Unfancy food on the Other Coast

If I were in New York this weekend, I'd be going to the Unfancy Food Show, at the East River Bar, 97 South 6th Street, in Williamsburg. (tagline - "This year we will set something on fire, and it may be a can of PBR.")

Put on for lots of reasons, not most importantly of which is a cheerful contempt of the Fancy Food show, its organizer is the author of one of my favorite blogs, Grocery Guy. He's also known as Tom Mylan of Marlow and Sons in Williamsburg. Tom's blogged-about accomplishments include making prosciutto in his apartment, teaching classes on how to butcher lambs, and hating on the New York Times food section.

This little interview in New York magazine gives Tom a good chance to articulate his usual rant, and comes complete with comments from self-unaware readers who comicly misunderstand his disdain for the "precious, let’s-all-pat-ourselves-on-the-back-liberal-guilt" (Tom's words) side of the 'foodie' movement in favor of the unglossed appreciation of the rough and dirty things made and eaten by real local people.

Read his blog, and if you're lucky enough to be on the East Coast, go check out Unfancy Food this weekend. Huzzah!

One more thing - the chickens keep delivering

So you’ve just roasted a chicken. Or two of them, if you were following me on the earlier poultry adventure. And now you’ve got some remains. The chicken that made it to the plate was thoroughly nibbled down to bones, and the rest was fastidiously stripped from the carcass and stowed away in the fridge to be made into future incarnations as sandwiches, soups, or salads.

It's not pretty, but it's beautiful.

Now in the place of our picture-perfect bronzed birdies, we’re left with a horror movie’s worth of gruesome remains, an herb-infused scattering of bones, skin, neck and other unappetizing detritus, all embalmed under a glistening sheen of gelled translucence.

It’s wonderful.

For all its myriad uses and idiot-proof preparation, chicken stock remains a mysterious ingredient in most home kitchens. If we lived in the utopian culinary world where all food was good and honest and slow, then making stock wouldn’t be blog-worthy material; it would be about as informative and interesting as a treatise on how to load a washing machine. But in truth, most of us don’t make stock. Four-dollar 1-liter Tetrapaks are the closest that many of us get, and truth be told, those are usually an acceptable replacement.

But making the real thing is a joy in itself, and has the side benefit, also bequeathed by homemade bread and beer, of filling a house with a genuinely uplifting aroma for hours on end. It doesn’t hurt that it costs pennies to make copious quantities of this endlessly useful elixir, and that you can be fully assured of its quality and provenance.

It doesn’t get simpler than this. Put your chickeny bits in a stock pot:

Plop.

Throw in some chunky vegetables (do bother to clean them though; it’ll make the stock clearer in the end). Onion, carrot, celery, bay leaves and peppercorns are standard. Thyme made it into mine too.

Pour in water to cover everything. It took me 2.5 liters plus another half liter top-off during the simmer.

Boil and bubble, ain't no trouble.

Bring up the heat, don’t let it boil, and scim the scum as it comes to the top. Keep the heat low and let it bubble gently for an afternoon. Two hours should be your minimum, but 5 or 6 would be ideal.

When the fun is over, turn off the stove and strain out the chunky parts with a colander. Those grey bits have finally seen the end of their tour of duty – send them to the compost for an honorable retirement.

Okay bai!

Hot, strained and lovely

Cool down the stock with the lid on, and do it as quickly as possible, using an ice bath for your stockpot if possible. Now put the cooled pot of goodness in the fridge, and come back in the morning to take the fat off the top.

That stuff on top is tasty tasty schmaltz. Sauté with it, spread it on toast, whatever – don’t throw it out!

One thing worth noticing here – if you made it right, your stock will be slightly thick at this point. That’s assurance that you’ve got plenty of flavorful gelatin suspended in your life-giving concoction, extracted correctly from the bones. Those oh-so-convenient Tetrapaks would clog at the very thought of such a substance. So which one’s better, the homemade or the prepacked? You decide. I’m just sayin…

Now portion out and freeze your stock, unless you have an immediate need for that much nourishment all at once, like a visiting sniffly circus troupe.

It will keep in the fridge for a few days without souring, but in the freezer, you’ll get weeks or months. Endlessly useful, and made from little more than otherwise worthless remains. Thanks, chicken!

Roasting the right chicken the right way

It seems like every authoritative all-encompassing cookbook, the kind with Basics or Principles or Everything in the title, has a wistful and solemn tribute to roast chicken tucked somewhere between its chapters. It's a barometer dish by which a cook's overall technique can be evaluated. And when asked what their last meal on earth would be, a fair number of famous chefs are likely to choose something simple and wholesome, like a good chicken, roasted with herbs and served without ornament.

Poultry, like all varieties of meat, used to be much more expensive, because it was primarily raised on family-owned farms, small scale operations with conditions more suited to Norman Rockwell paintings than to value supermarkets. Chickens ate bugs, and ran around outside, just like the South Asian junglefowl from which they descended thousands of years ago.

Things have certainly changed. My copy of the Gold Cook Book, written by Louis P. De Gouy and published in 1947, raves on about the technological 'advances' that were dramatically changing our relationship with Gallus domesticus. Seen now through the lens of hindsight, his enthusiasm is a bit unsettling:

About fifteen years ago, before man could control vitamin D, chickens had to have plenty of sunshine to soak up an abundance of the lifegiving vitamin. When confined to their coops and shut off from the sun, they would die. But, when we conquered vitamin D and could feed it to chickens in cod liver oil and other products mixed with their food, it opened up a vast new streamlined way of producing eggs, called the battery method...Their contentment can be measured by the fact that battery hens produce 15 per cent more eggs than their less civilized sisters who live on the range...Recently the chemical, Colchicine, was discovered to speed the growth of baby chicks, while still another scientific approach to better and speedier breeding of poultry has been artificial insemination. There is no telling where all these fantastic experiments will lead us, but the fact seems to be, as far as science is concerned, that a chicken makes a good guinea pig!

Yeah, and I've also heard great new things about this thing called asbestos. Three cheers for progress!

Today, over 60 years later, we eat more than 9 billion chickens a year in the United States, most of those raised in battery farms with clipped beaks, pumped with growth hormones to make them busty, and antibiotics to keep the germs of confinement at bay. Their lives are short, dark and cramped, and as a result, chicken is no longer a luxury, but rather the stuff of value menus, sold to be eaten with a level of conscientiousness and self-awareness commensurate with the battery farmer who used science to boost his bottom line. We've gone from chicken dinner to chicken fries.

Want to bring back the happy bug-eaters? Want chicken to be revered and special, to be enjoyed and savored, to satisfy both belly and conscience? So do I.

There are many arguments into which I won't delve right now regarding what free-range means and what it should mean. Regulations are only as good as their worst loopholes, and unfortunately, current laws regulating food labeling still have some large ones to close. But just because we still don't have federal laws that mandate humane treatment of chickens, that doesn't mean there aren't old-fashioned happy chickens out there to be found.

I know that when I look for chicken, I feel confident about a few particular producers. Hoffman Game Birds is top of the list, but hard to come by. Fulton Valley Farms, in Fulton, California, is another top-notch producer. So for today's slow Sunday meal, I picked up a couple of little Fulton Valley chickens, weighing in at just 2.3 kg total (that's 5 pounds for two whole birds), and with some very basic preparation, made them into a lovely little roast.

Ingredients
Two small chickens, 1 to 1.5 kg each
225 grams of butter (about 2 sticks)
Two large cloves of garlic, crushed and chopped
Assortment of fresh herbs (I grabbed some thyme, oregano and sage from the garden)
Two heavy pinches of salt (chunky grey sea salt works well here)
A few crunches of black pepper
A glug of white wine or white wine vinegar

Now there are many fancier ways to roast a bird, but I like to go the simple route, because I want to taste the chicken above all else. I'm also thinking forward a bit, and want my leftovers to be versatile; the remnants from these birds could go into soup, a curry, a taco, or a salad, and won't harbor twinges of spices that might not play well with others.

Bring the oven up to Blazing, aka 200C or 400F. Now take care of the prep.

Chop the herbs, then crush and chop the garlic. Take these smelly friends and introduce them to the butter. If your butter just came from the fridge, you'll need to get your hands involved to get things soft enough to make a roughly integrated herb butter.

Now you'll need to give your birds a very intimate massage. Rub half of the herb butter on the outside, and put the rest inside. If your chicken is big enough to accomodate, feel free to make a little cut in the skin and put the butter between the flesh and the skin; this will guarantee crispy skin in the end. Let's get the chickens ready for the heat. A roasting pan would be ideal, but anything flat with a little depth will do. Put your passengers onto the conveyance of your choice, and deliver them to the oven.

Twenty minutes later, interrupt them briefly to give them a little baste with a brush or a carefully wielded spoon. Pour the white wine in, taking care not to pour onto the chickens themselves. Drop the heat down to 175C or 350F, and let them enjoy the heat for another 30 minutes. Now, crack the oven door open just a bit for some slow ventilation, and leave it that way with the oven turned off, for another 20 minutes.

Bring them out, check to make sure the juices run clear, and allow to rest for awhile. Presto - you've got roast chicken. It wasn't hard to do, and didn't take very long!

The advantage of using small chickens? They cook before their skin burns.

In addition to the delicious peace of mind that comes from roasting an honestly-raised chicken, you've also got a bonus that you'll never find with a chicken fry - the bulk of ingredients needed to make world-class stock. Stay tuned..

The Zeitgeist of summer

The bedsheets are hot. The toilet seat is hot. Yesterday's bacon fat left in the frying pan to congeal is still viscous. Shampoo runs too freely from the bottle. And opening the windows only lets more tepid treacley blobs of hot air ooze through the house.

The Texan in me is quick to point out that it's only 85 degrees, but the fact is, San Francisco simply isn't built for this kind of weather. I own summer jackets, after all. But when a city without prevalent air conditioning gets a heat wave, staying indoors is only going to exacerbate the problem. So today, I'm taking a cue from the Germans, and spending this steamy sunny afternoon with friends in a beer garden.

Zeitgeist is an old friend, a tattered biker bar with a gravel-lined beer garden filled with dozens of picnic tables. Waitstaff are surly, the toilets will test squeamish stomachs, and just about the only thing you could do to offend your fellow customers would be to overdress.

The shadow of the freeway cools a few lucky corners near the fences, and the occasional breeze wafts cool air and bright green scents from the mobs of black-clad hipsters gathered around stacks of empty glasses. Dogs and people alike are drawn to the plumes of burger smoke from the kitchen window, and the beer selection is encyclopedic. And until the cool weather returns, this is where I'll be pleased to stay.

Mastering the art of brunch

I know I’m not the only one who’s had a hangover brunch in the city of New Orleans. But it stands to reason that a town so widely acknowledged as a bastion of bacchanalian bingeing would have also have mastered the creation of the greasy meal that serves as respite for so many bleary-eyed mornings after.

It's a tiny restaurant.

As I see it, it’s no coincidence that beignets, po-boys and inky black chicory-laced coffee have become Crescent City hallmarks, alongside the crimson hurricane cocktails and streetfuls of plastic cups spilling over with foamy lager. Without each other to balance their respective sides of the night, these two excesses of food and drink could never be sustained.

Of course, San Francisco and New Orleans have entirely different civic personalities. But a night of revelry, whether on the bayou or the bay, demands redemption, in the form of serious food. So it was with a great sigh of relief that I was introduced to Brenda’s French Soul Food, a creole Louisianan embassy in the heart of the otherwise unwelcoming Tenderloin.

Good grits, good omelets, good pancakes, and ridiculous Last Meal-worthy biscuits

The coffee was so black it stained the cup as I sipped. The hollandaise has obviously entered the building as disparate ingredients, a rarity when powdered packets are so temptingly easy. The pancakes, grits, and omelets were textbook perfection. The biscuits – oh, the biscuits! I will categorically declare these to be the most authentic southern biscuits I’ve tasted in the state of California. I suspect voodoo. Or pork fat. I’m not entirely sure, but I want these biscuits at every meal.

Beautiful beignets

There’s a flight of beignets on the menu. A flight. Of beignets. Honestly, why haven’t we seen this brilliant winebar solution applied to fried pastry before? In addition to the gold standard fluffy pillow of plain sugared fried dough, there was one filled with apple and cinnamon honey butter, one filled with dark chocolate, and one filled with – and this one is sheer genius – crawfish, scallions and cheddar. Only after our group had discovered and devoured the sublime crawfish edition did I manage to take my photograph, so there’s understandably no sign of the final piece of artistry among the dabs of chocolate and bits of apple strewn across the plate.

Aieee.

San Francisco Groceries for Newcomers

I've had occasion over the last few months to meet several new residents of San Francisco, recently moved here from Britain and Australia. Foreign newcomers to San Francisco all seem to have received the message that this fair city offers a bountiful landscape of food and gourmet artistry, and as a result, they arrive at SFO with an expectation of ubiquitous freshness and local variety. But at first inspection of the nearest neighborhood market, new arrivals may be shocked to find that the most common grocery offerings in San Francisco are still the same chain-supermarket garbage as the rest of the States -- industrial, agenda-laden mediocrity.

Luckily, the blessings of the city aren't too far under the surface. For the recent newcomers I've met, I've written the following short list, and it's proven to be a helpful grocery orientation to buying food in SF. Geared towards the new resident with limited access to a car, it's brief and incomplete, and doesn't delve deeply into the food subcultures writhing throughout the Bay Area (ie, there's no nose-to-tail meat or black market raw milk cheese here), but as a quick start guide, it'll steer a newcomer away from Safeway and into the comforting arms of some simple stores selling simple and good food. For the sake of local authenticity, I've left off the venerable and indispensable Whole Foods, choosing instead to focus on more regional and local purveyors.

And now, the Quick Guide to San Francisco Groceries:

Rainbow Grocery

1745 Folsom Street

I buy almost all of my staples and bulk goods here. This a fully vegetarian grocery store; the only meat in the shop is in the pet food. The best thing about Rainbow is their bulk section. You can find herbs, spices, flours, salts, grains, cereals, coffees, etc, all in big bins. You get a small credit for using your own containers from home. They also have giant tanks of olive and nut oils, buckets of peanut butter, molasses, tahini, honey, dried fruit and countless other things. Massive selection of homeopathic and herbal stuff (some also in bulk containers, like shampoo, etc), and eco-friendly cleaning supplies. Produce can be a bit more expensive here, but it'll be meticulously identified with source, organic status, etc. If they can't find something in season, it simply won't be available. And the cheese...oh the cheese! In 2005, Saveur magazine said Rainbow is one of the top 20 places in the country to buy cheese, and they ain't lying. They also sell raw milk, biodynamic wine, and super-natural hippie chicken eggs. Huge selection amd a staff full of helpful little pierced anarchists.

Bryan's Quality Meats

3473 California Street

This is up in Laurel Heights, so a car is really the only practical way to get there, but it's the most competent and clean butcher shop I've found yet. They have an excellent selection of poultry, lots of fresh seafood, and well-sourced lamb and pork. My only disagreement with them is their staunch refusal to sell grass-fed beef, but otherwise, their name is completely appropriate. A picture-book butcher shop, white tiled walls and all. Surprisingly competitive prices. Good prepared food too - try a sandwich!

Andronicos

1200 Irving Street

This is in the Sunset District, so it's fairly accessible by Muni, but a car would be much easier. Andronicos also has locations all over the rest of the Bay Area, but just one in the city. A good all-round gourmet supermarket, where you could buy everything in one spot if you needed to. If American Safeway is Tesco, then Andronicos is Waitrose. Prices might be a little higher, but it's tough to find crappy food here. (Note for British expats - there's also a little British import section, if you're dying for a McVities or some Heinz Salad Cream)

Alemany Farmers Market

The Ferry Building Farmers Market is beautiful, and has boundless tourist appeal, but also has $4 artichokes. Alemany is the real deal, with actual farmers selling their produce out of trucks, driven into town from their farms early in the morning. Strictly car only, unless you really want to walk over Bernal Hill with armloads of groceries. Some things are organic, some things aren't, but everything is seasonal, and dirt cheap. I like to make a Saturday morning event out of it, and grab a tamale or some chilaquiles from one of the vendor stalls for breakfast while I gloat about scoring a huge bag of heirloom peppers for 75 cents. Artisanal olive oil and honey is usually available, as well as, depending on season, crabs, clams, oysters, and...if you walk down the street from the official market....live chickens. It's a fun place.

Trader Joe's

(at least three locations in SF)

Almost everything here is private-label Trader Joe's, but that's not a bad thing at all. It's all top quality and really good prices. I've never seen anything expensive here. If you want quick and natural convenience foods, this is the place to go. Also the home of the (in)famous Two Buck Chuck, a line of quite drinkable but completely unremarkable table wines that sell for $1.99 per 750ml bottle. Solid and reliable.

BevMo (aka Beverages and More)

(three locations in the city)

Not much to say here. Anywhere else you buy beer, wine or spirits will be more expensive (with the possible exception of Trader Joe's) and won't have nearly the selection (no exceptions at all). Good cheap glassware too.

Slow Food Nation approaching quickly

Those ardent arbiters of food policy behind Slow Food have put together a group to organize Slow Food Nation, a four-day festival stretching over Labor Day weekend throughout San Francisco to "showcase the best of American food and producers, and bring together chefs, farmers, scholars, authors and activists to discuss issues surrounding food production in today's world."

Their new site, slowfoodnation.org has launched today, and is full to the brim with details of the producers, the events, the speakers, and the ways that volunteers can get involved to engage the public in this monumental task. I daresay that this site is even more useful than the parent Slow Food USA site; this has plenty of action-oriented and educational material here to get everyone involved and aware of the food process. There will be brewers, farmers, bakers, chocolatiers, distillers, ranchers, and likely many more purveyors of tasty things.

Food is important for everyone who eats, so an event like this that enriches the connection between supplier and consumer is a huge boon for us all.

Tickets go on sale today. Show your support, buy a ticket, and attend. I'm making my Labor Day plans now!