Huitlacoche, Black Gold of the Aztecs

In America, the only people who have heard of corn smut are corn farmers. It is a pathogenic fungus that swells and distorts corn into large blueish-black kernels, and usually gets fed to the pigs. The USDA has spent considerable time and money eradicating corn smut. South of the border, throughout Mexico, the same fungus is an ancient delicacy. Since the days of the Aztecs, it has been deliberately inoculated by cutting the stalks so that the water-borne fungus would infect the corn, promoting the development of the highly valued corn smut. It is called by the ancient Nahuatl name, huitlacoche, which means "raven's shit." Ears of corn infected with this dark colored fungus nearly quadruple the value of the corn. It takes on a rich, earthy flavor, retaining notes of the original sweetness of corn, but with far more complexity. When simmered with garlic and chiles, or made into a mole, the corn smut is often served on quesadillas or tamales. Maybe corn smut and raven's shit are not the most inticing monikers, which is why some American chefs are trying the term Mexican truffle! Whatever you call it, don't just throw it to the pigs, find out what the Aztec kings were so excited about.

McSweeney's Starts Cooking

In typical McSweeney's fashion, the San Francisco based publishers have entered the world of food writing with a rather unorthodox beginning. The first book from their newest imprint, McSweeney's Insatiables, is Mission Street Food: Recipes and Ideas from an Improbable Restaurant. This book tells the story of Anthony Myint and his wife Karen, opening a cart in 2008 in San Francisco's Mission District.

What is so interesting about that? Thousands of carts opened across the country after the economic collapse. In this case, a talented cook began by offering delicious late night food at dirt cheap prices. They twittered and they gossiped, the buzz spread, and so did their business. They eventually moved out of the cart and into a number of other iconoclastic restaurant formats collaborating with famous chefs in the community and donating proceeds to charitable organizations. Their book not only chronicles their madcap tales of how this all came to be, but shares many of their recipes with step by step photography. This is not a glamorous cookbook, but it is gritty and substantial.

The writing is sincere and silly. There are bold ideas that came from bold actions. Besides the sly commentaries and original page layouts, there is also a comic storyboard about how it all began. It is a very fun book to read or even peruse. At the end of the book, they list the four golden rules of a successful chef, after which you "reap your rewards." Once you complete the four steps, the authors have the following advice:

The night before you open to the public, take a shower and go to sleep early.
This will be the last time your life feels under control. By the time you wake
up, you'll already be a couple hours in the shit, no matter what time it is.
Equipment will malfunction, food will be compromised, and the first-aid kit may or may not be adequate...Congratulations! Your rejection of money, a social life, or any conventional form of happiness is now complete. You are a
successful chef.

There are laughs in many forms available in these pages. It makes sense that McSweeney's would be their publisher. In their own words, the authors had never written a cookbook, and the publishers had never printed one. Cookbooks are a very complex kind of book to produce, requiring not only an interesting story and good writing, but lots of photographs, recipes and recipe testing. This takes a considerable amount of time.

The surprising turn for me is how McSweeney's crew has begun their new genre with such hubris. They have also become the publisher of Lucky Peach, a quarterly food magazine conceived by New York celebrity David Chang and Peter Meehan. David Chang is many things. Like Anthony Myint of Mission Street Food, he is an opinionated, iconoclastic chef who started out by feeding people delicious late night food on the cheap. Like Anthony, he went on to open several other food service operations. Both publications have a collaborative spirit, with contributions from other famous chefs and food writers, and also a desire to bring fine dining concepts down to the proletariat price point.

Chris Ying is the editor-in-chief of both Lucky Peach and Mission Street Food. The $64,000 question in my mind is how this project ended up at McSweeney's. Dave Chang and Peter Meehan had published the Momofuku cookbook with Potter, an imprint of Random House in New York. They had originally conceived of Lucky Peach as a Food Network TV show, then as an iPad app. Somehow it ended up being a magazine from a west coast publisher that had never handled food writing before?!? It could be that a new generation of publishers, like the new generation of chefs, are willing to explore new media.

Oregon Wasabi

Over the course of this summer, I was introduced to the farmers of Oregon's only wasabi farm, Frog Eyes Wasabi. In fact, there are only four such farms in North America, all of them located on the Pacific coastline. This remarkable plant grows very slowly, taking over a year to mature. It requires the cool and steady maritime climate to stay healthy. This long growth cycle is part of the high cost of fresh wasabi, but as with so many great foods imported from other cultures, Americans have little understanding of wasabi.

The most widely used part of the plant is the rhizome, which we call wasabi root, and which few Americans have ever tasted. Sadly, most Americans have been to sushi bars serving blobs of green paste alongside their nigiri and maki rolls. This is powdered horseradish and green food coloring. It has a simple one dimensional nasal heat and no flavor or aroma. It is very cheap, but it is no substitute for wasabi. Real wasabi does have a spiciness like horseradish, but it also has a very complex vegetal flavor and floral aroma. These compounds are very volatile, and they dissipate within a few minutes of grinding them into paste. This is why wasabi is traditionally ground to order.

Although the cost of fresh wasabi is high, that is partly because supply is low, and supply is low because awareness is low. My friends at Frog Eyes are in their first year of production, and they are already having a difficult time meeting demand. We thought it would be fun for them to come to Park Kitchen and have a tasting menu with wasabi applied in different ways. I wanted to show them the potential of wasabi in cooking, so they could open up new ideas for their marketing.

The meal started with something familiar, oysters on the half shell, trout roe, and a granita of wasabi root. I hoped that the sight of the wasabi leaf, rocks and seaweed would invoke the feeling of being at the farm. From here, they tasted dishes using different parts of the plant, and pairing them with tomatoes, cucumber, tuna salad, beef and mushrooms. The main course was grilled ribeye with wasabi root butter, sauteed chanterelles, padron peppers, potcha beans, and a puree of wasabi leaves, which is a vivid emerald green with a bright spicy herbal flavor.

You may begin to see fresh wasabi on the shelves of Portland grocery stores like Whole Foods, New Seasons, or Uwajimaya. The rhizome is particularly hardy. You can store it in the refrigerator for several weeks and it will not deteriorate. However, once grated, the nuances fade rather quickly, so use it as soon as possible.

A Guide to Summer Berries

The Pacific Northwest is home to some of the finest berries in America. Boysenberries, marionberries, jostaberries, gooseberries, raspberries, loganberries, chesterberries, blueberries, huckleberries, a person could get lost in the lexicon of berries. Here are a few notes on what the names mean.

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  Strawberry (fragaria) is widely known and loved. There are many cultivars, but are generally divided into "June bearing" or "ever bearing" fruits.



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  Blackberry (rubus) is by far the largest family of berries with more than 350 species. The most widely known cultivars are the 'Boysen', 'Marion', 'Chester Thornless', 'Triple Crown', 'Logan', and 'Siskiyou', to name a few. Oregon is the leading world producer of cultivated blackberries.



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  Barberry (berberis) is more widely known as the Oregon grape or mahonia. It is too tart to eat out of hand, and generally used for making jellies.



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  Raspberry (rubus) generally refers to the European red raspberry, but there are also golden, purple and black raspberries. These fruits are particularly perishable, with its fruit being very soft when ripe.



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  Dewberry (rubus caesius) resembles the blackberry and is a close relative. It is reminiscent of the raspberry, but ripening to dark purple or black, and not as fragile as the raspberry.



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  Loganberry (rubus x loganobaccus) is a cross between a raspberry and a dewberry. It is about the size of a raspberry with the color and flavor of a blackberry.



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  Tayberry (rubus fruticosus x idaeus) is a cross between a raspberry and a blackberry, more resembling a raspberry and being sweeter than the loganberry.



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  Gooseberry (ribes uvacrispa) is a very tart berry, either green or red skinned, with green flesh. It is very popular in Europe, but not as well known or loved in America. I personally love this berry and use it extensively every year. It has a very short season, usually the month of June.



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  Jostaberry (ribes nigrum x uvacrispa) is a cross between a gooseberry and a black currant. It is slightly smaller than a gooseberry with a very dark colored skin and flesh. It's flavor is more like the black currant, especially when fully ripe.



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  Currants (ribes) are small, tart, pea sized berries ranging in color from white, pink, red, and black. The tartness of the berries also varies. They are generally used for jellies, preserves, liqueurs and sauces.
  


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  Blueberry (vaccinium) is divided into "lowbush," which are regarded as wild, and usually very small, and "highbush," of which there are many cultivars, and the berries are much larger.

Farmers markets in Portland are bursting with a wide variety of berries all summer long, and many people in the Northwest are passionate jam and jelly makers. People also store the berries in the freezer and use them well into autumn. Although I have always loved berries, I had never seen the wealth of fruits we have here in the Pacific Northwest, so take advantage of them.

Back at the End of the Line

The cover story of Time Magazine this week asks the question, "Can farmed fish feed the world?" Bryan Walsh makes the case for the future of integrated aquaculture, but it sounds better than it really is. It seems ironic to me that he uses the same title as Charles Clover's 2004 novel The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What we Eat. In Walsh's version, farmed seafood is the latest chapter in human control of the natural world. In Clover's version, modern technology and a growing population have wiped out world seafood stocks faster than we knew they were there. Can they both be right?


Introducing Aquaculture

There is no question that seven billion people eating seafood cannot be satiated by the natural world. In Charles Clover's book, he first talks about the total collapse of the cod population in the once bountiful waters of Newfoundland. He then makes a nearly decisive case for the total collapse of bluefin tuna within the next decade. However, the limits of wild seafood fishing are already being supplemented. People around the world are already eating more farmed fish than they realize. As the techniques and efficiency improve, some of it actually tastes good, too. Over 90% of Atlantic Salmon is farmed, over 1.4 million tons annually, and more than 40% of the shrimp consumed globally is farmed.



Basic Math Skills

If there is one glaring hole in Bryan Walsh's optimism, the math doesn't add up. The United Nations says that food production must increase by 100% in the next 40 years to keep up with current demand. That is a startling statistic for seafood. The studies of professor Daniel Pauly are featured in Clover's book, where he finds that global seafood harvest is several years past its peak. That means next year, we will have less wild seafood than this year. However, even in the best possible examples, it takes 2 pounds of wild fish, ground up and fed to farmed fish, and in the end you only get 1 pound of farmed fish, which leaves the ocean at a net loss. So, as Josh Goldman, founder of Australis Aquaculture observes, "the question of what the fish will eat is central to aquaculture. We can't grow on the back of small forage fish." Indeed, since the more realistic conversion rate is 5 pounds of wild fish to produce 1 pound of farmed fish.

Just Add Water

Clearly, the big question is "Can aquaculture technology develop fast enough to keep up with demand?" It will certainly not be able to do so without using resources from the wild. We are learning rapidly which fish are effectively farmed, such as barramundi, tilapia and carp. They have good conversion ratios and their habitat can be effectively simulated in integrated aquaculture systems. Ultimately, the question will be answered by economics. For example, when I started my culinary career, fish like skate, monkfish and black cod were very affordable because they were relatively abundant and underutilized, selling for eight dollars a pound wholesale. Now, fifteen years later, those numbers have doubled. If that trend continues, in 2025, wild salmon could cost $40 a pound at the retail counter. Most Americans will not be able to afford that. In Bryan Walsh's closing arguments, he concludes "if we're all going to survive and thrive in a crowded world, we'll need to cultivate the seas just as we do the land. If we do it right, aquaculture can be one more step toward saving ourselves." Let's hope that step is taken in stride.

Pimientos de Padron

Padron peppers have taken America by storm. They originated in the municipality of Galicia, Spain, where they have long been a popular tapas dish simply sauteed in olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt. They were first brought to the Pacific Northwest by Manuel and Leslie of Viridian Farms, and have since been grown by a dozen other farms on the west coast. In Galicia, they have a saying, "os pementos de Padron, uns pican e outros non," a rhyme that translates as "some are hot and some are not." Manuel and Leslie say that only one in twenty is spicy, but I find it to be more like one in seven!

At Park Kitchen, I like to cook them with all sorts of accompaniments, from chanterelles and cherry tomatoes, to gnocchi or octopus. They also make a lovely side dish for a pork roast or braised beef. Their size and mild heat are so versatile that they deserve a versatile presentation. You can find them at many farmers markets from July to late September or early October. They are quick and easy to cook, so give them a try.

Considering Dessert

I have enjoyed my subscription to Art of Eating for years. It is an opinionated quarterly, and a rare kind of food magazine in today's publishing world, a work of diligent food journalism that has thus far not diluted its content to the full color photography driving most monthly magazines. When I received the latest issue with several articles addressing desserts and pastry, it was as if Edward Behr and his team had peered into my recent thoughts on the sweet subject.

Mr. Behr himself wrote A Point of View in Pastry, describing the talents of Shuna Lydon. In writing about her work history, he is able to discuss the differences between east and west coast sensibilities regarding the final course. I like what he has to say about Lydon, and his observations of the craft. His conclusion particularly resonated with me. "A dessert has to fit the whole of the restaurant. It has to mesh with the savory part of the menu; the waiters have to be able to describe and sell it; the time between order and pickup can't be too long." As usual, his observations extend beyond creativity, and place it within the context of the logistics of a restaurant.

I started my career in cooking as a baker and pastry chef. Now, after many years of savory cooking, I am once again directing the pastry program at Park Kitchen. My perspective has changed, and my approach to desserts are more of an extension of the savory meal. I think this makes my menu more consistent, and the transition from savory to sweet is more seamless. I also set out to make the desserts complete without fussy garnishes and inedible decorations. I was inspired by influential pastry chefs like Claudia Fleming to make desserts as seasonally focused as the rest of the menu. So I was eager to read Mitchell Davis' well written article, Where is Dessert Headed? and see what he thinks of American desserts in the twenty-first century.

Mr. Davis begins by proposing that American tastes have evolved over the last half century, but "our dessert tastes are for the most part stuck at a five year old's birthday party circa 1952." I suppose this is true inasmuch as America loves comfort foods. He proceeds by asking the question "what makes a dessert great?" Is it innovation or is it satisfaction? It really depends on the audience. Mr. Davis describes a recent meal at the James Beard House in which Matt Lightner served his creative seasonal cuisine with mixed responses. Although Mr. Davis enjoyed the meal immensely, "it felt as though half the dining room was in rapture and the other half wanted their money back." This is usually the response to very personal creations. They may seem like a revelation to some, while being completely lost on others.

This is especially the challenge of restaurant desserts and pastry. In the restaurant industry, desserts are a loss-leader. The ingredients cost a lot, perishable fruits and fine chocolates, and the techniques require a lot of time and skill. The price of desserts rarely covers the cost of their own production. This is perhaps the reason why the world's most innovative pastry chefs have abandoned their posts, and in many cities, pastry chefs are becoming as hard to find as sommeliers. In Spain, Albert Adria, former pastry chef at El Bulli is now the owner of a tapas bar. In America, Alex Stupak, former pastry chef of Alinea, now owns a Mexican restaurant, and Sam Mason, former pastry chef of WD-50 is now a bartender. This seems to me to be at the heart of the question "Where is dessert headed?"

America will always love apple pie and cupcakes. The classics endure for two reasons, because their flavors and textures are simple pleasures, and because they are affordable. Fine dining desserts require extravagant bells and whistles to entertain, whether they are the old world spun sugar cages and towering spires of chocolate sculpture, or the new world liquid nitrogen and high tech chemistry. They are less likely to have the endurance of the classics. Mr. Davis recalls his most memorable dessert, a simple "slice of lemon tart served unadorned" at the legendary restaurant of Fredy Girardet. Although that perfect simplicity might exhibit a certain sophisticated restraint, it was the conclusion of a $250 lunch that few can afford.