Teff Beer Attempt - Step 5

So for those of you joining in late, we'll wait for you to catch up with the class. I promise the notes are at least entertaining.

 In Step 1, we decided on an idea for a beer and in Step 2, we looked for a recipe. In Step 3, we went shopping for equipment and ingredients. Step 4 was when we decided to malt our own grain. 

In this exciting episode, we will do the Mash and Boil which sound like a dance craze but results in standing around and measuring things. It is best to have a beer while doing this. It is like eating eggs and chicken, a bit perverse but pleasurable.

Had to decide on a date to do this and the beer festival season is upon us. The Only was having a beer fest and it started at 5 pm, so I invited a friend over for 2 pm to help me. I mean the next two pieces seemed easy, make a porridge, takeaway the scuzzy stuff, do another boil with hops and then add yeast to the cooled down liquid.

The day before, I did a check of ingredients and equipment. Had the kit but I was missing a strainer. Given the grain used, teff, I knew that whatever I used would have to catch 'em all (Pokemon reference). The dollar store provided. Might as well check on the other ingredients. Looked at the date and preparation instructions on the yeast. Need to take out for a few hours before, blah, blah, blah and expires June 2014. Wait, that was LAST year. Before we panic, a little breath to talk about what I have done so far in terms of a recipe to make 1 gallon beer.

~ 1 lb of malted teff
White Labs Belgian Ale Yeast
5 g US Fuggle Hops (split into half)
6 g Williamette Hops (split into half)
.25 lb of Belgian Candi sugar

That wasn't my intended recipe but that it what it turned out to be. The yeast... yeast is a living being and I am so glad for my cooking experience because I have used bad yeast before and most of the time it works out. There are some tricks and one is written on the bottle on how to create an activator. If you have made pizza or homemade bread you are probably aware of how to do this. Put the yeast in some water and add a little sugar to kick start it.

Like baby delivery in movies, the first thing I did was boil a lot of water. A whole stockpot of water. About 4 times what I thought I would need. I boiled it to make sure the chlorine was all gone.

I used a little of this water with about a teaspoon of sugar and set it on the counter. The vial was for 5 gallons and I was making 1 gallon. Should remember to put in 1/5th of the yeast later on.

At around 1pm, before my buddy was set to arrive I started down the merry path to get everything going. Added the grains to about 1 gallon of water and got it to between 140 and 155 degrees for most of the mashing process. The goal is to keep it in this range to get the sugars out. Normally, you try for a slightly higher range but teff malts at a slightly lower temp with the pocket being around 142. I have read all sorts of stuff on how different temps will affect the brew but the goal is to get all the sugar out. I slipped a few times below the 140 but never for long. It was hard to keep at a great temp, and I tried to err on the lower side so that I wouldn't stop the reactions necessary to convert starch to sugars.

Lesson 1: There may be a better way to keep a constant temperature. The oven. I think that is something to investigate for next time. 

When this liquid was tasted about 40 minutes into the process, it was sweet but a grassy sweet and not horribly sugar sweet. Not sure if that makes sense but there is something called the iodine test where adding some iodine to a sample of the liquid and stays brown then there is no more starch. This process is supposed to take around an hour and a half. I boiled for around 1.75 hours and still not fully converted. That is when I decided to add candi sugar to the boil. This conversion factor is really important for commercial brewers but for one gallon as unconverted starch is money. It is important to get the flavour for home brewers but sugar provides the food for yeast farts of alcohol and carbon dioxide.

At this time, you need to get the gunk out. I poured the liquid from the stock pot to a canning pot using the sieve to hold back the grains. Then you get help from your friend to put some warm water to rinse the remaining sugar from the grains. So, I get my friend... oh wait, he didn't arrive yet.

Lesson 2: Get better friends or only make 1 gallon batches. If this was a 5 gallon recipe, this part called sparging would have been horrible. And I would have to get a bigger sink. 

Make sure you boil a lot of extra water. I found that soooo much evaporated. So, I'll use the oven or lids or something next time. It doesn't matter that much as you can always add water into the overly sweet wort (that's what the official beer porridge name is) at the end of the process.

This process of sparging, well there has to be a better way but I'm not sure I know what it is. Some research will be necessary.

So, now you have this sweet liquid. I added some more hot water, the candi sugar and brought it to a boil. Looking at a bunch of recipes, I settled on 11 g of hops for an 1 gallon batch. Looking at a lot of recipes that used these hops, I decided on putting half the hops at the beginning and the remaining about twenty minutes before the end of the boil. All boils seem to be for an hour. So, I put in the first bit and stirred and waited and my friend shows up. We have a few beer while waiting. I put in the second set of hops and create an ice bath in my sink because the next part is to cool the wort so I can put yeast in and not kill it.

We finish our beer and my friend helps by almost pouring the wort into the ice bath.

Lesson 3: Don't get sloppy drunk and try this. There are two mistakes that I made after this point and one meh moment. Yes, this stuff is simple but not foolproof.

We cooled the wort down to room temp and move it into the container that I am going to use as my primary. We take a sample and I try to use the hydrometer. The only thing I actually can comprehend and figure out is that it bobs at the 6% level for beer. I have to figure out how to calculate the specific gravity better.

The temp is  as recommended on the yeast and I add the yeast that is sitting on the cupboard. All of it. Go back up and read the piece where I talk about how much yeast I was supposed to use. The good news is that I know that yeast will only eat the food that is there and then stop. Also, since it is old, I am expecting that it will underperform anyways. We will have to see.

I put the liquid into a carboy instead of the plastic pail because I wanted to watch it ferment. I have a few old fashioned jugs for the next step which I follow up with later. For now, I have this...

Stay tuned for the next few weeks where this becomes beer and I taste it.

Food from the Sky

Moved into a new house in October and in days it began to rain hard fruit on the roof. There is a walkout that is begging for a patio to be built next year and it was covered with these yellow greenish fruit. When you squished it, there was this yellowish stain that turned quickly to black. The stain took days to fade and required much scrubbing.

My sons had tons of fun taking the fruit and throwing, kicking, squishing and taking the insides out. We had to use gloves to make sure that we didn't become permanently stained. 

Found out that this is what black walnuts look like. So we spent several hours repeating the activity until the kids got bored. We just removed the outer fruit to expose the nut. It turns out that the flesh was used to make stains and dyes. It really is hard to get off. Even with the gloves, my thumb got stained and stayed that way for about a week. 

The shucked nuts have been drying in the porch for a while and we are going to figure out what to do with them. Fresh nuts have a different taste than the ones you get in the stores. Last year, I got some black walnuts from Forbes' Fine Foods and used them sparingly to add a slight bitterness and nuttiness to salads and soups. This year, I have more and picked by my own hands. I wonder if that will change how precious I feel about them? 

The boys had fun and are proud of their work. They are really interested in trying them. It helps kids to connect to food when they can see how plants grow and the fun you can have. When I was younger, my folks kept us out of the garden except for weeding. We were fairly destructive and it was probably a good thing. But some nights when we went picking for beans for that night's supper, I would find myself taking a few extra to have right there in the garden. 

Here is the free food from the sky, drying. Next weekend, we are going to crack open some of these. 

Teff Beer Attempt - Step 4

The story so far... In Step 1, we decided on an idea for a beer and in Step 2, we looked for a recipe. In Step 3, we went shopping for equipment and ingredients.

For next few hundred words, we will take you on a journey through time and space (BTW, all of our journeys are through time and space) to a placed called the Malting.

I've been reading and re-reading beer books lately. I feel as if there are no new ways to approach the topic of beer. Malting is the sprouting, drying and maybe the toasting/roasting of the grain being used to make the beer.

I bought teff. The smallest grain in the world because I wanted to make a gluten free ale from the cradle of civilization, Ethiopia. It happens to be one of the quickest sprouting grains. There were a bunch of ways to sprout grain on the internet that just didn't apply because the batch was so small. Most recipes are scaled to 5 gallons and above. Remembering my school days and having recently revisited the whole sprouting stuff on a window sill thing with the kids, this process was still fresh in my head. Recommendations are to put the grains in a bucket or some tray where water can be removed or in a clear jar or... Some of these methods were not usable due to the size of the grain but it was wide open. The only requirement was that the grain had germinated.

So, first I soaked the grain for about 3 hours and then laid it on an unused, as in new, dampened hand towel set in 9x13 pan. I took a second towel, also dew dampened by the mists from Toronto tap water and placed it over the grains and waited.

Most of the literature talked about optimal length of the sprout, some calling it acrospire and timings  for germination were all for the more common grains. There was talk about being 80-100% of the grain. Germination time for teff is two to three days. I was contemplating raiding the kids' toys to see if I could find a magnifying glass. These grains are so small that it felt like beach sand when I was soaking them. I had to rely on something other than sight, so I popped one in my mouth. Dry, vague cereal taste. Flavourful dirt.

After 24 hours, when I lifted the cloth, it seemed as if I was looking at an out of focus picture. The sprouts had started a lot quicker than I expected. I tasted it. It was slightly green tasting and less crunchy than the day before. I didn't have time to set up for drying so I didn't have time to make a decision. I think that was for the best. When I came home from work that night, there were visible sprouts at least 6 times the length while others were still in that starting stage. It was time unless I wanted the whole pan to become filler to sandwiches. I couldn't worry about the inconsistency of the sprouts.

The grain was dumped out onto cookie sheets. More cookie sheets than I expected. You need a lot of room to dry these suckers. This is probably why brewers get malt from malters. I turned on the stove at a low temp briefly and let the pans rest inside once I was sure that it would dry without starting to cook the seeds. After the initial time, I left the pans around the house to air dry. They were dry within days. Several blogs and books had recommended an optimal after drying weight but there was no way I was going to transfer these suckers back and forth. Already there were grains everywhere. Did I say that they remind me of beach sand? Same problem.

With the slight toasting they received in the oven when I put them in too early one time, they would be a very light colour. This appeals to me since I love lighter beer such as wit, weiss, and wheat beers. It will go well with the other ingredients mentioned in the previous post. Put the grains away in a cool spot and in a sealed container.

Okay, so some stuff happened. Firstly, don't use a cloth with teff. I now have a wonderful cloth that is ready to be planted. The seeds grew into the cloth.

Drying can be anxiety ridden, so if you have never dried anything, don't start with grain.

Taste the grain. I have an appreciation for the differences during the sprouting process and you are trying to get the most sugar out of the grain. We have an amazing ability to taste sugar. The larger sprouts were not as sweet as the smaller ones. While we can get all scientific about the process and remove grains that are too big or two small, the nature of handmade goods is that they are complex or sometimes muddy rather than clean and perfect. Think of the difference between a meal at home and a meal at a fancy schmancy restaurant.

Let's go at that point that I just made another way. After spending a few days worrying that the sugar would not be optimized, I took to twitter to ask about what to do. "Test during the boiling process and add amylase." That will come up in the next chapter but what I took out was that there was a possible solution. I had a more brillianter idea. I asked a few friends who spent time in Ethiopia, okay grew up there... Okay, I asked a few Ethiopian friends. You may ask why I didn't do this before but I had. The difference is that this time I described the process and got back a whole whack of information that I couldn't get from the internet. Go ahead, look. That is what I would do to. We'll wait.



Okay, for those know-it-alls, glad to see you are joining us again. Here is the recipe I got back.

My mom puts a bunch of teff in a bucket with water and lets it sprout. In another bucket she combines injera, water and sometimes spices. She also adds this green leafy thing, dried. Don't know what the English name is but we call it Gesho and here is the Amharic symbols. There is probably some on the Danforth. So, she chops it up and adds them together when the first bucket is ready. After a week or so, it is ready to drink.

There are so many great things about the recipe and how I got it, I'm not sure I can do it justice. Firstly, beer making is still the domain of women in Ethiopia and that harkens back to earlier days of brewing in Western societies. These women were known as brewsters or ale wives. A good friend of my wife is named Brewster and like the Millers, were a big part of regular life.

Second point, is the recipe itself. Read a post by Mirella Amato about losing sight of the craft. While she came to a slightly different conclusion and direction, there is definitely a sense that scientific geekery might be losing sight of a fundamental bit about brewing. It is more like making homemade bread than molecular gastronomy. Both have there places but don't worry if you mess up a little bit because there is some Ethiopian grandmother making this stuff in a bucket without heating it up to get all the sugar out. Food wants to rot. This is just controlled rotting.

And last one I'll make here. Gesho is a bittering agent. It is used like hops. Everyone makes a bitter fermented beverage. I'm wondering if there are all types of beer out there in the non European world that have so much for us. I have heard of Indian traditions and wonder about Asia. A world map of traditional beer other than the small one I have in my head that is centered around central Europe would be cool.

The next post for this topic will be on the boiling process. I just have to get some iodine and amylase.

So, the next step is here at Step 5.

Teff Beer Attempt - Step 3

The story so far... In Step 1, we decided on an idea for a beer and in Step 2, we looked for a recipe.

Now that we have a recipe of sorts, it is time to go shopping. The question for me was what ingredients and equipment did I need.

Ingredients 

The ingredients were the easier of the two to contemplate. I needed yeast, hops, malt, and water.

Yeast was easy to find and the only real choice was between dry or liquid. I chose liquid yeast as I trusted the brand name after hearing great things about it. Hops, I had already figured that I would use English hops and a number of different shops had them. No biggie.

Then I thought, let's get the liquid malt and save some time. I don't need to go all alpha beer nerd and make my own malt. A quick search through the beer suppliers of Toronto yielded no teff malt. Okay, let's see about the states. Oh, Colorado Malting will do it custom. With the customs and excise tax and the waiting and everything, I decided to ask a few brewing supply stores in Toronto with little luck. I'm sure someone does it out there but I wasn't able to find it easy by a search or a tweet.

Now comes the pseudo confession time. I'm writing this breezily and as if I am doing everything off the cuff. This is largely because I'm feeling ducky. I want this to look easy like a duck swimming but underneath the water, I'm paddling like hell. To put it another way, I've been talking about trying to home brew for two years. I have read two years of subscription to Brew Your Own, own more than six books on fermentation and brewing, read forums, follow twitter folk, ask questions of beer guys and strengthened my google fu in this glorious quest. While I AM talking out of my arse, I have a fair idea of what is going on. Most home brewers do NOT malt their own grain. Here I was with only a handful of articles, some tutorials on YouTube with no information of teff malting. So, of course, I decided rather than wait that I would malt my own. I bought teff at a local grocery store. It was easy to find as it is a common grain for celiacs and people who want to go gluten free. More on the malting process and outcome in the next step. I still have to finish buying everything.

This realization made me curse my choice of grain for a few seconds until it dawned that I was going to one up all those home brewers who look down on those that used liquid malt rather than brewing for grain, I was malting my own. Just as a background for those uber new into brewing, one of the first questions you get asked when saying you are home brewing is whether you have ever brewed from grain. Brewing from grain is just about whether or not you make the porridge and then add the yeast.

Quick review of the standard home brewing process - make the porridge and add hops, cool it down and add yeast, let the yeast do its job and bottle. Some brewers don't make their own porridge but rely on buying ready made malt. No shame. Not too many people make their own ketchup either. 

Okay, that only leaves water. I've got water in my tap and that should be okay. There are huge discussions on forums about whether treated water affects yeast and how differences in water accentuates bitterness and so much more. Water is very important but its not worth the amateur worrying about. Leave some water from your tap overnight if it is treated with chlorine. Other than that, whatever you use as drinking water will be fine for most beer purposes.

Equipment

Yeast, hops, water, and grain. All taken care of in a trip to Toronto Brewing. What about the equipment? My original thought was to just use stuff from my kitchen. I had given the question of volume some thought. Standard recipes are 1 gallon, 5 gallon or 10 gallon. I've decided that given my space, I would do 1 gallon test batches and 5 gallon batches for now. The reasons are that I can only drink one kind of beer for so long. One gallon yields about 3.8 l, that's about 11x33cl glasses, the standard metric 'pint'. More of one beer than I normally drink. Also, if a batch has gone wrong then I don't want to throw out more than a gallon. Five gallons is probably the limit of what can be done in our second kitchen due to the size. This batch from unmalted grain would be a one gallon batch.

I had most of the standard equipment - something to make the porridge in and something to ferment in and even some bottles from the U-Brew-It. Yes, a lot of books make a huge deal about the equipment but the disagreement is so wide. I ended up buying a one gallon kit.

I was swayed by a book that had the same issues I had with the uber recipe nature of most brewing books and he explained something in simple scientific terms that reminded me of the time I spent with the guys at Fermentations. I had asked them when they knew the beer was done. I had some experience with a balloon over a one gallon old timey jug used for fermenting mead and wondered how they did. A hydrometer. This handy dandy thing lets you know when all the sugar is fermented. I had to have one because Beer Making For All said so. I've also bottled and it is nice to have tubes and stuff to make it easy. Oh, and I didn't want to have to worry what was last cooked in my stock pot. Maybe there would be a need to make stock and beer at the same time.  If I brew more often, I can't take my stock pot out of circulation. Anyways, I bought a kit for some of the reasons listed above.

The trip to the brewing supplies store was fun. I proudly stated my first time status, as if they hadn't heard it before, and got all the help I needed. It was fun. I also walked away with ingredients for a backup batch for my second beer but that is another story. Did I say that it was fun?

With all the ingredients together and shopping done, it was time to start brewing. But first, I guess I had to malt the teff. That is where we will leave off today, kids. The next part will be on the malting. Sounds like a horror movie, doesn't it. The Malting.

Other posts in this series: See up top for the earlier posts and Part 4: Malting and now Part 5: Mash and Boil.

Teff Beer Attempt - Step 2

In the last exciting episode, I had talked about my grain decision and promised to talk a bit about science versus art. But first, I'm looking at that title. Step 2, it says. I'm not sure how to break it to you but I'm not sure of how many steps there are or how to break it down in digestible blog post style. So, there it is. I know the end will be the drinking of the beer and the beginning the concept. Buckle up.

After picking the grain, (not literally, I picked it up at the store in the gluten free section) I wanted to see what had been done before so off to the internet we went. Yeah, that's when I started to realize something. Just like in cooking, recipes and approaches fall into some broad categories. There are the recipes followers, the scientists, the artists, and the goof offs.

The two more junior members of the homebrew band, note that I did not say artisinal or craft, are recipe followers and the goof offs. The recipe followers measure and follow the steps without any understanding, hoping for some insight to come along the way. Some are keeping decent track of what is going on so that when it fails, they can see where they deviated from the recipe. Often these failures will push the followers into more rigid following of said recipes or push them into troubleshooting mode. The second way leads to geekery. There are a lot of geeks on the internet.

The goof offs are those who want cheap, but not awful beer. These tend to be frat boys, handy men and friends of friends who had a friend who brewed this stuff one time. Good times.

Then there are the scientists, technicians and experimentalists, who measure and note take. Sometimes they have a very clear idea of what they are replicating and other times they are testing one or more parts of the brewing protocol. What happens if I overhop here or use this method for wort chilling? How can I tweak my setup to get the qualities I desire out of the beer?

Then artists. With the idea that brewing has been happening for thousands of years, the basic recipe hasn't changed. All that is left is ornamentation and experiment. Yes, you still have to understand basic techniques and science but beer is a living thing. Beer is beautiful. Brewing is art.

Look, those are quick and dirty ideas of what I found on the internet. Of course, being the internet, the scientists and goof offs are well represented. The recipe followers often show up in forums starting their questions with "I followed the recipe exactly but..." and the artists... Hmm, I found most of them writing books. Sandor Katz wrote a great book on fermentation, Wild Fermentation, that will put your mind at ease. It doesn't cover just beer, which is only a small mention, but all types of fermentation.

I am usually more on the technician side rather than the artist side but we all fall somewhere along that line. If you are a perfectionist, the problem is that there is so much information with a lot of it being bad ideas masked in technique. How do I know this as a novice? Cooking and fermenting other stuff. When I looked at the recipes, they offered little in technical matters cause it just seems so straight forward. Boil some stuff (okay not really boil), cool it down, add yeast, let them eat, bottle and add some more food for yeast to eat and then enjoy. My sons put it this way, I am drinking yeast poo.

But that process is not how beer was always made. And there is the rub. Having read historic recipes for all sorts of food including medieval bread, the technique of cooking and brewing was known to everyone so much so that the techniques were never written down. I fear that a lot of our homebrewing knowledge is of recent vintage. Sandor Katz' book and other older homebrewing books such as 'BEER Making For All' don't have the focus on styles and tight grip on process but really understand the whole idea from an historical perspective. The basic idea is that stuff rotted and people found the best way to get that rotting stuff to taste good. There is some theory that humans are scavengers and therefore like the taste of savory and sour goods because of it. That is a whole other discussion.

With all those concepts rolling around in my poor undersized head, I tried to figure out the best approach for me to get this teff brew done. I wanted to make sure I could understand what the grain would taste like. I wanted to make sure that I had yeast and hops I was familiar with. Also, the choice would have to be complementary to bring out what I thought would be the best from the grain. I chose some British hops (Williamette and Fuggles) and Belgian Golden Yeast. I'm not sure if I'll use a mix of the hops or just one. That'll be a brew day decision.

What's that? What style of beer will it be? And this is where we will part company. I'm not interested in the style. Style is a recent phenomenon to help consumers know what they are getting. It is a way to categorize beers of the world for comparison. It is a way for amateur brewers to enter into competitions and learn to make better beer. The home cook who draws from different cuisines and techniques isn't all that interested in describing their food in terms of naming the dish or determining the style of cooking. Remember, I am just a talented home cook at heart.

Thus ends part the second. In the next part, I take a trip to the store and then I wrestle and cry about the grains I chose. Hopefully there will be some real information that someone trying to brew a beer can use.

Other posts in this series: Part 1: The Big Idea, Part 3: Shopping, Part 4: Malting and Part 5: Mash and Boil.

Teff Beer Attempt - Step 1

I'm finally doing it and making my own beer at home. I'm making a gallon just to see how its done. The preparation to get to this point has been a lot of reading, talking to some homebrewers and doing a lot at the local U-Brew-It. (Hi Fermentations!).

I'm fairly confident of doing a brew from malt extract or even malted grains. Mead was no problem to do, and neither is cider. So, why did I think that this was a good idea. Teff. From grain.

Why?

How did this come about?

I was talking to a few buddies about what the next recipe was going to be <aside> Making a recipe at a U-Brew-It! means choosing a style, choosing hops and some adjuncts -- except when it doesn't. Sometimes you can mix and match what they have at the shop and not worry about it too much. It's more like making a meal out of leftovers than cooking from scratch. It doesn't make it any less tasty or creative just a little less DIY. </aside> and he brought up the fact that he was having problems with gluten intolerance.

Wait, wait, I know that some of you are now going to point out a hypocrisy, especially if you read me regularly. You'll talk about how gluten allergies have been debunked or roll your eyes or whatever. Here is the truth about that. People eat a bunch of stuff and feel crappy afterwards. Eating a gluten free diet, has up until now, meant eating less processed food. The kid feels better not eating things with gluten like eating more veggies and stuff. It could be that veggies are better for you than processed food. As big business gets into the market, we will see what happens. There is no denying the GI problems that someone who is eating a diet that happens to have gluten along for the ride causes.

It could be that processed food and additives pile up and you don't feel well. It could be that when they eat all the carb rich foods, they ignore the other good for you stuff that may regulate their lovely stomach critters. If my friend believes it is the gluten then so be it. As long as he is willing to try my older wheat type of breads and less processed food then we can keep the scientific door open. Not everyone wants to go on some elimination diet to figure out what is really causing the problem.

I haven't tasted a really good gluten free beer. I know there are a lot stateside but I'm not setting out to make a gluten free beer. I am setting out to make a beer that hails from the cradle of civilization and one of the earliest grains. Teff is the smallest and one of the quickest germinating (36 hours) grains so that if I mess it up, it will be easy to do another batch. There are two Ethiopian drinks that are sometimes made with teff but those would qualify as a mead like substance and I make take a try at those later.

A lot of attention has been paid to hops over the past few years. Grain bills, the stuff that the malt is made out of, has been changing a little too but it is still largely barley due to have readily available sugars and proteins. Wheat is particular to a few styles and corn and rice are still (unjustly) four letter words for craft beer. Older grains that are less likely to be GMO and processed are still forgotten. If I'm going to make a beer at home from scratch then it has to be something quick, simple, historic and not solely steeped in scientific homebrew geekery. I'll get into that as I go along. I'm simply trying to make a good beer from a grain that is not a common grain that has a quick germination so that I don't feel like some hippie growing sprouts.

So, I've sprouted the grain and am now drying it. It unevenly germinated but I'm not going to fuss. What I hope to understand is the process of making beer and I am not so worried about being perfect this time out. If the resulting liquid even tastes remotely like a beer that I would like to drink, then I will do this again. I'll try to blog this process as I move along. So ends the first part of the program. I think the next part will be on Science versus Art.

Other posts in this series: Part 2: Recipe Selection, Part 3: Shopping, Part 4: Malting, and Part 5: Mash and Boil.

For the Young and Old

Recently read a profile of the chef, Flynn McGarrie, in the New York Times magazine. Much was made of his age. He is fifteen years old. He is being hailed as a wunderkind.

Most of us have heard about dreaming Jiro and his sushi. He is the oldest Michelin three star chef at 82. This is also claimed as a miracle. We seem to live in the era of miracle children and never aging seniors. This could be a product of the baby boomers on both ends. As they age, the society switches it focus from boundless youth to the fountain of youth. The biggest bulk of North Americans self indulgent focus shows up in the reflections of the products and stories they consume. The advent of youth focus and teenagers grew with the baby boomers and now they turn to aging.

There is still a preciousness that is attached to young people. In the New York Times article, it is noted by one of the European chefs that this would not be such a big deal in Europe. Not that he is saying that this is a product of electronic media saturated USA nor that Flynn McGarrie isn't gifted but I feel that there is an unstated thought that this should not be as big of a surprise as it has been made out to be. As far as aging, it seems that we have forgotten that the concept of retirement for the masses is relatively new.

This attitude towards age extends to foodstuffs and beer. There is the exultation of fresh cheeses such as burrata and curds to the mature bleus and cloth bound aged cheddar. In the beer world, cask beers and real ale campaigns bracket the one side while sours and barrel aged beer squeeze the other.

There is a cost to age. Shelving, storage and the work required to ensure there is no spoilage make these expensive. The sales cycle is long. It can take years to finish the first sale and unless you are sure of your product, it is very hard to make changes. It takes a while for changes to happen. When you factor all these in, it is easy to see why these things cost money

Both artisianal cheese and craft beer are still fairly young industries in Ontario and I've noticed a trend. In cheese making it takes time to raise a herd. In beer, the sour lambics take time to age. I have recently tasted some noted Belgian lambics that have tasted thin and unaged. In a rush to meet the new demand for these products, not enough time is being spent waiting. A large brewery has recently bought many of these breweries for their portfolio and I wonder if profit is being put before product. We have isolated some of these yeasts and are now using innoculation methods that take the guessing about what critters are in the air and reducing risks for bad tasting ales. The traditional method means to expose the beer to the air and let wild yeast do the work.

Are we, as consumers, too impatient? I have tasted a cheese from a newer cheesemaker and can tell that the cheese still hasn't got there. It will. I'm not going to give up on these Ontario dairies just because their cheese doesn't have all the ripeness that is promised. It takes some years. In the meantime, I'll enjoy where they are in the process and support them when I can.

Producers risk new consumers tasting their products to be let down on what all the fuss is about. The producers are relying on the neophytes not knowing any better and leave old curmudgeons, like myself, sounding dated with 'they don't make it like they used to'. A funny thing though, this hypermediated environment may cause them to rethink their strategies. As more people get together in virtual bars and discuss relative merits of this over that, there will be a gravity towards clusters of products. They risk not being old enough or not popular enough. People will see through strategies that only serve the interest of the producer's pocketbook.

What do Moms Eat?

When I was young, I remember Mother's Day gifts as being firstly, crafts from school but as we got older, it became oven mitts, tea towels, aprons and small kitchen appliances. For Father's Day, it was clothes, tools, and fishing gear.

If someone were to ask me what was my Mom's favourite foods, I would say well cooked pork chops and sweets, especially squares and cakes. My Dad's would be meat and potatoes, even though I remember rice pudding and bread pudding being things he liked.

I wonder how often food is still compartmentalized into the sexes? Ladies who lunch implies salads and teas while a businessman's lunch is often steak at a strip club. When I've talked to restaurant owners, there is still the idea that they have to have a salad on the menu for women who watch their weight, even though we have overall become a more body conscious society.

Ladies drink wine and men drink beer or scotch. Some of this might be biological, in that, women are more likely to be supertasters and therefore more sensitive to bitter flavours. So less beer, green tea, coffee and the whole brassica family. The popularity of kale salads may render that totally incorrect.

There is also the calorie requirements being different which may impact how we choose our food. If you have to eat more to maintain your equilibrium then choices for more efficient energy would be required. That doesn't explain the sexing of healthier foods nor the feminity attached to chocolates and candy. A way through a man's heart is through his stomach but a woman requires chocolates and flowers. Yes, these are tropes but they seem to be expected, even in less traditional households.

My wife's favourite is probably a steak or sweets. Emotionally, I feel that sweets would be her choice and only steak when she craves it. I'm not sure I would describe her or any woman's appetite that I know as feminine but for Mother's Day, there will be flowers and chocolates.

Easter Food

As the long weekend approaches and meal planning begins, I'm thinking about Easter food. The Easter Sunday meal has always seemed a poor cousin to Christmas and Thanksgiving although it is the highest of holy holidays in the Catholic calendar.

We often had turkey or ham for this meal. By ham, I mean fresh, unsmoked pork shoulder slathered in mustard, brown sugar with cloves poking through the meat. We would have a big roast with the leftovers tasting minty from the cloves served in sandwiches for days afterwards. It was one of my earliest recollections of wanting to eat the fat where most of the flavour rested. If I could easily find a recipe, I would have linked to it. Even in its reduced state, this was one of the biggest meals of the season. What I have more food memories about is Lent.

Lent is that time before Easter where we had to give something up and eat fish on Fridays. Usually, as kids we would give up dessert or candy making the Easter Bunny arrival all that sweeter. The arrival of Lent often meant that the snow was so deep in the bush that my father would be laid off work. He worked in the bush cutting trees or taking the trees to a landing (skidding) where they could be loaded onto trucks to be taken to mills.

This meant a couple of things. Money become tighter due to reduced income and my dad had more influence on food. We would begin to open our reserves and preserves. The deer meat would come out of the freezer. The last bits of the half cow or pig that was slaughtered and sent to the butcher to be wrapped would start making the way onto our plates. There was canned beef and venison that would make a quick meal fried with fried onions and served with mashed potatoes. The potatoes themselves would have to be hauled up from the cellar and you could see the age as the skins became wrinkled and hard to peel. The onions that came up were not always the ones that we had grew in the garden but sometimes purchased in 10lb bags. If Lent was late that year, eyes and yellow green tops could be seen from these basement dwellers.

What I remember most is all the fishing that was done. Dad would go ice fishing in hopes to get some fish for that night's dinner and of course, for Fridays when we could not eat meat. When we were unlucky, there was fish sticks on occasion, the only fish I would eat. Even thought there was lake trout and ling (fresh water cod), I would eat very little of it. The story is that I used to eat fish a lot but choked on a bone when I was small and never eat fish again. In truth, I will only occasionally eat fish but never have taken up the habit again. We would collect the fish grease and use it over and over again until the fish started tasting too fishy and it would be time to ditch the grease.

With the fish, we would often serve fresh fries made from those old Kennebec potatoes which I still believe make the best french fries. They would be cut thicker and I would be in charge of cooking them. The first batch in oil always came out pale and white and only slightly crispy. It is only in recent years that I found out that this always happens with fresh oil. The process was very messy. I don`t do it now because it is hard to find old potatoes in the store and Kennebec potatoes are not found there.

Other than fish and fries, the other food that reminds me of Lent is macaroni and tomatoes. When I started working when I was fourteen years old, I would often miss the Friday fish fry which didn`t bother me that much because of the whole not caring for fish thing but it set me off on a course of cooking. If I was hungry after working on Friday, I would come home and make some boiled macaroni, drain and add a can of tinned tomatoes after buttering and salting the pasta generously. After dishing it into the bowl, I would speckle it with black pepper and eat. Being a teenager, I would often demolish a whole tin of tomatoes with a half pound of pasta by myself before heading up to bed.

So, while I now I savour hot cross buns and plan to eat peameal bacon breakfast with a smoked ham lunch, I sometimes miss the other `lesser`traditions of Easter. It is hard even to achieve that food of fresh caught fish with french fries made from last year`s crop of old potatoes. Even in rural areas, these foods are disappearing for the sake of convenience foods. I`m not some old guy being in my early forties but these foodways are leaving and I miss them.

Did you ever have to make up your mind?

I'm just a guy who likes good tasting beer. If possible, I'd like to get it in more convenient places while supporting local, small breweries. Given the amount of hyperbole on twitter lately between the Beer Store and the Ontario Convenience Store Association, I was beginning to believe that I was the only one. Either I was in the pocket of big beer and wanted to continue the monopoly while keeping craft beer down or I wanted escalated costs and wanton death and destruction of Western society as we know it. Which one to choose?

A few days, I was challenged to take a position and frankly, I didn't know what to say. I've been brewing at a U-Brew-it for a little over three years and seriously drinking Belgian and what is now considered craft beer for around twenty years and I feel unqualified to have an opinion on Beer Store versus Convenience store. This is not some feint where I'm taking the piss out of them but rather a reflection on the labryrinthine regulations and dense legislation surrounding alcohol sales in this province.

If it wasn't for Jordan St. John's poll, I wouldn't have bothered writing anything. It is only because most of my opinions are reflected in his findings that I feel confident to say a few things here.

The Beer Store is not something I necessarily want to protect. It is owned by three large multinationals on a cost recovery basis where they use the advantages in the regulation to boost their profits through reduced costs, advantageous product placement and pricing practices to licensees. I won't bother rehashing their arguments for the continued survival of the Beer Store but rather note that they do have one shining benefit, recycling. Our recycling program is damned good and any replacement would have to do as well or better.

As a consumer, although it is a pain in the ass, I can't imagine what type of patchwork returns would exist without them. I am old enough to remember doing bottle returns at the grocery store where we would only accept glass bottles from certain brands and not others. I can imagine a return to that era. There is a reason that bottle returns are no longer done.

The convenience store arguments are all around promises that cannot be kept, including an expanded ability for craft beer breweries, more jobs and a beer in every pot. They don't seem so keen on ensuring that there is a true open market for all stores, only convenience stores. Anyways, their claims are fairly spurious and their defense is rabid. I don't trust a convenience store to have the best interests of a beer drinker at heart any more than they support the local snack food industry. They are in business to make money.

In short, they both suck.

A few observations. Currently, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario already does risk based licensing. What does that mean? Studies show that more outlets selling alcohol (density) among other effects of privatization leads to rising costs due to alcohol. If people claim bias, it would be a weird claim that CAMH wants less money by reducing alcoholism. AGCO bases sales location on this reasoning. So, any new stores of any type would have to continue to undergo this licensing scheme.

Maybe the way forward is to modify our system slowly rather than taking the legislation out and burning it in the streets of our provincial capital. Modifications such as:

• Open the market to any location while keeping AGCO methods of evaluation whether convenience store, grocery store or Tim Horton's. I don't care.
• Allow for novel places of business while respecting AGCO. (Farmer's markets, co-owned craft beer stores, boutiques). Currently can only buy at LCBO, Beer Store, licensees, and on site breweries.
• Allow for small breweries to enter the market easier by limiting SKUs at Beer Store and LCBO. Each brewery can only have so many products at a time.
• Allow for either co-op stores of some type for small breweries from any where in the world or allow for small brewers to buy into the Beer Store.
• Offer assistance for development of small breweries as is offered for other agricultural and manufactured products. Put another way, incentives to get people who are brewing out of other breweries their own place to increase jobs.

That's all I have come up with in the last few weeks. The message is clear, younger beer drinkers don't care for the beer store but all beer drinkers like greater access. Many believe the LCBO is doing a good job. Full stop.

My point is that this false choice between either a Beer Store or a convenience store is just silly. The good part is that in the past week, I have heard more play of the beer geeks, blogger, columnists and aficionados than ever before. Real experts are finally being heard and that can only be helpful when trying to move forward. Of course, their bias is more good beer.

Friday Family Pizza Night

Over the past couple of months, we have had pizza on Fridays coupled with a movie. This past Friday, we collectively came up with a apple butter, smoked ham, brie and cheddar pizza. Everyone had a hand in coming up with it and helping prepare it. Serendipitously, the movie that we picked, National Treasure, had pizza in it. It was a fun night. 

 It got me thinking to how this pizza night thing has been with us throughout our growth as a family. In the early years, pizza was the easiest delivery when we had a baby in the house. Call up Pizza Pizza. Reorder last order. Hope the baby stays down long enough to eat it hot but if not, then cold pizza before falling into bed or even in the middle of the night. 

Plain cheese pizza and pepperoni pizza filled the toddler years when we were both back to work and couldn't cook at the end of the week. We would order one bland pizza and one more exciting pizza. Selfishly, it would often be a slightly spicy pizza as my wife enjoyed the regular pizza toppings.

As the kids got older, they would go through phases of specific likes, Hawaiian, plain cheese and pepperoni. Eventually, they wanted different pies. We were able to stave off ordering three pizzas by coming up with a compromise pizza which we called Pepperwaiian, a half pepperoni and half Hawaiian pizza. 

Once again, this worked for several years until once again they began experimenting. Granted, this was probably forced a little bit as I grew weary and discontented with Pizza Pizza and wanted to try some better places. This lead to developing a meat pizza description to cover all sorts of pizzas that the two boys could abide. Any pizza that was called Meat Lovers caught their attention. The order became more fluid depending on where we ordered from. Big House Pizza, for example, had several pizzas that could be sold as a meat pizza that would allow all of us to have a slice or two that we liked. The ritual was come home from school, forget about the backpacks in the hall, down to the PS3 and wait for the doorbell to ring. Right after the end of the last slice, up to bed. This meant that they had a slightly later bedtime than normal but it worked.

The other driving factor is growth. At some point two little boys turn into big boys and now just "the boys". It appears that the pizza size grows with them. We saw it move from small to medium to large. The bills go from a cheap meal to the same price as a restaurant cheque. The kids can now stand staying up until slightly past 9 o'clock without becoming a pile of misery the next day. We added movies and a new ritual.

So, in the last few months, we have made our own pizzas.  Sometimes the pizza crust is from scratch; sometimes bought dough or shells. There are always two pizzas. That has been the constant. The kids tend to want a meat oriented pizza and sometimes help with the second one. They always taste the second one. This approach has led to watching all the LOTR movies, the Hobbit, Elf, National Treasure and two chess documentaries. Second pizza has ranged as much as the movie choices: fig, prosciutto and asiago; apple butter, ham, brie and cheddar; chili and cheese and the always present pepperoni or meat pizza. 

It's been fun watching the kids suggest, make and try these pizzas. They have a loose structure to their week that they anticipate. They look forward to Fridays. It reminds me of how far we have come. From the days where pizza was just the easiest, most convenient filler food to something that we make as a family. I wonder what this ritual will bring as the family changes and the kids become teenagers. I hope that somehow the base notes of family meal time and relaxing together remains. 

Did I just fall off the coffee wagon?

I have been off coffee for about two months. I stopped for a variety of reasons. Look, I was a heavy coffee drinker for years and wondered how much of an impact it had on my health and mental well being.

I have always been a high strung person which I guess is a euphemism for anxious, nervous and worrying. There have been studies... coffee studies really suck. One day it kills you and the next it cures you. The smell and taste of coffee are incredibly complex and not well understood. Making fake coffee like fake chocolate has been impossible so far. There are many compounds and only a few are even studied.

At the peak of my consumption as a twenty something year old, I was probably doing two pots a day. Eventually, I whittled down my habit to three cups--three twenty ounce cups. That can be a lot of caffeine, especially if you are drinking the light roast. Light roast and flavoured coffees tend to have more caffeine while your expresso has less. Seems counter intuitive but there it is.

In my late thirties, I started going to see my doctor regularly. With a family history of heart attacks, heart disease, diabetes and strokes, I thought it might be a good idea to see if I had any of the risks. Well, I did. Turns out that smattering of risk factors has a name, Metabolic Syndrome. Just a fancy way of saying that it appears that your body maybe shit at converting sugar to energy. They are not sure of the cause but know that reducing your girth is the best way to deal with it. Who are they anyway? There is evidence to show that these cluster of risk factors are genetic. There are things that can be done to reduce the risk.

So what does this have to do with coffee? Well. I have found that I am caffeine sensitive (duh, that's why I drink it) and my blood pressure rises more than average after a cup of joe. The amount of coffee that I was drinking may also cause issues with the ability to deal with the absorption of carbs.

When you are looking at studies, it is important to note that the results are taken at a population level. You need to understand the population under study and determine if you are a member of that population. Even then, it is important to note that the result is a general result and not necessarily going to affect you in particular. With that caveat, I can say that we know that caffeine has an effect on metabolism and it appears to differ between individuals based on a few criteria. The ones that seem to matter are weight, age and coffee consumption. I'm oversimplifying but hey, it's a personal blog. I fall in the bad side of the criterion categories. I was overweight, older and drinking too much.

I found myself wondering whether my high strungedness, risks for all that crap and metabolic issues could be tied to caffeine. I GP'd myself. Anyone remember Hammy Hamster? GP was the Guinea Pig. I stoppered the big caffeine pipeline into my body only allowing no more than a hot chocolate or two a day. This is waaaaaaay less caffeine than before. I don't even want to think about the numbers.

Now, after about two months, I am having my first coffee. It is of the type that I used to think of utilitarian or maintenance coffee. A Nescafe in the morning (or two or three) before getting my coffee at a local coffee shop on the way work. Note, I didn't consider the Nescafe as my morning coffee.

Half done the cup and already notice a slight rise in heart beat and the flow of brain chatter increasing. I know that if I have coffee every day, these small benefits recede into the background to be replaced with small withdrawal symptoms that feed the cycle. Eventually, we need caffeine to wake us up rather than push up past our normal. Science says that within three days of regular consumption, the average individual experiences these affects.

So, I will probably remain off caffeine until my yearly physical and see if the numbers improve. Even if they don't, I may limit my coffees to ones I really like no more than twice a week. But we will see. There will be more posts about this (mis)adventure.

Sharing is Caring

There is a tension between the individual wanting it their way and the natural urge to share food. This post is a little more passive observational than many of my posts. Just throwing an idea out there and seeing if it floats.

In the last few weeks, I have noticed a tension between two different approaches to food consumption. There is a tension between the individual wanting it their way and the natural urge to share food.

On the one hand, you have the Kitchen Library on the Danforth which is an extension of the Toronto Tool Library, both who are a member of the so-called new share economy. It is really an internet version of asking your neighbour to lend you something without the hassle of creating a relationship. Okay, that's a little unfair. It is a way for a group of people to share tools and equipment that are rarely used to ensure maximum economic benefit.

Not Far from the Tree is another organization that helps fruit tree owners collect and share their bounty. Owners get part of the pickings and the rest gets used to generate income for charitable causes.

On the restaurant front, you have the rise of communal tables and small plates for sharing. I had a meal in this fashion at Hopgood's Foodliner recently and the server guided us through the appropriate dishes to greet the table.

A lot of these services have replaced or renewed the idea of community and extended family. Growing up in a small town, the idea of borrowing and lending was common. You often helped your neighbour with picking crops and exchanged pickles, jams and excess produce. The internet seems to be allowing this to occur again. Instead of sitting passively in front of the television screen watching Food Network and mowing down some gourmet takeaway from the local gourmet food shop, we are starting to touch someone through the wires and share food experiences.

Cities makes anonymous easier and allow for carrying privacy like a cloak. Cities make anonymity easier and allow residents to carry privacy like a cloak. With the rise of individual wrappings of stuff, like apples, hummus and veggies, fast food restaurants with individualize menus and the fall of family style servings at restaurants, it seems natural that their would be a push back.  Buffets are giving way to communal tables.

As food issues become more prominent in the industrialized world, I wonder how these tendencies will play on the world stage.

Someone suggested the above edit and made a true wisecrack that I must have been sleepy when writing this. Thanks, Chris...

Book Review: The Windup Girl

So, I pick up this science fiction novel, The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi and I am really blown away by the characters, the setting and just the great writing.  I could go on about some of the themes of GMO animals versus "real" animals or the underlying themes of what it means to be genetically modified with the current constraints on science but this is a food blog.

For those interested in food issues, there are three underlying assumptions of this universe that provides for provocative pondering...and additional purple prose from pundits.

1. Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) are here to stay.
2. Calories are a basic unit of work and will be incorporated into our daily lives.
3. Localism turned to a global scale will bring interesting effects.

GMO is becoming a big thing. When I was doing a science radio show in the 90's, the producer and I would have arguments over this very thing. I am largely okay with GMO until it starts crossing lines in the Kingdoms. Adding fish genes to tomatoes would never happen in the wild and so the husbanding of this erzatz product, and it is only a product, seems ridiculous. If it is a more gentle coaxing then I tend to be okay.

The other point is that banning something tends not to work. Telling kids not to have sex doesn't work, so you should just go right into harm reduction mode. Think of it as a road to co-option. If you agree but only on these terms, then maybe we have a chance at ensuring a safer and more sane approach to messing around with our foods. Right now, the corporations will only be looking at ways of improving their bottom line without regard to such things as biodiversity, flavour, nutrition, and ancillary issues. If it sells and gets produced for cheaper then it works.

Calories have already started to make their way into our mindsets but generally as a negative thought, as in, reducing your calories to a minimum. Now, if you think of it a different way, as in how many calories did you create or use today, then the system starts to flip itself on its head. If a calorie became the unit of currency due to food shortages then certain jobs become more important namely agricultural, food production, and biochemical engineers. Also, your body becomes important when you die as a calorie source that should find its way back into the food system.

Not all of this is in the book but my mind turned to what an economic system based on calories would look like. I assumed many bad effects because I had recently finished reading The Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins, which is the same job as one of the protagonists in the novel.

The third foodie thought that came while reading this book was around a profound effect that could be had by making localism a norm and rule rather than a nice thing to do for the local farmers. If some place like Colombia said that it would no longer provide the world with coffee but that it would only produce enough for itself and convert the remaining plantations to food to grow calories for its own population, think of the impact.

It is not to far fetched as the climate changes and affects the coffee yield, it may be in their best interest to change to crops to something more sustainable and relevant to them. Given that food crops are now being affected adversely by the creation of the equivalent of stock markets that reward speculation that drives up real world prices. The producers cannot afford their own food as is the case for quinoa. I am only linking one example but if you start looking into that example and looking at the complex effects, I am sure that you will get what I am going on about.

Anyways, the book isn't about food but these three throw away ideas that don't even drive the novel are incredible by themselves. It just goes to show how deep and curious this almost like our world is. Read any of his stuff. So far, I am really impressed by the imagination and the writing itself. Worth a read.

Slow Down! Queen Street West Restaurant Study

This morning Gord Perks was on CBC talking about the Queen Street West (between Roncesvalles Avenue and Dufferin Street) - Restaurant Study. In Parkdale last year, the city put a moratorium on restaurant and bar licenses until they had a chance to study the impact this densification had on the current community.

Now, the recommendations will be presented by the Toronto and East York Community Council on June 18, 2013, a little over a week away. It will only take a few minutes to read the recommendations but basically boils down to restricting the density to a level of 25% as stated by Gord Perks. Full backgrounder is available here. 

For the last week, I have been trying to blog each day. The easiest type of blog has been one where I produce a short personal story along with some tidbit of information. Most of these type are easy because it is easy to see where they fit into how I feel and think about food. Something like this takes a lot more time for me to develop my opinions.

Food blogging should require an amount of introspection that leads to a well thought argument. At best, I could say that it always seems that the complaints that come from a neighbourhood that is becoming gentrified is often from people who have not lived there long. Most often is takes the form of someone who moves into an area where there is - let's say - an abbatoir and then complain about the noise and the smells. 

Another knee jerk response would be around the lines that this is the natural progression of a neighbourhood. If the area cannot support these restaurants then they will close. There is a counter argument that is similar to an anti-Walmart argument that states the addition of the restaurant will drive out other required services that make an area tick such as hair salons, convenience stores and super markets. 

I guess one approach to writing a blog post would be just to report what is going on and what is available but somehow that seems like not a good enough reason. Another approach would be to take a side or opinion and show the story in that way. I could state that I am against bad restaurant and concentrated restaurant areas and this is why...but we already have too much of that happening in comment sections already around this city.

In reality, many blogs are trying to drive traffic in order sell advertising and make a living. This is my hobby and I want to take a think. It will probably take a while to process the impact. Living close to little India, I can see the effect of restaurants and neighbourhood services closing down. I can also see the effect of restaurants re-invigorating an area. Take a look where Burger's Priest, Queen Margherita Pizza, and Sausage Partners (now Oliffe) opened along the Beach.

So, for down, I am going to slow down and digest this meal. I'll relax and take in the scene with some coffee and an apres-dinner drink. 

Canned Meats

Finished reading James A. Michener's book, Journey, about the Klondike Gold Rush from the Canadian side. In it there was some business about five tins of canned meat. In this case, canned meat meant tinned meat which began in the early 1800's. The time of this novel is set in 1897-99.
Now, tinned meat means something different, often Flakes of something or bits of meat such as escargot. Rarely does can meat mean hunks of meat cooked in a liquid and that is all.

There is a description of them splitting open the cans and cooking with the meat in a pot with some chopped onions. This is the description that got me going. My dad used to can beef or venison using the standard canning jars. It was chopped up hunks of meat with a good amount of salt then canned using a hot water bath. Those jars would wait until late winter and early spring to make an appearance when he was laid off from working in the bush. The snow would be high and the fish wouldn't be biting.

Out would come the jars. First, onions would be sliced and fried in butter or fat. When the onions turned translucent, a quick turn flick of a knife would break the seal on the jar with a quick hiss and  a sharp pop. In would go the meat, liquid and all, to warm. While it was warming up, a quick slurry of flour mixed with the already warming broth would be mixed, ready to thicken the mess when it was time. This salty, gravy based onion and meat dish would be served with boiled potatoes and white bread and butter.  I suppose if there was homemade bread, it would be more welcome but during those cold spring days, my mother would be working and she was the one known to occasionally bake bread and buns.

Another dish, that was similar to this, was taking hamburger, adding it to the fried onions instead. There was many times that the burger meat came straight from the freezer because we always bought extra when it was on sale. There would be steam coming from the pan as you turned it over and over, to scrape the cooked meat away to let the heat get at the frozen parts. Once it was browned, sometimes frozen peas or carrots were added and the gravy was made the same way as on the canned meat. Served over boiled potatoes with bread, it differed only with the addition of ketchup. Us kids would sometimes ask for mashed potatoes and mix the whole bunch together. It is something that I miss sometimes.

If we are serious about eating in season and ending our reliance on factory farming there may be a return to these type of dishes. We have a ready supply of meat that is rarely finished on grass but rather grains. If you want a grass finished cow in the middle of winter, you will; have to transport it, pay for the keeping of the feed, or have it from frozen. In  "simpler" times, you would can when you had excess.

Canning has some advantages over freezing. Aside from the availability of fresh meat, another reason that this art is rarely practiced is due to the dangers of canning. I wonder at how much this is oversold. Yes, canned meat is at a risk of botulism but does the modern mass market protect us from food borne diseases any better? The Maple Leaf and Costco food recalls and illnesses are still fresh in my mind.

Not that I am suggesting that we all make sure that we get free range food and only eat seasonally but consider it next time you are eating fresh beef in February. There are sometimes that I wished I had a jar of beef hidden in my back cupboard. It makes a quick meal too.

Book Review: Get Jiro!

So, Anthony Bourdain, not content with writing memoirs, cooking, doing tv shows, has also acted as an author on Get Jiro!, a graphic novel. Okay, technically it is a co-writing credit with Joel Rose. He wrote a fun little book called New York Sawed in Half at the same time that Bourdain had written another book for the same imprint called Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical.

Anyways, back to Jiro. It is a graphic novel set in a future where food and food stars has replaced the natural order of crime and politics. Two large factions rule the food scene in Los Angeles. There is a mother earth type, Rose, representing an Alice Waters type aesthetic and of course, a traditional French style kitchen chef, Jimmy who looks for the best ingredients regardless.

The two philosophies are strung out through the book showing the downfall of being dogmatic to either of them. These failings will be obvious to those who have been following the food trends over the years.

The localvore movement can be strident and militant while some of its proponents will stretch the meaning of local in order to get ingredients to fit the mold making this style of cuisine, though local, unavailable to locals without the ability to pay and pay.

The traditional French style requires certain ingredients to make unchanging classics. It has lead to the destruction of species and a regimenting of the correct style to do a dish. However, public tastes have changed and even though giving an air of superiority for fine dining, it twists the definition to keep diners.

The third way is Jiro, a sushi master who has to innovate but still tries to deliver the best food he can with the ingredients he has. In the first scenes, pages go by with the whole sushi making. These panels of food making are a delight. There are several scenes of this type of food porn and they are fun. It is good to see something other than mayhem be delivered in exquisite colour and stop time precision. One motion captured for a page that suggests what will come next. The customers break a taboo in the ritual of eating and Jiro deals with them harshly.

This third way philosophy bothered me in this regard; eaters should not be pigs at the trough and are partially to blame for the degradation of the cuisine. Fine. At what point do they become educated? How does this happen? I mean, I ask my server how I am supposed to eat something but is that the way it is supposed to be. But, hey, this is a graphic novel so sometimes there are gaps.

The rest of the novel unfolds as a result of the two large forces trying to deal with the "authenticity" of the third way. This seems to be a definite collaboration as the voice found in the Bobby Gold novels seems to be hanging in the air. There is violence, food, and some funny moments. The food world does get skewered and we do get a glimpse into what Bourdain's and Rose's definition of authentic food would include in a scene that I spent a little time going over and over.

It's a fun read and suffers from too little exposition. The characters are cartoony but the philosophy of food is argued clear and well. For anyone trying to get food culture, this is a really accessible way compared to reading Nestle, Pollan and so many others. This could be a gateway book into a lifetime of trying to understand food politics.

Mommy, why is Daddy feeding us weeds?

What do you see in the picture above? Ignore the fuzziness and lack of composition. This is one of the reasons that I don't have pictures on my blog. I guess I should do a post about that some time.
I am talking about the bug. Well, not actually about that particular bug but that I found a real live bug on a weed in a front yard garden in Toronto. This particular weed is a lamb's quarter. It tastes a little like spinach when cooked and can be eaten raw. There is a strong chlorophyll flavour. If green was a flavour than this would be a good representation. Behind the leaves there is a dandelion whose leaves can be used for salads, roots for tea or coffee drink, and the flower can be made into wine or tempura.

All of this is made possible by the ban of pesticides in Toronto. This is not the real point but rather the reemergence of unwanted plants as foodstuffs. I went to the Leslieville Farmer's Market and bought some weeds this past weekend. The vendor didn't call them that but I recognize them from my lawn pullings. I bought some purslane and could have bought a tincture made of borage. It will not be long before we see some more of these older crops that may include lovage and other old time greens that are more in fashion for ground cover rather than culinary purposes.

Purslane is a sour green that tastes between lemon and vinegar. It can be used in a variety of ways such as salad, soup or fried. When fried, it becomes sticky and mucilaginous like okra.

Now the idea of sour in our diet is not new. I put on a medieval feast around two years ago and found that most of the recipes were more delicate and herbal with accents of sour. I really should post that menu. It was very enlightening. Other recipes called for herbs such as lovage, borage, dandelion, and sorrel.  From Absinthe to Zest : an alphabet for food lovers by Alexandre Dumas has reference to some of these being typical in a 18th century kitchen herb garden. These greens are now making a comeback. Sometimes all it takes is to look in your front yard at the weeds that are crowding out your grass. 

I dislike grass so much that maybe I will see if some of these ground covering plants can replace my grass and replenish my larder.

Book Review: Endless Appetites

Endless Appetites was written by Alan Bjerga.  It is a book about food crisis.  The conceit of the book is that it uses one burning guy instead of what this one guy represents.  This is the one individual that went viral. Bjerga chooses Mohamed Bouazizi rather than any other self immolator. It is useful to make his point but it undermines the reading of the rest of the book for me as it seems to discard this practice as a means of protest.

So, getting my bug out of the way.  I really enjoyed the rest of the book.  Enjoyed might be a bit of wrong word to use but I was informed about how Bjerga sees the unfolding of the commodification of food and some of the impacts.  

In many parts of the world, there is uncertainty over one's next meal.  One of the recurring themes is that growers can't afford their own food.  Think about the current quinoa example. The first world gets its hyper health consciousness raised over the effects of a super grain with a lot of protein and everyone has to have it.  The problem is that for a poor region, the fact that they can grow a grain with... is a survival thing.  It now makes more sense for them to sell their food for profit then eat it, especially if they are part of an organized business.  But they are not able to purchase new food at local prices but rather inflated world prices.  The reasons for that is complicated but it wouldn't be too unfair to point directly to communication and futures markets where every farmer can see what is being traded for what price and act accordingly.

 It is really ironic that even Henry Ford understood the need to ensure that workers afford the goods they are making or in this case, growing. We, the world, have not found a way to address the problem on a global level even though it was Ford and his ilk that started us on this path.  A country should be able to afford its own produce.  Put another way, globalization turns regional problems into global problems.

Bjerga gives a history of Chicago Board of Trade.  It created grading standards for wheat that along with rise of telegraph allowed for communications of standard, prices and arrival dates for wheat.  The world now sees these prices and reacts to them. Chicago kept dominance by; 1. making it easier to do deals on the floor, 2. physical ownership of a good that degraded quickly, 3. Limit of contracts traded by traders were intended to limit speculation.  This kept everything manageable.  

Then in the 1990s brought on the big boys to start trading; Goldman created an index and ways around the limitations of trading started to develop.  They found a way to game the system.  They weren't trading food anymore but had found a way to make money that impacted actual food prices.  Think about fluctuations on the stock market now applied to the stalk market.  

China used to be excluded from analysis as they were largely self sufficient.  Not true anymore. A rise in wheat can cause a rise in rice and the spiral begins. And of course, oil prices affect transportation and therefore food costs.

Local trading networks in places like Ethiopia are falling.  So, instead of buying grain at a reasonable price locally, grain is bought at world market prices that are higher.  People who can grow for themselves start hoarding making local grain much harder to buy.  Many local markets set their prices to the world market (Chicago), the internet and cell phone technology has made this easier.

Higher food prices means an increase in costs for food which means less money to plant crops. This leads to richer countries to buy up land in poor countries to plant, a form of land grab.  So, multinational seeing dollar signs and wanting to ensure that they can continue their food supply begin to own some of the best growing land in the world.

Then the world markets start tightening as supply becomes scarcer.  If countries stop trading, that leaves the market at a deficit, driving prices even higher. Even if the tightening is not based on the reality but rather the perception of what is going on in the market.  If someone thinks that a place like China will be needing more wheat and tries to hold back to get a better price, that could set off this spiral.

Throughout the book, there are small vignettes of people who work - a trader in Chicago, a farmer in Ethiopia, and UN food aid bureaucrats.  These issues transcend the right and left that so mark many of these issues.  It allows for a lot of the high finance bugaboos to be turned into human faces and actions.  All in all, this is a really depressing book.  It is a descriptive one and that means there are some silver linings but I leave the book for you to read to find them.  Hint:  It involves Africa.  

There are case studies of better ways. These include; coffee, banana, and Thai rice.  That brings me to my favourite chapter.  The Price of a Cup of Coffee.  Ethiopia is working to creating a coffee market.  This will likely lead to the increase of the quality of coffee overall but might destroy the specialty coffee market as I know it.  I love some of the special coffees that come from specific plantations but I will gladly give that up, if one of the solutions lead to overall better coffee and better ability for the local markets to create a better living for all farmers. 

I may not have to give up Ethiopian coffees completely as those specialty beans are only 4% of the Ethiopian market.  The Exchange does makes it harder to find the gems of the beans.  However, there are some coffee merchants who will still go all the way to the plantation.  Most other buyers had issues with coffee bean quality but did not have the ability to trace the beans back to the farmer who grew it.  So, many buyers had to forgo the opportunity because of the risks.  This means that sometime soon there will be more Ethiopian beans for the world for a quality that can be trusted and a lesser selection of specialty beans from single source plantations.

Look, this book is definitely worth reading to try and gain an understanding of food riots in Egypt, rising bread costs, and the impact of globalization on food.  It is a fairly equitable tale that didn't hit you over the head with prescription.  This makes it a harder book but a more enlightening one.

in Just-

in Just- is a springtime poem by e. e. cummings.  I pull out that poem at this time of year as I begin to notice signs of spring.

The earliest sign was about three weeks ago when older Greek ladies of the neighbourhood began combing the sides of the berms in public areas looking for dandelions and other greens.  This has been an interesting result of reducing pesticide sprays in Toronto.

Another sign is my rhubarb in the backyard has unfurled its leaves and shows signs of this year being a more productive year than last.  I have also started a few seeds of vegetables that I cannot get at a farmer's market or the specialty shops.  These tend to be heirloom varieties of tomatoes, cucumbers and beans.  Stuff that can grow well in a compact city garden.

Then comes the ramps.  I get ramp recipes from my RSS feeds; cooked and pickled.  Pickling has always been a way of preserving abundance for me, so I always wonder who has so many ramps that they need or want to pickle.  The advent of the ramps brings on the inevitable backlash about the upcoming death of the wild garlic.  I guess that it is not a bad thing that the thing that ushers spring in for foodies also comes with a discussion around sustainability.

My father would sometimes pick some ramps from a spot pretty near to the house.  It was a small patch that barely seemed to grow.  There were no other patches near it and I had seen no signs within walking distance.  I always wondered where they came from.  Some people are still trying to find a way to cultivate these wild plants but I wonder if that is from where our garlic and our chives have come.

Fiddleheads are starting to creep into my feeds as well.  Funny how RSS feeds make me think of food.  Hell, feed is right in the title.  Many of these seasonal crops, I would not like year round. Fiddleheads is a good example.  After cooking a few snacks of fiddleheads, I am done with their greenish brownish flavour.  I don't know how else to describe the taste.  So, spring reminds me of a fleeting season with produce that I only wish to try once a year or is it just that we only have them once a year that has caused me to only desire them then?

Regardless, spring is too fleeting to be spent at my keyboard.  I think I'll go outside and see if I can figure out what those old ladies were picking...