120 | #Protips You Can Use
2023 Salmon Season in Peril
Hello!
"I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now. I suppose life always ends badly for almost everybody. We must have long fingers and catch at whatever we can while it is passing near us."
—Tennessee Williams, Letters to Donald Windham 1940-1965
BTW, 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 our last newsletter was the recipe for Jennifer Latham’s Orange Galette with Ricotta and Pistachios.
Housekeeping Note: In the future, we will use the NY Times and Washington Post “gift article” feature when we share URLs from those publications so that you won’t run into their paywalls. Now if only SF Chronicle offered this feature as well…
There’s a Recipe For That: Tamar Adler’s new book, The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z (March 14, Scribner Book Company), is an encyclopedic tome (it clocks in at 560 pages with more than 1500 recipes) for cooking with leftovers. On page 22, you'll even find a recipe for broccoli cooking water, you know, the water you cooked the broccoli in; that’s how deep in the weeds this book goes. We usually dump that water into our drought bucket to irrigate our garden, but maybe we’ll save it next time. Take a look inside The Everlasting Meal.
💪 #Protips
Chocolate Mayo Cake: It’s the best fat for crisp grilled cheese sandwiches, but you can also slyly slide it into a chocolate cake mix to make it super moist. How to cook with mayo. Food & Wine
Stock Jelly: Take your favorite stock mixed with gelatin, cooled until it congeals, force it through a strainer to form salt-sized grains, and mix it into meatballs to keep them tender and juicy. Great for meatloaf too. Food52
Rice a Negroni: A few tablespoons of sushi rice stirred into a negroni “softens the heat of the spirit and makes the flavors more cohesive,” says Leanne Favre, head bartender at Leyenda in Brooklyn. The rice adds body and texture with a rounder mouthfeel in Old-Fashioneds, Manhattans and Boulevardiers too. Punch
🧄 Hardcore Root to Stem: Don’t toss the garlic skins! Besides boasting plenty of garlic flavor (throw them in your soup and stocks, for starters), they are packed with antioxidants and nutrients. Tasting Table
🥑 Skip the Wrap: We’re all for this #protip from ATK (for using a plate instead of plastic wrap), but skip the oil and place the avocado (sans pit) upside down on a plate. It stays just as green and eliminates having to use oil and wash a plate. We use a plate to top or bottom everything in place of plastic wrap. See below:
This #Protip Could Save You Millions:
Honey Cake Roll: If you ask any Ukrainian to name their favorite dessert, Anna Voloshyna guarantees this honey cake roll will be the most popular answer. In Ukraine, it's called Medovyk, which means "honey cake." This wonderful layered cake has been in the Ukrainian culinary repertoire for at least 100 years and has always stayed in fashion; the feather-like texture will surprise you with its incredible lightness. Download the recipe from our latest issue:
SALTY LIKE THAT!
NY Times Food Writer Eric Kim throws down the kosher salt gauntlet for Morton in a recent Instagram post, and chefs and home cooks piled on. We come down on the sea salt side: why use kosher salt when sea salt is as readily available and tastes better? Sea salt is saltier; it has natural minerality and salinity, adding a layer of complexity to recipes, whereas Diamond/Morton kosher salts are basically bland sodium crystals. You have to be more precise when using sea salt because the seasoning stacks up quickly, and you can easily oversalt a dish. Plus, most recipe ingredient lists these days default to kosher salt, usually Diamond, and following the exact measurements is risky business. But as Samin Nosrat, author of Salt, Fat, Acid Heat, notes in the NY Times:
“Salting isn’t something to do once and then check off your list; be constantly aware of how a dish tastes as it cooks, and how you want it to taste at the table. At Zuni Café in San Francisco, the chef Judy Rodgers often told her cooks that a dish might need “seven more grains of salt.” Sometimes it really is that subtle, a few grains dividing the satisfactory from the sublime. The only way to know is to taste and adjust, and to do so over and over again as you add ingredients and they transform throughout the cooking process.”
We buy our sea salt in bulk at Rainbow Grocery and keep it in Mason jars in the pantry.
The Saltworks Kosher Grain Sea Salt features almost round granules twice the size of fine sea salt. The Kosher Chef from SF Salt Co. is a close match to Diamond Kosher in feel when you grab a pinch, but “seven more grains” could take a recipe over the salty edge if you’re not careful.
We’d Eat There: “Restaurant workers deserve a restaurant certification program that evaluates the quality of the workplace as critically as the quality of the ingredients — a more vigorous version of the restaurant sanitation letter grades established in many states. There should be a symbol for restaurants to display on their windows as proudly as they display their stars and reviews, a symbol that says: We care about our people, too.” NY Times
🍕Ranking SF’s Frozen Pizzas: Tamara Palmer tastes these local contenders for 48 Hills:
Napoletana by Pizzeria Delfina
Margherita by Del Popolo
Pesto Margherita by Vicolo Pizza
Just Cheese by The Pizza Place on Noriega
We like The Pizza Place’s Pepperoni and Delfina’s Funghi frozen pies and usually have one or both in the freezer. We always had a stash of Vicolo’s frozen pizzas for years when our kids were little; they were the instant dinner solution when we didn’t feel like cooking, but been there, done that, too many times. What’s the pizza Palmer says will be in her “freezer for the next apocalypse?”
Party Down Returns after 13 Years: “Unlike, say, “The Bear” or “The Menu” in which a chef’s fierce intensity and ambition drive the business, “Party Down” features food workers who don’t really care about the job, and the food itself is almost entirely beside the point.” Tejal Rao for the NY Times. Check out the trailer: Party Down Reunion.
2023 Salmon Season in Peril: Sadly, Sacramento River fall Chinook returns fell well short of conservation objectives in 2022, and the salmon are close to being classified as overfished. Federal and state agencies are expected to take a conservative approach when approving 2023 salmon seasons to provide additional protective measures to these stocks, and very limited or no fishing in 2023 appears possible. California Department of Fish and Wildlife
Free Food at Whole Foods: “Let’s just say I don’t feel too bad about taking $15 or $20 of stuff from Whole Foods when Jeff Bezos is the richest man on Earth,” one woman told The Washington Post about stealing from the store, referring to Amazon’s owner, who is worth $123 billion and considered the third richest person in the world. “As a Whole Foods worker, I see shoplifting all the time—and I don't stop it. Bon Appetit
On repeat this week: Another stellar performance on national television for Lizzy McAlpine as she performs the song Ceilings from her album Five Seconds Flat on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show:
That’s all for this week.
We’re outta here.
P.S. In case you somehow missed that subscribe button:
The only people for me are the mad ones: the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who... burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles.
―Jack Kerouac
Best salt ever- Omnivore Salt by Angelo Garro.
Yeah, love that salt. I think he uses the SF sea salt as his base.