Entries Tagged 'Food and eating' ↓

This show didn’t have the excitement of June in NYC, which may be due to the fact that the west coast was harder hit by the recession than the Northeast. (Though many of the same vendors exhibit at all the shows in SF, Chicago and NYC, merchants tend to go to the show closest to them.) There were some empty booths, but good floor traffic. Three trends I noted:

1. Gluten-free everything. People with celiac disease can’t eat gluten, but for most of the rest of us it’s the wheat protein enhanced during kneading that makes rustic bread chewy and delicious. But marketers seemed to have sensed a trend that “free” of anything equates healthy goodness, so there are many booths advertising “gluten-free” products that would never contain gluten in the first place.

2. Pizza. Lots and lots of frozen gourmet pizzas are on hand, designed to be sold at $6 or more for an individual-size pie. Also a lot of flatbreads that are advertising themselves as pizza foundations.

3. Old-timey packaging. There are an increasing number of packagers trying to make their product look like it has been around for 150 years, with accompanying benefits of heritage and nostalgia and old time values, even if it just came to market. Correspondingly, there’s less of the light and bright “lightbox” look (I call it that because the products are designed to look great when lit from below on a shelf) that has been popular in recent years.

I did a taste comparison of high end vodka pasta sauces, which were easy to find on the floor. I’d had the real thing, more or less, at Rao’s in Las Vegas last week, and the ones I tasted (included jarred Rao’s as well as Mario Batali) suffered in comparison less from being preserved than from being dumbed-down in flavor and salt. Marketers, no doubt with lots of consumer research backing them up, have decided that the product’s personality should come from the face on the label, rather than the actual taste.

This show is not blogger-friendly, by the way. I registered as a media “trade affiliate” which I won’t do again. Maybe guessing I am not a serious buyer, some boothers tend to pull back the sample tray as I approach. Or maybe they’re just worried I am going to suitcase them.

Yesterday I drove from San Francisco to Hollister for the last Tomato U-Pick of the season at Mariquita Farm. It’s run by a couple who decided they’d rather sell direct from the fields than pay rent at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market.

If there is anything better than standing in the autumn sun and plucking a warm ripe tomato off the vine and popping it in your mouth, I would like to know about it. I had planned to pick 10 pounds of San Marzanos for sauce and 5 pounds of Early Girls mixed with a few heirlooms. But my emotions got the best of me and I ended up with 25 pounds of Marzanos and 30 plus pounds of everything else.

The tomatoes, other than the Marzanos, were so ripe that many of them got squished and overripe on the long drive back (punctuated with a stop for Bun Pho Hue in San Jose) and they ended up in the sauce. I made a classic red sauce, which I wanted for comparison to the “red sauce places” I’m encountering in my new home in Saratoga. I adapted a recipe from Marcella Hazan which goes like this:

Classic Red Tomato Sauce for pasta or pizza

10 pounds San Marzano tomatoes

1 ½ cup each finely chopped onion, celery and carrot

Extra Virgin Olive Oil (mild, not overly “grassy” in taste)

Salt and sugar

Dump the tomatoes into a sink or very large bowl full of water. Take them out slicing each in half lengthwise and cutting out any bad spots and transfer to a large pot. Bring to a simmer, covered; the water from washing will be enough liquid so they don’t stick. Once the mixture is bubbling away remove the lid and continue simmering about 90 minutes more until the tomatoes have lost their individual identity. Allow to cool to a safe handling temperature, then put them through a food strainer. I did this twice: at a coarse setting to remove the skins, then a finer setting to remove the seeds.

Meanwhile, sauté the onion in about ¼ cup olive oil until translucent. Remove then sauté carrots 5 minutes, then add celery and sauté 3 minutes more. Puree the carrots, onions and celery in a food processer and add to strained tomatoes. Cook 30 minutes then taste for seasoning. I only added 1 T of salt and 1 T of sugar and thought about using even less than this; the tomatoes themselves were that good and complete.

The result was fabulous, rich and tomato-y. Out of curiosity, I’d initially cooked the other squished tomatoes separately. Heirlooms are pretty, Early Girls are sweet, but San Marzanos have the robust flavor profile this sauce demands.

Dinner was an assortment of pizzas made with the red sauce and with individual tomato slices, accompanied by sliced green zebras (they were getting ripe faster than anything else) in a vinaigrette with garlic and basil. All in all, a pretty good day—assuming you like tomatoes, of course.

My fellow blogger Daniel Berman is a former San Francisco ad guy who, like me, found himself in upstate New York through a twist of fate. We met on Yelp through our reviews chronicling the quest for good food in Albany and environs. Daniel has now taken this a step further with a quixotic campaign to persuade Albanians to chef up and be more like Austin, a city of comparable size. He’s been driven a bit mad by observing that “Our top food blogger is promoting free beef and cheddar sandwiches at Arby’s. And our top food critic is spending her time in converted pubs and pizza parlors.” This sturm und drang caused me to reflect on what my own food experience has been since moving here.

As all things should, we’ll start at the track. One of the wisest and most economical things you can do in the Capital District is go to Saratoga Racetrack early on a summer morning and watch the horses exercise while the dew melts and the steam rises off the grass. It’s free and you can sit in a box seat which will subsequently be occupied by a celebrity or racing nabob, while you sip your coffee or nosh on the breakfast you’ve picked up on the way in.

They clear the grandstand at 10 am and you have to go out, pay, then come back in again. On the way out you will see: most of the tables in the $3 picnic area already claimed by folks who have brought in coolers and tablecloths and will return sometime before the 1 pm post time. I personally can’t think of a better way to spend the afternoon since you can watch the horses and jockeys go by in the paddock, on the way to the races, see the races themselves on closed circuit TVs everywhere, stroll over to a betting station, and potentially splurge by spending a big $2 additional to see the races live by moving to the clubhouse.

So my first look at a quality Saratoga dining experience consists in peeking at what’s inside my cooler. It is this: half a pastrami and swiss on seeded rye with Saratoga chips and Cole slaw from Ben and Bill’s deli, accompanied by a can or more of Genessee Cream Ale.

Ben and Bill were the original Golub brothers, a distinguished Jewish family which owns the Price Chopper chain of supermarkets upstate. Their descendents chafed at the lack of local deli food and resolved to create the best deli between New York City and Montreal, which happens to be placed inside a supermarket in a strip mall. No matter: the pastrami is lean, the cole slaw is excellent and the included pickle is authentically fluorescent. They’ve licensed a few things from Carnegie Deli such as the cheesecake and the gut-busting Woody Allen mile-high sandwich but the $5.99 half sandwich special is really all a reasonable person needs to eat.

This includes a generous bag of potato chips which, as Wikipedia will tell us, were invented right here, across the Northway at Saratoga Lake:

The original potato chip recipe was created by chef George Crum at Moon’s Lake House near Saratoga Springs, New York, on August 24, 1853. Fed up with a customer who continued to send his fried potatoes back complaining that they were too thick and soggy, Crum decided to slice the potatoes so thin that they could not be eaten with a fork. As they could not be fried normally in a pan, he decided to stir-fry the potato slices. Against Crum’s expectation, the guest was ecstatic about the new chips and they soon became a regular item on the lodge’s menu, under the name “Saratoga Chips.”

Ben and Bill’s Saratoga chips are fried up fresh each morning and are miles apart from the uniformity of a bag of Lay’s. Some are burnt, some are a bit flaccid, but that’s the idea. Each one unique, these chips are made to be noticed and savored slowly over a race or two till the bag is gone.

The ideal liquid accompaniment for this would be a growler (64 ounce jug) of IPA from the ever-changing tap at Eddie’s Beverages on Excelsior, except that the track does not allow glass containers to be brought in. On a warm summer day, the light, refreshing and slightly sweet Genny Creme is a fine substitue. It’s a benefit that many upstaters regard this as a working person’s brew, a bit déclassé, so I’m rarely (actually never) asked to share my stash.

When I go back to San Francisco, my treat of choice will be a special from a Chinese lunch place, most likely shrimp in garlic sauce from Taiwan in the Richmond. Except with great difficulty, I’m not going to find anything like that here. Nor will I get Texas brisket or a perfectly simmered pot of turnip greens. But my trackside lunch works well enough, and I feel proud and resourceful regarding my competence in foraging in my new haunts.

It appears that the purveyors of fancy foods, and the consumers who buy from them, are ready to lead us back to fiscal health. The Javits Convention Center, which two weeks ago was so deserted you could picture yourself getting mugged during DM Days, was today so packed it was hard to make it down the aisles. Both exhibitors and attendees were delighted.

There’s always a big trend that emerges at the Fancy Food Show and this year it was, as one possibly might have guessed, fancy chocolate…. the stuff that soothes us and feels like an acceptable treat when life is hard. There was single origin chocolate (lots and lots of that), high end chocolate with handsome packaging, chocolate to eat with wine, even chocolate sushi. Runner up trend: tea, in both liquid and dried forms.  Also the broad category of things you can make at home that feel like currently unaffordable restaurant meals: pasta sauces from Rao’s or Mario Batalli, premade soufflés guaranteed not to fall, spice kits with a recipe card etc.

Flavored water is still a strong category, while celebrity foods, energy drinks, artisanal salts, salsas and specialty vinegars—each a trend at one point—were hard to find at the show. Most surprisingly pervasive single item: sun dried tomatoes. Most popular booths among attendees on a New York summer day: anything serving iced desserts, or slicing prosciutto or Serrano ham.

After the writeup on Texas barbecue, several folks asked if I would repost my original brisket recipe as text, not an image, for easier reading. Here you go. I’ve added a few thoughts on technique, in italics. This recipe came to me in a package of materials purchased through some kind of multilevel marketing exchange back in the 80s. You would pay the sender $1 for the packet and then send it on to 10 new people, each of whom would send $1 to you. For whatever reason, this did not make me rich, but the recipe is worth all of $1 and more.

5 Easy Steps to Delicious Brisket
(8 to 10 lb. Brisket)

1. First – Rub salt, pepper and brown sugar on both sides of brisket. Leave the fat side up thru entire cooking time.
Unlike some, I recommend lightly trimming away the fat while still leaving a good layer over the meat. If you don’t trim at all you are going to end up with a lot of tasty smoked fat.
2. Second – Put on smoker “fat side up”. Remember not open flame, just hot fire with smoke. Charcoal broquett is fine.
Smoking is cooking with indirect heat, in which the fire is in another part of the grill and the smoke and heat are drawn across the food by the way you manage your airflow. The good smoky flavor is going to come from chunks of hickory or oak (I find mesquite and apple too light in flavor) that you will soak for 30 minutes or more before adding to the fire. Also, you need a source of moisture, such as a pan of water inside the cooking vessel, to humidify the cooking atmosphere and concentrate the flavor.
3. Third- Leave on smoker for 3 hours checking fire every 45 minutes so bottom of brisket won’t burn.
During this time you should be steadily replenishing the charcoal and wood chunks for a constant smoky fire. I like to leave the smoke vents open at the beginning to build up a good fire, then shut them completely to grab all that sweet smoke, then open them a little just before the fire is about to go out and leave that way for duration of cooking.
4. Fourth- To finish for perfect tenderness wrap in foil, put in loaf pan, and finish in the oven at 325 degrees for 2 to 3 hours. The last hour of cooking in oven, test by sticking a fork in brisket at both thick part and thin part. When fork goes in easily without force it’s done.
5. Fifth – Unwrap; let cool slightly before slicing. Remember: Never put B.B.Q. Sauce on brisket while cooking. The smoke gives the flavor and the oven gives great tenderness.

It isn’t hard to make good brisket. (Brisket = barbecue, at least for the purposes of this article.) You need a reasonably fatty piece of meat, USDA Choice or higher. You need a rub containing brown sugar for a nice crispy crust. You need a smoker with a good tight seal to keep the smoke in while letting air circulate so the fire won’t go out. You need moisture, in the form of well soaked wood or chips and a steaming pan inside the cooker. And most of all you need patience. Have all those elements at the ready and you can look forward to a tender and tasty piece of meat several hours hence, whether you use a massive smoker and aged hickory logs or a backyard kettle with chips on top of charcoal.

It is, however, hard to make great brisket. And that is why Texans of all ages and social perspectives travel considerable distances to taste the best that can be had. On a recent trip to South by Southwest I found myself on such a journey, repeating some of the same itinerary as when I coming down from Dallas in my college days not a few years ago.

First stop is Lockhart, 30 miles south of Austin by a fast country highway. This is the home of Smitty’s and Kreuz’, two establishments with near-identical menus and customs. The tale is that the owner of Kreuz died and had a son and a daughter, and he left the business name to the son and the original smokehouse and market to his daughter.

For a proper Smitty’s experience you need to go in from the original entrance on a sidestreet, not the big parking lot next to the highway. You will pass through a long dark hall lined with hard wooden counters and benches. When I was young these walls had big dull knives hanging on chains. You would buy your meat by the pound, bring it to the counter, and hack it with a knife to your liking. I assumed somebody came along and wiped the knives clean at the end of the day. Even so they would not pass today’s health regulations and today the hallway exists only as a relic.

From this you emerge into the pit room, a dark smoky atrium which probably should be visited in summer heat for a properly hellish atmosphere. You will gingerly step past an open fire to get to the counter. In the background a butcher is prepping meats on a butcher block and a counter person will scoop up your order for “hot rounds” (sausages tied together at the end), brisket and ribs by the pound.

You’ll also get a few slices of white bread in case you want to make a sandwich, or crackers if you prefer. The counter person weighs your food and delivers it on a large piece of butcher paper atop a smaller piece of butcher paper (this is your plate) and you carry this into a big dining hall where you can buy sides and soda or beer. There’s sauce on the tables, not the sugary abhorrent “BBQ sauce” found in supermarkets but a thin red mixture that’s like a mild Tabasco.

I always take my first bite neat, no sauce. I am looking for a smoky dryness, an intense flavor of beef combined with the effect of long smoking. Even though brisket is a fatty cut, it has gone through hours of cooking and lost much of its original weight and the first taste and mouth feel should not be fat, pleasurable though that may be. And I don’t want chewy meat. Fall-apart tenderness is a plus, but not mandatory; what is essential is that the texture of the brisket should not distract from the taste.

My meal was a rib, 1/4 pound of brisket and a hot round. The rib was tender but the brisket wasn’t, and it had a row of fat across the top. (Even though brisket is sold as “fat meat”, a thoughtful butcher will trim off this layer before weighing.) And not a lot of smoky flavor. I’m not a sausage person, but the hot round was pleasant, a coarse grind of beef and pork with pepper flecks mixed in and (I think) a bit of grain for density. A side of cole slaw was forgettable.

Next stop is Kreuz’s which needs less description because everything is pretty much the same as Smitty’s except that the building and the smoke pit room are recently built. But you’ll find the same meats and the same procedures, down to the pair of straight-edged spatulas the server uses to scrape the meat from the butcher block onto the serving paper.

I can’t do a straight up comparison, however, because Kreuz’s was out of brisket! That’s right, they’d sold the last of it shortly before my arrival and no more would be ready for a while. So I had to settle for a slice of “lean”, or barbecued shoulder. It was surprisingly tender for “lean” and tasted fine on a sandwich. The rib was suspiciously light in color but had the smokiest flavor of anything so far. The sausage was fine and tasted a lot like Smitty’s—which isn’t surprising because they apparently come from the same source (see photo).

If you’re headed to Lockhart I’ll send you to Smitty’s, I think. The food is marginally better at Kreutz’ but not enough to make up for the atmosphere at Smitty’s. Still, neither one will give you the best barbecue I’ve had in Texas. For that you have to wait until Saturday and journey a little farther, in a different direction, to Snow’s in the tiny and out of the way town of Lexington.

Snow’s caused a stir in winter 2009 because it was named over the Lockhart twins as the best barbecue in Texas by Texas Monthly, and soon after that the lines were out the door on Main Street and the barbecue was selling out by 10 am. It’s a tribute that the folks at Snow’s (who have other jobs and only smoke for the weekends because traditionally that is when the ranchers brought their cattle to auction) kept their good humor and quality and perspective through it all.  Now (4 months after the article) the lines are down to a manageable size again.

What makes Snow’s the best? First, the brisket is sublime. Mine had a perfect smoke ring… pink around the edges of the meat and also pink inside along a layer of fat separating two layers of muscle. (Brisket is the “chest” of the animal, in the very front between the two front legs where a number of muscles come together in a criss-cross arrangement.) And not only was it fork-tender, it fell apart at the first touch of the fork.

Ribs were at least as good as Kreuz. (You may have guessed that pork ribs aren’t really my thing. If made from a commercial pig, they have a pleasant and not very complex flavor and you really can’t go wrong so long as the excess fat is cooked away.) And the sausage was crackling with goodness, cooked until the interior fat was boiled through the skin leaving it crispy and the interior hollow in spots.

Aside from the meat, what makes Snow’s special is that they are good marketers of what they sell. And this is important. It is one thing to bite into a perfect apple in a farmer’s market, something else to dine in a restaurant where a good chef has taken the trouble to ensure that everything is coordinated for a satisfying experience. Snow’s does this where the other establishments don’t.

You can get a plate with sides (solid Texas renditions of mustardy potato salad and vinegary slaw). You can have endless, very good, smoky pinto beans at no extra charge.  You can take it outside and dine on picnic tables surrounded by barbecue pits and assorted rolling smokers which I assume are used to cater events in other locations. And you can even get it mail order since they’ve discovered if you smoke once a weekend you might as well smoke again (on Saturday, while the counter is open) and freeze that meat and send it around the country.

But Snow’s does have a weakness and it is their sauce, a sour blend informed by the insidious Carolina influence which has spread across Texas in recent years like Johnson grass. (Thank goodness there is no “pulled pork” at Snow’s.) . Do not under any circumstances put it on your food until you have tasted the meat naked, followed by a trial squirt of the excellent Cajun Chef hot sauce on the table. This should be all you need, especially because Snow’s meat tends toward the salty side and the hot sauce acts as a corrective.

It’s nice to know that the best barbecue store in Texas still has room for improvement. I will be back.

Want to get more people into your trade show booth? Yes, you do, because a crowded booth creates buzz and attracts still more people, and a certain number of those will end up being qualified prospects.

You can do a lot to influence traffic with the design of the booth itself. Do: allow for a seamless flow of traffic from the show floor into your booth… so people can find themselves inside your booth without expecting it. This means minimizing the use of registration kiosks that throw up a barrier. Do: use people imagery in your booth signage, especially people who make eye contact with passers by.

Don’t: put kiosks in the far corners of a large booth. They create a desert island effect, making your booth look empty even when it isn’t.  And especially don’t: put up walls or barricades of any kind that people have to pass through to get into the booth. They simply won’t do it and your trade show will be an unsuccessful and lonely experience.

You can also build traffic prior to the event by inviting customers, prospects whose contact information you have collected, and possibly registered attendees (depending on how much it costs you to use the list, it could be a good deal or not) to come to the booth and get something specific with solid perceived value: a new research report on trends in your industry, for example. Don’t invite them just to check out your new product line, that’s not a strong enough call to action. A drawing or bring-this-postcard-for-a-free-gift will also work, though as with other soft offers this means more response but less quality.

Today’s SF Chronicle has an article on boorah.com, one of the growing number of services that allows business owners to get a perspective on how they are being talked about on social networks. (Others include circos.com for hotels, and radian6.com for businesses in general.)

Curious about boorah, I looked up Jack’s Burger House in Dallas. The front page of the review has the comment that “The waiters were terrible , it took us 30 minutes to be seated even though I made reservations 2 weeks in advance , and the food tasted like it came out of a can and was way over priced … It was absolutely TERRIBLE!”

Problem #1: Burger House is a hole-in-the-wall burger restaurant. If you tried to make a reservation they’d laugh. Problem #2: this review doesn’t actually exist; if you click through to the “more” it doesn’t appear among the expanded commentary. My guess is that there is some kind of database sweeper that goofed and pulled the data from the wrong place… but meanwhile there is what looks like a real restaurant review on a real reviewing website, bad news for Burger House if anybody reads it and certainly for boorah which will need to fix this problem, stat.

A cautionary tale with the moral being, don’t throw that “go live” switch before you’re sure you’re ready for the world to see your website.

Three years ago, I did a post on newspaper inserts and the Super Bowl… and how snack manufacturers contort themselves to create a “big game theme” without ever actually mentioning the Big Game, which is a copyrighted product with big licensing fees attached. Looking at this past Sunday’s crop of FSI’s, it’s reassuring to see that nothing has changed. The nation’s economy may have melted down and the web has transformed marketing for most products, but for salty snacks and their teammates it’s still “game on”.

Smirnoff offers us a “smart choice for your super party”.  Newman’s Own wants you to “go natural for the big game”. Tums will let us “enjoy the game heartburn free” while Pop-Secret popcorn promises a “home field advantage” and Hersheys wants us to “treat your home team” to a “candy bowl blitz”.  Marie’s salad dressings invite you to “tackle the taste” and Dean’s Cool & Creamy exhorts you to “bring the ultimate dip to the ultimate game.”  You can also “score one for the home team” with Ling Ling egg rolls, say “it’s good!” [umpire with upstretched hands holding up two hamburgers] for White Castle or enjoy “football food… ready for game time in minutes” from El Monterey Taquitos.

It’s clear that the marketers are doing an end run around the NFL by not mentioning the Super Bowl by name, and that the NFL has dropped the ball by not figuring out a way to bring them into its licensed marketing huddle. But more important, there’s a flagrant violation by most of these marketers because they forget that coming up with a catch-phrase is not the same as selling a product.

And so the winner, in overtime, is an ad from Butterball cold cuts with the theme “One taste brings the party together”.  Because after all, the reason these marketers are trying to tie in their products to the Super Bowl is that you’re going to serve them at a party—and here’s one marketer with a generic ad (originally created around the election, maybe?) that says how their product is going to make your event a success. Touchdown!

Like CES, the January 2009 Fancy Food Show is down a bit in both attendees and exhibitors. But there’s still room for people like Mr. Bacon here, and his product Bacon Salt which is based on the premise that “everything should taste like bacon”. It’s all vegan and there is a bacon survival kit including bacon chapstick, bacon flavored vegan-aise etc for converted vegetarians who miss the taste of bacon.

Footnote: Fancy Food is where food purveyors, mostly regional distributors or mom-and-pop shops, come to present their offerings to potential retailers or food service clients. There are also a number of international country-sponsored booths though those are really down this year.