Padma Lakshmi’s Taste The Nation Explores Immigrant Roots Of American Cuisine
In her new 10-episode Hulu series, Taste The Nation, Padma Lakshmi explores the history of American food through modern-day cooks around the country. Each episode features a “hero dish” made by an immigrant community, and the show emphasizes indigenous people such as the Navajo in Phoenix, Arizona. The show delves into personal experiences of immigration and assimilation in American food culture, tracing the lineage of iconic dishes through wars and colonization. Lakshmi, who is also a host on Bravo’s wildly popular Top Chef show, immigrated to the U.S. from India at the age of four. She had the idea for Taste the Nation while working as an ambassador for immigrant issues with the American Civil Liberties Union.
Study Finds Most Avocado Oil Is Rancid Or Adulterated
In a new study published in the journal Food Control, researchers found that 82% of the 22 domestic and imported oil samples tested were either rancid or blended with other oils. Some samples contained no avocados at all, despite being labeled “pure” or “extra virgin” avocado oil. Three samples with such labels contained 100% soybean oil (no avocados at all), and six samples contained large amounts of sunflower, safflower, and soybean oil. “Because there are no standards to determine if an avocado oil is of the quality and purity advertised, no one is regulating false or misleading labels,” said Selina Wang, PhD, who led the study.
“These findings highlight the urgent need for standards to protect consumers and establish a level playing field to support the continuing growth of the avocado oil industry,” added Wang. In the meantime, make sure your virgin avocado oil is green in color, smells fresh, and tastes buttery and grassy. A harsh aroma reminiscent of Play-Doh is a sign of rancidity.
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.
Local Food Boxes Deliver The Flavor Of Place To Your Door
As summer travel remains constricted due to the pandemic, local food companies across the U.S. have begun shipping food boxes that capture a city or state’s unique identity. Interested in tasting the local specialties from Alaska, New Jersey, Kentucky, New Orleans, Albuquerque, Philadelphia, or Maine? Each box offers different tastes from the area such as hot sauce made from Alaskan kelp, New Jersey’s blueberry butter, and New Mexico’s official state cookie, the cinnamon-sprinkled biscochito.
Bon Appétit Editor In Chief And Condé Nast Video Programming VP Resign Over “Racist Culture”
Things are shaking up at the popular cooking magazine Bon Appétit. Adam Rapoport, its editor in chief since 2010, resigned after a 2004 photo of him wearing a racially insensitive costume resurfaced on social media. The photo prompted several BA staffers to speak out about personal experiences of racism at Condé Nast, the media company that has been nurturing an audience of elite readers since 1909 in magazines such as Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Glamour, Architectural Digest, and Vanity Fair. BA Staffers cited several examples in which people of color at the company have been treated unequally and paid less than white staffers in similar positions. After resigning from Bon Appétit, Rapoport acknowledged his shortcomings in an Instagram post, saying “From an extremely ill-conceived Halloween costume 16 years ago to my blind spots as an editor, I’ve not championed an inclusive vision.” Amanda Shapiro, the former editor of BA’s companion publication Healthyish, was named acting deputy director. Shapiro took the job on a temporary basis only, urging Condé Nast management to name a person of color as the new Bon Appétit editor in chief.
Two days after Rapoport’s departure, Condé Nast vice president Matt Duckor tendered his resignation as well. Duckor was in charge of Bon Appetit‘s wildly successful video programming, including its popular “Test Kitchen” YouTube videos, which have more than 6 million subscribers and had 76.7 million views in the month of March alone, according to company data. Several current and former BA staffers said that Duckor failed to feature people of color in BA video content or fairly compensate them for their work. Reporters for Business Insider spoke with fourteen former or current BA staffers or contributors who identify as people of color and said there is a pervasive “toxic” culture of exclusion at the company. Some of those interviewed said that people of color are included in videos only as tokens and that few of them have the same lucrative video contracts as their white peers.
After the high-level departures, Bon Appétit and its sister website, epicurious, issued an apology acknowledging that “At times we have treated non-white stories as ‘not newsworthy’ or ‘trendy.’ Other times we have appropriated, co-opted, and Columbused them.” The apology also said that “While we’ve hired more people of color, we have continued to tokenize many BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color] staffers and contributors in our videos and on our pages.” After citing specific changes that will be made, the statement went on to say that the company vows “to be transparent, accountable, and active as we begin to dismantle racism at our brands.” .
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
