Culinary Muse

Good-bye Junkies, Hello Starbucks

I haven’t been in NYC since 1998. I arrived Friday afternoon and by Sunday I realized what had changed in the past 11 years. New York City has been steam cleaned. Along with the grime that has been swept away is a certain tension that made trips here in the past both exciting and exhausting. By tension I mean the contrast between the best and the worst. This isn’t a complaint, just an observation. New Yorkers must be relieved that everyday life has eased up at least on the surface. However, along with the grime and the junkies a lot of NYC’s uniqueness has disappeared. I was at the Time Warner building Tuesday morning. With so much marble and glass around me I felt what the recent years of great wealth has brought to this city. But will this new economy be able to support what the old economy built? 

Except for the architecture and better museum collections, I could be in San Francisco or Los Angeles. I look out the window of the bus and see familiar Big Box American stores along stretches of avenues that at one time were desolate and foreboding.  I walked home from Times Square one night after seeing ‘West Side Story’ and only saw people that looked like they could have been transported from Any Mall, USA.  That was not the case in 1979.  Starbucks is a clear indicator of neighborhood gentrification. Between the theater and my hotel I passed four of them. While I am grateful to be able to get a decent cup of coffee (something that was once impossible to find in NYC), I wonder what happens to a place that has been polished to such a high shine.  The NYC that I knew was a tough place. You had to be strong, crazy or rich to survive.  Now it seems to be a blander, more expensive version of the rest of America.

Now that I got that observation off my chest here is a list of what I love about NYC this time around:

Dinner at Cookshop on Tenth Avenue. I have never tasted scallops so sweet.  Was it the Bombay Martini up with a twist that put me in the mood for dessert?  Some crazy concoction that included peanut butter, chocolate, sea salt, and a variety of textures that only someone with the munchies could truly understand.  Thanks, Chef.

James Beard Media Awards Dinner. Sat with fellow judges. The food was great.  The company even better.  Ran into an old cooking school friend, sat next to a man who raises goats, and behind an old school cookbook editor who kept yelling at the waiter for ‘stealing’ her glass. 

Spending time with David Leite of Leite's Culinaria .  David really pulled through for this San Francisco gal with a media event at Per Se  and a private tour of the kitchen by Chef Keller.  

I haven’t eaten dinner at Per Se yet.  But I did manage to embarrass myself as we were leaving by attempting to push open the faux blue doors.  As I kept pushing against the very tasteful brass doorknob I looked over to my left to discover that the real door is a sliding pane of clear glass. Am I the first to assume that the doors are doors? And to think I only had two espressos.  I can only imagine what happens there on a Saturday night.

A day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the chance to see this amazing sculpture on the roof. 

 

Pastrami sandwich at Carnegie Deli

PACKING

I pack the suitcase for practice. I zip up the side zipper. And then I pick it up. Hmmm, not too bad. Could I run for a train with this on my shoulder? Sure. Now I get cocky. Can I travel with even less? Out goes the extra just-in-case pair of shoes. With a vow to hand wash nightly, I toss out the extra underwear. I call the hotel to see if they provide bathrobes. Yes, they do. Out goes the bathrobe. Can I part with my slippers? If I want to take the new red dress sandals I must. Good bye slippers. Something still doesn’t seem right. I re-read the article about packing. It suggests choosing just one or two colors for wardrobe. I am staring at a suitcase with three colors. I eliminate one of the colors. And then I remember my Aunt Mary’s European packing advice circa 1974. ‘Take just two colors. But not red and blue. You will look dumpy and everyone will know you are an American’. She would surely approve of my black and white wardrobe. I am comforted by the simplicity of my choice. They aren’t colors at all. They are as plain as a blank page. A good way to begin a trip.

ON THE ROAD TO JAMES BEARD AND THE GREENBRIER

It’s countdown time.  In one week the Muse sets off for food adventures of a magnificent and metropolitan sort.  The James Beard Media Awards and The Food Writer’s Symposium at The Greenbrier, via D.C., are our May destinations.  Planes, trains and taxis (no subways, thank you).  Tickets have been purchased, hotel reservations made (thank you for great deals, Orbitz and Hotels dot com) and we are forcing ourselves to stop the pre-planning there.  We need to leave some room for serendipity. Oh, yes, a letter to our senator has secured a tour of the Capitol.  A White House invitation is in the works.

Every trip needs road songs.  Here is the playlist so far:

‘So little time, so much to do’, Catherine Russell

‘Nigerian Marketplace’, Oscar Peterson Trio

‘Gonna take a miracle’ Laura Nyro

‘Back on the Block’ Quincy Jones

‘You must believe in spring’ Bill Evans

‘Hindustan’ Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby

Let the packing begin!!!

A SHOCKING CHOCOLATE PAIRING

I have used many words to describe the chocolate pairing experiences I have had over the years.  Fruity. Smokey. Citrus. Divine. I have never used the words ‘fungal’ and ‘shocking’. Until last Friday night, that is.  Our friends, T & P presented us with a bottle of Hanahato Kijoshu Sake.  This aged sake (eight years) has a beautiful amber color, the taste of a dry sherry and the nose of fungus gone amok.  I have never sniffed and then tasted any liquid for which the nose had no relationship to the taste.  I poured each of us a small portion. We all took a sniff and then started laughing. Could anything that smelled this bizarre have any redeeming culinary value? After a couple of sips it was clear that we had to try this with some really good chocolate, as suggested by Beau Timkin at TRUE SAKE . I went into my chocolate stash and pulled out a bar of  AMANO CHOCOLATE'S Jembrana 70% Dark Chocolate.  We each took a small bite of chocolate, allowed it melt for a moment on the tongue and then took a sip of Kijoshu.  That is when this, excuse the analogy, magical mystical mushroom trip began. The sake brought out the cherry in the Jembrana.  What cherry, you Jembrana fans might ask?  Exactly.  Alchemy and magic at work.

PEOPLE WATCHING 101

One could easily become a habitué of the Sunday morning outdoor café scene in San Francisco’s Union Square.  The appeals are many.  Lush urban setting. Sophisticated people watching.  Table service.  On this 79 degree morning I have observed an extended French family with a total of eight children consume 10 cans of Coke, an 80-something Grandmother light up a cigar and a young Asian man stroll by wearing a Panama hat, white linen pants, pale blue sport coat and spectators.  Did he lose his walking stick?

It occurs to me that a degree in People Watching would require course work at this Field Campus.

Course Description:

PEOPLE WATCHING IN UNION SQUARE, SAN FRANCISCO (1 unit)

This course will work on your people identification skills in the field.Identification will be, but is not limited to, the following Classifications:

 
People with Parrots (single/couple)

Street People (mutterers, screamers)

Tourists (foreign, domestic, w/ & w/o children)

The Tattooed, the Pierced, the Sun Burned

The French

The Nervous

The Confused

I leave you with this final question: Why is that man sucking on his cell phone?

HOW TO NAVIGATE A FOOD SHOW

The more often I go to Food Shows, the more select I become.  In the early years I would eat myself silly.  Sure, I would love a hand full of jelly beans with that Polish Sausage Sandwich. And could I have an espresso to wash it all down with?

After years of acid indigestion which seemed to linger for weeks after the show I knew that I needed a different strategy. So, one year I decided to limit myself to the International Aisles.  This showed a lot of promise. The olive oils alone could take a half a day to taste. The Italians loved pouring wine. And the cheeses from the British Isles!  I ate so much Neal’s Yard cheddar one year that I swear my heart started skipping beats. But this was still too much.  It would be one thing if I was the food buyer for a gourmet food shop and was trying to stock the shelves.  I was just an inquisitive chef roaming the aisles for inspiration.

The narrowing of my tasting focus happened naturally the year that I started The Art of Tasting Chocolate website.  I tried all the chocolate confections.  ALL OF THEM.  It took two days.  But at least they were all in the chocolate family. There are a lot of confections that should be avoided at all costs.  However, I couldn’t report on what I thought was the best unless I tried them all, right?  Down one aisle.  Up another. Masterpieces of construction from Spanish confectioners were sampled beside hand dipped artisan chocolates from Oregon.  Chocolate with chilies.  Chocolate with cheese.  Chocolate with smoked pork products. I traded acid indigestion for a near diabetic coma. 

So with that criteria, I went a’tasting.  And this is what I found. I tasted only pure chocolate.  These are my favorites in no particular order:

MICHEL CLUIZEL : Oh, those French! So elegant. So refined. A guided tasting of five ‘1ers Crus de Plantations’ plain chocolates took less than ten minutes yet transformed me into a Cluizel groupie. This was one of the best guided tastings I have ever experienced.  Starting with Los Ancones – Santo Domingo – 67% cacao, we worked our way around a tasting map that took us to Venezuela, Madagascar, New Guinea and Sao Tome.  

AMANO ARTISAN CHOCOLATE : Art Pollard always continues to amaze.  This year he added a fourth chocolate bar to his repetoire.  JEMBRANA, 70% minimum cacao, is produced from beans that Art sourced from the Regency of Jembrana, on the southwest coast of the Indonesian island of Bali.  This is a gentle bar of chocolate.  Nice fruitiness with a hint of nuts and a background of vanilla that rounds out the flavors.

TAZA CHOCOLATE : This was the ‘wow’ moment for me at the show.  Stone ground chocolate so the texture is rough, not smooth like chocolate that has been conched.  Only four ingredients: cacao beans, cane sugar, cocoa butter and whole vanilla beans.  When I tasted the 80% Dark Stone Ground Organic Chocolate Bar I could taste cherries.  Added? No.  I was just tasting the terroir of the beans. 

If all this talk of chocolate has you drooling then you won’t want to miss the SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL CHOCOLATE SALON  which is happening this Saturday, March 21.  This year it is being held in a larger venue than in past years.  More room to roam around in a chocolate coma.  I will be there as a member of the tasting panel. See you there!

IS CHOCOLATE RECESSION PROOF?

What compels people, especially in this current economy, to pay $55 to watch a guy stand in front of a room and talk for two hours? Chocolate.  But, most importantly, chocolate as interpreted by Michael Recchiuti.  Over 20 people sat in a cool room (ambient temperature 65 degrees) in an industrial building in San Francisco this afternoon and watched while Michael demonstrated how to temper chocolate, how to form a tuile, how to make a perfect ganache and transform it into a truffle and what to do with unhopped barley-malt syrup:Oh, yeah, and then there were those triple chocolate cookies and chocolate bark.

I have taken two other classes from Michael.  He did a similar class to this one when his cookbook first came out.  There was also an amazing chocolate/wine pairing class that he did with the Ferry Market Wine Merchants two years ago.  I take Michael’s classes for two reasons. He has an alchemist’s aptitude for combing flavors (i.e. ruby red grapefruit and tarragon and for controlling fire. As I watched him make the Burnt Caramel Base(a signature Recchiuti Confections flavor) I was reminded of one of my cooking school chefs who taught me how to burn onions for the best onion soup.  It was at that moment, years ago, that I understood where flavor is developed.  It is developed at that precipice where one might panic and turn back. It is the moment when you think the onion might be burning or the croissant is getting too dark (see Tartine Bakery), or the sugar is about to burn beyond recognition.  Good chefs brown.  Great chefs burn.

For upcoming classes check out their website. The questionnaire passed out at the end of the class asked which topics we would be interested in for future demos.  I vote for Chocolate Pairings, Savory & Sweet Chocolate and Demos involving chocolate and other non-chocolate items (herbs, salts).  

Bye Bye Scharffen Berger

When I heard the news , I felt as though someone had told me that a good friend was moving away.  I am shocked especially since just the week before, at the Fancy Food Show, the local Scharffen Berger folks confidently told me that business was good and ‘chocolate is recession proof’. It is clear that their bosses waited until after the show to make the announcement. Am I surprised that they are whisking our own Scharffen Berger away?  Not really. When a corporation as big as Hershey’s goes shopping to create a portfolio of special chocolates and confections to create an Artisan division we can’t be too surprised when they eventually decide to take their purchases home, literally. California is a very different place to do business.  I once worked for a San Francisco cooking school that was purchased by a company based in Mississippi.  Talk about culture shock.  They kept sending us recipes that included cups and cups of mayonnaise and cream of mushroom soup.  They didn’t know why we wanted to keep the recipes that include crème fraiche.  I got out of there as soon as I could.

The discussion of whether or not the founders of Scharffen Berger sold out is moot and boring. Would you, could you turn down millions of dollars for a business you had worked hard to build? Nevertheless, this latest turn of events just doesn’t feel right. I think that we in the Bay Area are offended by the buying up of local food businesses because we have a proprietary attitude toward our bounty of food riches.  We are the ultimate Culinary Benefactors. We pride ourselves in recognizing a quality product when we taste it. It is our enthusiasm and our dollars that help these businesses to succeed.  Employees take a chance and hop on board because they are told that they are on the ground floor of something exciting and new. They work just a little bit harder.  And in the end, they are rewarded with a severance package and a not so chocolate-covered future. 

 

So you want to be a food writer...

It is rare that a food writer would presume to also offer financial advice.  While I don’t pretend to be able to tell you where you should invest what is left of your stock portfolio, I can tell you that the best place to invest the money you have left is in your own education.  Now is the time to figure out how to prepare for the future when the money starts to flow again.  I know from experience that this, too, shall pass. After a particularly rough financial time during the early 90’s I vowed that if I couldn’t read it, eat it or wear it I wouldn’t spend money on it. Because, in the end, they can’t take your education away from you and I have yet to see someone try to repossess a meal or my Blahniks. 

While the current economic climate might preclude you from dropping $350 for lunch at Per Se or $800 on a new pair of Pradas, I do know the one place to invest $425 with a guaranteed return.  And it is only one click away.  Enroll in David Leite’s Eight-Week Online Introduction to Food Writing Course .  I took my first food writing class from David in 2005 and I can still hear his voice every time I write a piece.  Take this class if you have ever toyed with the idea of becoming a food writer.  It will give you a real life education in real time.  And it is worth every penny. 

one last thing...

It has been quite a year, dear readers. The Muse couldn’t let 2008 slip past without getting a few last words in. I am happy to say that for every low this year there has been an equally great high.  A rollercoaster comes to mind. I know the same has been true for many of my friends.  Parents have died.  A baby was born.  A house was sold. A new career was launched in the same month that a job disappeared.  An engagement, a wedding and new friendships have been formed.  And what have I concluded after such a tumultuous year? That in the end the only thing that truly matters is love.

May the New Year bring you the comfort of love, the luck of good health and the joy of a meal or two or three shared with loved ones.  See you in 2009!