#16 |Eat Local Or Else
Pan-Banging 💪 Cookies
🔥 Even our laptop is overheating. We do crawl out of bed into an ice-cold shower every morning (a la Wim Hoff), but even that wears off once the sun comes up. So we’re meditating on this right now:
By the way, I'm Bruce Cole, Publisher of Edible San Francisco. You're getting this email because you subscribed. If you'd like to hop off at anytime, simply unsubscribe. I appreciate you reading this newsletter (would really love it if you tapped that ❤️ under our byline too ☝️).
Time to bang some pans.
EAT
Toasted Sesame Chocolate Chip Pan-Banging Cookies
We’re huge fans of Sarah Kieffer’s pan-banging cookie recipes and are thrilled to share Toasted Sesame Chocolate Chip Cookies from her new book, 100 Cookies: The Baking Book For Every Kitchen. Maybe you’ve seen her recipes in the New York Times (Giant Crinkled Chocolate Chip Cookies) or The Kitchn (I Finally Tried the Pan-Banging Cookies That Are All Over the Internet). But if not, be prepared to tack this recipe to the top of your favorite cookie list. There’s a simple yet inventive technique that makes these cookies flat and crisp around the edges, but soft and chewy in the middle (that’s everything we want in a cookie). You bang the cookie sheet by dropping it on the oven rack every couple of minutes as the cookies bake, deflating them and results in that trademark crinkled texture. And the secret ingredient that pushes these over the top is toasted sesame oil, which is something you might never think of adding to a cookie, but once you make these you’ll understand why it’s a stroke of genius!
DRINK
Ready For This? Fresh Roasted Coffee Is Not The Best Coffee
We used to order green coffee beans from Sweet Maria’s in Oakland and roast our own in small batches every morning, but that process tended to get in the way of readying our kids for school, walking the dog, and the rest of everyday life. So we traded in our roaster for an espresso machine.
But yes, coffee beans fresh out of the roaster are nowhere near as refined and complex as beans that have had a few days to de-gas and mature. We try to only purchase coffee bags that contain one-way air valves that allow CO2 to vent without letting oxygen in.
When someone is buying whole beans, I always recommend not to brew up the coffee too soon after the roast date. Let it rest minimally for a few days, ideally a week. Too soon after, the coffee hasn't really formed its structure and lots of the nuances in the taste profile aren't apparent yet. Many of us will find we enjoy our coffee better—that it will have more flavor, complexity, and dimension—if we have allowed the coffee to significantly rest and undergo the degassing process. –Liz Clayton in Is Fresh Roasted Coffee Better? The Truth Might Shock You for Sprudge
#protip when you see the “roasted on” date that’s printed on bags of coffee, choose the oldest ones, not the most recent.
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THINK
Eat Local Or Else
Please join us in supporting your local neighborhood cafes, bars and restaurants before they are gone forever! Because when the restaurants go, so do the farms, ranches, food producers, fishing boats, cheese makers and everyone else that is connected to the restaurant universe. Heather Hadden's article, McDonald’s, Chipotle and Domino’s Are Booming During Coronavirus While Your Neighborhood Restaurant Struggles is behind the paywall at the Wall Street Journal, but these two paragraphs are all you really need to know:
The coronavirus pandemic is splitting the restaurant industry in two. Big, well capitalized chains like Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. and Domino’s Pizza Inc. are gaining customers and adding stores while tens of thousands of local eateries go bust.
Larger operators generally have the advantages of more capital, more leverage on lease terms, more physical space, more geographic flexibility and prior expertise with drive-throughs, carryout and delivery.
And don’t forget about bookstores too, which is such a vital part of San Francisco’s literary history. Consider ordering Sarah Kieffer’s 100 Cookies: The Baking Book For Every Kitchen from Omnivore Books so you can get all of her pan-banging cookie recipes and more.
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Your Food Isn’t ‘Natural’ and It Never Will Be
Rebecca Solnit once wrote that “none of us is pure, and purity is a dreary pursuit best left to the Puritans.” Yet the fight for pure food would seem to be never-ending.
Researchers found a compound common in yoga mats, azodicarbonamide, in 500 food products, including bread. Although it wasn’t clear that the compound’s presence is necessarily bad for your health—in fact, it isn’t—the multisyllabic mystery substance was guilty by chemical association. –Benjamin R. Cohen in Your Food Isn’t ‘Natural’ and It Never Will Be for Wired
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Define Dismantle
“African people have not been handed the mic, there’s a misconception that [the cuisine] is difficult, that it’s far, that it’s not ‘sexy,’ for lack of a better word. But that’s not true. Everything you need, for the most part, is in your pantry. We want to dismantle that this food is somehow at a reach.” –Hawa Hassan, author of In Bibi’s Kitchen in Hawa Hassan Shares the Spicy Somali Pasta Recipe From Her New Cookbook, ‘In Bibi’s Kitchen,’ with Elise Taylor for Vogue
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Define Covert Racism
How does a company that basically created an open forum for customers to be racist, become the arbiters of what is racist? You can't just say it @yelp and will it into being. –Preeti Mistry
Define Sidekick
Cooking as a brown person in America is complicated because audiences and diners do expect a particular kind of performance, whereas white men have the latitude to do whatever they want. “The fact is Brad’s show did do very well,” she says, referring to Brad Leone, one of the first stars of Bon Appetit’s Test Kitchen, who hosts It’s Alive With Brad. “For some reason, people like watching a big dumb white guy. But why? What does that say about the audience? Why do you want to watch this incompetent white man when we have one in the fucking Oval Office?” –Sohla El-Waylly in Going Sohla: After leaving Bon Appétit, the chef now has her own show, with E. Alex Jung for Vulture
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Chatter
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New this week: 1-2-3 True Confessions
We’re starting a new feature this week that we hope can lead to some fun and interesting conversations with you, dear subscriber. We’re calling it True Confessions and it goes like this:
There are at least 12 different types of salt in our pantry.
We’ve never watched a single episode of this thing called Top Chef.
We have yet to stand in line to eat at Swan Oyster Depot.
On Wednesday let’s talk about your True Confessions. Keep an eye out for the email thread in your inbox and you can fess-up your food-related secrets too 😉.
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When You’re A Tad Too Slow on the Trigger Finger
SPAM® Pumpkin Spice Sells Out in Matter of Hours.
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Newsletter recs
If you’re a fan of newsletters and salad (isn’t everyone?), you should give The Department of Salad a go. It’s published by Emily Nunn, a former New Yorker magazine editor and Chicago Tribune food and features reporter, whose 2017 book “The Comfort Food Diaries” was chosen as a Best of the Year by NPR. Emily’s newsletter this week is about Greek salads:
But I do not remember ever eating a good one, nor do I recall the experience of sitting across from someone else eating a Greek salad who said: “Oh, yes. This is it. Perfect. Exactly what I wanted.” I also never observed one that looked particularly appetizing. But every NYC diner and a lot of other restaurants offered the Greek salad. –Emily Nunn in Welcome to The Department of Salad #2
ONE MORE THING
That’s all for this week.
Feedback? Questions, complaints, unanimous praise and topics you think we should consider are always welcome!
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We’re outta here. Be well and take care,
–Bruce
p.s.
#PROTIP: You might encounter a pay wall for some of the articles linked to in this newsletter. While we don't advocate not paying for content (subscriptions keep journalists/writers employed!), from time to time we do use OUTLINE to read an article for research purposes.
"Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end" –John Lennon