→ October 9, 2012
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Culinary Intelligence.

Peter Kaminsky is a longtime food writer, as a journalist, food critic, and cookbook co-author, who found that his career was threatening to shorten his lifespan – after a few decades in the business, he found himself overweight, prediabetic, and rejected when he applied for life insurance. His newest book, Culinary Intelligence: The Art of Eating Healthy (and Really Well), promises an approach to food that keeps calories in check without sacrificing too much pleasure while weighing the ethical concerns about some types of foods. I thought it fell a little short of those goals, but for someone looking to transition from a diet heavy on processed foods and chain restaurant meals, it’s an excellent starting point to get you to elevate your eating habits, one that never lapses into preaching or the monotony of calorie-counting.

This short (209 pages in deckle-edged hardcover) volume covers quite a bit of ground without much wasted verbiage. Kaminsky briefly recounts his history as a food writer whose waistline expanded with his fame, and discusses how he dropped forty-odd pounds without feeling like he was depriving himself. Some of the advice is obvious – cut out sugars and white flours, load up on whole foods, fill your stomach with vegetables rather than with meat (although he never argues for abstaining from meat entirely) – but much of it will be useful to readers who grasp that stuff but feel like their meals have become boring or even painful. There’s a lot of advice on cooking, including lists of key ingredients to keep on hand as well as using the powers of science, notably caramelization and the Maillard reaction (the flavors created when foods high in protein are browned). Kaminsky abbreviates this concept as FPC, or Flavor per Calorie, a variable that should be maximized at every opportunity – sound advice, easily followed with some basic kitchen skills and ingredient knowledge, some of which is contained within this book.

He also discusses sensible approaches to restaurants, including a discussion of why most chain restaurants are evil – and, along the way, why it’s not elitist or snobbish to try to avoid them. (He singles out Chipotle as an exception, mentioning their commitment to local, sustainable agriculture.) Any experienced home cook knows you can often salvage a mediocre cut of meat by drowning it in butter, cream, salt, or even sugar – think of Guy Fieri’s favorite “sweet soy sauce,” which can’t actually be a thing, right? – so when you see a restaurant dish that seems to promise those things, what are they telling you about the quality of the underlying ingredients? I also appreciated his thoughts on ordering less at restaurants, where portion sizes have grown to absurd levels, something you don’t find when traveling abroad. I tend to eat pretty small portions and rarely finish full entrees at restaurants, but I still feel a bit guilty knowing that what I didn’t eat will simply be trashed (or, rarely, composted). Sometimes I’ll order a few smaller plates rather than a main course, to try more items and to avoid wasting food, but Kaminsky validates that practice, arguing it should be more of the norm, and that a party of four would often do better (and consume fewer calories) to order two to three starters and two entrees, sharing everything as they go.

For me, the value in Culinary Intelligence is twofold: Kaminsky’s writing, which is elegant and spare yet highly descriptive; and the expostulation of a food philosophy very similar to mine. The book’s main point, about eating well without getting fat, will seem a little obvious to anyone who’s been cooking avidly for a number of years, and while Kaminsky’s book will help me keep my awareness of what I’m eating high, I don’t think I learned any new tips or tricks from it. It’s absolutely something I’ll buy for friends who want to start getting into cooking or to try to lose weight without using complicated programs or filling up with “diet” processed foods, and its readability should help it reach that target audience without making them feel like the author was talking down to them.

Next up: I’m currently reading Alan Bradley’s A Red Herring Without Mustard, the third book in the Flavia de Luce mystery series; I reviewed the first book in the series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, in September of 2011. After that, I’ll start Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres.

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→ July 3, 2010
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The Story of Sushi.

My most recent piece on ESPN.com went up yesterday – a preview of the major amateur free agents available in Latin America this summer.

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I recommend a lot of books around here, but I’m not sure the last time I said that any you must read a particular book. If you like sushi, or just seafood in general, however, you need to get yourself a copy of Trevor Corson’s The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice (published in hardcover as The Zen of Fish), a tremendous read that blends the history of what we now refer to as sushi in the U.S. with a surprisingly interesting subplot around a class going through a sushi-chef academy near Los Angeles. Corson’s integration of the two threads is remarkable, but for me, the value was in hearing him subtly say to American diners: “SUSHI: UR DOIN IT WRONG.”

Corson boils sushi down to its core components – the rice, the vinegar in the rice, the seaweed – and even dabbles in some food chemistry by explaining why we particularly like those ingredients as well as raw fish, discussing umami and the chemicals that deliver it (glutamic acid and inosine monophosphate in particular) and why we like the flesh of sea creatures raw but generally don’t like uncooked meat from land creatures. He discusses why certain types of fish make better or worse sushi, and of course discusses wild fish versus farm-raised (wild is better, but farm-raised does have some advantages) as well as the dangers overfishing present to natural fish populations. There’s even a chapter on uni, a paste comprising the gonads of sea urchins, which I recently learned is also consumed raw in various Caribbean cuisines as well.

Those sections were interesting, but didn’t do too much to change the way I thought about sushi, since I already knew I liked the stuff. Corson also discusses the various traditions around sushi and the etiquette of eating it (use your fingers for nigiri; never rub your wooden chopsticks together; miso soup should be eaten after the meal), as well as the logic for eating certain pieces in certain ways. A good sushi chef will, if you allow him, consider the order in which you’re eating your fish, moving across a continuum from milder flavors to stronger ones, or from softer textures to firm ones. Stirring wasabi (which, you probably know, isn’t actually wasabi at most U.S. restaurants but American horseradish dyed green) into soy sauce reduces the flavor of the wasabi, because the heat is partly deactivated in liquid. The fish used in spicy tuna rolls – a thoroughly American creation – is generally refuse, scraped off the skin of the tuna after the best pieces have been removed and used for nigiri or other dishes that require better flavor and texture. In fact, most rolls are inauthentic and used to hide inferior-quality fish under ingredients that are strongly flavored, like chili oil, or that coat the tongue with fat, like mayonnaise or avocado.

I’ve never been a huge fan of complicated rolls, since they tend to layer lots of ingredients together and come with sticky-sweet sauces, and I’m not a fan of mayonnaise so I generally avoid spicy tuna anyway. Having a rich, fatty, sweet roll can burn your palate for the delicate flavors of the fish-and-rice nigiri. But Corson’s book, without ever explicitly saying, “don’t eat the fancy rolls,” presents three arguments – one based on authenticity, one on the quality of the ingredients, and the fact that sushi becomes rather unhealthy when you load it up with fats and sugars – for at least limiting your consumption of those rolls, if not eliminating them altogether. And the teachers and sushi chefs who appear in the book all share his disdain for the fancier rolls, even while they teach them at the academy because customers want them – and they’re very profitable. (Another good reason not to order them, actually – you usually get more bang for your buck with nigiri.)

A book that just discussed sushi’s history, traditions, and science would have been worth reading without an actual plot to carry it along, but Corson built his book around the story of a class at The California Sushi Academy, a school run by a longtime sushi chef named Toshi whose restaurant (adjacent to the school) is struggling and who is himself recovering from a fairly recent stroke that has sapped his energy. Corson focuses on a few specific students in the class, including Kate, the nominal star of the book, a young woman struggling to find a career while fighting depression who nearly quits the school a half-dozen times; Fie, the Danish model/actress who decided she’d rather be the bombshell behind the sushi bar; and Takumi Nishio, the former Japanese boy-band star who quit the music business to study first Italian cuisine and now authentic sushi; while also devoting some time to Zoran, the Yugoslavia-born/Australian-raised head instructor who is a True Believer in traditional sushi even as he teaches the students American-style rolls. Their stories are interesting, as are their struggles – except for Takumi, who, in the book at least, seems to be a complete natural at whatever cuisine he tries, so he’s fascinating but without much drama. Corson follows them on assignments outside the classroom, like feeding the cast and crew on a movie lot, or watches them work a shift in the back room of the restaurant, using each episode as a segue into some note on the history or components of sushi.

If you like sushi, The Story of Sushi is $10 well spent. You can simultaneously learn the history of the California roll – its inventor is actually known, and there’s a good reason why there’s an avocado in it – and why you shouldn’t really bother with it when you’re in a quality Japanese restaurant.

For more from Corson, check out his official site, which includes some notes on the people in The Story of Sushi and other links and articles about seafood.

Next review: Richard Russo’s The Whore’s Child and Other Stories.

Filed Under: Food, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ February 24, 2010
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Why I cook.

Returning to the subject of Michael Ruhlman, the passionate and blunt food writer behind Ratio, he posted a mini-essay on his blog last week titled “Why I Cook,” giving his reasons and urging his readers to do the same. (This comment from one of his readers is alone worth the click, although it’s quite sad.) Here, therefore, is my answer to the question of why I cook.

I cook, first and foremost, to eat. When I was in graduate school, my wife was working 40 hours a week as a preschool teacher, which, some of you probably know, is exhausting work. I, meanwhile, was done every day by 3 pm, sometimes sooner, and generally didn’t have much homework to do, so I thought it was the least I could do to take over the cooking duties. And, in hindsight, I was pretty bad at it. But we ate, and we ate cheaply. That still holds today, even though I can splurge on more expensive ingredients – although I now understand the value of those ingredients, and when and where it’s worth the splurge and which corners one can safely cut for home cooking.

My life has changed dramatically in the eleven years since I’ve graduated, as I now have a demanding job but a commensurate income and at least have the excuse to slack on cooking. I continue to do so because…

* I want the control over what goes into our bodies, especially since the first-person plural now includes my three-year-old daughter. I know what we’re eating, and I know that we’re limiting her intake of pesticides, high fructose corn syrup, preservatives, or needless quantities of salt. I know the bread we eat is 100% whole wheat, because I made it. I know the beef we eat was grass- or grain-fed, and that the sea bass I purchase (rarely) came from a sustainable fishery, because I bought it and cooked it myself.

* All three of us have to monitor our diets to limit our intake of one or more ingredients or nutrients. For me, it’s lactose, and a handful of other foods that my stomach doesn’t like. For my wife, it’s sugar and a few minor food allergies. For my daughter, it’s protein, so we’re raising her as a vegetarian, and are glad that she hasn’t quite made the bacon/pig connection yet. (I did suggest we name the stuffed-animal pig we bought her “Smokey,” but my wife called that “twisted.”)

* It lets me spend my calories where I want to. I’m not on a diet, nor am I a rabid calorie-counter, but I will put on weight if I completely ignore what I’m eating, something that happens to many people in my line of work because we’re on the road so much. When I cook, I can stick with lean meals and use those extra calories on dessert, or on a big mess of waffles and sausage on a Sunday morning.

* I can vote with my mouth. Organic food isn’t for everyone because it’s expensive, and while I wish organic farms could feed everyone today, we’re not there yet. I also know that the more that people like me who are not rabid environmentalists but care enough about food safety, the environment, and the rights of farmers and laborers in the food supply chain choose to buy organic or sustainable or fair-trade products, the more that that section of the industry can grow.

* You can’t beat the flavors of fresh food. I can buy and cook the same day, and if I time it right, I might get a locally-grown vegetable or fruit from ground to table in a day or two. We pick strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries every summer and I put them up in jams so that I can still get that unbeatable taste of summer in the middle of January. I grow herbs in my backyard because pesto Genovese is sweeter and more potent when you picked the basil 20 minutes before putting it in the food processor.

* And, most of all, I cook because I love it. There is something magical about taking ingredients, applying heat and a little know-how, and producing a dinner to feed your family. There’s a tremendous reward in bringing a dessert or a basket of bread to a party and seeing people enjoy the food you crafted with your hands – regardless of whether you ever receive a “thanks” or a “wow.” And, to me, food just tastes better when I earned it in the kitchen.

Any one or two of these reasons would be sufficient for me to continue cooking, but all of them together have made it a part of my routine that borders on obsession, to the point where I miss it after too many days on the road – the sight of bright-green basil or deep red roasted peppers, smell of onions caramelizing in the pan, the feel of bread dough that just needs a few seconds of kneading, the sound of meat hitting the surface of a hot pan, and the taste of all of the above.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , , ,
→ June 29, 2008
→ By

Mediocy in food.

So CNN runs these occasional articles on healthy eating, and they’re just about always inane, like today’s article on “food pairings.” To wit:

DO mix grilled steak and Brussels sprouts

“It’s always best to cook meat or fish at low temperatures until it’s done,” says Kristin E. Anderson, Ph.D., a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health and Cancer Center, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “And if there are burned pieces, trim them off.”

So apparently “cruciferous” vegetables (members of the cabbage family, by and large) help the body eliminate potential carcinogens found on charred meat. That’s fine. But Dr. Anderson’s solution, don’t cook over high temperatures, is hilarious. You shouldn’t cook over high heat, so cook over low heat? So now what – no more Maillard reactions?

Here’s a tip: Don’t overcook your food. Two to three minutes over high heat gives you a nice crust and no char. Just make sure that if you invite Dr. Anderson over, you poach her steak to a nice soft gray instead of grilling it. Yum.

DON’T mix coffee and breakfast cereal

Most cereals sold in the United States are fortified with iron. … Problem is, if you sip coffee while eating your Wheaties, polyphenols, an antioxidant in coffee, can hamper the body’s ability to absorb the iron.

The article says black and herbal teas also have high levels of polyphenol. That’s as may be, but the article omits a pretty major problem: The calcium in the milk you put in your cereal has the same effect as the polyphenols, binding with the iron in the cereal and dragging it right out of your body. (Here’s a PDF version of a brief article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, saying the same thing in fancier terms.)

In other words, the tea I am drinking with my breakfast cereal now isn’t doing anything more than grabbing the sloppy-seconds of iron that the calcium in the milk left behind. And by the way, if you take a multi-vitamin with iron, it probably has all the iron than your body needs in a given day, so say nothing of the iron you might take in via red meat, legumes, or figs. Just don’t take a calcium supplement along with that multi-vitamin.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 1, 2008
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“What’s a rhubarb?” “It’s a plant.”

So Martha Stewart is making rhubarb desserts today – a fool (for April Fool’s Day, hah) and a grunt. But she said one thing that caught my attention:

The leaves are deadly poisonous … They are toxic, oxalic acid and you can really die from it. And you notice in the fields, at the farm, the horses never go near, the chickens, nobody goes near the rhubarb.

While it’s true that rhubarb leaves are poisonous the cause isn’t oxalic acid, which is found in many foods, including cocoa, spinach, carrots, and berries. Spinach contains enough to all but wipe out the calcium found in the vegetable, because oxalic acid combines with the calcium to form calcium oxalate, an insoluble compound that can build up and form stones in the kidney or gallbladder. If oxalic acid was the only toxin at work in rhubarb leaves, it would take several pounds to kill you.

It is possible, however, that there’s a second compound at work in rhubarb leaves that works with the oxalic acid to make them toxic. One suspect is a form of anthraquinone glycoside, which is present in rhubarb roots and has been used in traditional medicine as a laxative. The anthraquinone glycoside(s) in rhubarb leaves may work in tandem with the oxalic acid to have a toxic effect, although there doesn’t seem to be any hard evidence to back that up.

I have no idea why I posted this other than that I like rhubarb.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , ,