Why does bacon smell so good?

Now this is science teaching with a real purpose. The American Chemical Society, apparently the world's largest scientific society with more than 161,000 members has tackled that important question of: "Why does bacon smell so good?" In collaboration with the Compound Interest blog it worked to break down the science of the wonderful smell. The results are in the video

An American in Copenhagen

Noma’s Daniel Giusti: A chef at the top of the world: Dan Giusti, formerly of Washington’s 1789, runs the kitchen at Noma in Copenhagen, where his long days include reading the mind of executive chef and owner Rene Redzepi and managing the tight orchestration of service at what some call the world’s best restaurant.

A revealing insight from the Washington Post into the role an American chef now plays at the famous Danish restaurant Noma's.

... at Noma in Copenhagen, which recently regained the title of No. 1 restaurant in the world, the mistake is decidedly out of line. Giusti, the former Washingtonian charged with running the kitchen for executive chef and owner Rene Redzepi, knows that guests don’t travel thousands of miles and battle weeks for a reservation to dine on an incomplete dish, even if few would ever find anything wrong with it.

This is something the 29-year-old Giusti understands better than his charges: You cannot let the standards slip, no matter how insignificant some might seem to an outsider or even to a cook. A restaurant still striving for its third Michelin star can never compromise. It cannot compromise on service, plating, decor, ingredients and certainly not on the amount of lumpfish sperm required for a dish conceived by Redzepi in the test kitchen upstairs.

In 21st-century New York, the cutting edge of cuisine is the beet-heavy, cabbage-friendly, herring-loving diet of 19th-century Jews in Eastern Europe.

Everything New Is Old Again - NYTimes.com:

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Artisanal gefilte fish. Slow-fermented bagels. Organic chopped liver. Sustainable schmaltz.
These aren’t punch lines to a fresh crop of Jewish jokes. They are real foods that recently arrived on New York City’s food scene. And they are proof of a sudden and strong movement among young cooks, mostly Jewish-Americans, to embrace and redeem the foods of their forebears. That’s why, at this moment in 21st-century New York, the cutting edge of cuisine is the beet-heavy, cabbage-friendly, herring-loving diet of 19th-century Jews in Eastern Europe.
“It turns out that our ancestors knew what they were doing,” said Jeffrey Yoskowitz, an owner of Gefilteria, a company that makes unorthodox versions of gefilte fish and is branching out into slow-brined pickles and strudel. “The recipes and techniques are almost gone, and we have to capture the knowledge before it’s lost.”

Giving fish its silky, smooth texture when raw, and a flaky, light texture when cooked.

Sushi's Secret: Why We Get Hooked On Raw Fish : The Salt : NPR:

One fish, two fish, white fish, red fish: Muscles that depend on oxygen tend to be red, while those that don't are white. Salmon flesh is orange because of the food the fish eat.
Kake/

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But why do so many of us find utter bliss in eating raw sea creatures but aren't so inclined to chow down on uncooked birds, cows or pigs?
A big part of it is gravity — or the effective lack of it in the ocean, says biophysicist Ole Mouritsen, author of Sushi: Food for the Eye, the Body and the Soul.
"Fish are so soft. You can stick your finger through their muscles," he says. "Try doing that with a chicken or cow. Fish muscle is very different than that in land animals."
Why? Because fish can afford to be lazier than terrestrial animals. Fish essentially float all the time. So their muscles don't work constantly to fight gravity.
"Fish don't have to support their body weight," Mouritsen says, "so their muscle fibers are shorter and less tough than those in land animals." The same goes for the connective tissue holding the muscle fibers together: It's delicate and weak.
The result? Fish has a silky, smooth texture when it's raw, and a flaky, light texture when it's cooked.

The boom in goat meat

BBC News - Australia herds profits from feral goat meat:

Australia is the world's largest exporter of goat meat, and suppliers believe the trade is about to experience a boom.

"I can see it doubling. It's just got that potential to keep growing - the amount of feral goats," says Tim Walmsley, manager of the Ausgoat depot near Cobar in New South Wales.Continue reading the main story“Start QuoteThere are a lot of people making a living out of [goat meat] - Tim Walmsley Ausgoat depot manager 

"They say the Western division of New South Wales has a population of anywhere between a million and two million goats. It's a huge number of goats that can be supplied,"

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Oils ain't oils - It's the olives what do it

BBC News - Olive oil and salad combined 'explain' Med diet success:

"The combination of olive oil and leafy salad or vegetables is what gives the Mediterranean diet its healthy edge, say scientists.

When these two food groups come together they form nitro fatty acids which lower blood pressure, they told PNAS journal.

The unsaturated fat in olive oil joins forces with the nitrite in the vegetables, the study of mice suggests.

Nuts and avocados along with vegetables should work too, they say."



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France's battle of the baguette

It has been a losing battle for the boulangeries of France in recent years. Supermarkets with their pre-prepared frozen mixes bolstered with fast-rise additives have grabbed an increasing share of the bread market. The traditional baguette, baked from scratch on the premises from just flour, salt, water, and leavening, is now down to a less than 25% share of the market.
They tried back in 1998 to reverse the slide with legislation to prohibit the use of the word “boulangerie” on premises that didn't follow the old bread making principles or that used freezing at any point in the process. And traditional bakers have been running a promotional campaign to save the baguette from extinction by plastic wrapped sliced bread.

This week France launches the 19th edition of its annual Bread Festival across the country, a celebration of bakers who still hold dear the tradition of their craft. This year’s theme is centered around the crème de la crème of baguettes, called, suitably, the “tradition" as The Christian Science Monitor explains in a look at French cuisine on its website:

Top players in the bread industry continue to tout the benefits of traditional bread, says Jean-Pierre Crouzet, president of the National Confederation of Bakers and Pastry-Makers in France, who headed a 150-minute panel on this subject to launch the bread festival.
Bread’s decline has spurred a class of purists, like Fradette, and given rise to new experiments that could once again change French breadmaking – for the better.
Back in Provence, in the town of Apt, two giant bags of wheat indigenous to the region recently sat in the foyer of the Parc Naturel Regional, awaiting a local baker's demonstration for school children. It’s part of an initiative to revive a regional wheat that is long off the market but hardier and less in need of pesticide and fertilizer. The wheat’s lower yields, however, make it more expensive.
About 20 farmers are planting 150 hectares of the wheat, which is turned into bread sold in Provence at about a dozen bakeries. Public education is key to the project’s success, but so too are willing buyers. “We need to have consumers who are willing to eat it,” says the confederation's Nathalie Charles, acknowledging that the future remains unclear.

Micro brewery hop bombs lead to a doubled price

Hop prices soar as US craft beer boom takes off - FT.com:

... the craze for the microbrews made by small independent brewers has led to a scramble for hops, the key ingredient used to add flavour and bitterness.

In the US, where the movement was born, the $14bn craft beer industry has seen annual double-digit production growth over the past few years. This has doubled the price of the specialist aroma and flavour hops favoured by craft brewers to about $7 to $10 a pound over the past five years – the highest since 2007-08 when the market was hit by a severe drought.

Craft beers use between four to 10 times more hops than the average lager produced by multinational beer companies and are often described as “hop bombs”.

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Roast swan - legal in England for royalty and Cambridge dons but not for us mere mortals

Colonel Harland Sanders, I read recently, got his catering start in Kentucky with a little café he named Indiana Cooked Goose & Broasted Swan. Not a great success apparently but if first you don't succeed ... Strange though that we don't see swan on menus as we do chicken. I mean, it is a bird and a big one at that with meat described by one chef who has eaten it as "deep red, lean, lightly gamey, moist, and succulent."
"I have a lot of friends in Michigan who hunt, and we once ate a swan at Christmas nine or ten years ago,” Mario Batali, told Esquire's Eat Like a Man blog back in 2011. The same blog had Cathy Kaufman, who teaches culinary history at the Institute of Culinary Education, noting that "menus from the medieval period were replete with game birds such as swans, herons, and peacocks. They were food for the elite, prized for their beauty and seeming nobility, but fell out of favor in the 15th and 16th centuries. The culprit was the turkey, a more flavorful, tender bird."
Helped in Britain at least by the fact that Swans have been the property of the Crown since around the twelfth century, with Edward IV’s Act Concerning Swans in 1482 clearly defining that ownership.

Often served at feasts, roast swan was a favored dish in the courts of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, particularly when skinned and redressed in its feathers and served with a yellow pepper sauce; others preferred to stuff the bird with a series of increasingly smaller birds, in the style of a turducken.
An article in Modern Farmer this month updates the royal prerogative:

To this day, Queen Elizabeth II participates in the yearly Swan Upping, in which the royal Swan Master counts and marks swans on the Thames, and the kidnapping and eating of swans can be considered a treasonous crime. Great Britain’s royals are still allowed to eat swan, as are the fellows of St. John’s College of Cambridge, but to the best of our knowledge, they no longer do. Thanks to stories like Leda and the Swan and Lohengrin, the birds appear almost mythical; a restaurant on the Baltic island of Ruegen had swan on their menu for a short time, before protests began and it was swiftly removed.

In the United States the Colonel Sanders experiment might be on the verge of being repeated.

In Michigan, however, which has the highest population of mute swans in North America, the creatures are considered pests. According to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, the statewide breeding population increased from about 5,700 to more than 15,000 in just ten years. The birds attack people in the water and on shore, particularly children that wander too close to their nests.
In Michigan, mute swans threaten other native birds, such as common loons, black terns, and trumpeter swans, and are also destroying the wetlands where they live. The DNR has set a controversial plan to reduce the population to less than 2,000 by 2030 that involves issuing permits to remove mute swans and their nests from approved properties; a hunting season is not under consideration.

But someone must be doing a bit of swan hunting as in New York you can buy one if you have a spare thousand.

The classic tale of the wine judging nonsense

An excellent retelling of the exposure of the nonsense that is wine judging in the South China Morning Post (reprinted from the London Daily Telegraph) recently.It tells the story of American statistician turned wine maker Robert Hodgson who analysed how different so-called wine judging experts differed so widely about the quality of wines.
An example:

"I looked at a set of data that showed the scores for wines that were entered into as many as 13 different competitions," he says. "I tracked the scores from one competition to another. There were, like, 4,000 wines that I looked at. Of all the ones that got a gold medal, virtually all got a 'no award' some place else. It turns out that the probability of getting a gold medal matches almost exactly what you'd expect from a completely random process."

Other gems recalled in this piece that it well worth reading in full:

One French academic, Frédéric Brochet, decanted the same ordinary bordeaux into a bottle with a budget label and one with that of a grand cru. When the connoisseurs tasted the "grand cru" they rhapsodised its excellence while decrying the "table" version as "flat". In the US, psychologists at the University of California, Davis, dyed a dry white various shades of red and lied about what it was. Their experts described the sweetness of the drink according to whether they believed they were tasting rosé, sherry, bordeaux or burgundy. A similar but no less sobering test was carried out in 2001 by Brochet at the University of Bordeaux, in France. His 54 experts didn't spot that the red wine they were drinking was a white dyed with food colouring. 

A rave review for a pizza - Sydney's Da Mario

It would be harder to give a pizza restaurant higher praise than John Lethlean delivered about Sydney's Da Mario.

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Searching the forests for raw food and natural happiness

Nestling alongside the saffron and Chinese caterpillar fungus in the shop of Zhang Xiaowei in Lhasa, Tibet are jars of honey from Nyingchi gathered from low to high altitudes in the Yarlung Zangbo Grand Canyon. It is honey of a rare purity with beekeepers taking advantage of blossoms which are free from pollution and pesticides but production is limited by the comparatively short blossom season. To justify the annual trek into the Canyon beekeepers need a higher price than their peers from down on the plains but Zhang Xiaowei found it hard to convince his customers to pay it.

Until, that is, last month when Nyingchi honey featured in the first episode of the popular China Central Television documentary A Bite of China II. Almost immediately after the program was shown, featuring the story of a Tibetan family searching the forests for raw food and natural happiness, Zhang’s honey sales began to increase and he has now sold 3,500 bottles to customers online.

The China Daily reports that this year, Tmall, an online retail platform, has been authorized to launch a website featuring sales information about food mentioned in the documentary.Among the first batch of 100 food products, most of which went online on April 18 when the program’s second season made its debut, Sichuan sausages, Peking duck and Nyingchi honey were the first to sell out.

CCTV head Hu Zhanfan has described the program as a record of Chinese people’s “living wisdom and cultural traditions”. A Bite of China, which explores the relationship between people and food, was the most recognized TV production in China in 2012.
Staging a high-profile return, the documentary’s eight-episode second season travels to more than 150 places nationwide to focus on artistically crafted urban banquets, simple home cooking and nature’s raw offerings. ...

The Chinese food series becoming popular around the world

Zhang, the online shop owner in Lhasa, hopes the documentary will help to boost development of an industry. The local government had been supportive of beekeeping, and after the documentary was shown, some businesspeople had also begun to show their interest, Zhang said. “I hope the popularity of Nyingchi honey is just a start,” he added.

Return of the Murray Cod

From the Sydney Morning Herald : From paddock to plate, endangered Murray cod are back on the menu

The endangered and iconic Australian native fish is back on the menu, thanks to new fish farms ...

Back in the day: the fish was plentiful but heavy demand put it on the endangered list. Photo: State Library NSW

The largest of all native fish, cod have grown to more than 100 kilograms in the wild. But commercial fishing and changes in their native habitat in south-eastern Australia caused numbers to fall, prompting a commercial fishing ban and strict limits on recreational fishing. Until recently, farming cod has had mixed success, mostly because of widespread cannibalism when they were bred in farm dams. 

Marianvale, the largest of about 10 NSW producers that are now producing more than $450,000 worth of cod for fish markets and restaurants, has found that tightly packing the cod in the indoor tanks with moving water reduces aggression as it limits their territories. 

Cod may not play nice, but the fish is ''delicious'' and has a beautiful succulent texture, said Darren Robertson, a co-owner of the Three Blue Ducks in Bronte. His restaurant is one of a handful, including Rockpool, Sean Moran's new restaurant Tomah Gardens in the Blue Mountains Botanic Gardens and Quay, that has recently put farmed cod back on the menu after many years when it was unavailable.

A tablespoon of clay a day ...

BBC News - Who, What, Why: Why do people eat clay?:



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The US actor Shailene Woodley raised eyebrows this week after revealing on a chatshow that she eats a teaspoon of clay a day. But is it good for you?

In an earlier blog post, Woodley - who played George Clooney's daughter Alexandra in the Descendants and is the star of teen movie Divergent - wrote that clay was one of the healthiest things you can put in your body.

"I've discovered that clay is great for you because your body doesn't absorb it, and it apparently provides a negative charge, so it bonds to negative isotopes. And, this is crazy: it also helps clean heavy metals out of your body." She learned about it from an African taxi driver, she said. Some of her friends make clay toothpaste that you swallow instead of spit out. She cautioned that it was important to get it from a safe source.

Toasted cheese sandwich? Like dope with that?

Finally there's a food truck that sells marijuana-infused food.

The world moves on. Got a touch of the munchies? Then pull up at the Samich Truck and try a Samich (sunbutter and jelly), Banh Mi (Vietnamese-style pork sandwich), the Bronco (BBQ pulled pork sandwich), PhaReal Cheese Samich or a Kushie Tomato Soup. All are carefully prepared with cannabutter and canna-oil from magicalbutter.com — made from the very best cannabis with the help of the company's automatic botanical extractor.

The mobile food stall, a converted 40-foot school bus, made its debut last month at the U.S. Cannabis Cup in Denver. The team behind it envisions an entire fleet of these infused-food trucks along with a permanent beachside location in Seattle and, eventually, California and Florida.

You can find details of how to make your own cannabutter and canna-oil on theCannabist website, along with some recipes to use them on.

One way of staving off global warming - stop eating meat

What If Everyone in the World Became a Vegetarian? | Mother Jones:

"At least one research team has run the numbers on what global veganism would mean for the planet. In 2009 researchers from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency published their projections of the greenhouse gas consequences if humanity came to eat less meat, no meat, or no animal products at all. The researchers predicted that universal veganism would reduce agriculture-related carbon emissions by 17 percent, methane emissions by 24 percent, and nitrous oxide emissions by 21 percent by 2050. Universal vegetarianism would result in similarly impressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. What's more, the Dutch researchers found that worldwide vegetarianism or veganism would achieve these gains at a much lower cost than a purely energy-focused intervention involving carbon taxes and renewable energy technology. The upshot: Universal eschewal of meat wouldn't single-handedly stave off global warming, but it would go a long way toward mitigating climate change."



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Genuine Greek warmth at fair prices - Perth's Brika

Food that is described as straight, traditional and honest,

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