I mostly chalked up my seeming inability to make decent naan to my lack of a tandoori oven or any other means of emulating solar fusion in my kitchen.

Not that I didn't try. I'd crank the oven as high as it goes and preheat it forever with a baking stone inside seeming to absorb and radiate all the heat my kitchen could muster up. But my little circles of dough would just poof up like pitas, and brown modestly and taste, unsurprisingly, like pita bread. Which is fine and all, it's just nothing like the pillowy soft, flaky wedges of seared, blistering flatbread that's basically the best part of eating at Indian restaurants.

Every time I have naan like that, I'm reminded of the first time I ate in the Desi corridor on Devon Ave in Chicago with my friend Rachel. A minute or two after we sat down with plates loaded from the buffet, she started nodding as she chewed—not looking at anyone or anything, just: yes. Then she stopped eating for a minute, turned to me and said, "This bread is pretty awesome."

I finally achieved what I consider to be "pretty awesome" naan by baking it on the stovetop in a dutch oven. I'd tried that before—both in a normal nonstick skillet and in a dutch oven--but it just ended up underdone in spots, sometimes burning but not blistering, and chewy instead of pillowy. It was also always, for lack of a better way to describe it, too bready. Apparently the problem was that I was just too shy about letting the dutch oven get hot enough to melt my pastry brush into a solid nub of smoking black plastic. If you don't want to sacrifice a pastry brush to the cause, the traditional way to gauge whether it's hot enough or not is that the oil will be smoking, and not like a little modest smoking, full-on, disable-the-smoke-alarm-and-turn-on-any-fans-available smoking. My mistake, it turns out, had been turning the heat down when the oil started to smoke, thinking it would impart an unpleasant burnt flavor to anything cooked in it. I was obviously forgetting that naan often has a quite pleasant burnt flavor.

The recipe I sort-of used, which I found at Porcini Chronicles (and which they credit to Yamuna Devi's book The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking) was was also slightly different than the ones I'd tried before. If I'd actually looked at the recipes I've used before—not just for naan, but any bread I've ever made with my sourdough starter, I would have known right away that there was no way it was going to work as written. My starter is roughly equal parts flour and water by volume, so it's about the consistency of a thick pancake batter. The one they used must have been 90% water--or they just copied the amounts wrong. (Notes below about how to substitute for starter if you don't have one, and a post soon about how I cultivated mine).

To explain, the ratio of starter:flour for a typical, slightly sticky dough is 2:3. This recipe called for 1/2 cup starter and half cup yogurt for 3 cups of flour, or a liquid:dry ratio of roughly 1:3. Instead of thinking about that for the ten seconds or so it would have taken for me to figure that out, I just dumped all the ingredients into the bowl. Whee! I am so smart.

There was obviously too much flour. Scraps were flying out of the bowl as I mixed. I had doubled the recipe, so I checked again to make sure I hadn't done it wrong…and I hadn't. So, I just kept mixing and then started kneading it into a dough the best I could, but, I mean, the recipe actually said you could add flour if the dough was too sticky.

I did manage to get it to start to come together like a dough, but too sticky? It wasn't even sticky enough to keep the seeds in the dough—they were scattering all over the place. And it was so stiff it was almost impossible to knead.

There was a moment when I wondered if maybe this was the key to delicious, soft, flaky naan: a super stiff dough that only a real Indian grandma would know how to handle. Maybe, I thought, I should just go with the recipe no matter how crazy it seemed.

But the recipe was telling me two different things: on the one hand there were the amounts, on the other the suggestion that it might be sticky.

I choose sticky. I ripped a gap in the dough and poured some more sourdough starter into it. And I kneaded that in. And then I did that again. And a third time. I probably added another cup of starter, and none of the flour I'd left out. Eventually I had a supple, smooth dough.

Each time I added more starter, the ball would initially be a big sticky mess. Rolling up the stray nigella seeds, I felt like a giant with a tiny katamari. This, I thought, is not "a science." The whole idea that cooking is "an art" and baking "a science" relies on so many flawed assumptions: the idea that science can't be improvisational and cooking is, the idea that art isn't often extraordinarily, painstakingly precise, the idea that you can't just throw some flour and water and yeast together and come up with great bread.

So, I think the following is roughly what ended up in my dough, but if you're looking to recreate it, just aim for something dough-like, get a pan really, really hot, and don't get too caught up in the details.

Recipe: Sourdough Naan

• 1 c. sourdough starter*
• 5 T. ghee or vegetable oil, divided**
• 1/2 c. yogurt
• 2 1/2 c. bread flour
• 2 t. sugar
• 1/2 t. baking soda
• 1/2 t. baking powder***
• 1 1/2 t. kosher salt (1 t. reg)
• 1/2 t. kalonji/nigella/black onion seeds, or poppy seeds (optional)

Combine everything but 1 T. of the ghee or oil and knead until it forms a smooth, elastic dough (at least 6-8 minutes). Place in an oiled bowl, turn to coat, cover and let rise 4 hrs. or until a depression doesn't heal immediately.

Preheat a cast iron pot on high with the lid on. Add about 1/2 t. ghee or oil and spread around a little—I recommend a spatula rather than a pastry brush. The oil will smoke. You want it to smoke. You probably also want to use the kitchen exhaust fan if you have one.

Divide the dough into 6 pieces, and roll into a circle approximately 1/4" thick—you can roll them all first or roll each one as the others bake. Either way, keep the on deck balls/circles covered with plastic wrap so they don't dry out too much.

Remove the lid of the pot and drop the dough flat onto the bottom. Cover and bake for 30 seconds. Flip and bake 30 seconds more. Remove, and repeat with the remaining circles.

You could try baking it super hot too, but don't blame me if it comes out like pita.

I also threw half of the dough in an oiled zip-top bag and left it in the refrigerator for a week, removed it an hour before baking so it could warm to room temperature, and made another batch that was just as great. A little more sour, because my yeast were faithfully producing acid and alcohol the whole time, although slowly because of the cold temperature. You could probably let it go up to 10 days, or maybe more, which means you can make the dough anytime and have beautiful, fresh naan with very little immediate effort any night of the week.

*You can always substitute equal parts flour and water and some instant yeast. For 1 cup of starter, use about 2/3 cup flour, 2/3 cup water, and 1 t. yeast.

**Don't substitute butter or olive oil. The milk solids in the butter will burn and olive oil has a lower smoke point than vegetable oil.

***The original recipe called for 1 t. baking soda, but I've had too many bad experiences with my acids not being adequate, especially when doubling recipes so I used half baking powder. Chemical leavening isn't strictly necessary in yeast breads, but I think it's part of what made this recipe so soft and light. I nearly forgot it in a second batch I made—I had already started kneading, and as soon as I sprinkled the soda and powder on and kneaded it in I could feel the change in the dough. I imagine much of the chemical leavening is lost in the kneading, shaping, and rolling and in the long rise, but I'm sure there's still some left by the time you bake.

Confession: I not only avoided high-fructose corn syrup (hfcs) until about a year ago, I was actually skittish about fresh corn for a while after my first encounter with Michael Pollan in The New York Times Magazine (or it might have been this article). I stopped eating corn tortillas and frozen corn kernels and felt vaguely panicky about the possibility that I was consuming hfcs in condiments and sandwich bread when I ate out, even if it would have only been tiny amounts.

Now that I'm over it, I sometimes have a hard time remembering what was so scary about the idea that there was corn in everything I was eating, an idea that was obviously ludicrous anyway because I was a vegetarian who mostly ate food prepared at home from whole, fresh, non-corn ingredients. But looking back at the articles linked above, they are pretty ominous. Even though Pollan notes that a corn-based diet has been the norm in Mexico for centuries without any apparent ill effects, and the story he tells about the "cornification" of the American diet is too complex to be a nefarious plot designed to kill us all, it's clear that he thinks the amount of corn Americans eat on average is a Bad Thing. Sure, it may rely on innocent accidents of nature, like the uniquely efficient way corn fixes carbon during photosynthesis and and the great distance corn pollen has to travel to reach the style, but it's also reliant on much more insidious developments: synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, an arcane federal farm subsidy systems that turned corn into "a welfare queen," agribusiness giants with seed patents on genetically-modified strains, giant livestock feeding operations that use antibiotics to keep cows alive because eating corn makes them sick, and food manufacturers who profit from getting people to buy cheap food in ever-increasing quantities. Eating corn in any form may seem like a way of giving in to all of that or even supporting it.

So although I did a fair bit of eye-rolling when I read about people avoiding sweet corn at their farmer's markets this summer or feeling "corn guilt" when they eat popcorn, it's worth remembering that I was one of them not so long ago.

HFCS paranoia is not primarily an issue of ethical consumption

It's not that many of those concerns are invalid—it's true that most corn relies on a lot of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, that much of it is grown using genetically modified seeds with patents held by huge corporations that have been known to sue farmers when corn with their patented genes end up in their fields, that cows fed diets of corn get sick and are more susceptible to diseases like e coli that can threaten humans. But it's also far from clear that refusing to eat ketchup containing high fructose corn syrup is an effective means of changing any of that or even primarily motivated by the desire to change those things.

Although people like Pollan have made a big deal about corn sweeteners being artificially cheap due to farm subsidies, the actual farm cost of hfcs in the food products we buy is so minimal that even if subsidies were eliminated entirely, it might not affect portion sizes or consumer demand at all. Even in soft drinks, which are by far the most demonized hfcs delivery system, hfcs represents just 3.5% of the total cost of manufacturing. The corn content, the only part actually affected by farm subsidies, is only 1.6 percent of the price (based on US Department of Commerce data). A comparison between the U.S., Australia, the UK, and France, all of which have different sugar policies but similar consumer prices, show no pattern in the relationships between how cheap sugar is, how much of it people eat, or how fat on average they are (which most people wrongly assume is a reliable measure of health outcomes, but I'll tackle some other time).

Pollan's formal case against hfcs relies primarily on arguments about price and prevalence, but that doesn't really explain the kind of paranoia his books and articles have helped inspire about eating corn and/or hfcs. Not buying and eating something because it's too cheap just isn't the kind of consumer behavior that spreads the way hfcs-phobia has. Nor is this some sort of mass avoidance of all added or refined sugars, or brands like Snapple and Pepsi wouldn't be running huge campaigns to advertise soft drinks containing only "natural sugar."

Instead, people have latched on to the implication, which isn't supported by any data I can find, that hfcs is nutritionally worse than other sugars. The hfcs paranoia isn't caused by the idea that hfcs might be unwisely or unfairly subsidized or that pesticides used to produce corn are poisoning waterways or anything related to feeding corn to cows. The fear is that hfcs might be some kind of demon poison that makes people fat.

The confusing part: "high fructose" isn't actually high fructose

The idea that hfcs is worse than other sugars seems to be primarily reinforced by research about how fructose is metabolized. Just last April, an article about a study comparing drinks sweetened with fructose and  glucose in the New York Times began:

Some research has suggested that consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, used as a sweetener in a wide variety of foods, may increase the risk of obesity and heart disease. Now, a controlled and randomized study has found that drinks sweetened with fructose led to higher blood levels of L.D.L, or "bad" cholesterol, and triglycerides in overweight test subjects, while drinks sweetened with another sugar, glucose, did not.

Things like this get reported all the time. However, the very last sentence of the article quotes another biochemist:

The study did not test high-fructose corn syrup, he said, and judgments should not be made about it from the findings.

Not that that stopped the author from leading with the useless, ambiguous claim about a supposed link between hfcs and obesity, but surely this deserves a little more attention: yes, fructose alone seems to cause more insulin resistance and weight gain in both rats and people than glucose alone. But high fructose corn syrup is only "high fructose" relative to normal corn syrup, which is 100% glucose.

The kind of hfcs used in most food processing, including soft drinks, is hfcs-55, which is approximately 55% fructose and 45% glucose, or almost identical to sucrose, which is about 50/50. Another kind, hfcs-42, is used in the manufacture of some baked goods, and if fructose is really worse, that would make that kind of hfcs healthier than cane sugar. Indeed, studies comparing the consumption of hfcs to sucrose have shown no differences in metabolic responses (or energy or macronutrient intake) at all.

The argument that hfcs is somehow responsible for the obesity epidemic relies entirely on correlations between the rise of hfcs in food manufacturing in the 1980s and the rise in national rates of overweight/obesity (and the exponential rise in concern about fatness). Pollan's case against hfcs amounts to a gut suspicion that:

It's probably no coincidence that the wholesale switch to corn sweeteners in the 1980's marks the beginning of the epidemic of obesity and Type 2 diabetes in this country.

Of course, this fails to account for the simultaneous increases in obesity in many other countries, perhaps most notably Australia, where obesity rates rival or even exceed those in the U.S., but sugar is the primary sweetener. It's not that he's totally wrong; it does seem probable that U.S. farm subsidies and the cheap price of highly-palatable, nutrient-poor, calorie-rich, primarily carbohydrate-based foods is one factor driving the relatively small increases in the average American's weight since the 1970s. And the history of corn cultivation and agricultural policy has something to do with that. But there's no reason to think that hfcs is uniquely responsible for the "obesity epidemic." After all, if it weren't for subsidies and tariffs that keep the price of sugar artificially inflated, which are the result of a different set of biological, historical, and political contingencies, it would be just as cheap. 

Ultimately, hfcs is just another source of sugar, nutritionally no different from cane sugar, and way better than agave nectar if you're concerned about fructose. It might be slightly worse than things like honey (esp. raw) and maple syrup (esp. grade B or lower) if you're interested in vitamins and minerals. (This is all assuming the hfcs in question contains mercury, but that's sort of another story altogether).

That doesn't mean hfcs is  "natural," a word which has virtually no meaning when it comes to food labeling anyhow, but then, if "natural" is the alternative to "processed," no sweeteners are. Agave nectar must be filtered, hydrolyzed, re-filtered, and concentrated before it can be used as a sweetener. Refined cane sugar is purified with phosphoric acid and calcium hydroxide, and sometimes whitened using bone char which is why some vegetarians and vegans refuse to eat it.

The upshot is there's no reason to believe that hfcs is any worse for you than sugar or much worse for you than any other sweeteners, and there's certainly no reason to believe that a little bit here and there in a favorite condiment or even the occasional soda is going to hurt you.

Later in this series: I've gotten a request to weigh in on fruit juice, and will try to do that soon. And someday I'll get around to msg, as promised before.

I've never made a galette before, but it seemed like a good idea because pies are one of the primary traditional applications for ground cherries, and I didn't have nearly enough to make a traditional double-crust pie filling. Since galettes are free-formed around their fillings, they can be as big or little as you want to make them. And so much easier than pies—there's no delicate procedure to get the crust into a pie pan without cracking, no par-baking and hoping the sides don't droop or shrink. No crimping or lattice.

But I was wary of just following a normal ground cherry pie recipe and changing the shape, because the lack of shaping and par-baking means the crust can get soggy if the filling is too wet, which is why fruit galette recipes often call for a layer of crushed cookies or cubes of pound cake or a frangipane to help soak up the juices. Rose Levy Beranbaum's suggestion to let cut fruit sit with sugar for 30 min and then drain off and reduce the syrup sounded like a good idea, but unnecessarily fussy. Instead of going to the trouble of draining off the juice, I just simmered the halved ground cherries with some brown sugar and limoncello (a desperation substitution when I realized I didn't have any lemons) until the liquid had reduced a bit, basically making a quick ground cherry jam. And then I entirely forgot to add the butter most of the pie recipes called for. C'est la vie.

It turned out like a big ground cherry pop tart, basically. Just a simple buttery pastry crust filled with a thin layer of rich, sweet ground cherry preserves. Lovely with ice cream, perfect for breakfast. I may still try to pick up enough at the market this weekend to do a proper pie, but this galette definitely sated my somewhat-batty obsession with the fruit, which is good in case the two pints from last week are all I get for the summer. It probably goes without saying you could do this with any other kind of berry, and most stone fruits too, but there. I said it anyway.

Recipe: Ground cherry galette

(crust adapted from Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food, filling adapted from Allrecipes and Vesey's)

For the crust: 

• 8 T. butter (Alton uses 6 T. butter and 2T. lard, I don't usually have lard around and didn't feel like digging out the shortening)
• 1 1/4 c. (6 oz) all-purpose flour
• 1/2 t. salt
• 2 T. sugar (optional—leave out for a savory galette)
• 2-3 T. ice water

For the filling:

• 1 1/2 cups ground cherries, husked and halved
• 2 T. brown sugar
• 2 t. tapioca
• 1 T. limoncello or the juice of 1 lemon
• a pinch of grated nutmeg
• 2 T. butter (also optional, apparently)

Cut the butter into 16 or so chunks and freeze while you get the other ingredients together. Combine the flour, sugar, and salt in a food processor bowl and pulse (or just whisk together). Add the butter and pulse 10 or so times (or cut in with a pastry blender or two crisscrossing knives) until the biggest lumps are the size of small peas.

I decided to try Alton's recommendation of using a spray bottle to distribute the ice water evenly, but it also misted the sides of the bowl (and I can't imagine how that could be avoided entirely), so when I hit "pulse" again, the mist attracted flour and formed a thin layer of moist paste on the side of the bowl, which is about as awesome as most things you describe as "moist paste." So I gave up on that and just fed the ice water through the opening in the top, pulsing until the dough just barely started to come together.

Then, dump the contents of the food processor onto a piece of plastic wrap (or into a large zip-top bag). Use the plastic to help you press it into a disk about 5" in diameter and 1" tall. Chill for 30 min.

Meanwhile, husk the cherries and slice them in half into a sauce pan, setting aside any that are still tinged with green. Sprinkle with brown sugar, tapioca, and lemon juice or limoncello. Grate in a pinch of nutmeg. Stir over medium heat until the cherries release their juices and the juice thickens into a glaze.

Preheat the oven to 400.

Roll out the pastry on a piece of parchment paper—leaving the plastic wrap on top helps. Doesn't have to be a perfect circle because the whole idea here is a rustic, uneven sort of charm, but the best way I've found to get a roughly even circle-like object is to roll from the center of the dough directly away from your body, or up towards 12 o'clock. Then, turn the parchment about 30 degrees and do it again, and repeat, turning it in a circle and always rolling in the same direction with roughly the same amount of pressure.

Spread the filling in the center, leaving at least a 2" border or up to 4". Then, fold the edges up, letting them pleat naturally or attempting to bend them to your will or some combination of the two.

Bake for 35-40 min.

A few minutes after I'd put it in the oven, I remembered that I'd seen Thank God It's Pie Day sugar her galettes before baking, which gave them sparkle and a little crunch. So I pulled it out of the oven and did that. Bonus for being forgetful: I didn't having to brush the pastry with water to get the sugar to stick.

Recipe for the no-churn, no-whisk, ice-cream-or-semifreddo-like dessert object will have to wait. I'm tired.

I've been dying to try these for what feels like forever. They're basically just a tiny husk tomato*, and according to James Beard, they used to be quite common in many parts of the U.S. But now, for some reason, few people seem to have heard of them and I've certainly never seen them at any supermarket or on any restaurant menu. Perhaps, despite the fact that they supposedly grow well even in poor soil, they don't take well to industrial-scale cultivation or don't hold up well over long distances. Or maybe their scarcity has something to do with the idea that some varieties are believed to be hallucinogenic, which is apparently the reason there's a law in Louisiana that says you can only grow smooth groundcherry for ornamental use.

The feeling of "forever"  is so variable. Ten consecutive hours of driving. Ten minutes waiting in line. Apparently, in time spent waiting to taste a ground cherry, forever is just over a year.  I first heard about them last summer when a friend from Ohio got some in his weekly CSA share. I went looking for more information, and the descriptions I found were unbelievably tantalizing: a fruit that tastes like a cross between strawberries, pineapple, and vanilla custard. They sounded like they might be the most delicious thing ever found in nature.

I kept an eye out at the farmer's market, but must have missed their window last summer, or maybe no one was growing them for sale yet. Then, in February when Brian went to Egypt, he had something that fit the description perfectly, as improbable a place as that seemed to find an almost-completely unknown husk tomato cultivar. They wouldn't have survived the trip, even if he'd been able to smuggle them past customs, so I waited and waited for summer which never comes fast enough in Michigan anyways. And for most of this year, too, I searched the farmer's market in vain. I started to feel like they were some mythical creature, and I was Molly Grue.

But then this weekend, I spotted a handful of pint baskets full of what looked like the tiniest tomatillos I'd ever seen. At first, Brian thought I was pointing at the actual tomatillos, slicing-tomato-sized on the shelf below, as if my desperation had made me delusional. But no, there they were.

Are they the most delicious thing I've ever tasted? Okay, probably not. But I'm not disappointed; they're pretty great. The tiny seeds and mild acidity are definitely reminiscent of strawberry or kiwi, but with this rich perfume that is a little like vanilla but also entirely its own thing.

When we got back from the market, I husked a small handful and ate them with some of the raspberries with plain yogurt and a little bit of maple syrup.

You can tell from the picture that some of them are a little green, which apparently means they're not quite ripe, and just like  unripe tomatoes, those ones had a bit of crunch and bitterness. But left at room temperature, preferably with their husks on, they get sweeter and more golden every day.

A recipe coming soon, not that you need one if you do manage to get your hands on some. I totally agree with with James Beard: "When eaten raw [ground-cherries] are refreshingly sweet and rich.  It is mystifying to me that they are not more prized." (from Cooking Books)

*which aren't technically tomatoes, someone just pointed out to me. Husk tomatoes are in the same family, but a different genus than other tomatoes. And all of them related to nightshade, and someday I'll write something about why so many people used to think tomatoes were poisonous.

The Modern Four Taste Orthodoxy

The idea that there are four basic tastes—sour, salty, bitter, and sweet—was widely taken to be gospel truth until 2002, when the taste receptors for glutamate were identified. Glutamate, and the "umami" flavor it imparts to foods like seaweed, bacon, parmesan cheese, and Doritos, was first identified and isolated by a Japanese chemist named Kikunae Ikeda in 1908. But the four-taste model was so dominant that umami's status as a distinct taste was considered "controversial" until its molecular basis was confirmed almost a century later. Here's the description of umami in a book titled Sensory Processes published in 2002 (before the taste receptors were identified):

Umami originated from a glutamate derived from seaweed. The chemical substance is commonly known as MSG, monosodium glutamate, and, by itself, has no odor and an unusual taste that is approximated, so they say, by appropriate combinations of the four primary taste qualities. Whether umami is a result of the unique combination of the four tastes or an independent classification of is own is open to debate (176).

Oh, they and the things they say.

Umami's been gaining traction—Kikkkoman's current advertising campaign is "discover umami"(.com)—but it hasn't quite arrived. This past Sunday on Iron Chef America, one of the judges said he detected some "umami" in a coconut-based soup, and then he had to define it for the other judges (and perhaps the audience?). His first stab was to call it an "illusory" taste, although he did follow that up by ranking it with "sweet, salty and sour," so perhaps he actually meant something more like "ineffable." Either way it shows how dominant the classical four tastes still are.

Except "classical" isn't quite right word, because it turns out the idea that we only experience four distinct tastes is actually a pretty recent invention—more recent than Ikeda's "discovery" of umami, actually. Traditional Chinese medicine named five tastes: sour, bitter, sweet, pungent, and salty, each one corresponding with one of the five elements or movements that are omnipresent in early Chinese thought. Aristotle claimed there were only two, which doesn't come as that much of a surprise given his characteristic love of dualities. Just as he divided visual perception into the "fundamental colors" black and white, which contain all the elements of all the other colors we perceive, Aristotle thought the whole range of gustatory sensations derived from the "fundamental tastes" of sweetness and bitterness. He also proposed a second-order classification of seven "primary flavors" that corresponded with his rainbow of seven "primary colors": sweet (which included fatty or oily), bitter, salty, harsh, pungent, astringent, and acidic or sour. Hard to say now what exactly the difference was between harsh, pungent, and astringent—I suppose the latter might be something like the tannins in tea and red wine while "pungent" instantly evokes blue cheese although it often just acts as a modifier rather than a descriptor—a pungent smell is strong, not necessarily strongly any particular thing. It's hard to even think of those things as taste categories on the same level as "sweet" or "sour."

But one question that raises is whether or not it's hard to think of them that way because there's some objective difference between sweetness and astringency or because it's just unfamiliar to think of "astringent" as a primary taste category. Certainly tannins cause a particular reaction on people's tongues—is that less of a distinct taste experience than the reaction caused by sugars?

Colors are a useful parallel, again. A linguistics professor I had at NYU told us about this experiment that my casual googling is not coming up with, but here's the gist: if you give children a set of colored tiles and tell them sort them into as many piles as they want, by color, there are predictable, reliable differences between the number of piles they make that correspond to the number of primary colors in their primary language. So, for example, English-speaking kids generally put all hues of blue in one pile while Russian-speaking kids usually separate lighter blues from darker blues because they have two "primary color" words for those shades. It's one of the classic examples of how language can shape how we perceive the world rather than just reflecting it. Also a reason why translation is always imperfect. 

Getting back to the four taste orthodoxy, that was something a German psychologist named Hans Henning  came up with in 1916. He devised a ""taste tetrahedron" with each of the four tastes he thought were primary at the four vertexes. The idea was that flavors could be conceptually mapped onto geometric plane based on which of the primary flavors they were comprised of—a flavor relying on two of the primary tastes would be located on the edge between those two vertexes. Flavors that used three would be on the surface between the relevant three points. And the tetrahedron was hollow, according to Henning, because no substance could produce all four taste sensations. So while taste itself was three-dimensional, tastes were two-dimensional at best. Read more »

My friend Raffi's family has a summer house on Lake Erie in Ontario, and a group of us who meet there every year stage an Iron Chef-style battle. The battles actually  started in college when Kit's dad gave him a 7-lb can of refried beans for Christmas, which doesn't make any more sense if you know Kit, except that he's the kind of person who appreciates that kind of absurdity.

Obviously, unlike on the show, the ingredient for Battle Refried Beans wasn't a secret, and we've continued to choose the primary ingredient in advance because 1) none of us is Morimoto (who I'm shocked to discover has the lowest winning percentage on Iron Chef America, which apparently includes his record in Battle of the Masters, but still, lower than Cat Cora!?) and 2) although Kitchen Stadium Canada is pretty well-stocked, especially given that it's not a primary residence, we still have to bring some tools and spices. And by "some," I mean basically half the contents of our kitchen, including the stand mixer and rice cooker and food processor and three chef's knives and a third of the spice rack and more than eight pounds of tomatoes from our garden and farmer's market, and I'm sure we would have had a great time trying convince the border patrol we were only in Canada for the weekend if they'd opened our trunk.

In our battles, chefs get two hours to cook instead of one, and they can plate their dishes and even do last-minute cooking right before serving so nothing suffers from having to sit for hours while other dishes are judged. Judges can award up to 10 points for taste, 5 points for presentation, and 5 points for creativity, and they also double as sous chefs. Especially talented cooks get traded off between the competitors to try to keep things even. Beyond that, it's all delicious chaos.

The main ingredient this year paid homage late summer's bounty and Leamington, Ontario's reputation for being "The Tomato Capital of Canada." I knew as soon as the ingredient was chosen that I wanted to make ice cream, but the rest of the dishes were up in the air until I stumbled across an old post on Smitten Kitchen with a recipe for eggs in tomato sauce. The runny yolk in the last photo sold me on the idea of a brunch plate, but I decided I needed to do something with a slightly more sophisticated presentation. About the same time, my friend Laurel posted about making oeufs en cocotte to sate an appetite awakened by Julie and Julia, which made me think perhaps instead of poaching the eggs in a tomato sauce, I could bake them in hollowed out tomato cups.

Naturally, I'm not the first person to think of this. So from the mash-up of those recipes and their reviews, I ended up with this:

Recipe: Tomato Toad in the Hole*

For each serving:

• 1 medium tomato
• 1 t. prepared pesto
• 2 t. finely grated parmesan cheese
• 1 medium egg at room temperature
• 1 slice prosciutto (optional but highly recommended)
• a dab of butter or bit of heavy cream
• salt and black pepper
• oil or cooking spray
• fresh basil to garnish

First, take the eggs out of the refrigerator if you haven't already. If you attempt this with cold eggs, the yolks will harden before the whites are even close to done.

Slice off the tops off the tomatoes and then scoop out the insides (which you can either discard or reserve and strain for juice or cook down into a sauce or paste). Salt the insides lightly and invert them on paper towels to drain for at least 30 minutes. (People seem to have had more issues with the whites setting with recipes that didn't include this step)

Preheat the oven to 425F, and coat a baking dish large enough to accommodate all your tomatoes with oil or cooking spray

For the assembly, smear the inside of each tomato with some pesto—I used a traditional basil pesto out of a jar because of the whole frantic two hours business, but the romaine pesto here sounds intriguing and I bet a sharp arugula pesto would be excellent. Sprinkle the insides with parmesan cheese. Then, wrap a slice of prosciutto around each tomato and secure the ends with a wooden toothpick and set in the baking dish. The prosciutto should help the tomatoes stand up straight, but you could probably cut a thin slice off the bottom to create a flat surface as long as the cup remained intact. Break the eggs into a small dish, and gently tip one into each cavity (if using "large" eggs instead of medium, you may wish to reserve some of the whites. Top with salt and pepper, a dot of butter or a tiny bit of cream, and another teaspoon or so of parmesan cheese.

Bake for 20 min, or until the eggs are softly set.

Garnish with torn basil leaves, or basil chiffonade, which is super easy: just stack the leaves flat on top of each other, roll them up, and then cut the roll into thin slices, as seen here.

Mine clearly weren't done at 20 min, and I got a little paranoid about the possibility of serving undercooked whites, so I left them in the oven for another 4 minutes and that turned out to be about 1 min too long. If the yolks had been just a bit softer, they would have been sublime. Even so, with the prosciutto crisped from the oven and the tomato soft and warm and all the savory herbs and parmesan, they were pretty wonderful.

I served them with a freshly-baked roll studded with chopped sundried tomatoes and asiago cheese based on the Kitchen Aid 60-Min Dinner Roll recipe That Winsome Girl made BLT sliders out of, which was part of my original plan for a lunch plate until I decided that BLTs would be too repetitive given the prosciutto in this dish. I made the rolls anyway, thinking there'd be slightly more runny egg yolk to mop up. The rolls turned out to be as fast to throw together as promised (largely because there's so much yeast in them):

Recipe: Quick Sundried Tomato and Asiago Rolls

Yield: 12 rolls

• 1/4 cup milk
• 2 T. sugar
• 1 t. salt
• 3 T. melted butter, divided
• 3.5 t. instant yeast (a little less than 2 pkgs)
• 3/4 cup warm water
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup chopped sundried tomatoes (drained if oil-packed, soaked in hot water and then drained if dried)
• 3/4 cup grated asiago cheese
• vegetable oil or cooking spray

Melt 2 T. butter and set aside to cool for a few minutes. Meanwhile, heat the water to 105-115F combine it with the yeast and a pinch of sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook. Add the milk, butter, sugar, salt, and 2 cups of flour and mix on low for 1-2 min. Add remaining flour 1/2 cup at a time, mixing 1-2 min after each addition. Dough should begin to form a ball and clean the sides of the bowl. Mix on low for another 2 min.

Knead by hand briefly, either in the bowl or on a lightly floured surface, if necessary to bring it together, and then wipe the mixer bowl clean (it needn't be perfect) and coat with vegetable oil. Return dough to bowl and turn to coat, cover with a towel and let rise 15 min.

Grease a 9"x13" pan and preheat the oven to 425F.

Once the first rise is done, knead in the sundried tomatoes and 1/2 cup of the asiago (or whatever else you want, or nothing at all for plain rolls) and then it divide into 12 balls. Sprinkle with the remaining 1/3 cup of asiago. Cover and let rise another 15 min.

Bake for 12 min, or until golden brown. Melt the remaining 1 T. butter, and brush the tops of the rolls (or just rub with a stick of butter if you're running around and can't be bothered). Return to the oven for 1 min. Cool on a rack—or don't, if you forget, like I did. The bottoms might get a little moist but it's not mean to be a crusty bread anyway

To complete the brunch course, I served a fresh tomato Ruddy Mary, which is differentiated from its better-known Bloody cousin by the use of gin instead of vodka.

Recipe: Fresh Tomato Ruddy Mary (adapted from Martha Stewart's recipe)

Yield: 4 servings, about 3 cups

• 1 lb fresh tomatoes (about 4)
• 1/3 cup fresh lime juice
• 1 t. Worcestershire (could use diluted vegetable bouillon for a vegetarian version)
• 20 dashes Tabasco sauce
• 1 1/2 t. freshly grated horseradish
• 1 t. celery salt
• 1/2 t. pepper
• 6 oz. gin
• more celery salt and paprika for rims
• celery stalks ( hearts would have been prettier) and cherry tomatoes to garnish

Core the tomatoes and pulverize them in a blender or food processor. Force the mush through a medium wire sieve about a cup at a time (you can use a fine one if that's all you've got but it'll take longer) and discard the solids. Combine the strained tomato juice with everything but the garnishes in a pitcher, taste and adjust seasoning as desired, and chill until read to serve. You can leave out the gin if you want to serve virgin versions or give people the option of having a traditional Bloody Mary, just top each glass off with 1.5 oz of liquor.

To rim the glasses, combine enough celery salt and paprika (about equal parts) in a thin layer on a small plate, moisten the rim of each glass with a wedge of lime, and invert the glass onto the plate and give it a little twist. Then, fill each glass with ice, add a celery heart, top with the cocktail mixture, and garnish with a cherry tomato.

I'm not usually a big fan of bloody marys, but I enjoyed this recipe a lot. The fresh horseradish is a lot milder than prepared horseradish and obviously fresh tomato tastes entirely different than canned tomato juice. I wouldn't bother with a high-quality gin in a traditional recipe, because the other flavors will overwhelm any subtleties, but Boodles or something would probably be great in this.

Four more courses to go: To Be Continued…

*Re: the name, my personal memory of this is fuzzy, but I have the vaguest idea that either my mother or grandmother, or maybe both, once upon a time cut a circle out of a piece of toast, cracked an egg into the hole, and either baked or griddled it, and called this a "toad in the hole." I may have imagined this entirely. But according to wikipedia, that is one of the names for that basic egg preparation, along with "eggs in the basket," "frog in a log," "hen in a nest," "Rocky Mountain toast," "Soldier in a Boat," "moon egg," "cowboy egg," "one-eyed monster breakfast" (!!!), "One-eyed Jack," and "Guy Kibbee eggs." Apparently in England, "toad in the hole" usually refers to sausages baked in a yorkshire pudding. So you have your choice of names, or, if you want to go upscale, call it Oeufs en Tomates.