107 | 🐄 The Beef On Beef
SF's Women Sake Brewers
Hello!
THE WINE
When the townspeople
gave the teenaged Buddha
a glass of wine
so delicious he grew
to an unthinkable size
and froze into a blue statue
that shielded the town
from a wave that broke
upon his back
and would have swept away
the town if he’d not tasted
the wine and afterward the people
were overjoyed and said
they would do good deeds
like carpool their children to school
more often and plant lettuce
everywhere while the Buddha
melted into water and receded
into the calm sane sea.
—Michael Metivier, from Poetry Magazine, 2015
By the way, I'm Bruce Cole, Publisher of Edible San Francisco. If you’re new here, welcome to EAT.DRINK.THINK., a newsletter spotlighting seasonal recipes, the latest SF Bay Area food news, poetry, and more!
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was the feature story on Mashama Bailey (more on her below), dubbed the “most important chef in America” by the Financial Times.
Do you know someone who loves a good Greta Garbo? Send them this newsletter!
Today, in EAT.DRINK.THINK.
Video: The Women Brewers Of Sequoia Sake
It’s Complicated: Should You Stop Eating Beef For Climate Change?
🐄 Holsteins Are The New Angus
Smitten Kitchen Sets Instagram On 🔥
“F—ed Up” Natural Wines Are In Demand
Gourmet’s Greatest Hits
Civil Eats TV: Women Brewing Change at Sequoia Sake. Two of the three female craft sake brewers in the U.S. make up the mother-daughter team at Sequoia Sake in San Francisco. Working with California rice farmers, they’re bringing Japan's nearly 2,000-year-old national drink to more Americans. This story and video are a co-production of Civil Eats and Edible Communities
ICYMI in last week’s newsletter: Sequoia Genshu Sake tasting notes | Our story on Sequoia Sake c. 2016
Sake: Why Japan's Greatest Drink Is More Popular Than Ever Before. Food & Wine
Should You Stop Eating Beef For Climate Change? The answer is complicated, and as always, you can rely on the Washington Post’s Tamar Haspel to crunch the numbers:
I enlisted the help of Paige Stanley. She’s doing postdoctoral research at Colorado State University on how grazing affects soil, but she’s also a patient, evidence-based, totally reasonable voice on social media, where this conversation can get — let’s call it “heated.” She’s also a co-author of papers on some of the most rigorous experiments involving cattle and carbon.
We talked to Paige Stanley for our beef issue in 2020 👉 Where’s the Good Beef?
Recommended Thread:
🐄 The Holstein Chain:
Holstein’s are the predominant dairy cow breed (you’d recognize them as black and white colored cows).
In order to produce milk, a heifer (a female with no offspring) must be impregnated.
If the offspring is female, they are raised in the dairy herd.
If the offspring is a male, they might live for 2 years and be slaughtered as veal, or they could be shot and killed at birth.
Most male Holsteins are also sent to fatten up at feedlots where the meat is processed into ground beef (for fast food burgers).
A select few male Holsteins are raised on pasture to be slaughtered as premium beef. The meat is richly marbled and highly valued by chefs and consumers in the know (now you know).
Flannery Beef in San Rafael is one of the few butchers nationwide that specializes in dry-aged, pastured Holstein beef.
“Within five to ten years, Holstein as a breed will be mentioned at the same level as Angus as a breed.” Bryan Flannery for Eater.
Eater has been producing exemplary videos on food producers lately (remember that anchovy video?), and this one on Flannery Beef is no exception:
🍷 Forget Funky: “I think ‘funky’ is the new ‘mineral,’” says Hildegarde Heymann, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology, referring to the controversial descriptor that’s clung to natural wines for years. “The other main argument I hear a lot from the natural wine community,” says Heymann, “is that the proliferation of “funky” has rendered natural wine into a kind of caricature, falsely implying to many people that all low-intervention wines will taste a certain way.” But according to Andrew Nelson, a co-owner of Habibi wine bar, funky is passé, what the kids call for now is a “F—ed up” bottle; an all-out mousy wine, jacked up with brettanomyces. SF Chronicle
🦞 Headline of the Week: Lobster feud boils over in Maine. Politico
Es Verdad: “Taco Bell Quarterly is the literary magazine for the Taco Bell Arts and Letters. We’re a reaction against everything. The gatekeepers. The taste-makers. The hipsters. Health food. Artists Who Wear Cute Scarves. Bitch-ass Wendy’s.” TBQ
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
Deb Perelman of the popular blog Smitten Kitchen cut her grilled cheese sandwiches in half (top half all crust even!) instead of triangles, and panic ensued. The Washington Post
A Few Of Gourmet’s Greatest Hits: via Ruth Reichl’s La Briffe:
👀 Spotted:
On repeat this week: Compact Flashes by No Age, “a playfully surreal post-punk track that pairs laconic vocals with a maddeningly insistent drum-machine track.” Sterogum
That’s all for this week.
We’re outta here. Be well and take care,
–Bruce
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"Despite its artistic intentions and its many accomplishments, humankind owes its existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains." —Anonymous