#134 | The Black Art of Blackberry Eating
Prepare Yourself to be Manipulated
Hello!
Blackberry Eating
I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry-eating in late September.
—Galway Kinnell, From Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980)
Hey there - 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! We share Kinnell’s blackberry poem every year in late September; hopefully, it’s become a favorite of you long-time subscribers, too.
👉 ICYMI The most clicked link from our last newsletter was the On Repeat YouTube music video (the first time that category has topped the list) of Olivia Rodrigo’s All American Bitch. It's such a great song!
🍑 🍅 🌿 Gazpacho Salad? Susie Middleton calls this a “gazpacho” salad not because it looks like one but because you can roughly purée any leftovers in a blender, chill it, and have a delicious gazpacho. If there are any leftovers, that is. Heirloom Tomato, Summer Peach, and Fresh Herb “Gazpacho” Salad. Edible SF
Cornmeal Skillet Sourdough Pizza: Jennifer Latham’s hearty, easy, one-skillet meal. She mixes cornmeal with Cairnsprings Trailblazer bread flour for a really fluffy, crusty pizza. The Perfect Loaf
Finger Lickin’ Good: After years of regularly roasting a whole chicken once a week, we’ve pretty much given up eating the bird (still freaked out about the numbers). But this video by the New York Times’s Eric Kim got us longing for chicken karaage again, the delectable sake and soy-marinated, fried Japanese chicken dish we used to devour at Yuzuki, the now-closed Izakaya that was on the corner of 18th and Guererro. We bought chicken thighs, a bag of potato starch, and heated a pot of oil to make Kim’s Chicken Karaage. It did not disappoint!
No Such Thing As Too Much Zucchini: While the summer squash glut is still on, we’ve been making variations of this Summer Squash with Chili Oil and Burrata recipe for weeks. Highly recommend! Taste
Your Mama’s Kitchen: Michele Norris talks with former first lady Michelle Obama, Abby Wambach, Matthew Broderick, and many others, about their mother's kitchens - what they remember, what they learned there, what it means to them. NPR
📱 From Your Phone to the Bookshelf: TikTok stars are taking over cookbook sales. As we noted last month, Baking Yesteryear by B. Dylan Hollis became the best-selling book in the country—not the best-selling cookbook—best-selling book, period. Publishers are racing to sign up TikTok cooking stars to tap into their vast online audiences who eagerly purchase the titles. DK United States, a division of Penguin Random House, has already published six New York Times best-selling cookbooks by authors famous on TikTok.
One of them is Barbara Costello (she goes by “Babs” on her channel), 74, a retired preschool teacher in New Canaan, Conn., who has 3.9 million followers who love her all-American recipes like grilled egg salad, rum, and chicken parm crescent roll braid. Her book “Celebrate With Babs” has sold almost 100,000 copies since its release in April 2022. Not surprisingly, Costello said she didn’t realize just how much work went into writing a recipe — measuring every ingredient, determining precise bake times, and writing introductions. More: Video Stars Top the Bestseller Lists. The New York Times (gift article)
Related: Who Do They Think They Are? Kristin Donnely, cookbook author, recipe developer, and former food editor at Food & Wine, on how it can be frustrating when you’re a skilled and experienced recipe developer, and brands are hiring people with less experience and more followers.
Is Excess Sodium Killing Us? The FDA has been stalling (the wheels of bureaucracy seldom turn anymore) to “encourage the packaged food and restaurant industries to lower sodium levels, as well as efforts to encourage consumers to lower their sodium intake.” According to the Institute of Medicine, setting mandatory limits on sodium could prevent more than 100,000 deaths a year and save billions in annual healthcare costs. Per FoodFix’s The FDA’s Sodium Problem: “The FDA has also approved the use of potassium chloride (an ingredient that can be used to replace sodium in foods) labeled as “potassium salt” to make it more palatable to consumers.”
When we read this story, our first thought was why not explore substituting some of that sodium with MSG? Then we found this Yasmin Tayag feature in the Atlantic, “Eat More MSG,” which proposed that exact strategy. Tayag notes:
MSG satisfies the need for salt to a certain extent because it contains sodium (it’s right there in the name, after all)—but just a third of the amount, by weight, that salt does. The rest of the molecule is made of the amino acid L-glutamate, which registers as the savory, “brothy” flavor known as umami.
MSG’s lousy reputation originated in 1968, when The New England Journal of Medicine, published an article by a Chinese physician where he described feeling ill after eating Chinese food and suggested it could be because of MSG. Other researchers subsequently produced studies that echoed and substantiated the claim and justlikethat the infamous Chinese Restaurant Syndrome was born, prompting restaurants around the country to post “We don’t use MSG” signs on their menus to ward off the public panic about eating Asian food.
Fast forward 50+ years, and we’ve been using MSG on the regular to minimize the use of salt in our meals, inspired by a series on the once-notorious food additive by noted food writer and cookbook author Andrea Nyugen, who writes:
MSG is based on the flavor properties of seaweed and created in 1908 by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda. MSG is a concentrated, commercially made glutamic acid, which, when dissolved in food, adds savory deliciousness—umami, a term coined by Ikeda. Glutamic acid is a nonessential amino acid produced by the human body; it is also naturally present in many ingredients and foods. Our bodies do not identify MSG’s glutamic acid as being different from its natural kin.
Nyugen has a three-part series extolling the virtues of MSG and why you should consider adding it to your diet on her website. “People don’t openly talk about using MSG like they would other transformative staples like say, pepper or sugar. In fact, in a near whisper, cooks have said to me, “There’s MSG in there.” (Wink.)”
MSG Deep Dive part 1 - Why Befriend the Notorious MSG and Its MSG-less Kin?
MSG Deep Dive part 2: How to Buy and Use MSG and MSG-less Flavor Enhancers
MSG Deep Dive Pt 3: Fragrant Dressed Tofu with Basil and Garlic
Did you know these popular foods contain MSG? Maybe that’s why they’re so popular!
Doritos
Pringles
KFC
Ramen
Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup
Good luck trying to find MSG, or Accent. You won’t find it at Whole Foods, Safeway, Rainbow, Mollie Stones, BiRite, Gus’s, etc. But you can find it in Asian markets where it’s usually labeled as Ajinomoto. MSG has a similar granular structure to sugar, so it’s easy to grab just a pinch to add to your dish. While it’s easy to over-salt a dish, in our experience, we’ve yet to overdo it with MSG.
Oddly Satisfying: Stop Motion Cooking ＆ ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) video of butchering a Lego salmon. The sound effects!
Show Me the Money! Registered dietitians are being paid to post videos that promote diet soda, sugar, and supplements on Instagram and TikTok. “Steph Grasso, a registered dietitian from Oakton, Va., used the hashtag #safetyofaspartame and told her 2.2 million followers on TikTok that the WHO warnings about artificial sweeteners were “clickbait” based on “low-quality science.” American Beverage, a trade and lobbying group representing Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and other companies is behind some of the campaigns. The Washington Post (gift article)
A Potemkin Playland for Food Scientists: It turns out that the 53,000 square foot facility that UpSide Foods built in Emeryville, full of gleaming stainless steel bioreactors that can potentially cultivate over 400,000 pounds of cell-based meat products per year, are just shiny decorative toys (for now at least). For a recent dinner at Bar Crenn, chef Dominique Crenn served Upside Foods cell-based chicken to a guest list that included the SF Chronicle’s Soleil Ho. But according to a Wired exclusive, the meat was not actually cultivated in the shiny new bioreactors and, instead, was laboriously produced by employees in a lab:
Employees grow thin sheets of tissue in small plastic flasks called roller bottles and combine them to create a larger hunk of chicken, an approach that is expensive and requires many hours of labor to produce even a small amount of meat. According to former and current employees at Upside, this process happens in a laboratory that doesn’t feature in the factory tours Upside gives to journalists and members of the public. Wired
Ho writes: the fillet I ate began as a cell sample taken from the egg of a chicken that’s still walking around somewhere, out there. Kept inside of a stainless steel bioreactor that looks a bit like beer brewing systems, the cell was suspended in a pricey, purified growth medium where it multiplied and was made to take the form of muscle fibers. Those fibers were then shaped to resemble a chicken fillet, though they potentially could be crafted into anything: a square, a horseshoe, Barbie. SF Chronicle
In the end, Ho notes that eating the faux chicken just made her sad, not what a chef wants to hear, right?
Fake Bacon Fails: Hooray Foods, the Bay Area startup that produced plant-based bacon made from coconut oil, white rice flour, pea starch, tapioca starch, maple syrup, and more, has shut down due to lack of funding. Despite attaining national distribution in grocery stores and restaurants, they couldn’t crowdfund enough money to sustain operations. SF Gate
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San Francisco Benefit Premiere: The Art of Eating- The Life of M.F.K. Fisher
An illuminating new documentary, “The Art of Eating: The Life of M.F.K. Fisher,” celebrates the influential gastronomic writer with a San Francisco film premiere on Sunday, October 1st, at the Vogue Theatre. Not to be missed are the post-film conversations, featuring Gregory Bezat (Director and Producer), Kennedy Friede Golden (M.F.K. Fisher’s daughter), and special guests, moderated by culinary bookseller Celia Sack of Omnivore Books.
The Most Exciting 50 Restaurants in the U.S.: San Francisco’s Noodle in a Haystack and Prik Hom make the New York Times list.
Who Deserves to Eat at Noma? At this point, who actually wants to eat at Noma? Or, as author Jason Stewart says, “You can’t manipulate an evening at Noma, the legendary Copenhagen restaurant that is set to close at the end of 2024; all you can do is prepare yourself to be manipulated.” Taste
What’s the Deal with Corn in a Cup? 🤔 For Latino Heritage Month, KQED’s Paloma Abarca (@palomayac) took Josh Decolongon (@sommeligay) to the Mission District for his first-ever taste of esquites, a sweet and savory Mexican street snack consisting of corn, mayonnaise, cotija cheese, and chile powder. The verdict?
On Repeat This Week:
The classic 80s hit was initially written as a rap, says Neil Tennant, 'It's about sex and escape. It's paranoid.' The Guardian picked the song as their #1 British single hit of all time in 2020.
That’s all for this week.
We’re outta here. Be well and take care,
—Bruce
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“There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.”
—Gary Snyder
Your roundups are always so enjoyable, even though I live on the other coast. Had to vote no to MSG, though. Too many vibrating headaches convinced me!
Aw thanks for including my “gazpacho” salad Bruce! Always love this combo and with the late season fruit and tomatoes ...sublime.