October 2009

Coq au Vin, or really ambitious and somewhat disappointing adventures in amateur meat preparation. Also: how to break down a whole chicken into pieces

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Oct 30 2009

mmmm frenchy

I wouldn't normally cook two chickens in back to back weeks, but last month I ordered two chickens from a local farm with a stand at the farmer's market and then basically forgot all about it. The day after I roasted Larry, I got a call letting me know they'd killed my birds and I could pick them up Saturday. We were still working on Larry's leftovers, so I decided to do something other than simple roasting with at least one of the local birds.* I'd been wanting to try Coq au Vin, the "classic" French treatment for old roosters, and even though my just-butchered birds were relatively small, young chickens, I decided to give it a go. many, many hours earlier

The reason "classic" gets scare quotes is that there's some debate about whether Coq au Vin is actually the ancient, peasant dish it's often alleged to be or something more modern. The most compelling evidence on the side of "ancient": the ingredients and methods are typical of many other age-old European cooking traditions—it's basically a fricassee in wine with mirepoix (onions+carrots+celery), mushrooms, herbs, and some salt pork or bacon. There are also dozens of regional variations based on different varietals of grapes and mushrooms. For example, in the Alsace region, there's a recipe for cooking roosters that uses Riesling, morels, and cream (the epicurious version is here). Additionally, since it's basically a time and labor-intensive way of salvaging a tough piece of meat, it seems to exemplify the ideals of frugality and resourcefulness associated with old, "peasant" traditions.

But those traditions are often invented rather than discovered. What makes Coq au Vin questionable is that despite the long history of French culinary publications, the first written reference to "Coq au Vin" doesn't show up until 1913. A decade later, when the first recipe for "Coq au Vin" appeared in print, it presented the idea as a truly novel. According to the Oxford Companion to Food, aside from the cockscomb, which was prized as a garnish, the cock was historically regarded as indigestible.

Whether or not it's ancient, it's certainly a "classic" in that it's become part of the popular canon of French cuisine, on par with other dishes like ratatouille and coquilles St. Jacques, if not quite as iconic as the baguette. In The Next Iron Chef Season 2 Episode 2 earlier this month, Coq au Vin was one of the "classic inspirations" contestants had to use as the basis for an elimination challenge (along with things like boulliabaisse, pasta puttanesca, and Greek dolmas). Although its modern popularity is a little ironic, given the difficulty most cooks would have securing the titular rooster, it's easy to see why it would be a winning flavor combination. What wouldn't be delicious after marinating overnight and then simmering long and slow in a lot of wine infused with the richness of mushrooms, bacon, garlic, mirepoix, and fresh thyme? I'm almost tempted to try it with an old belt or pair of worn out shoes.

That gets at the main reason I was ultimately dissatisfied with the results: it was tasty enough, but the chicken is basically expendable. As a meal, it was no better than this mushroom bourguignon and way, way more time consuming. It's not that it's hard, but it just doesn't quite seem worth it. So unless I happen into some old rooster meat, I'll stick to roasting my chickens—which is not only easier, but tastes better and takes advantage of their juicy, tender, young meat better.

*I will never get over the delightful double-entendreness of birds and women, and because I am intellectually thirteen, I will never give a chicken a classically feminine name. The idea of a "bird named Larry" just tickles me on so many stupid levels. I named this one "Biff."

Recipe and pictures below the jump Read more

Things That Won't Kill You Volume 3: MSG

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Oct 14 2009

From Flickr user "The Other Dan" taken in Corktown, Toronto 

Unlike juice, which has sort of a mixed reputation even among contemporary nutritionists and doctors, MSG has been consistently demonized. Most people can't tell you why, they just know that it's bad. If pressed, they might tell you that it's "unnatural," that food manufacturers put it in processed foods to con people into eating "junk," that it's basically salt (which I'll address in a future post in this series), or that it gives some people headaches. Or they might just gesture to the fact that it's common knowledge that MSG is basically some kind of poison—after all, why would Chinese restaurants be so eager to reassure you that they don't use it if it were completely benign?

A recent commercial for Campbell's New Select Harvest Light (which is the sort of self-satirizing product name I'd expect to find in David Foster Wallace's fiction) suggests that even if people don't know what MSG stands for, they know that it's bad—potentially bad enough to deter people from buying a particular brand. Reading from a Progresso Light can, blonde #1 gets through "monosodium" but stumbles on "glutamate"—fortunately, the rainbow coalition includes an Asian woman who can translate that jargon into something we all understand: "That's MSG."

Although people may still associate it primarily with Chinese restaurant cooking, the Campbell's ad hints at its broader prevalence—MSG and other forms of glutamic acid are omnipresent in processed foods. They're especially likely to be found in foods designed to taste like things that have a lot of naturally-occurring glutamate (or similar molecules like inosinate or guanylate). Stock, broth, and bouillon often contain MSG, as does anything cheese-flavored or ranch-flavored, like Doritos, which actually contain five different forms of glutamate. I taste it the most in instant ramen and Chex Mix, but even though I know what it tastes like on its own, I can't always tell when something contains it or not. When used sparingly, it may not even be possible to discern because whether the glutamate in a dish comes from a mushroom or a salt, once it's dissolved in liquid or on your tongue, it's the exact same molecule:

from Wikipedia, showing up weirdly gray here

So even people who think it's "bad" and expect to feel bad after eating it probably eat MSG, at least from time to time, without even knowing it, and without suffering any negative effects. Read more

Oatmeal Chocolate-chip Cookies: righting institutional wrongs

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Oct 12 2009

charming compensatory cookies and crumbs

I usually don't find the store-bought baked goods or catering tray pastries at University functions appealing enough to eat, not because they're likely to taste bad, but because they're so vastly inferior to their homemade equivalents it just doesn't seem worth it. Which is to say: I usually know better than to get excited about the food at campus meetings. But last Friday was kind of strange—it was grey and wet outside and I had eaten a pretty light lunch and was feeling generally tired and overworked. All of which added up to really wanting something, anything that would fall into the category of a "treat." And suddenly, the plastic bins of cookies next to the sign-in sheets and stack of auto-generated powerpoint presentation handouts at a late-afternoon meeting I had to attend weren't just appealing, they seemed potentially redemptive. For a moment, I was actually genuinely glad to be stuck on campus for this stupid meeting which was virtually guaranteed to be a waste of time. 

It didn't last, of course. The meeting was even stupider than I'd anticipated—consisting primarily of one person summarizing the contents of an article that had been attached to the e-mail demanding my presence, adding only that this information was "very interesting," and then another person summarizing a bunch of information covered in a different series of e-mail messages. Both of them made a brief  show of asking for "feedback," but thankfully had the good sense not to really let people give them any because there were 80+ academics in the room and if they'd let them start talking, we'd have been there all night. And through all of this, I'm nibbling at this cookie which turns out to be dense and floury and a little stale. It was sort of soft-but-not-fresh in the way that vending machine pastries are soft-but-not-fresh, and there was no hint of butter or brown sugar. All it did was make me want a better cookie.

So, I made some. As the disappointing cookie I happened to grab was chocolate-chip oatmeal, that's what I made—looking for a clean substitution, I guess. I used the first recipe google served up, halved because I didn't have enough brown sugar for a full batch and didn't need three or four dozen cookies to make up for one bad one. No chocolate chips, either, but I had some bulk Callebaut milk chocolate leftover from a candymaking project, so I chopped some of that up. Normally I prefer a darker chocolate in cookies, but I wasn't going for perfection here. My motivating principle was that basically any homemade cookie would kick basically any storebought cookie's ass. And these totally did.

The recipe calls for a relatively high proportion of butter to dry ingredients, so they spread out thin and lacy, almost tuille-like—definitely not the recipe to use if you prefer thicker or more cake-like cookies. They also contain twice as much oatmeal as flour, which makes them really chewy, but they stayed soft even after they cooled. If you're more a fan of the crisp, shattering type of oatmeal cookies, again, this is not the recipe for you. The best part, like with most cookies, is how the sugar and butter caramelize, and I think that's accented beautifully by the bits of chocolate and relatively high salt content. They couldn't quite give me back the hour of my life I lost to the stupid meeting, but they definitely fulfilled my desire for a "treat." And definitely a go-to recipe for anytime you want a lacy, chewy oatmeal cookie.

Recipe after the jump. Read more

Simple Roast Chicken, or more adventures in amateur meat preparation

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Oct 8 2009

I named this one Larry

This was my fourth or fifth roast chicken—I've tried it Thomas Keller's way with almost no seasoning and no added fat, just lots of salt to dry out the skin so it stays crispy,  "Peruvian-style," which is covered in a pungent mixture of garlic, cumin, cayenne, smoked paprika, oil and vinegar, and a one-lemon version of Marcella Hazan's "Chicken with Two Lemons." They're all pretty great, but rather than pick a favorite I seem to be settling into a combination of all three of those along with techniques and tips and techniques I've picked up from so many random places I can't remember where and give them proper credit.

The basic formula is lots of garlic, lemon zest, rosemary, salt, and pepper tucked underneath the skin with the whole zested lemon and a few extra cloves of garlic shoved into the cavity. I truss it—no stitching, I just tie up the legs so it stays together—and rain kosher salt all over the skin. Then I roast it in a pre-heated cast iron pot at 425F for 20 min breast-up, 20 min breast-down, and 20 min breast-up or until the internal temperature is between 145-150F. I let it rest 15-20 min before carving, and usually serve it with a green salad.

nice, polite dinner portionWe typically carve off the breasts and drumsticks and eat them like polite adults, with a knife and fork, but when we finish with that, we inevitably start picking at the remains with our fingers. After a few minutes of that, we abandon all propriety and flip the body over to dig out the oysters and lick the juices dripping down our hands and wrists, making little guttural noises. When's the last time a boneless, skinless chicken breast made you do that?

after the carnage--the little spoons about 1/3 of the way down from the top are where the oysters wereA day or two later, after using the leftover meat in salads or sandwiches or omelets or quesadillas, I simmer the carcass for 4-6 hours with a bunch of vegetable peelings I accumulate in a zip-top bag in the freezer, along with a clove or two of fresh garlic, a couple of carrots and celery stalks if I have them around, and some thyme and bay leaves. That yields about two quarts of pretty amazing chicken stock. When we're out of stock, it's time to buy another chicken.

Details and pictures of the process after the jump: Read more

Against the Soda Tax

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Oct 6 2009

awesome depth of field courtesy of Stephane Pompougnac http://www.flickr.com/photos/vox_efx/3063389109/

Although many states already tax soda (usually a fraction of a penny per ounce), a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine on the potential benefits of a $0.01 per ounce tax on "soft drinks, energy drinks, sports beverages, and many juices and ice teas" has re-ignited the debate about whether or not we need a national soda tax. Back in July, Obama said a sin tax on soda was "an idea we should be exploring" in an interview with Men's Health although in the recent panic about industry profits and personal liberties, the White House has been quick to note that they haven't yet and have no plans to propose anything like it. 

Most people probably already know how the two sides shake out: promoters argue that soda makes people fat (which allegedly makes people sick and thus incurs social costs) so the tax would have the dual benefit of reducing the costs associated with obesity and generating money that would help cover health care costs (or balance state budgets). Opponents argue that soda isn't morally distinct from many other elective behaviors that sometimes (but not always) contribute to disease and health care costs, and as soda consumption is inversely correlated with income, taxing it would disproportionately burden those least able to pay.

All of those are actually pretty complicated claims, some of which I'll try to unpack below the jump but here's the short version: even promoters admit that the tax isn't likely to meaningfully reduce obesity or the diseases associated with it (note: not caused by it, as there's still no reliable evidence that fatness causes any disease besides osteoarthritis, and anyone who wants to hear more about that should consult Paul Campos' The Obesity Myth, J. Eric Oliver's Fat Politics, Glen Gaesser's Big Fat Lies, and/or Michael Gard and Jan Wright's The Obesity Epidemic). That means the only real argument in favor of the tax is that it would raise money. But everyone agrees that it would be a regressive tax. So unless you think that collective costs like state budget deficits and health care reform should be disproportionately shouldered by the poorest citizens, there is no good reason to support the soda tax (and this goes double for ill-considered suggestions that we just axe corn subsidies instead—also after the jump). Read more