Move aside umami. Ammonium is now the sixth basic taste, according to new research published in the journal Nature Communications. Those findings have yet to be widely recognized, but elsewhere in the food world, there is a new kid on the block that's 100% verified: Pepper X. This chile pepper is now the world's hottest, dethroning the Carolina Reaper with up to 3 times the tongue-scorching heat. Ouch. There's also a new World's Best Bar, a fun place called Sips in Barcelona, and in Atlanta, you'll find five new Michelin-star restaurants. What else is new? This year's winners of prestigious culinary awards from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. But some things never change. Like Carolina whole hog BBQ. Fourth-generation pitmaster Sam Jones shows you how it's done in this detailed video. And since today is All Souls' Day and Día de los Muertos (another thing that never changes), my condolences to the friends and family of Food Network star chef Michael Chiarello, who passed recently from a mysterious anaphylactic shock. Rest in peace Chef. —Dave Joachim
It's CookbookTober! Get ready for an onslaught of cookbook roundups and best-of lists. High on my list? Robert Simonson's Encyclopedia of Cocktails. It's also restaurant best-of season: the New York Times and Bon Appétit magazine have highlighted the year's best restaurants, and Food & Wine magazine unveiled its class of Best New Chefs 2023. Plus, Colorado now has 5 restaurants with Michelin stars, announced in the state's first-ever Michelin guide. More into pizza than tweezer food? Check out this new ranking of the world's 100 best pizzerias. Scotch whisky lover? Find out how US distillers are creating Scotch-style whiskies with novel uses of local peat. If you're a fan of all things smoky, you may also be itching to burn some wood, especially now that cooler weather is approaching. Take a look at what BBQ pros Rodney Scott and Bryan Furman have to say on the subject. Finally, if you cook with olive oil and see it on sale, now may be a good time to stock up. The cost of olive oil surged 130% over the past year, and prices are expected to keep rising. Thanks, climate change!
Apologies for the late food news this month. I've been on vacation! While I was away, a London neuropsychopharmacologist unveiled his new synthetic alcohol, Alcarelle, that purports to get you buzzed without the hangover. Thanks Dr. Nutt — I could've used that while I was downing cocktails like water on vacation! 😬 There were some developments in the BBQ world, too: boxy rotisserie-style smokers are apparently edging out traditional barrel-shaped offsets, especially in Texas. Go figure. Speaking of smoke, the classical Thai combo of aromatic smoke and sweet desserts has resurfaced, now with a twist from Modern Thai chefs. Bring on the smoky sweets. One thing I'm not as crazy about is a new surcharge on restaurant checks: up to 4% for using a credit card. Now, it's gonna cost me to rack up those airline miles! But I get it. Times are hard for eateries everywhere. It beats raising menu prices. Finally, in my lifelong quest to eat well without dying from it (thanks, Jim Harrison), a single vegetable has hereby been deemed the world's healthiest, the ultimate superfood, the one veg to rule them all, according to the CDC. No, it's not kale. Scroll on to discover this magical überfood!
—Dave Joachim
This summer is breaking heat records everywhere, particularly in Texas. Take a peek inside Louie Meuller's famous Texas BBQ restaurant to see how pitmasters endure 130ºF pit rooms day in and day out. Feeling oddly sick after eating your favorite BBQ brisket or any meat? You may be among the half a million Americans who now have a meat allergy linked to lone-star tick bites, according to the CDC. Yeesh. As if we need another new disease. Thankfully, Salmonella poisoning may soon become less common: researchers recently developed meat packaging that can warn consumers of Salmonella contamination. Meanwhile, in the upper echelons of the restaurant world, Michelin just released its California guide, adding six new restaurants to the Michelin-starred ranks. Congrats all! And around the country, it appears that restaurant diners now order more cocktails than beer, according to data from the Distilled Spirits Council. Chalk it up to the pandemic and the taste that Americans developed for to-go cocktails, now legalized in 16 states. If you're among the converts, you may have recently sipped a cocktail crafted with fat-washed booze. Say what? Yes, it's rich, delicious, and makes a mean old-fashioned. Learn how to create your own fat-washed bourbon at home right here. It's simple. Cheers!
In honor of barbecue season now in full swing, we are introducing a new permanent section to Digest This. BBQ Hot Spot will feature top stories in the barbecue world all year long. This month's key BBQ news? A peek behind the jerk curtain of Caribbean barbecue. And now that the USDA has approved the sale of cell-cultured chicken in America, you can make your favorite jerk chicken recipe with lab-grown meat. Yay! Maybe you'd like to wash down that barbecue with America's best-selling beer? That would now be Modelo Especial, as Bud Light was recently dethroned from the #1 spot. Another recent #1: Central in Lima, Peru, has been named the #1 restaurant in the world by the "World's 50 Best" organization. Yes, it's award season, and you may be interested in the winners of the James Beard Awards announced recently in Chicago. If you're a fine dining superfan, you may also want to book reservations in Colorado, America's newest (and only 6th) dining destination to receive Michelin stars for its restaurants. Finally, it appears archaeologists have discovered that pizza may not have originated in Naples, Italy, after all. Maybe it can be traced back to ancient Pompeii. Here's to a world of new discoveries!
–Dave Joachim
With Memorial Day come and gone, it's officially BBQ season. And time for a little quiz: What destination in China is sometimes more crowded than the Great Wall? Answer: Zibo, China's self-proclaimed "Barbecue Experiential Ground". Check it out if you're a die-hard BBQ lover. Question #2: How much water should you add to whisky to "open up the flavors"? Answer: <20%, according to the latest research. Question #3: What is the best bar in America? Answer: Double Chicken Please in NYC. Question #4: Where are those wonders of food science known as MREs developed? Answer: A fascinating military lab in Natick, Massachusetts. Question #5: Who holds the Guinness World Record for longest cooking session ever? Answer: Nigerian chef Hilda Bassey just cooked for 100 hours straight, setting a new record. Bonus Question: In US restaurants over the past year, how much change has there been in QR-code menu use? Answer: minus 27%. Thank you for playing—and hope you enjoy this month's food news!
—Dave Joachim
Correction: In the last issue, I hastily referred to Czechia as Czechoslovakia, which it hasn't been since 1993. 🤦♂️ Thanks to Jakub Lutter for catching the error.
Let's get the sad news out of the way: Mimi Sheraton, the groundbreaking food writer, died last month at age 97. Over her six-decade career, she became the first restaurant critic to wear a disguise and ate more than 21,000 restaurant meals in 49 countries. Also last month, legendary chef Emily Meggett passed away at the age of 90. Meggett authored 2022's acclaimed Gullah Geechee Home Cooking and was famed as the matriarch of South Carolina's Edisto Island. Both amazing women. RIP. In better news, New York City food scraps have been converted into biogas and are now heating New Yorkers' homes for the first time. Here's to effective recycling. And the James Beard Foundation has released its full slate of 2023 Media Award Nominees. Congrats all! (Winners announced June 3.) Elsewhere in the fine dining world, you can now buy and sell restaurant reservations for hard-to-get tables, just like concert tickets. Many of those restaurants are also opting for service fees in lieu of traditional tips. When you dine out, check the bill's fine print to help calculate your tip. It may already be baked in. Finally, are you easily grossed out by food? You can now put a number to your level of food disgust thanks to this simple test devised by Swiss food researchers. FTR, my food disgust is pretty low at 20%.
March is a tumultuous month. There's madness on basketball courts. Green beer in bars. Whiskey fungus on wedding venues. And storms rage across America. Some storms even jeopardize summer crops such as strawberries. Meanwhile, in Switzerland, Swiss chocolate Toblerone can no longer display its symbols of "Swissness.". Amid this madness, some harbingers of spring appear: a fresh crop of cookbooks, the James Beard Award finalists, and the promise that chemists will finally answer the age-old question that's plagued beer lovers for decades: Bottles or Cans? Yes, poultry and egg prices remain high due to the ongoing bird flu, but the USDA is testing a poultry vaccine that may ultimately stabilize those prices. And restaurant recommendations are now better than ever, since ChatGPT partnered with Open Table. Plus, the USDA is finally revising its country of original labeling laws so that "Product of USA" on meat labels will mean that the animals were actually raised in the US and not raised elsewhere but only the meat processed here. These are positive developments, no? Welcome to the season of hope. —Dave Joachim
2022 was a big year for booze. After playing second fiddle to suds for decades, spirits have now outsold beer for the first time with 42.1% of the alcohol market share. Premium tequila and American whiskey are the top sellers. One of those whiskeys, Proof And Wood's The Representative, just won "World's Best Bourbon" in the 2023 World Whiskies Awards. After reading that news, I immediately ordered a bottle: only $56.99! In other beverage news, the US Food and Drug Administration has decided that soy milk can legally be called "milk," despite complaints from the dairy industry. Elsewhere in government oversight, the US Labor Department has fined a meatpacking sanitation company $1.5 million for hiring children as young as age 13 to clean meat saws, among other hazardous jobs. And the State Department has renewed its Diplomatic Culinary Partnership with the James Beard Foundation. The two organizations hand-picked an American Culinary Corps of more than 80 top chefs to act as cultural ambassadors during diplomatic programs both at home and abroad. Let's hope they serve the World's Best Bourbon at their next event! —Dave Joachim
You've probably heard that "World's Best Restaurant" Noma is closing permanently, that celebrated Chinese chef and cookbook author Eileen Yin-Fei Lo has died, and that Ronzoni is discontinuing its pastina shape pasta. Ronzoni fans are devastated. Really? Just use the Barilla version. I am saddened by the former news: my uncle lived in the same town as Eileen and I learned a great deal from her teachings. As for Noma, chef-owner Rene Redzepi said it best: "It's unsustainable...we have to work in a different way." Fortunately, fine dining is alive and well at other restaurants, including the long list (450 strong!) of this year's James Beard Award semifinalists. The finalists will be announced in March and winners anointed in June. In other news, the FDA has finally gotten around to adding sesame to its list of major food allergens, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering regulating gas stoves. Don't worry: your kitchen stove isn't going anywhere. But you may want to open a window or turn on your range hood. Meanwhile, Edinburgh scientists are restoring the flavors of 19th century scotch with forgotten barley varieties (looking forward to those bottlings!), and US researchers have engineered a spoon that enhances our perception of sweetness in the absence of sugar. Maybe in the near future, a spoonful of sugar that's completely empty will taste just as sweet. Until then, can we at least get some clear labeling on store-bought chicken stock?
—Dave Joachim