Five Uncommon Steaks For Summer Grilling
Most backyard cooks are familiar with T-bones and ribeyes. But there are more interesting and flavorful beef steaks to be grilled, especially when common cuts may be less available at your local supermarket.
Zabuton means “pillow” in Japanese, which describes this cut’s rectangular shape and its tenderness. Also known as the Denver steak, the zabuton is a supporting muscle residing under the blade of the chuck (shoulder) area. It has the deep, beefy flavor of the chuck without the toughness. From $34 for 8 ounces at Mishima Reserve.
Picanha (a.k.a. culotte or rump cap) is often skewered into a C-shape on a sword and served tableside at Brazilian steakhouses. It comes from just above the top sirloin and rump area on the steer and is cut with its thick cap of fat cap intact. From $55.59 for a 2 1/2-pound steak at Gaucho Ranch.
Bavette (a.k.a. flap or flank) is a small, relatively thin steak that comes from beneath the bottom sirloin. It is extremely flavorful, and according to Texas pitmaster Aaron Franklin, “the apex of the flavor and price ratio.”$19.75 for 1 1/4-pound sirloin flap at Crowd Cow.
Rib-Eye Cap (a.k.a. deckle) has the intense flavor of ribeye steaks but with a little more tenderness. The muscle is often referred to by its Latin name, spinalis dorsi, and since it’s relatively thin, it only needs a hard sear over the hottest part of the fire. $89 for 18 ounces at Snake River Farms.
Bife de Chorizo de Argentina (a.k.a. striploin) is not related to chorizo sausage. It is essentially equivalent to a NY strip steak. But to enjoy the authentic Argentinian steak, buy grass-fed beef from cattle raised on the Pampas. $24 per pound at La Carniceria Buenos Aires.
With Restaurants Closed, Food Banks Receive Tuscany’s Finest Food
Giuliano Faralli is the director of his local Caritas, a charity run by the Catholic Church in Montepulciano, Italy. Caritas distributes grocery bags to 500 families in Pienza, Chianciano, and other Tuscan towns once a week. In February, the group delivered food to about 120 families, but since lockdowns began, the number of families registered with Caritas grew to more than 3,000.
While the Italian government has authorized commercial businesses to reopen, many food producers in small Tuscan villages have elected to remain closed, partly due to a lack of tourists to buy their products. To avoid waste and help pay the producers for their foods, Faralli has coordinated the donation of high-quality Tuscan food products to Italian families in need.
When building family food packages, Faralli consults a nutritionist and regularly includes pantry staples like pasta, tomato puree, beans, canned tuna, biscuits, flour, and sugar. But tucked among these staples, the packages also include premium foods like PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) Prosciutto Toscano, Finocchiona (salami seasoned with wild fennel seeds), and Pecorino di Pienza. Some packages even include Cinta Senese, prosciutto made from an ancient pig breed that costs about $45 per pound. These premium local foods are typically exported to upscale restaurants or sold to tourists, but food producers are happy that Italians in neighboring villages now get to enjoy them in donated food packages.
Portland Chef Demonstrates Beeswax Curing Technique For Fish
Chef Jacob Harth, owner of seafood-focused Erizo restaurant in Portland, Oregon, lightly ages his fish with beeswax, an ancient preservation method. This gentle curing technique coats the fish in melted beeswax, which lets some oxygen in and out, allowing the fish to dry slowly while protecting it from spoilage. The fish texture concentrates a bit and the beeswax adds a unique aroma and texture to the skin.
At Erizo, Harth makes extensive use of this preservation technique to ensure a year-round supply of high-quality fish. He first coats the gutted whole fish in a paper thin layer of melted beeswax, then hangs the fish to dry for about a week. After removing the beeswax and beheading the fish, Harth often grills butterflied whole fish or trimmed pieces and serves them with a simple sauce to highlight the cured fish’s unique texture and flavor.
Home Delivery Of Premium Fresh Ingredients Is Likely Permanent, Say Retailers
In the absence of restaurant sales, farmers, fishmongers and wholesalers are making house calls, and the change could be permanent. Dozens of premium food purveyors now sell direct to consumers, many for the first time. To spur sales, some have lowered or dropped minimum order requirements and/or delivery fees. Baldor Specialty Foods, the Bronx wholesaler specializing in fine produce and meat, dropped its minimum order for home delivery from $250 down to $200 and expanded its delivery area from New Hampshire to Maryland. Other restaurant supply companies that once sold local vegetables by the case to chefs now offer them in packages of 16, eight or four ounces.
Around the country, ingredients like wild morels, specialty cheeses, grass-fed beef, locally milled flour, green almonds, finger limes, sea urchin roe, sushi-grade tuna, oysters, and fresh-caught fish are now available through online stores and home delivery. Four Star Seafood, a San Francisco based seafood wholesaler, has had enormous success with selling direct to home cooks. “We certainly don’t want to let this go when this is all done,” said co-owner Adrian Hoffman. “Selling directly to consumers is almost a better business in that it spits out enough cash to pay off everything we owed.” In March, the company rerouted its 13 fish trucks from Bay Area fine-dining restaurants to the homes of individual customers. “The cash flow model is incredible,” said Hoffman, echoing the sentiments of other fine food wholesalers and purveyors who have begun to see big economic opportunities in direct-to-consumer sales.
Lavada Nahon Preserves African American Food History At New York Historic Site
Lavada Nahon is a culinary historian, interpreter, and scholar. She studies both the food of the Mid-Atlantic region and the enslaved cooks who cooked for the upper class. Twenty years ago, Nahon toured the Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, and fell in love with the home’s wide hearth, where cooking took place. “I cooked over fire in my house growing up, and was a Girl Scout, so that kind of cooking was not foreign to me,” says Nahon. “I wanted to learn how to cook a roast, which is one of the most difficult things about historic cooking. I wrote to the site director and said ‘I’ll volunteer for a year for private time on the hearth,’ and she agreed.”
During her time as a volunteer, Nahon learned that the Van Cortlandt family had enslaved African cooks. “It doesn’t take long to realize that all of these wealthy families owned slaves, and their cooks were enslaved as well,” says Nahon. “I wanted to know who these slaves were, and what were they doing.” Seeking an answer, Nahon found herself cooking and lecturing among many historical sites, while studying the lives of enslaved cooks. Old historical documents such as wills, cookbooks and journals all revealed answers to Nahon’s questions about the lives of enslaved people in the Mid-Atlantic region. Now, she has taken on a new role as the interpreter of African American history for the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation. “We know that people didn’t grow up on collard greens or sweet potatoes because they didn’t grow here,” says Nahon. “These cooks were making high English-style food, they’re cooking Dutch food. They’re cooking Jewish food and French food; they’re cooking what their owners want them to cook.”
Pitmaster Aaron Franklin Reveals How To Make Real-Deal BBQ At Home
Since Aaron Franklin began Franklin Barbecue with his wife in 2009, he has been devoted to making delicious barbecue, even manufacturing his own barbecue pits. To inspire others to make fantastic barbecue at home, Franklin shares these tips.
Source local wood. Franklin says that barbecue has been homogenized in many ways, and he encourages people of different regions to source wood locally. “…If it’s hickory or it’s mesquite or it’s pecan or if you have red oak or almond…that’s kind of what makes a regional specialty,” says Franklin. “That’s what barbecue used to be—you had different animals and different woods and that’s what made that style. You don’t have to get post oak from Texas, just use what you have.”
Avoid kiln-dried wood. Franklin points out that firewood has to be kiln-dried to legally cross state lines. “They have to heat it up to get rid of bugs and stuff that are in the wood, so that changes the structure,” he says. “That dries it out so much you don’t really get much smoke and everything burns so much faster.”
Use a solid rig. “I’ve been building cookers for about 10 years now and building backyard-size pits I’ve been working on for five years,” says Franklin. He recommends using a steel smoker that excels at holding heat and smoke. “Our smoker is a mini version of what we do here. It’s a six-foot-long, handmade offset barbecue pit with a semi-insulated fire box that fits three briskets. It’s all made out of 5/16-inch steel, so it’s intended to be the kind of thing that you pass down, generation to generation—like a cast-iron skillet.”
Skip the grass-fed beef. The award-winning pitmaster says he prefers not to use grass-fed beef for smoked brisket, claiming it doesn’t have enough fat and some of its gamier flavors don’t mix well with smoke. “I usually would go with Angus as a breed but you could order Wagyu online,” says Franklin. “I would get the fattiest thing from your local butcher. Really, Costco is a good place to go sometimes.”
As the global food supply, restaurants, and everyday folks around the world adjust to pandemic catastrophes, a 1-year-old in the kitchen is helping to bring smiles to people’s faces. “Chef Kobe” has an infectious, outsized personality and his parents began sharing their cooking sessions on Instagram near the end February. While the pandemic dragged on, their account quickly amassed over a million followers. Kobe’s parents, Ashley and Kyle Wian, say they are “all about hands on learning,” and that cooking teaches basic skills. “He investigates new ingredients, feels new textures, learns practical skills like pouring, scooping and measuring,” says Ashley. “That is why this all started…He has fine tuned so many motor skills just by helping me.” The Wians are thrilled that Kobe’s explorations in the kitchen can help people all over the world smile during a time when it’s needed most.
Documentary Reveals Salty Side of Mexican Food Icon Diana Kennedy
Diana Kennedy, widely regarded as one of the greatest living documenters of Mexican cuisine, now has her own documentary. The food icon is nearing a century of life at 97 years old, and has only now shown signs of slowing down. The documentary may be the last glimpse of Diana Kennedy in her true element, driving her stick-shift around Mexico and tending to her gardens. “I have planned only five [more] years, and nobody can say no,” Kennedy says in the film. “There’s a time, it’s like the caducidad, the date on your ingredients you buy, OK? They last so long.” The cookbook author has shaped the way Americans think about Mexican cooking throughout her entire life.
Hot Dogs Take Flight Under Quarantine
Hot dogs sales skyrocketed in March, according to data from data analytics firm IRI. Hot dog sales increased 123% in the week ending March 15, compared to the same week last year. Then sales increased 127% in the week ending March 22. As general consumer stockpiling slowed in April, sales fell slightly, but 2020 remains a banner year for hot dogs. Since early March at the start of the pandemic, sales have been at least 29% higher every week compared to the same weeks in 2019, according to IRI. Founder of 210 Analytics, Anne-Marie Roerink, explains that hot dogs offer several advantages to unemployed, cash-strapped consumers concerned with meat shortages: they are inexpensive, have a long shelf life, and make quick and easy meals, particularly for children no longer getting meals from school.
Plant-Based “Meat” Sales Are Soaring
U.S. consumers continue to develop a taste for plant-based proteins. During the four-week period from April 12 to May 9, sales of all plant-based meat substitutes were 35% higher than the four-week period ending January 18, according to consumer-analytics company Nielsen. The companies with the biggest increases are Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, manufacturers of a new generation of meat-like products made with plant proteins. Why are consumers buying more of these products? Nineteen-year-old William Thomas of Brookline, New Hampshire, says he’s eating plant-based foods because “I’d always been trying to block out a lot of what was going on behind the scenes of the meat industry, but I can’t ignore it forever.” Faizal Karmali, 45, of Brooklyn, turned to plant-based meat because “it uses much less water to grow a bunch of peas than it does to grow a cow,” and because he doesn’t want to stress the meat industry further.
The coronavirus has been hard on the U.S. meat industry, forcing dozens of slaughterhouses to close temporarily, but the plant-based food industry had already been growing prior to the pandemic. Consumers were seeking alternatives in both fast food restaurants and in grocery stores, and manufacturers of plant-based meat substitutes had already been ramping up production for increased sales this year. Impossible Foods products are now sold in more than 3,000 stores, up from fewer than 200 in January, and the company has increased its workforce to 653 full-time employees, up from 587 in January. Beyond Meat also reported net revenue of $97.1 million in the first quarter of this year, an increase of 141 percent over last year. Its products are now in 25,000 grocery stores nationwide, and the company recently expanded into China. “We were saying that by 2030, Beyond Meat could have a $1 billion in sales,” said Alexia Howard, senior analyst at food equity research firm Bernstein. “Now, we’re saying by the end of 2020.”
