trans Fatty Blog

Shredding for Pleasure

I have just made a purchase that gives me great pleasure: a shredder. (That's a paper shredder; no culinary implications.)

From tequila buzzes to home makeovers, most of life's perks are transitory. That new kitchen will eventually grow dated; your well-toned abs will soften or expand with age. But shredding the reams of unwanted documents that have taken over your closet is forever.

Fatty Adjectives

I have seen the future and it is dressed up with far too many adjectives.

At a recent James Beard Foundation Dinner, described in the Chicago Tribune as "culinary alchemy" and a "food revolution," items included a hollow sphere of watermelon and saffron frozen in liquid nitrogen (basically a hollow popsicle without the stick) and

Chino Farms Carrots and Venezuelan Chocolate with chocolate crepe, milk jam sauce, Indonesian long pepper ice cream, chocolate caramel sauce, cherry vinegar, and microbasil.

Is that a dish or a list of ingredients? It's not complexity I'm opposed to, but the flaunting of complexity itself as a feature. Indonesian long pepper ice cream is really just ice cream flavored with long Indonesian peppers, no more exotic in principle than vanilla. I'm not against naming your sources, but there are more subtle ways to do it. Chefs, like writers, need to learn the value of brevity. If anything, food should be more complicated than it looks rather than the other way around.

Dipping Sugar

My 2 year-old son uses a French fry as a utensil for eating ketchup. He dips a fry, sucks off the ketchup, then goes back to the well again with the same fry, repeating as needed until nothing is left but an inedible mess of slimed potato. Then he grabs a new fry and starts again.

And you thought food blogs were supposed to be appetizing.

I bring this up not to dissuade you from ever having children—that's your call—but to make a point. I'll give you a hint -- it's not the authentic tomato flavor he's after. Like most of us, what he really craves is sweet.

That's right, though cleverly disguised with just enough vinegar, ketchup is loaded with sugar, more dessert than dinner as far as nutrition is concerned. From barbecue sauce, to honey mustard dressing, to sweet and sour pork, to the French gastriche, the idea of mixing sugar and acid is not new. What is new is the habit of pouring it over everything we eat, made easier than ever by the introduction of the squeezable bottle. (Once upon a time you had to wait for your ketchup, but not anymore. Sales must have skyrocketed. )

So next time you pick up that red bottle, take a pause. It might not be your burger that's making you fat. It might be your ketchup.

Sourdough Pancakes

This week at Tuesday breakfast we served real sourdough pancakes made from my homegrown starter, leavened by the natural yeast that grows in my own kitchen. Strange as that may sound, let me assure you there's yeast in your kitchen, too. And while the whole sourdough process may sound like some bad sixth-grade science experiment, it's actually the oldest way to make yeast-leavened bread. (Unless you managed to scam some yeast from your local brewery, it was the only way until commercial yeast became available in the 19th century.) For all I know it was a sixth-grader who discovered on some pre-biblical hearth that if you started each new baking with a bit of last week's dough, your bread would rise magically in the oven, and would have a more interesting flavor and crumb. But whoever it was, they were on to something, and thousands of years later, this is still the best way to make bread. Or in this case, pancakes. (I'm betting they were just trying to find a way to recycle their leftovers, but it paid off.)