#31 | Ottolenghi's Valentines Day Menu 🍆
Saveur Calls it Quits
Hello!
Happy (early) Valentines Day! Did you know that Americans will spend $2B on candy this year? Wonder what percentage of that is spent on Conversation Hearts and does anyone actually eat them in the first place?
This is the thirty first edition of EAT.DRINK.THINK., a weekly survey of the most interesting food media on the web with a handful of social posts thrown in for good measure.
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 anytime, simply unsubscribe. I appreciate you reading this newsletter. Let’s eat!
EAT
Yotam Ottolenghi’s Valentine’s Day Recipes
Yes please. This burnt aubergine with feta and harissa oil recipe by Yottam Ottelenghi for The Guardian is right up our alley. Pretty sure we saw some aubergines, aka eggplants, at the farmers market last week from a farmer in Fresno, so we’re planning on this dish to grace our Valentine’s Day table on Sunday. The next recipe in the article is prawns in vanilla and rum butter with sticky rice and papaya pickle, which we’d be wholeheartedly enthusiastic about making too if it wasn’t for the fact that prawns/shrimp are one of the worst possible seafood ingredients available anywhere. That is unless you can find wild-caught from the East Coast or Gulf of Mexico, or farmes in the midwest. The shrimp found at most grocery stores likely comes from farms in Southeast Asia where horrific slave labor conditions have been reported, as well as the widespread use of antibiotics, liquid-waste pollution and the destruction of mangroves. In other words, we find it cringworthy when we see a recipe for shrimp without a qualifier that prompts the reader to consider the source first, so we’re going to take a hard pass on this recipe. For dessert, Ottolenghi includes a recipe for coffee mousse with tahini chocolate sauce, which sounds like a nice palate cleanser after the spicy eggplant, but desserts aren’t in our wheelhouse so it’s unlikely we’ll get to enjoy that one.
DRINK
40 Acres and a Brewery
In celebration of Black History Month, four Bay Area Black-owned breweries collaborated to create limited IPAs featuring American civil rights activists on the labels: Oak Park Brewing, Full Circle Brewing Co., Hunters Point Brewery and Hella Coastal. SF Gate
In 1970, People’s Brewing Co. was one of the first Black-owned breweries in the U.S. People’s was owned by Ted Mack, a Civil Rights crusader, an Ohio State football player and an entrepreneur who brought the Black community together to purchase a small brewery in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Oak Park’s People’s Beer uses the original recipe. Sac Bee
THINK
So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good bye!
Bidding a fond farewell to Saveur, which recently announced it will no longer be publishing a quarterly print magazine (but the title will live on as a digital platform). Flashback to 1994 when issue #2 arrived in our mailbox with a San Francisco-themed cover and one of our favorite stories ever: The Old Stoves of North Beach by Peggy Knickerbocker.
"Old stove" is gentle, complimentary North Beach slang for someone who has put in a lot of time in front of a lot of stoves in his or her day. Old stoves are sometimes restaurant chefs, or retired restaurant chefs—but more often they're simply home cooks, with many years of experience making savory dishes for themselves, their families, and their friends. Old stoves are renowned throughout the community for their culinary skills. They're old souls, legends, well-aged and cured. There is not one chance in a million that you'll have a bad meal at the hands of an old stove.
Recognizing “old stoves” in a lavishly photographed (by Christopher Hirsheimer) and beautifully designed national food magazine was a ground-breaking moment, especially since Gourmet, which after the sudden passing of Laurie Colwin in 1992, ceased to have a column that spoke to us home cooks. And as John Birdsall noted on Twitter today:
I think history will show that Saveur was a transitional mag, bridging the old, rich armchair food and travel aspirations of Gourmet (I mean, "Saveur"!) and the identity immersion essay-style food journalism of today.
Knickerbocker signs off her story with this lovely note, which sadly speaks to a North Beach that may have disappeared forever.
North Beach is my Paris, my Greenwich Village. It is my nourishment, the principal flavor of my life. I never want to leave—not for a great house, a tempting job, even a love affair. I want to stay here so long that maybe one day somebody might remember me as an old stove. I couldn't ask for higher praise.
The Future of Food Isn’t Quite Here Yet
☢︎ Zombie salmon: AquaBounty’s bioengineered salmon is close to market readiness, but there’s a long list of retailers and restaurants that will refuse to sell it including Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, as well as Red Lobster. The Counter
🥩 Don’t mean to ruin your breakfast: but this photo of a lab-grown ribeye steak spit out of a 3D printer just doesn’t look right. Right? Observer
🎥 Watch: Revolutionary new farming techniques in Russia. YouTube
🍝 For those of you keeping track: the great bucatini shortage is almost over. Grub Street
🇱🇰 Sri Lankan Lamprais: Back in 2017, we spent 3 weeks in Sri Lanka, enjoying our share of the ubiquitous egg hoppers, topping everything with spicy pol sombol, and even an occassional avocado toast. But somehow, we missed out on lamprais “a fading culinary creation of the Lansis — or, the Dutch Burghers, an ethnic minority in Sri Lanka.” Whetstone
🎧 Listen: Boundless Horizon is a new podcast exploring African Americans impact on America's food, hosted by food writer Korsha Wilson. A Hungry Society
Up next: the great feta shortage.
The viral TikTok baked feta pasta craze first started in Finland in 2019, when food blogger Jenni Häyrinen posted a simple pasta recipe to her Instagram: uunifetapasta, or oven baked feta pasta.
The recipe went viral, even creating a nationwide shortage of feta cheese. Fast forward to January 2021 when MacKenzie Smith posted a video of the dish to her TikTok, Grilled Cheese Social, and the recipe found a second life, quickly gaining millions of views, with imitators everywhere, and resulting in an apparent shortage of feta cheese. The recipe couldn’t be more simple: dump a basket of cherry tomatoes into a baking dish, put a block of feta in the middle, top with sliced garlic and chili flakes and drizzle generously with olive oil. Slide the dish into a 425º oven and set a timer for 25 minutes. In the meantime, have a pot of pasta at the ready. When the timer goes off, pull the dish out of the oven, garnish with a handful of fresh basil, drain the pasta and stir it into the dish coating the noodles with all that gooey melted cheese and tomato sauce goodness. Bon appétit!
🥜 Peanut Gallery
Choosy Readers Choose: Peanuts are a sustainable, low impact, good for the planet crop, but when they are grinded into a jar of peanut butter with added hydrogenated palm oil, that sustainable label takes a hit: “To keep up with the incredibly high demand for the cheaply produced oil, acres of rainforest are being cut down - leading to a loss of animal habitat for endangered species.” The Independent
Alicia Kennedy stirred up the peanut butter conversation with her take on natural versus processed in her newsletter this week, prompting readers to question their loyalty to spread they grew up on. We survived on Jif for 20-some years, but are now firmly in the all natural, no sugar added camp. Coincidentally, David Leibovitz and Luke Tsai also published pieces this week featuring the two leading brands. Here’s all three takes:
All-Natural: to see the world in a jar of peanut butter. And a heaven in a two-pack from Costco. From the desk of Alicia Kennedy
Skippy: Parisian food writer David Lebovitz finds that Skippy is the secret ingredient for his Peanut Butter Chocolate Brownies.
Jif: Bay Area food scribe Luke Tsai prefers Jif for his Garlicky Peanut Butter Cold Noodles.
Let’s Chat: Keep an eye on your inbox this Tuesday (2/16) as we’re sending out a link to a conversation about natural vs. leading brands. Does your choice of condiments and pantry ingredients define your food philosophy? Do you dip your fries in Heinz ketchup on the sly? Best Foods mayo or a vegan brand on your sandwich? DeCecco, Barilla or Rustichella pasta? And of course, the great peanut butter debate.
Edible Pursuit will return next week!
That’s all for this week.
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–Bruce
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