooden spoon to stir the mixture until it’s cool enough to use your hands. You want to spread the butter and sugar evenly through the oats and seeds.
Spread the granola onto the silicone-lined baking sheet, and place in the oven for 15 minutes. Stir the mixture to bring oats from the bottom up to the top, and cook for another 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and set the jelly roll pan on a rack to cool.
While the granola is cooking and cooling, thinly slice a mix of dried fruit. (For you Berkeley farmers’ market shoppers, Blossom Bluff’s dried fruit is markedly better than Frog Hollow’s.) You can use anything you like — we favor dried peaches and plums — as long as you slice them into inch-long, matchstick-sized slices. Dried fruit pieces that are too big create an unpleasant clash in textures. As with the nuts, I like to chop about two handfuls’ worth.
Add the dried fruit to the warm granola, and stir to evenly distribute. (If you add the dried fruit before the granola goes into the oven, it becomes too dry.)
Serve with yogurt. We’re fans of Redwood Hill’s goat yogurt at the moment.

I know I have a few programmers among my readers, so you may also like my new blog, An Obsession with Programming. It’s definitely aimed at a technical audience, but everyone is welcome.

Wine And Roommates

2009-04-12T10:36:00.000-07:00

Hey, everyone. I'm working on an article about Bay Area folks who have to deal with disparate wine tastes among their roommates, and I'd love to hear your stories on the subject. Know a wine drinker who lives with beer fans? A wine snob who lives with White Zinfandel fans? How do they share their beverages? Do they hoard their wine or share it with roommates to enlighten them? How do wine drinkers — who often drink half a bottle with dinner and after — manage with light drinkers or teetotallers?

You can write me privately, and I'm happy to protect your anonymity if you want to talk about your current roommates but don’t want months of fights.

The Bookcase in the Pantry

2009-03-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

I recently moved a bookcase into our kitchen. It’s a tall, skinny thing, all white. The friend who handed it down to me no doubt bought it from Scandinavian Designs or IKEA. It fits in a space about one foot wide next to the monstrous metal shelves that fill one wall of the pantry space off our main kitchen area. (It fits now, anyway; those shelves were about 11 1/2 inches away from the wall until I moved most of their contents to the floor, pulled them over about an inch, and then replaced everything I had taken off them.)

Once I moved the bookcase in, I had to figure out what to put in it. Books, of course, and food books at that. But which ones? My collection of food books sprawls far beyond what one slim little bookcase can hold, even with the books grouped by height and squished together for maximum efficiency.

Part of the answer was simple practicality. Certain books show up often when I’m planning meals, and it makes sense to keep them close by. Super Natural Cooking, which guides gourmets through a world of interesting grains and veggie dishes. The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, perhaps my very favorite cookbook, with its long essays about the simplest dishes. Slow Mediterranean Kitchen, the perfect book for slow cooker owners. Kitchen Sense, a good reference for all those classic dishes that I mostly know how to make but sometimes need a refresher for. The Art of Simple Food, which reminds me that sometimes a souffle or pizza is a great dinner.

Others are books that I use often, but less often than the ones above. The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion serves my needs when I need to look up a simple baked good. Bouchon occasionally scratches a food craving itch, and The French Laundry Cookbook provides inspiration for fancier meals. The Perfect Scoop gives me ice cream ideas. The River Cottage Meat Book provides a nice reference for uncommon meat cooking tasks. Mediterranean Street Food has a stellar collection of recipes that give variety during the week. The Cheese Board Collective Works has a smattering of bread recipes and, at the moment, my favorite granola recipe.

There are, of course, reference books scattered about the shelves. I almost never look at these books, but I like to think that I do, and so onto the bookcase they go. On Food and Cooking, the must-have encyclopedia of food science for laypeople (and lapsed science nerds like myself). The Elements of Cooking, a handy pocket guide to unfamiliar kitchen terms and proportions for common preparations. Culinary Artistry, a collection of voluminous lists of flavor pairings. Putting Food By, the classic book about preserving foods. Sauces, with its no-nonsense title and thick spine.

But there is a final category to the books I fit in to the little white case: guilt-inducing. These are the books I feel like I should be cooking from, but almost never do. Perhaps I hope that by placing them next to my kitchen staples, I will finally pluck them from their shelves and give them the attention they deserve.

Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes came out ahead in an illuminating survey of bread books done by James Macguire in The Art of Eating a couple years back (though “came out ahead” hides the fact that he skewered every bread book on the market). I’d like to make my own bread more. But we live so close to Acme Bakery that making my own seems silly.

Madhur Jaffrey’s World of the East Vegetarian Cookbook is a thick sheaf of interesting vegetarian dishes from cuisines I rarely explore, and yet I haven’t cracked it open in years. The dishes are unfamiliar enough that I don't get a “Oooh, I want to make that” rush like I do when I flip through Zuni’s familiar French/Italian/California ideas.

Similarly, The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking promises to give me the basics of a cuisine I enjoy when I eat it, but know very little about cooking. I know it’s not hard. I know I could start with one or two simple dishes and add them to an otherwise European meal. Maybe I could make steamed pork buns for lunch. All good ideas that never happen.

The Whole Beast and Beyond Nose to Tail are witty, charming cookbooks that everyone should own. And yet I no longer make a point of keeping offal — the mainstay of the two books — in my freezer, and the meat vendors at the market don’t usually bring any. I know I could put in a special request, but that takes layers of planning that even I haven’t gotten around to yet. And so Fergus’s warm prose stays folded in the covers.

Charcuterie lives in this category. One of these days, I plan to set up a corner of my basement as a meat-curing area. I have everything I need, except a free few hours to plan it all out and set it up. And since I rarely have the extra meat on hand that would steer me to salumis and hams, I never get up the inspiration to set up my meat cave downstairs.

I’d really like to use Cooking By Hand more. The sprawling, in-depth look at making pasta is reason enough to pull it off the shelf. But I hate making pasta by hand. Its conserva technique is good, but I’ve done it enough times now that I don’t need to reference the book anymore. I’m probably missing yet more fascinating ideas simply because I never look to it for pasta suggestions.

But you know, I might start opening these books. Maybe I'll plan a vegetarian week that forces me to open Jaffrey’s book. Maybe I’ll make potstickers. Maybe, for real, I’ll make myself some pasta.

Or, you know, maybe not. But the books will sit there, right where I’m bound to see them, making me feel guilty for neglect.

Got any books you feel you should cook from more? Share your guilt-inducing cookbooks in the comments.

Almond Butter. What's Up With That?

2009-02-25T19:29:00.000-08:00

At the Ferry Plaza market recently, I counted four vendors selling almond butter. At the Berkeley market, where we usually shop, I counted three. At the Temescal market, I counted two.

I bought some out of curiosity; now I’m a convert to its deep almond flavor. Melissa and I frequently have almond butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, and I made almond butter cookies recently by swapping it one-for-one with the recipe’s peanut butter.

Have I just been blind to this before?

In part, yes. Lagier Ranches has sold a range of almond butters for 10 years now, says Casey Havre, who manages the company’s livestock and the company’s subsidiary, Loulou’s Garden. Of the three types of almonds they grow, Lagier uses one, the Butte, only for almond butter. They use whole almonds, since broken almonds turn rancid more quickly. They know their almond butter.

But there has been a surge in almond butter at local markets. Massa Organics, best known among foodies for their flavorful, locally-grown rice, started making almond butter within the last year, says owner Greg Massa. And a quick look through Riverdog Farm’s newsletters shows that they started selling it at about the same time.

Probably everyone is selling it for the same reason: product diversity. Small farms succeed when they can sell a range of items. One crop pays the bills even while the market for another one tanks; one crop in season covers costs while another one lies dormant. “Almond butter for us was just a natural extension of getting into the almond business,” says Massa. “ In 2004, commodity rice prices were so low that we planted our first-ever almond orchard in an attempt to diversify our farming operation.”

It’s surprising that more farmers haven’t started selling almond butter before now. Almonds are everywhere here. California’s $2 billion almond industry is the only commercial one in North America, producing 75 percent of the world’s almond supply, according to the California Almond Board. Almond butter plays straight to our locavore crowd as a peanut butter substitute sourced from nearby. It plays straight to our gourmet crowd as an interesting, flavorful ingredient. And It plays straight to our health nut crowd as a “superfood,” a concentrated nutrition source.

But it doesn’t play to our budget-watching crowd, unfortunately. Almond prices are higher than peanut prices — though they’ve dropped off sharply this year — and almond butter reflects that cost. Most of the jars of organic almond butter I’ve seen cost about $1 per ounce, although non-organic brands seem to cost about two-thirds of that.

If you’ve got the budget, you can find Massa’s at the Berkeley market and the Ferry Plaza market. You can find Lagier at the Ferry Plaza, Grand Lake, Marin Civic Center, and Temescal markets. Any vendor will give you other ideas for using it beyond AB&Js and cookies. Massa likes his almond butter on toast with honey, but he also uses it in peanut sauce recipes. Havre likes it with her oatmeal, but she suggested a combination so odd I just have to try it: almond butter and homemade sauerkraut sandwiches.

Add your suggestions for almond butter in the comments.

1984 Terrebrune, Bandol

2009-02-04T20:41:00.000-08:00

Two years ago and some change, Melissa and I went to Provence. Before we left, I booked us winery appointments in Bandol, saying that I was a wine writer but that I wasn’t on assignment. While the town itself is a checklist of Riviera requirements — a cycle of bedroom-sized creperies, souvenir stands, and Egyptian cotton sellers repeated a million times along the beach — the wine region is probably the best of Provence’s appellations outside of the Southern Rhône.

It would be hard to pick our favorite winery visit. At Domaine Tempier, the darling of Richard Olney, Alice Waters, and Kermit Lynch (who imports the bottles), the wine maker played "guess the age" with a bottle of Tempier from the early 80s (I guessed early 90s). At Chateau Pradeaux, we met the seemingly endless stream of dogs and walked in among the foudres in the old cellar. At Chateau St.-Anne, Bandol’s biodynamic estate, the wine maker drove us to a remote vineyard in the forest and then to a vantage point — complete with an old ruin — where he explained the different terroirs of Bandol by pointing to the streaks of color in the hills across the valley.

But our visit to Domaine de Terrebrune (also a Kermit Lynch import) may top them all.

Once we arrived, the wine maker’s assistant took us around the winery, explaining in slowed-down French how the winery works. She took us downstairs to show us the gravity-fed system, which was busy with staff handling the harvest. The owner came down and chatted with us about his farming philosophy and his thoughts on Mourvedre, the dominant grape of Bandol. He then suggested we eat at the restaurant on the grounds (he tried to pick up our tab, but I explained my rules about such things).

I will never forget that meal. A heavy drizzle of rain plopped and pitter-pattered just outside the restaurant. It was open to the elements at one end, but the crackling fire for cooking all the food warmed the room. The first course was a plate of mushrooms with thyme and a hardened streak of grilled ham. The second course was an arc of steak cooked rare.

I don’t mean rare the way Americans think of rare. It was arranged by doneness, and the most well-done piece on the plate was what a good American restaurant would call rare. (And many restaurants can’t even deliver on that: A “rare” order often comes out medium-rare.) I can still picture the plate and conjure the taste of each piece of that meat. We ordered a bottle of a decade-old Terrebrune to go with it.

After lunch, we stopped at the front desk to buy some wine. We’ve found that European wineries often have good prices on library wines. We had brought shipping boxes on the trip, knowing that we’d be buying wine, so we still had plenty of room for two bottles of the 1984 Terrebrune. Like most premium Bandol wines, this one is 95 percent Mourvedre, a tannic grape that benefits from a bit of age: Seven years seems about right for the wine to start opening up, but it will last much longer.

We opened the first bottle earlier this year. We took our friend Sean-Michael to dinner at Jojo as thanks for getting me the Maxis job. We knew he’d appreciate it. We opened the second bottle the other night, just because. I made a pot roast, mashed potatoes, and braised greens. We burrowed our noses into the glasses, inhaling the smell of lush violets and leather. The tannins had dissolved into nothingness, but the acidity and the fruit were still lively and invigorating. A decade from now, we still would have loved this wine.

But it almost didn’t matter what the wine tasted like. Every sip and every sniff brought us back to that meal, that tour, the wine maker, and his staff.

Yes, yes, I have once again been neglecting OWF. Let me give a word of advice to you relatively new bloggers: Don't stop blogging, because you'll find it hard to start up again. Nonetheless, I intend to get myself back in this habit.

UCB Extension Wine Class: Fundamentals of Wine Studies II

2009-01-10T13:29:00.000-08:00

The latest UC Berkeley Extension catalog is out, and I am once again teaching Fundamentals of Wine Studies II, a class about the sensory analysis of wine. Unlike most classes, which talk about the regions, this one talks about the guts of describing wine. I love this class, and my students always get a lot out of it.

Here are my descriptions of an earlier incarnation of this class: Session 1, Sessions 2-4, Session 5, and Session 6.

Real World Wine Pairing

2009-01-06T21:42:00.001-08:00

My mom called me early on December 24th to brainstorm about wines for that night’s dinner. As I’ve said before, she and I have similar cooking styles, and she had planned a stunning feast. Fortunately, we were invited.

We were starting with a vintage Champagne, but then she asked about the crab bisque she had made. Crab is one of the few dishes that sends me hunting for the rich Chardonnays that we produce in California. You don’t want a lot of oak character for this pairing, because the tannins will smother your tongue and prevent you from enjoying the delicate crab. However, a little of the butter character that comes from malolactic fermentation (converting apple-crisp malic acid to creamy-soft lactic) goes nicely with the crab meat. After all, we dunk cracked crab into little pots of melted butter. But you still want some acidity: Avoid the flabby Chardonnays that winemakers so often produce here in the land of overripe fruit.

My mom had a slightly older California Chardonnay, and we pondered its potential over the phone. She read the label, which said that it had been made in the Burgundian style. Lots of people say that, of course, but the rest of the label, which at least implied that it had been aged in neutral oak, sounded promising. In the end, it proved to be exactly what we hoped. The age gave it an extra creaminess, but its Russian River origins gave it the acidity we wanted.

Then we talked about the main course. She was cooking Muscovy duck breast — rich meat even when it’s not magret, the fat-filled breast of a foie gras duck — and garnishing it with a pomegranate wine sauce. I like a jammy, opulent Syrah with this combination of rich meat and syrupy sauce, and I had just the bottle: Melissa and I had visited Ridge Vineyards during our Manresa weekend, and we had bought one Zinfandel and one Syrah. I don’t actually like jammy Syrahs in general, so this one still had a lot of acidity to combat the sharp tang of the pomegranate and cut through the fat of the duck breast. But, again, California wineries tend to produce heavier, jammier wines that can stand up to the weight of this meat.

Part of the challenge of real world wine pairing is that we don’t actually have a large wine store in our basement. We have to make do with what we have. But in this case, by combining my mom’s bottles and mine, we came up bottles that worked nicely with the dishes she served.

Chunks Have Returned!

2008-12-27T14:47:00.000-08:00

Sam and I work for the same large corporation — albeit in different divisions — and we are both on the Foodies list. In a recent email thread about tempering chocolate and the chips one can buy for the purpose, she casually suggested the new Scharffen Berger chocolate chunks she was snacking on.

My breath caught, and I clicked the link. Could it be? It could.

Because these are not a new product. Scharffen Berger made these chunks a few years ago, but the process was too expensive given the demand. As I remember it, they had to stop their normal chocolate production, switch the factory over to a new mode, and then make chunks for a while before undoing all the effort to make normal chocolate again. I guess all that Hershey money has empowered them to start up again.

You can snack on these, as Sam was doing, or melt them down for tempering, as she suggested. But the baking chunks are perfect in the thick, chewy chocolate chip cookies I prefer. They become gooey pockets in the cakey mass, bigger (and better) than chocolate chips. They are also, it turns out, ideal for the “chocolate things” recipe in The Cheese Board Collective Works (a buttery yeast dough filled with chocolate bits). The recipe even calls for six ounces, which is the exact weight of one package of chocolate chunks.

So far, I've only seen them at the Scharffen Berger stores (at the factory and at the Ferry Building), but you can order them online. Here’s hoping they stay around this time so that I don’t have to go on another hoarding run when I hear they’re being discontinued.