#19 | Crème Fraîche With Everything
A Revelatory Bottle of Wine
What a week. Having fullheartedly committed to the polls that predicted a massive blue wave on election night, we started out with a celebratory drink at about 5 p.m. on Tuesday. It was all downhill the rest of the night and as the map turned more red than blue, we finally had to slam our laptop shut in disgust at about 10 p.m. Luckily the sun did indeed come up Wednesday morning and here we are.
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First up a little food science to get you salivating. One of our culinary tenets is crème fraîche with everything, so this recipe from Nik Sharma’s new book checks all the boxes of deliciousness.
EAT
Baked Sweet Potatoes with Maple Crème Fraîche
Nik Sharma’s latest book The Flavor Equation, The Science of Great Cooking Explained in More Than 100 Essential Recipes (Chronicle Books, October 2020) is our favorite kind of cookbook. We love authors who explain the science behind a recipe, Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015) being a prime example. Take this recipe for Baked Sweet Potatoes with Maple Crème Fraîche. A quick Google search for baked sweet potatoes generates 164M results, but do any of them diagnose why the Maillard reaction (a chemical reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars that gives browned food its distinctive flavor) occurs only when you use butter? Sharma explains:
Butter works as the fat of choice here due to its higher smoke point. As the butter melts, it separates into its constituents—fat, water, sugars, and milk solids—which undergo caramelization and the Maillard reaction.
The sugars concentrate as the water evaporates during cooking. Fish sauce adds a spot of umami to the sauce, you can use vegan fish sauce as an alternative. The peanuts and scallions provide crunch against the softer textures of the potato and the dressing.
So if you tried to veganize this recipe using olive oil or coconut oil in place of butter, your results will vary, but they won’t have the distinctive caramelization as described in the recipe.
Before writing cookbooks, Sharma, who is also the author of Season: Bold Flavors, Beautiful Food (Chronicle Books, 2018), was a molecular biologist. He adopts the same approach in developing and testing recipes that a scientist uses when conducting experiments, trying different combinations of ingredients and techniques and observing the results. In the baked sweet potato recipe he notes:
I’ve been testing new ways to improve on roasting sweet potatoes in the oven, and I found that a combination of steaming and roasting works great for a dish like this for both the texture and the extra set of aroma molecules that comes through. The first step, partial steaming, keeps the moisture inside the sweet potato while cooking, and the second step, uncovered roasting, helps create a robust flavor profile.
Understanding the science behind what happens when we prepare food can make us better cooks and at the same time make our food more delicious, which is the end game after all. You can find a signed copy of The Flavor Equation at Omnivore Books.
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DRINK
Raft Wines, 2019 Weed Farms Syrah, Dry Creek Valley
We drink a lot of this Syrah. It’s reasonably priced at $28/bottle and it comes from a vineyard with an interesting story, which means we enjoy it that much more, because when a winemaker shares intimate knowledge of what goes into a bottle, they’ve also poured a little bit of their soul in as well. Besha Rodell, the Australian wine writer for The New York Times wrote about just that in a column this week, describing revelatory bottle of Nicolas Joly Savennières she enjoyed with her husband on their honeymoon:
It was one of those watershed moments in the life of any wine drinker, transforming one’s understanding of what wine can be and do and conjure.
Nine years later she eventually met the winemaker.
Our meeting with Mr. Joly taught me something thrilling about wine: Sometimes you can taste the soul of the maker in the bottle. This is not always the case. So much wine is made purely as a product, or as a result of longstanding tradition, or as an act of hubris. But there was a reason we’d connected with that particular wine on the night of our honeymoon, a reason it stirred something deeper than pure enjoyment. It was as mystical and weird and complex as the man who made it. —Besha Rodell in When Wine Is More Than Just a Drink for The New York Times
And here’s winemaker Jennifer Reichardt of Raft Wines talking about the Weed Farms Syrah Vineyard from a podcast interview with Joy Manning of Edible Communities in 2018:
The proprietor, Sally Weed, it’s her vineyard. There’s a few things special about the wines. One, when I started Raft Wines, those were the first grapes that came onboard. I’ve known Sally for many years and she always said when I was ready to let her know, and hopefully she would have some grapes available and she definitely did in 2017. So it has a special place in my heart for that.
On the other side, she farms it very, very, very sustainably. It’s kind of the coolest part about the whole wine is she has coho salmon that run along the creek in the vineyard, and coho salmon are very endangered in California, and so it’s rare to see them at all, and they actually spawned in this creek, which is incredible. So anything that happens in the vineyard has to positively affect the creek, so therefore it only gets pruned and it gets mowed, but there’s no spraying on the ground, there’s no spraying on the vine. Even if you farm organically, you’re still allowed to spray things in the vineyard and there’s nothing, so I think it’s the most honest expression of terroir there is because it’s just the grapes. There’s nothing else. I craft it in a way to really highlight all of that.
It’s just the grapes.
Plus a lot of soul.
We purchased this bottle directly from Raft Wines.
THINK
Speaking of Salmon
In last week’s newsletter we pondered salmon zombies, those still swimming upstream despite huge chunks of skin sloughing off their sides. This week we’re back on the salmon zombie trail, with news on their evil cousins:
Today, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) violated core environmental laws in approving the genetically engineered (GE) salmon. The Court ruled that FDA ignored the serious environmental consequences of approving genetically engineered salmon and the full extent of plans to grow and commercialize the salmon in the U.S. and around the world, violating the National Environmental Policy Act. Federal Court Declares Genetically Engineered Salmon Unlawful —earthjustice.org
•
Define Disgusting: Part 2
The chairman of the Court of Master Sommeliers, Americas, resigned on Friday, after a week of turmoil at the most elite organization in American wine. In a New York Times report last week, 13 women went public with accusations of sexual misconduct in the court’s highest ranks.
On Thursday, as calls mounted for the entire 13-member board to resign, The Times sent questions to the chairman, Devon Broglie, about a woman who said he had an inappropriate sexual relationship with her in 2013, before he became chairman. —Julia Moskin in Chairman of Elite Wine Group Resigns Amid Its Sexual Harassment Scandal for The New York Times
•
ICYMI
Time to switch up coconut milk brands. We’ve been buying Chaokoh forever.
Costco drops Chaokoh coconut milk over allegations of forced monkey labor. "When not being forced to pick coconuts or perform in circus-style shows for tourists, the animals were kept tethered, chained to old tires, or confined to cages barely larger than their bodies," a PETA news release stated. —Lauren Padgett for CNN
•
Spice Shortage Alert
Actually there’s plenty of raw spices available out there, and due to the pandemic, sales are booming as everyone is cooking at home. But apparently the tiny jars the spices are packaged in are now in short supply.
“Jugs, shakers, bags, plastic tubs — the lead times are stretching from two to three months and now into the new year. We’re having to bring in plastics where molds don’t fit the specs,” says McKinley Thomason, owner of the Doug Jeffords spice company in Mount Pleasant, Tenn.
Overstreet at Spiceology is having similar problems. The company has pivoted entirely to direct-to-consumer, launching 13 new salt-free blends in August. The spices themselves have been relatively easy to source, he says, but two- and nine-ounce glass jars, 5.5-ounce plastic containers and even restaurant-sized containers have been in short supply. —Laura Reiley in A spice boom has left manufacturers scrambling, and packaging materials can’t keep up for The Washington Post
•
Vote With Your Vote, Not Your Fork
Remember when Michael Pollan penned the “vote with your fork” mantra back in 2006?
“You can simply stop participating in a system that abuses animals or poisons the water or squanders jet fuel flying asparagus around the world. You can vote with your fork, in other words, and you can do it three times a day.”
A decade later, Pollan stuck a fork in his original thought ballon in a conversation with Joe Fassler for The Counter:
While the cultural consciousness around food has shifted, we haven’t made much progress changing things in Washington. The real challenge now is to bring the fight from the consumer to the citizen: to get people to vote on food issues, to get people in Congress to vote for improvements to the food system.
Alicia Kennedy noted as much this week in her newsletter:
I don’t eat meat and I buy all sorts of stuff that has been sourced through the most ethical possible channels, that support agroecology. Am I a good person for that? No, I’m doing the actual least I can do as a person with some spare cash, a deep concern for the environment and small farmers, and no desire to eat animals. I really should be doing so much more on a real political and social level to change the food system.
Now there’s an urgent call to create a US National Food Strategy, created in partnership between Vermont Law School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems and the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic.
Simply stated, the need for a coordinated federal approach to food and agricultural law and policy has increased dramatically since 2017. Our food system has been in crisis for years; given the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic coupled with the strong, sustained efforts to address systemic racial inequality that raise significant food system issues in the U.S., our nation can no longer afford to postpone strategic food system planning. Read the Urgent Call Report
There’s also A Call for a National Agenda for a Healthy, Equitable, and Sustainable Food System created by Nicholas Freudenberg DrPH, and Marion Nestle PhD:
Whether Democrats sweep the election or Republicans retain the Senate or White House, the devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, the deepening economic crisis, and the continuing disruptions from climate change demand rethinking how federal food policies can contribute to improved human and planetary health.
Be prepared to put down your fork, but prepared to dig in just as well.
•
Chatter: Election Edition
ONE MORE THING
This week we give thanks to everyone who voted, although it’s hard to believe that Californians voted against affirmative action. Saw that on that ballot and figured it was a gimme. WTF? And we also give thanks to turkeys, whose days are numbered, although these wild ones will still be stalking acorns on Thanksgiving day.
SURROUNDED BY WILD TURKEYS
Little calls as they pass
Through dry forbs and grasses
Under blue oak and gray digger pine
In the warm afternoon of the forest-fire haze;
Twenty or more, long-legged birds
all alike.
So are we, in our soft calling,
passing on through.
Our young, which trail after,
Look just like us.
—Gary Sndyer
No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1993)
That’s all for this week.
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–Bruce
p.s.
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"Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end" –John Lennon