#73 | Stop Seasoning With Salt And Pepper
Plant-Based What?
Hello!
BLK HISTORY MONTH
If Black History Month is not
viable then wind does not
carry the seeds and drop them
on fertile ground
rain does not
dampen the land
and encourage the seeds
to root
sun does not
warm the earth
and kiss the seedlings
and tell them plain:
You’re As Good As Anybody Else
You’ve Got A Place Here, Too
—Nikki Giovanni, from Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea
By the way, I'm Bruce Cole, Publisher of Edible San Francisco. Welcome to all the new subscribers, thanks for joining us!
First up, our thoughts on salt and pepper. We link to a recent article in Taste (below) that discusses the age-old tradition of restaurant servers bringing a pepper grinder to your table after the food has been served, before you’ve even had a chance to take a bite of your meal. How do you know if a dish even needs pepper, and shouldn’t the chef season it properly before the dish leaves the kitchen? It got us thinking about another other age-old tradition, at least in recipes, where the phrase “season to taste with salt and pepper” is most always tacked onto the instructions, which really bugs us.
🛑 Stop Seasoning With Salt & Pepper To Taste! These seemingly obligatory instructions ("season with salt and pepper") are the default footnote to countless recipes. You should season almost every dish with salt; adding salt incrementally from the beginning of a recipe helps build layers of flavor. But pepper is a spice; adding it fundamentally changes a dish—there's no going back once you throw it into the mix. Pepper seems to have been anointed with the same magical seasoning qualities of salt and has been paired with it by recipe developers these days, by default. Sure, some ingredients need black pepper to accentuate their flavors; we made a black trumpet mushroom risotto that just screamed for black pepper the other night. Yet there's no real reason why you should always "season with salt and pepper." Why not try something else instead of reaching for the pepper grinder? There are probably more than a few options in your spice collection. 😉 We like Aleppo pepper flakes (sweet and mildly spicy), Gochugaru (Korean red chili flakes, sweet, hot, and smoky), or one of the Shichimi/Sansho spice mixes stashed in our freezer (preserves their pungently aromatic and fiery properties). And anything with cumin is fine by us.
The End Of The Grind Is Near: “The question of whether grinding fresh pepper on a finished dish is a gesture of sophistication, or a ghost of gauche culinary flair, is a deeply polarizing one.” Taste
How The Other Half Lives: Ruth Reichl’s Poor Man’s Tarte Flambe. La Briffe
🔥 Mouth On Fire: “This mapo tofu recipe (麻婆豆腐) is the true blue, authentic real deal—the spicy, tongue-numbing, rice-is-absolutely-not-optional, can’t-have-just-one-scoop mapo tofu that you get in the restaurants.” The Woks Of Life
What Is This Snack Cake Recipe You Speak Of? “My family fell under the spell of Yossy Arefi’s simple recipes for cakes that are meant to be eaten anytime.” The New Yorker
🎧 Step Away From The Pot Roast: Cooking Winter Vegetables with Hetty McKinnon and Amanda Cohen. The Splendid Table
A Little Mouthful: How do I make sense of the bocadillo? A mouthful of triumph, a mouthful of expulsion, a mouthful bit out of the world, a mouthful returned to nourish; bocadillo de jámon, an ache you didn’t know was there—answering the same question over and over… The Word and the Sandwich
The American Truffle Triumph: “The bianchetto truffle is a different species from the famed white truffle of Italy and the black winter truffle of France. It doesn’t deliver the erotic crescendo of the white, but it still possesses most of the pheromonal zip at a much lower price. I thought: Has one of the world’s greatest wild ingredients been sitting in our backyard all along, waiting for someone to notice?” The Fern
Farm To Table Connect Is Strong With This One: Aomboon (Boonie) Deasy of K&J Orchards, one of our main fruit stand stops at the CUESA Farmers Market, is taking the plunge and opening a restaurant in Oakland. “Everyone said, ‘Are you nuts?’” she recalled, laughing. “We’re trying to bring the farm to the city instead of the city coming to the farm.” Pomet opens Feb. 23 at 4029 Piedmont Ave., Oakland SF Chronicle (paywall)
So Berkeley: NYC schools to serve vegan-only meals on Fridays. NY Post
Swing And A Miss: ☝️not exactly a vegan lunch.
So Danish: 🎥 It’s not MØ MØ but, Hvad fuck er en bælgfrug, or “what the fuck is a legume” music video. YouTube
Just Do It: 15 Vegan Cookbooks to Inspire You to Join the Plant-Based Revolution. Vogue
8 Tips For Sticking To Your New Years Resolution To Eat Less Meat: #5 “On a vegetarian or vegan diet, you can get enough protein if you eat an adequate number of calories from a variety of whole foods.” Full list here. Vox
🥩 Why We Eat What We Eat: “Large brains are phenomenal energy hogs—even at rest, a human brain consumes about 20 percent of the body’s energy. But a switch to a diet full of calorie-rich meat meant an excess of energy that could be directed to supporting larger, more complex brains.” Wired
Buyer Beware: “It seems that the more “plant-based” has become ubiquitous as a marketing term, the less clarity one can have on what it refers to precisely. “Plant-based” could be the new “natural,” meaning whatever the person selling a product wants the consumer to believe it means.” From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy
🎧 Peeling Back Food Labels: Amy O’Neill Houck of Edible Alaska talks with Danielle Nierenberg, the president and co-founder of Food Tank, to understand what’s behind various food labels and certifications and to explore how eaters can decide what standards to support with the products they choose to purchase. Edible Communities
Koi Palace’s Conundrum: From massive tanks of seafood to multicolored dumplings, can one of the Bay Area’s most popular banquet halls continue to make “Cantonese cuisine that’s accessible to new generations of clientele, and reproducible without a classically trained kitchen staff.” A great in-depth story on the brothers Ronny and Willy Ng, who founded Koi Palace, by Anthony Shu. Eater
🤔 The View From New York: The Rampaging Pigs of the San Francisco Bay Area. “I would prefer a California where we had no wild pigs,” said Brendan Cummings, conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity, adding that reintroducing jaguars into California could help reduce wild pig populations.” New York Times (paywall)
Black History Month: A list put together by the CUESA staff for digging into the legacy, foods, and stories of Black farmers, chefs, and documentarians of African American food culture. Celebrating black voices in food and farming. CUESA
There Are No Rules: John deBary's Food and Nonalcoholic Drink Pairing Guide. Boisson
Have A Take, Don’t Suck: TL;DR I expect more from a paper of this caliber than to refer to an entire category of drinks as “gross.” The attitude is—to take a similarly unsophisticated approach—shitty. Good Drinks
No Habla Health Care: Migrant farmworkers in California are cut off from mainstream health care by language and cultural barriers. By the numbers:
407,300 workers—mostly Mexican and many undocumented—prepare, maintain, and harvest fruit, nuts, and vegetables up and down the nation’s richest agricultural state.
165,000 of California farmworkers are believed to be migrants from Indigenous communities in Mexico.
23 different languages are spoken by migrants from Indigenous communities. Most arrived from 13 different Mexican states. More than half speak Mixteco and another 30 percent speak Zapoteco.
9 percent of Indigenous Mexican interviewees were covered [by health insurance] and 19 percent of their spouses.
Full Story: Indigenous Farmworkers Are Unheard, Overlooked, and Exposed. Civil Eats
We’ll Take ‘Smells Like Cow Burps’ for $600 Alex:
February Playlist
Update: In solidarity with Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and other musical artists who’ve removed their musical libraries from Spotify, we’ve deleted our Spotify account and moved to Tidal. “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines {via the Joe Rogan podcast} – potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them.” — Neil Young in Rolling Stone.
Play EAT. DRINK. THINK. FEBRUARY 2022 on TIDAL. We're obsessed with Ellie Rowsell's tantalizing vocals on How Can I Make It Ok? Can’t stop listening to it. Also, new tracks from Nilüfer Yanya, Toro y Moi, Raveena, Mattiel, Hanni el Katib, Three Sacred Souls, maye and more.
That’s all for this week.
We’re outta here. Be well and take care,
–Bruce
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"Despite its artistic intentions and its many accomplishments, humankind owes its existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains." —Anonymous