Adventures in fermentation

Fermented foods have taken the food world by storm recently. It really isn’t any surprise. The process is pretty easy to do at home, requiring nothing more than some salt and a Mason jar. The microbes in them are believed to be beneficial for health, and there is increasing scientific evidence to back this up. The process hearkens back to a simpler time. Often, the flavors are more interesting and complex than alternative methods. Like anything that requires a Mason jar and allows people to feel knowledgeable, superior, and healthier than the main stream of American society, it has taken off.

I have been jumping on and off of this bandwagon for years (in some cases, even before it was cool). A couple of months ago, I decided that I would like to try making my own kombucha at home. I could have ordered the necessary culture from an online company, but I know that cultures grow and people are always looking for new homes for the babies. I sent an email to the listserv maintained by our neighborhood organization, asking if somebody had one they could split and share with me. I received a positive response and have been happily brewing kombucha in my kitchen ever since. I also got an email from the woman who runs the neighborhood newsletter, asking if I would write an article about fermented foods. I wrote what I felt was the bare bones of an introduction to the subject. She told me it was so long it would take up two whole pages, possibly bumping the article about kombucha written by my benefactor. We edited it some and I hope she is able to run both pieces. Below is the full version…my idea of a bare bones introduction to fermented foods.

Humans have been manipulating yeast and bacteria to preserve our food, increase its digestibility, and improve flavor for millennia. Some even argue that the chance fermentation of leftover gruel, resulting in rudimentary beer or bread, depending on whether you are talking to a brewer or a baker, was responsible for our ancestors’ choice to settle down into agrarian settlements. More recently, researchers have begun exploring how our intestinal flora can affect everything from our mood to our weight. When Martha Steward is blogging about gut health, it is no longer the province of the radical fringe (http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/18/health/good-gut-bacteria/). Prior to our modern, post-Pasteurian obsession with sterility, human diets contained a lot of bacteria and fungi. Increasingly, we are learning that we may be harming ourselves with our Lysol cleansers and hand sanitizers. Very few people would argue that we should return to a pre-sanitation way of life, but fermented foods are a delicious way to increase the beneficial microbes in our diets.

Whatever you are fermenting, the process is basically the same. The microbes (usually some suite of yeast and bacteria) break down complex molecules into simpler ones. They take starches and break them into sugars, complex sugars into simple sugars, simple sugars into organic acids and alcohols. If there is protein present in any quantity (like when you are fermenting milk, soybeans, or meat), they break proteins into amino acids. These simpler compounds tend to have flavors that are more complex and more pleasant to human taste buds.

In talking about fermentation, of course, we are talking about a process that, when uncontrolled, goes by the less pleasing name, “rot.” The process of fermenting food is about managing the environment to help the “good” microbes thrive and eliminating (or at least out-competing) the “bad” microbes. This is often accomplished by inoculating your culture with a “mother” of the good microbes, giving them a head start on the rest. It can also be done by salting, which creates an environment in which friendly microbes thrive.

Kombucha, which started the process that led to my writing this, is just one of the many non-alcoholic fermented drinks around the world. Kombucha starts with sweet tea, black tea with sugar. A SCOBY (Symbiotic Community of Bacteria and Yeast), or mother, is added and the microbes do what they do. The tea supplies nutrients to the microbes as well as flavor and caffeine to the final result. Like many humans, these particular microbes seem unable to function without caffeine (apparently coffee can also be used, but herbal teas don’t work). Flavorings can be added later after fermentation, though I find the flavors contributed by the microbes to be quite nice all on their own. The SCOBY starts as a pellicle, or thin film of microbes on the surface of the liquid (feared by beer brewers as a sign of infection). This pellicle thickens with each successive batch, forming quite a strong layer. It gets thicker with each successive batch, and can be split to share with others or start a new batch. Water kefir is another popular option, the culture for which looks like those water absorbing polyacrylamide crystals you see in diapers and potting soil. Most people don’t enjoy the flavor on its own and add other flavoring. We did this for several months and gave up after the second time a grape flavored batch showered the kitchen. I much prefer the natural flavor of kombucha, but that is purely a matter of personal preference. A shrub, or “drinking vinegar” is a vinegar (see below) mixed with sweetening and flavorings to produce a beverage or mixer for cocktails.

Of course, the fermented beverages that contain alcohol are even more popular. Beer, wine, mead, and all of the world’s myriad alcoholic drinks owe their existence to Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the same yeast that rises our bread. When deprived of oxygen, it ferments the sugars (from fruit juice, malted grain, honey…or really anything at all) to alcohol. Different strains of this yeast behave differently, producing the distinctive flavors of Belgian beer, Champagne-style sparkling white wine, or any of a number of other regional delights. It is important to note that alcohol has a lot of energy left in it (which is why it burns when concentrated and contains more calories per gram than fats). If oxygen is reintroduced, microbes will use that energy to grow and convert the alcohol to organic acids, which results in wine or malt vinegar.

Of course, sometimes acetic acid is exactly what you want your microbes to produce. Vinegar is a prime example, which you can make by adding a “mother” culture to nearly any sweet liquid and allowing it to ferment out. Most pickle recipes you can find today start with distilled vinegar, which is dead vinegar. There are no good microbes in most of the vinegar you find in the store. Nearly every culture in the world, however, has a recipe for naturally fermented pickles. Sauerkraut, kimchi, and kosher dills are all examples. In these cases, vegetables are salted or added to a salt solution (called a brine) with flavorings and allowed to ferment. 

I have made kimchi several times . In one memorable instance, the matriarch of the Korean family that owned the produce market where I bought my ingredients recognized recognized the combination and inquired. I brought her a sample of the finished product and received her stamp of approval. My recent attempts at lacto-fermented pickles, using both cucumbers and green beans, have been pretty successful. Recipes recommend adding a source of tannins to keep the veggies crunchy. I had no ready source of grape or oak leaves, so I used black tea. It worked and the flavor is great, but the dark staining from the tea is a little off-putting. In the past year, I have also started making fermented hot sauce, in the style of Sriracha. The short fermentaiton period at the beginning adds a depth of flavor that is not available from just adding filtered vinegar. In my opinion, some of it is lost when you heat it to cook it down and thicken it. I am still refining the technique. I've posted links at the bottom of the page to some reliable sources for recipes in case you want to try it yourself. 

My first love when it comes to fermented foods is homemade bread. In today’s post-Atkins, gluten-intolerant world, eating bread is almost a defiant act. But there is evidence that the long, slow ferment of sourdough bread leads not only to better flavor, but a healthier product as well. For some people with gluten sensitivities, it may even solve the problem without resorting to the gluten-free aisle (http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/aug/12/rise-sourdough-bread-slow-fermented-health-benefits). Sourdough bread is not easy. It is painstaking and slow, requiring weeks of nurturing and then several days to prepare. Done right, however, the slow-rising wild yeast give the bacteria time to break down the flavorless starch in the flour into sugars, organic acids, and alcohols, which make for a better tasting as well as healthier loaf of bread.

Milk has been an important source of protein in many cultures throughout history and there are a number different ways to ferment it. Yogurt, buttermilk, and sour cream are created by adding a bit of the last batch to new milk and maintaining the correct temperature. My forays into yogurt making have never worked the way I would like, with much runnier results than I wanted. The temperature range for these bacteria is often very small, making them more complicated to manage. There are plenty of commercially available yogurts with active cultures and I generally just buy them. Milk kefir is another fermented beverage, much like buttermilk. The mother culture, like water kefir, looks like grains which are strained from each batch. It can be flavored and sweetened to more closely resemble commercial examples.

Then, of course, there is cheese, which has been called “milk’s leap toward immortality.” This is literally true, since cheese is far less perishable than milk. Figuratively, of course, the flavor of aged cheese is much more complex than that of the best milk. Again, bacteria and fungi break down complex molecules (which taste bland to our tongues) into simpler sugars, organic acids, and amino acids. A variety of other microbes can be added or simply introduced from the environment to create a variety of flavors. Washes with wine or salty water, storage in wax or cloth, and aging while controlling humidity and temperature encourage different microbes and produce different results. While I have not yet tried to make cheese, a cheese cave in the basement is something I hope to build soon. I have read that it can be as simple as a plastic box in a cool location to manage temperature and humidity. Hopefully I will be able to write about it soon…

Beer, wine, mead, and all of the world’s myriad alcoholic drinks owe their existence to Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the same yeast that rises our bread. When deprived of oxygen, it ferments the sugars (from fruit juice, malted grain, honey…or really anything at all) to alcohol. Different strains of this yeast behave differently, producing the distinctive flavors of Belgian beer, Champagne-style sparkling white wine, or any of a number of other regional delights. It is important to note that alcohol has a lot of energy left in it (which is why it burns when concentrated and contains more calories per gram than fats). If oxygen is reintroduced, the yeast will use that energy to grow and convert the alcohol to organic acids, which results in wine or malt vinegar.

Of course, sometimes acetic acid is exactly what you want your microbes to produce. Vinegar is a prime example, which you can make by adding a “mother” culture to nearly any sweet liquid and allowing it to ferment out. Most pickle recipes you can find today start with distilled vinegar, which is dead vinegar. There are no good microbes in most of the vinegar you find in the store. Nearly every culture in the world, however, has a recipe for naturally fermented pickles. Sauerkraut, kimchi, and kosher dills are all examples. In these cases, vegetables are salted or added to a salt solution (called a brine) with flavorings and allowed to ferment. See below for recipes.

Meat can also be fermented. Many cultures have fermented fish dishes. Cured meats are flavored by the production of lactic acid by microbes. Meat, like milk, has a lot of protein. This results in the production of amino acids when fermented. One of these, glutamic acid (when purified for use as a food additive, it is known as monosodium glutamate*) produces the flavor known as umami. This accounts for the popularity of fish sauce, its vegetarian alternative developed by Japanese Buddhists, soy sauce, and dry cheeses like parmigiana reggiano. Unlike many of the things I have listed above, improperly fermented meats can cause serious illness. I haven’t yet tried my own charcuterie and may continue to leave that to the professionals. I know people who do it and love to eat at their houses.

Since prehistoric times, humans have been manipulating microbial populations to preserve and flavor our food. Louis Pasteur began the process of removing microbes from the equation entirely, which has increased the safety of our food supply. However, it has also limited the flavors available to us and there is increasing evidence that it has made us less healthy. I have focused on the flavor compounds that fermenting microbes create as byproducts of growth, but we shouldn’t forget that they also are growing and multiplying in there. There is increasing evidence that we increase our own health by eating these foods and introducing probiotic organisms into our digestive systems. So often, eating for health means giving up flavor. Not so with fermented foods. They taste good and are good for us. To get started making your own fermented foods, you can check the cookbook section of your local bookstore. There are several excellent books that have been published recently. For a more 21^st century solution, I have included several links below.

Safety note:  It is important to remember that fermentation produces carbon dioxide. If you seal your jars, while fermentation is active, explosions are a real possibility. An airlock, topping the jar with a cloth, or simply leaving the lid somewhat ajar are all solutions to this problem.

For more information:

For a list of examples of fermented foods:  http://www.chowhound.com/food-news/54958/that-coffees-rotten/

http://www.culturesforhealth.com/ is a great source for information on fermented foods as well as products and cultures. They have several recipes, including a good one for kosher dill pickles, which I have used.

For the adventurous, who would like to try kimchi at home, this is a good recipe:  http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/traditional-napa-cabbage-kimchi-233839. Korean Korner on Veirs Mill Road is a good local source for ingredients.

*A note on monosodium glutamate:  Glutamic acid, or monosodium glutamate, is one of the first things that humans taste. It is present in mother’s milk in high concentrations, which may explain why we find its umami flavor so pleasant. Its bad reputation is largely due to some very questionable science performed in the late sixties and early seventies. The truth is that it naturally occurs in many foods we eat every day such as fish and soy sauce, parmesan cheese, and mother’s milk. There is plenty of information available and I have no interest in what you choose to eat. If you are interested, here is one such source of information:  http://greatist.com/grow/why-msg-has-a-bad-rap

My Neck, My Back

Looking back, I realize that I originally started this blog to encourage myself to write about growing up in the unique way I did. After the first couple posts, I've kind of gotten off track. Consider this post to be a return to the original purpose of the blog.

I have always hated the idea of going to the gym to exercise. There is something fundamentally broken in a world where we invent machines to do all the work for us (at great expense in terms of social injustice and environmental degradation), then invent machines to keep our under-worked bodies from the inevitable atrophy that results. I like the idea of exercising because there is work to be done. Cardio? Walk or bike to where you need to be. Resistance? Surely there is a ditch that needs digging, or wood that needs splitting. When you live in the country, there is always manual labor to be done.

I always loved doing this kind of work as a kid. Well, that isn't quite true. When I was younger I'd be working with my dad. He'd say, "I want to see the sweat dripping from your nose," in a kind of a half joking way. I was perplexed. I thought he was joking. Or exaggerating. I'd sweated before, but dripping off your nose? Surely that was a myth.

At some point, probably around the time puberty hit and I started to bulk up, I learned to love working. I discovered that sweat does, indeed, drip from the end of your nose when you get going. Especially in hot weather. Splitting firewood, digging a ditch to lay pipe, carrying rounds of wood...I was your guy. I remember on one occasion my dad and I were cutting wood on a steep slope. He, being older and wiser, had chosen a tree above the road, so we could roll the rounds down to the truck. One particularly large round bounced past the truck, off the other edge of the road, and thirty yards down the steep hill on the other side. He said, "Oh well, leave that one." I was having none of it. In the arrogance of youth, I slid down that hill, picked up the forty pound round of oak, and carried it back up the hill. I still remember (and now understand) his look of combined envy and disbelief.

When I got to graduate school, I was working at a computer or a lab bench all day (sometimes not seeing the sun once), and my metabolism started to slow, I discovered that I was going to have to start exercising not to do work, but simply to keep myself from going to pot. Two friends took me under their respective wings and showed me around a gym. One taught me to swim and not to feel too self-conscious getting into and out of a pool. The other showed me around a weight room, acting as coach and spotter. His bulk as all from the gym, and designed mostly to look good. Hence, most of it was on the front. He had nice pecs, good biceps, and abs. I wasn't much at the bench press or doing bicep curls, but when it came to back exercises (seated rows, lat pull downs) I was always adding quite a bit of weight after his sets. I never thought much of it. I had strong back and muscles, that was just the way it was. Thinking back, I think of a couple of particular activities that might have contributed to this fact. Splitting wood for instance. Besides carrying the big rounds, there is swinging the 8 or 12 pound maul.

Then there is swinging a pick. I once spent a week digging a ditch to lay water pipe. You see, we had a lovely spring that was the source of our water for most of my childhood, but it was inconveniently located on a neighboring piece of land owned by somebody else. She had another spring above her house (the one we used was above our but below hers) so had no real use for the water we used. Why pump it uphill when there is perfectly good water above your house that gravity will bring to you? However, at some point our relationship with her soured. She became increasingly paranoid, stopped taking her pills, and began doing things like running naked through the woods, threatening passersby with loaded guns, and filing frivolous lawsuits. We (or more precisely my father) were the frequent target of her ire, so it was inevitable she would stop letting us use her water.

It was a result of this water conflict that I found myself tasked with digging a six inch deep trench up half a mile of meadow, passing the pipe through the culvert under the dirt road at the top, then digging another quarter mile of trench through the forest, across land owned by one friendly neighbor to a spring owned by another friendly neighbor. Lest you get the mistaken idea that we lived in a thriving metropolis here, I should point out that a total of two other houses were within shouting distance of the house I grew up in. And even then, if they were walking on gravel or running the sink, they'd never hear you. Before we got a phone, we used to hold shouted conversations across that very same quarter mile of meadow I became so familiar with.

The ditch digging wasn't actually so bad. There was a lot of it to do, but, unless I hit a root or a rock, the going was pretty easy. To my knowledge, that pipe has never frozen from that day to this, so I guess I got it deep enough. Another time I was asked to dig a new outhouse hole. The outhouse had always been 100 yards up the hill (inconvenient in the dark, or snow, or during a bout of stomach flu). We decided to locate it closer to the house this time. Far enough that the smell wouldn't bother us, but close enough to avoid the long trek in the dark. I discovered, a few feet down, that we had cited the new hole over bedrock. I had put in enough work by that time that I wasn't easily dissuaded. I can also be a stubborn cuss. Telling me I won't, can't, or shouldn't do something will sometimes get my back up, and I will do whatever it is, come hell or high water. This was one of those times. It is possible that my dad had told me it was a bad place for the new outhouse. In any case, I was damned if I was going to give up. I went to the shed and got the digging bar (a 20 pound iron bar with a point on one end and a wide prying thing on the other). I methodically forced that bar into the cracks in the rock, broke it up, and shoveled the gravel out of the hole. The hole on that outhouse wasn't as deep as some of the others, but we used it for a year or so.

Looking back, I'd say that it was experiences like those that made for my non-traditional physique. I have a tight spot in my middle back I can trace to an entire day swinging a Weedeater (when mowing that much area, another tool would be better, but some grass grows on inconveniently steep slopes, and can really only be cut by a fool and a Weedeater).

Most of the time I forget that I grew up in, essentially, preindustrial conditions. Today I use a computer with as much facility as most, text, carry a cell phone, and know last week's internet jokes at least (I know who Rebecca Black is and hate her song as much as the next guy). Every once in a while it becomes clear that my life has not been like those of most people I know. Sometimes it is a skill I have (making a fire, digging an outhouse hole), but more often it is a cultural reference I don't get (Peanuts cartoons for instance). I've learned to fake it. I know that the parents in the Peanuts cartoons spoke gibberish, so I laugh along with everybody else when someone makes a joke about that, but I don't get it. Not really. Most of the time people ignore the awkward moment.

Why do I do it?

I have been practicing some form of Japanese martial art since the year I graduated from high school. I've moved more than once, lived in various parts of three different states, changed styles, and grown up a lot. I've gotten two degrees, had children, been married and divorced, and I keep coming back. I find when I train regularly, my life feels better. Whatever else is going on, if I have a dojo and go regularly, I can keep it together. Over the years, I have been asked the question, "Why do you do it?" many times in a number of different ways. 

The first time was in an Aikido class, the summer after I graduated from high school. I would commute 40 miles each way (5 of those miles on a dirt road) on the old motorcycle I had bought twice a week to take classes from one of the toughest women I've ever met. She taught us Ki-Aikido which is a style founded by one of Morihei Ueshiba's (the founder of Aikido) students. He, I am told, was asked not to call his style Aikido, as it was more mystical and less martial. He (and thus my teacher) taught the power of energy to effect an attacker without touching him or her. I was sitting on the mat, an awkward 19 year old, usually too shy to speak up in unfamiliar company, with these 30+ men (the teacher that night was a man, not the regular female teacher), steeped in the Iron John mystique of Robert Bly's men's movement. The teacher asked us all to answer two questions, why we started in Aikido, and why we kept doing it. I can't precisely remember the answers, but am sure that, "I do it to control the violence inside me," was one of them. This drew appreciative murmurs and nods from the assemblage. At the time I honestly didn't have any violence inside me. My life was a pretty sheltered one and my reaction to conflict was to retreat, not to get angry. So, at that point in my training, my answers were a very simple and honest, "I started Aikido because my parents were doing it (precisely speaking this was true, but it was a little disingenuous), and I keep doing it because it is fun." This drew indulgent, "Well, you'll be more sophisticated when you are older" looks from the others.

An excellent answer to this question was suggested to me by my friend and (briefly) Renshinkan Karate teacher, Kevin. I was in another class, struggling to push my stiff ankles to adopt Renshinkan's particularly rigorous interpretation of the forward stance (zenkutsu dachi), and he asked me a question:  "Why are your here?" He meant it in the big sense. Why was I there in that class instead of home in front of the TV, or taking a stroll on the beach. When I, taken by surprise, stumbled to find an answer, he suggested one:  "Because I choose to be." For whatever reason I would rather be sweating in that room, with my ankles hurting and my thigh muscles shaking than any of the other things I could be doing. It is an excellent answer, but it doesn't really get to the heart of the question. Why would I choose that? There are easier, cheaper ways to get exercise that put you at much lower risk of injury. 

I ask myself the question periodically. I ask it when I am getting up at 4:00 to prepare for a 6:00 karate class. I ask it when I think about the ligament damage and "arthritic changes" the doctors tell me are present in my wrists from years of unnatural twisting. I ask it when my right shoulder aches where it never quite healed from being separated after a bad highfall. I ask it while writing another monthly check for dojo dues. I could probably have supported a crack habit on what I've spent on martial arts over the years. An Aikido teacher I respect once told me a story. A young man came to him and wanted to start studying Aikido. This enthusiastic young man waxed eloquent about the wonderful health benefits of Aikido training. The teacher (approaching 70 years old) pointed at his left earlobe and said, "You see this? I have been training for years and this is the only part of my body that doesn't hurt. There are a lot of things to be gained from Aikido. That isn't one of them"

I can tell you some things that aren't the reason I do it. I don't do it for self-protection. I am almost 36 years old and I have yet to get in physical fight. Chances are very good I have done more damage to my body in my training than would be done if I got beat up some day and couldn't fight back. There is also ample evidence that the kind of training I have done (rote drills and practice with a compliant partner) conveys absolutely no advantage in a fight and may actually make one less effective. When the adrenaline dumps, even if you can remember them, you lose the fine motor skills necessary for fancy small joint locks. Even blocking probably goes right out the window. It is people who have learned to deal with the adrenaline, take a punch or two without losing their focus, and react with simple large motor movements like punches and kicks who do well in real fights. There is an extensive literature on this subject you can search out for yourself if you want to know more. 

In his book Meditations on Violence, Sgt Rory Miller lays out this argument very nicely. He has trained traditional Japanese jujutsu to the point where it can be used to devastating effect in a fight. What he says is that, in order to reach that point, you have to train yourself to a hair trigger. You have to react to a perceived threat in an instant with deadly force. Jujutsu, after all, is a battlefield art. Unlike him, I don't work in a prison where I am threatened with deadly violence on a daily basis. I don't live on a battlefield where I have to kill or be killed on a moment's notice. I have no interest in training myself to the point where I will break your arm if you are in my blind spot when you say "good morning." The Aikido teacher whose earlobe didn't hurt related another anecdote about this subject. When approached by a student who wanted to learn Aikido for self-protection, the teacher said, "If you want to protect yourself, go buy a shotgun. Aikido is a long slow road to winning a fight."  Even in New York, a state with very stringent handgun laws, I could get a pistol and a concealed carry permit for less than the cost of one year of training (and that includes ammunition and range time so that I might actually hit what I'm aiming at). I don't train for self-protection. My training may help me if I ever get in a fight, or it may provide that moment of hesitation that proves to be my downfall (wait, did sensei teach ikkyo or nihonage osae from this attack?). Regardless, it isn't the reason I keep choosing to go back. 

When I really think about it, I have to admit that the awkward 19 year old was on to something. I do it because it is fun. Now don't get me wrong. I have gained a lot of confidence from my training. I am no longer that shy kid and part of the reason for this is martial arts training. I may be deluding myself, but I believe I have a better chance in a fight than I would without it. I am not a trained ninja assassin, will never throw a chi ball, and do not have to register my hands as deadly weapons. I don't know how I will react if somebody takes a swing at me, but I am pretty sure that if I keep my cool and connect, I will acquit myself better than I would have without training. Sometimes I want nothing more than a place to go and hit things or people and yell and have that be socially acceptable. 

All of these are benefits, but I am not thinking about any of them when I change out of my street clothes and step out onto the mat. The thing that I love and the thing that keeps me coming back is the feeling I get when I can go all out against somebody. When they come full speed with that attack and I know that I can throw them and trust they will take the fall without injury. When they hold the pad and I know I can put everything I've got into my kick and they'll be safe. I get this feeling of intense focus combined with complete awareness. I believe that this feeling is what is meant by the Japanese term zanshin, often translated as no-mind or awareness. I think some people get this feeling from a triathlon, yoga, or meditation. For me, meditation happens in motion. I do my best thinking while walking, swimming, or otherwise going from one place to another. And I achieve zanshin under pressure, on the mat, sending somebody flying through the air. So why do I do it? Well, I could say I do it because I love it. I do it for the way I feel in the middle of it. I do it to achieve relaxation and focus. Or, like I said when I was 19 years old, I do it because it is really really fun.

Cooking to infinity

This blog post was inspired by Crista Gray.  It would never have occured to me that anybody would be interested if she hadn't suggested it.  

I like to get the most out of things.  I don't buy new clothes when the old ones will do.  I wear my shoes until they fall apart.  I eat leftovers that are on the edge of inedible.  And I like to use up all of the usable parts of the things I cook.  Before I elaborate on that, I should explain how that relates to the title of this post.

There are few enough of you who read this (and bless you every one for caring).  Some of you, like me, grew up in Mendocino County.  I am sure you know the Pacific Lumber company.  It is hard to miss them up there in the land of pot and trees.  Perhaps you remember this lovely quote by Harry Merlo, LP's President and CEO during the eighties.  He said, ""We need everything that's out there. We don't log to a 10-inch top, or an 8-inch top, or a 6-inch top. We log to infinity. Because we need it all. It's ours. It's out there, and we need it all. Now."  He meant they don't stop with the little trees to let them grow into big trees.  They cut down everything, including brush, chip it up, and make pressboard.  Because that is how to make a profit.  In timber management, I find this idea abhorrent.  In my own domestic economy, however, I try to follow it.

There is nothing new about this type of frugality.  Many of our culinary delicacies today are the result of the frugality of our ancestors.  When you kill a calf, everybody can figure out what to do with the tenderloin.  A little salt, pepper, and maybe some other spices, sear it and serve it rare.  The meat is tender and tasty, and the prep is easy.  What am I supposed to do with the little guys legs though?  Even in a calf that meat is tough, made mostly of connective tissue and bone.  Well, braise that bad boy in wine for hours, and we have Osso Buco.  Have you ever ordered Osso Buco in a restaurant?  If you paid less than $20 for your dinner, you did well.  For a piece of meat some would be tempted to toss to the dogs.  Flank steak is another example of this.  It is tough but flavorful.  Somebody figured out you can marinate it, cook it rare, cut it against the grain, and make fajitas out of it.  Suddenly it is trendy and $14/lb at Whole Foods.  

However, I came here to tell you about my own innovation, not to complain about what trendiness does to meat prices.  My children love roasted chicken.  They call it Chicken With Bones-o.  This song, which you should listen to if you are not already familiar, is the reason.  They, being the little ones, love to chew on the bones-o.  This presents a problem though.  They like the legs, thighs, and wings.  I like the breast, but there is quite a bit of meat left on a chicken carcass even if we eat all of those parts.  And we don't always.  Sometimes they want to eat the leftovers, sometimes they don't.  So I freeze the carcases.  When I get about three in my freezer, I used to make stock.  Sometimes I still do, but even I can only use so much stock.  These days I make chicken enchiladas with the meat.  This means I get 1-2 meals for me and the kids out of every chicken, then an entire pan of enchiladas (about 12, or 6 meals for me) out of every three chickens.  Not to mention the scraps I feed my dog.  She gets real happy when I do that.


Here is my recipe for Leftover Chicken Enchiladas.  It borrows liberally from a recipe published in Cook's Illustrated, but is different enough to call it my own.

Leftover Chicken Enchiladas

3 chicken carcases.  

1 large (28 oz) can crushed tomatoes

1 small (14 oz) can enchilada sauce

1 Tb whole cumin seeds

3 Ancho chillies, dried

3 chipotle peppers from a can of chipotles in adobo, diced

2 medium onions, chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced or put through a garlic press

1 Tb Hungarian smoked paprika

Fresh ground black pepper to taste

1 lb Monterey Jack Cheese (or pepper jack)

1 bunch cilantro

12 corn tortillas

In a large dutch oven, stock pot over medium heat, or slow cooker, combine the chicken carcases (they can still be frozen), tomatoes, enchilada sauce, chipotles, onions, garlic, and smoked paprika.  Cover and bring to a simmer.  You may need to move things around to be sure the chicken is at least half covered with liquid.  Remove the stems from the Ancho chiles.  Place in a coffee grinder with the cumin seeds and pulse the grinder until they are finely ground.  Add 2 Tb of the resulting powder to your pot.  Reserve the rest and add to taste (I generally add it all up front).  Note that if you refer to skip this step (basically you are making your own fresh chili powder), you can use equivalent amounts of commercial chili powder.

On the stove top, simmer for 3-4 hours on low, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking.  In slow cooker, cook on low for 8 hours or so.  Remove from heat and allow to cool.  Pick the edible meat from the carcases.  If you have a dog, reserve the non-bone portions you don't want to eat for him or her.  Otherwise, toss the bones and other discarded parts.  

Place the edible meat in a colander over a large bowl.  Pour the contents of the pot into the colander.  This is a second chance to look for small bones or other unpalatable bits of meat.  Discard any you find.  Shred the meat finely, and press against the colander to allow as much liquid to pass through as possible.  Place the shredded meat in another bowl.

Grate the cheese and coarsely chop the cilantro.  Add half the cheese, all of the cilantro, and pepper to taste to the shredded meat and stir to combine.  Now you have your enchilada filling (the meat) and your enchilada sauce (the strained liquid).  Taste both.  Add seasonings to taste (salt, pepper, more spice, more chili flavor).  Some possible additions:  Diced pickled jalapenos, Sriracha or other hot sauce, more chili powder, diced roasted peppers (canned or fresh).  

At this point, the sauce and filling can be refrigerated to allow you to assemble the enchiladas later, at your convenience.  Saving them in the refrigerator has the added benefit of solidifying the fat in the sauce, allowing it to be easily skimmed.  

When ready to assemble, preheat the oven to 350.  Warm the tortillas, one at a time, in a skillet on the stove top.  A quick spray of oil, or a little added to the pan, makes them easier to work with.  For each enchilada, take a warmed tortilla, fill with 1/12 of the filling, and roll.  Place, seam down, in a 9x13 baking pan.  You will have to do a little Tetris to fit them all in.  I do a row of 8 or9 (as many as will fit) parallel to the short edge of the pan.  Then I put the remaining 3-4 into the space parallel to the long edge of the pan.  Whatever works for you.  It is important not to leave big empty spaces though, as the sauce will pool there and you will end up with hard tortillas.  

When the pan is full, pour the sauce over the enchiladas.  Make an effort to moisten the top of all of the tortillas.  Cover the pan with foil, and bake for about 30 minutes.  Remove pan from oven, top with remaining cheese, and return to oven for 15 minutes or until cheese is well melted.  Remove from oven and serve.

I like to top with diced avocado, sour cream, and salsa, and serve with lettuce on the side.  

I love this recipe.  It is versatile (change the flavorings for a completely different result, skip the enchiladas and use the meat as burrito filling or to top nachos).  It uses something that would otherwise be wasted.  To be honest, after one or two meals of roast chicken, I am pretty tired of it.  This allows me a chance to use the whole thing without having to slog through another chicken sandwich, or a third meal of reheated chicken.  Toss it in the freezer when you are tired of eating the leftovers, and it will wait patiently for you to make something tasty with it.  I have to admit, I have been amazed by the reactions I've gotten to these enchiladas.  I think of them as something to get me through the week.  Every person I have served them to has been impressed way out of proportion (in my opinion) to their quality.  So make them if you have some chicken lying around (whether you roasted it yourself, or bought the $5 rotisserie chicken at the store, I've used both) and let me know what you think.

What about the boys?

This post has been a long time coming.  It has been percolating in the back of my mind for months at least.  Years really.  Over the past few months, though, it seems that the plight of the modern man has been in the news a lot.  Here are my thoughts.

I sat down to write today because of a lucky juxtaposition.  A persistent cough, jetlag, and an understanding boss combined to allow me to be home at 3:00 in the afternoon.  On the way home I heard an interview with Cheryl Kilodavis, who wrote a book (My Princess Boy) about her five year old son who likes to wear pink dresses and sequins.  She was interviewed with two other women, one the mother of a male to female transgendered adult and the other a psychologist, expert in gender identity.  This comes on the heels of a wave of stories in the national media about families where men are unemployed or earning less than their wives or female partners and the effects this is having on us all.  In a country where men, especially husbands and fathers, define themselves by their ability to earn (bring home the bacon if you will), we are told that this is causing real problems.  I heard one call-in show where a man called in to explain that, while both he (a humanities professor) and his wife (a lawyer) were employed and successful, she was leaving him because she no longer wanted to be married to a man who made less than she did.  You could hear the agony in his voice.  I believe this illustrates a very particular moment in the history of gender relations in this country.

Gentlemen, we are behind the curve in terms of redefining traditional gender roles.  Feminism has become entrenched in our national consciousness.  This is not to say that all is well.  There is still a significant income gap, for instance as this graph from Wikipedia shows

(wiki linky)

However, I would argue that it has become generally accepted that women and girls should be encouraged, if they wish, to enter into traditionally male roles.  They may face adversity (ask a female service member sometime if you really think everything is okay), but, in general they will be encouraged by women if not by men.  The reverse is not true.  

Getting back to Ms. Kilodavis and her Princess Boy, there is a very strong backlash against men who choose to exhibit traditionally feminine traits.  In this case, her son wanted to dress in pink lacy dresses.  Her reaction was to try to guide him back to traditional male outfits.  At first she justified it by saying that it was to protect him from discrimination.  Later she came to realize it was her own hang up that caused her discomfort and she eventually came around.  Then she wrote a book and made a splash on TV talk shows, NPR, and in the national media.  Think for just a minute how a book publisher might react to a woman who allowed her daughter to wear jeans, and tried to pitch a book about it.  In 1911 there might have been backlash, but in 2011 we don't even notice.  

This, and the stories of male to female transgendered people are splashy and get attention.  But there is a more subtle distinction here as well.  Jeremy Adam Smith blogs about, and wrote a book about, a trend toward men breaking out of their Don Draper absent father roles, and toward acting as caregivers, sometimes primary caregivers, for their children (so-called, stay-at-home dads being the extreme example).  This is an extension of the call of women, as they enter the workforce, to have partners who share the burdens of homemaking, as they expand to share the burdens of breadwinning.  Again, I am not arguing that all is well in terms of gender equality or that things have shifted the other way somehow.  What I believe is that we have spent so much effort on valuing women's move into the public sphere, so long the sole purview of men, that we have forgotten to value the contributions of women and men in the private sphere, traditionally belonging to women.  It is empowering for a woman to break out of her traditional gender role and become a high-powered attorney, wearing a suit and working 70 hours a week.  When anybody, male of female, prioritizes the private sphere, they feel compelled to justify themselves to the world.

I believe it is past time for a men's movement to answer the advances of feminism.  I emphatically do not mean something along the lines of Robert Bly and Iron John (so eloquently described by Utah Phillips as men getting together and "dragging their scrotums through the underbrush").  This semi-tribal, yuppies-drumming-and-hugging-in-loincloths movement of the nineties just doesn't do it for me.  The exact shape of what I do want isn't completely clear.  I believe we need to re-value "women's work."  Raising children, cooking healthy meals at home, keeping the house clean and orderly, washing laundry...all of these things are vitally important.  It isn't doing anybody any good to work themselves to exhaustion in the public sphere in order to be able to afford to pay somebody else to maintain their homes.  

This is a question that weighs particularly heavy on my mind as the father of a son.  I am also the father of a daughter, which comes with its own worries.  I can say unequivocally though that I see far more role models and support structures for my daughter in the world than I do for my son.  Whatever my daughter does, I expect her to get a "you go girl" from somebody in authority.  I worry about my son though.  He doesn't want to be a princess, hasn't put on a dress in a while, and shows no inclination to wear one to school.  In fact, if anything, he shows more of the stereotypical boy traits than I am comfortable with.  He plays with toy guns, tends toward an aggressive personality, and torments his sister.  Where are the role models in the media or in stories for him to emulate? John Rambo?  Ben Stone of Knocked Up?  Men in popular culture tend to be muscle-bound, testosterone-poisoned brutes or (more recently) overgrown boys who never grew up.  I worry about what is cool these days, and how my boy will react.

My revolution is a quiet one for now.  I am not a good housekeeper, but I cook healthy, homemade meals from scratch.  I try to offset the type-A, career-obsessed modeling of their mother by leaving work early to pick them up when I can, by deliberately choosing a career where I rarely have to work nights and weekends.  I know I am not the only one moving in this direction, but I wonder what is the iconic image of this new change I hope I am only seeing the beginning of.  Perhaps you will see me in the newspaper, burning a jock strap in front of the courthouse.  Until then I will be baking bread, teaching my son to put the toilet seat down, and wondering what comes next.

Talkin' 'bout my generation

I have this very distinct memory from high school.  I was alone in the car with my English teacher and a neighbor on the way home from school.  Both of these gentlemen are of an age with my parents, and are members of the part of that generation who defined themselves by breaking with their parents' social standards and forging a brave new world.  That world is now primarily remembered for experimentation with drugs and new social standards, as well as a revolution in music.  This neighbor, feeling cantankerous perhaps, asked me a question as something of a challenge.  His question was, "What music defines the legacy of [my] generation?"  I was a shy kid.  I mumbled something about The Pixies, as that was the first thing that came to mind. He shot me down dismissively, saying that Art Rock had been around a long time.  He was, of course, perfectly right.  For his generation, Rock and Roll was a revolution that has changed completely the shape of music ever since. 

I suppose it says something about me that this conversation has stuck with me for so long.  I think about it periodically, and have come to the conclusion that the correct answer is very simple.  I was too prejudiced at the time to see it.  He would have hated it and I didn't have the strength of character to argue the point at the time, so I suppose it is for the best that I didn't try to defend it.  The answer, of course, is hip hop and the parallels are striking. 

Both hip hop and rock music have roots in African American music traditions.  Led Zeppelin (the band for which the term "heavy metal" was coined) started life as a blues band.  Rock, of course, has had at least thirty more years to evolve and permeate the mainstream than hip hop has, but when it started, the older generation dismissed it as noise, not music.  Ironically, those same rebellious youths who dismissed their parents as square are now all grown up and dismiss hip hop as noise, not music. 

Unlike rock, hip hop has remained primarily segregated racially.  With a few exceptions (Vanilla Ice, and Eminem standing out among them, each in his own way) artists that most would consider true hip hop remain black or brown (Pit Bull and other Latino artists are examples here).  All it takes is a few minutes on a modern pop music station to hear the influence of hip hop and R&B on modern pop.  I spend as few minutes as possible listening to modern pop music stations, so I am not going to embarrass myself here by trying to list names and songs.  Like rock in the eighties, hip hop aesthetics pervade modern music.  It is my generation's musical legacy.

Perhaps writing this piece will purge my memory of this conversation and allow me to stop making this argument in my head during idle moments.  Of course, it brings up another question to keep me up at night.  I like to think of myself as a pretty cool dad.  My iPod contains plenty of music my parents would find headache-inducing.  I do some judicial editing with the on-off button on my car stereo so that my daughter can indulge her passion for Eminem's Haley's Song (you see, she shares initials with him, and came up with the nickname M&M for herself independently so she feels a certain connection to that bleached-blond, foul-mouthed bad boy of hip hop).  Now that I have freed up some mental real estate, I can spend my time worrying about what the musical legacy of my children's generation will be.  What, in twenty years, will they be listening to that I will consider noise, not music?

A bread post, complete with recipe

I love to bake. For most of the people reading this blog, that will not be any sort of surprise at all, since you all know me pretty well. I started baking as a kid. We didn't buy cookies at the store like some families do. If we wanted cookies, somebody had to bake them. Since I was usually the one that wanted them, I was usually the one who baked them. I developed my own recipe, based off the Toll House recipe, quite young. I’ll share it with you if you ask nicely. I used to make cookies after dinner. I distinctly remember making people pause the movie so I could run into the kitchen to take another batch out of the oven without missing anything. I suppose that was kind of annoying to the other movie watchers, but I always came back with warm chocolate chip cookies, so I can’t imagine they minded that much. By the time the cookies were done, I had usually eaten enough dough that I had no interest in cookies at all. But they keep, and there is always tomorrow.

In college, I lived in a co-op called Columbae. The house was owned by the university, I believe it had started life as a fraternity house. The co-ops were kind of the anti-fraternities. I will just say, forty people (male and female) between the ages of 19 and about 24 (we had a few grad students), living in the same house, making every decision by consensus, and moving rooms every quarter. I will leave you with that image and save Columbae for a future post. It was there that I learned to bake bread. Every weeknight, it was somebody’s job to make a huge batch of bread for the whole house. For a while I held that job, and loved it. I would start prep after the dinner cleanup crew finished (about 8:00 or so). Bread would come out of the oven around midnight. The smell would always attract the many brain-dead students still awake, pulling them away from studying for a much-needed carbohydrate boost. The bread cognoscenti say that you shouldn’t cut it until it has cooled to room temperature (it lets some steam escape, resulting in drier bread). My mothers (yeah, I’ve got two, and a father, again, a subject for another post) believe hot bread will clog your ileocecal valve. I, on the other hand, am a firm believer in cutting one loaf right away, while it is too hot to touch, spreading some butter and honey on a piece, and enjoying it immediately with a cold glass of milk. This moment is about 50% of why I make my own bread.

My bread is, I believe better than what you can buy in the store. At least, I like it better. That is one of the biggest benefits of doing one’s own cooking (aside from saving money, and generally healthier eating). When I make my own food, I can make it to my taste. I like plain whole wheat bread, no nuts or seeds, moist and fluffy. So that is the bread my recipe makes. Just like I tinkered with the Toll House cookie recipe years ago to fit my tastes I have come up with my own favorite bread recipe. It is primarily drawn from Mollie Katzen’s basic bread recipe (I still send people to her hand-drawn illustrations of bread baking when they ask me how to bake) and Nancy Silverton’s everyday whole wheat, combined with everything I have learned in my fifteen year obsession with bread. For those who would like to try it, my recipe is attached below. I intend, someday, to publish it, along with other recipes I have developed. Feel free to use it, alter it, bake from it whatever you want. Please, just don’t publish it as your own. And cut a piece of that first loaf out of the oven, eating it hot however you like it best. Damn the bread cognoscenti and the ileocecal valve (whatever it may be).



Tim’s WW bread:
makes 4 ample loaves

Sponge:
5.5 cups (44 oz.) water
6 cups (26 oz) WW flour
2 tsp salt
1 tsp instant yeast*

Mix:
4 tsp. instant yeast
4.5 cups (19 oz.) white WW flour**
4.5 cups (19 oz.) bread flour***
2 eggs
½ cup sugar or honey
2/3 cup oil
4 tsp. salt
2 cups cooked grain (optional)****


The Sponge: I learned to bake bread from Mollie Katzen’s Enchanted Broccoli Forest. If you are familiar with her recipe, you may recognize some of it in this recipe. She suggests using a sponge, mixing part of the flour with a little yeast and water and letting it rise before mixing it with the rest of the ingredients. This is a technique called a pre-ferment, used by professional bakers to improve the flavor and rise of bread. Traditional hearth breads use a pre-ferment (called, variously, a poolish, mother, chef, or biga), often allowed to rise overnight. I included the sponge in this recipe because I have tried cutting this step out (I love cutting out unnecessary steps, as we will see in a minute when we get to the kneading bit) and found that my loaves rose significantly less. So, mix up the sponge ingredients (should make a wet dough), and allow to rise in a warm place, covered with plastic wrap or a clean towel. Be sure to leave plenty of room between the covering and the sponge, as it will rise and can make a mess of your towel if there is contact. A minimum of an hour is a good idea. Longer periods (up to 10 hours or so) are fine, depending on your baking schedule. If you are going to go longer than about 3-4 hours, I suggest letting it rise in the refrigerator where the cool temperature will slow things down.

The Mix: Take all of your sponge and put it in a bigger bowl (unless you used a nice big bowl in the first place). Add all of the ingredients of the mix except the flour first, mixing well. Some people caution about not letting the salt touch the yeast before it has been mixed with the other ingredients (they believe the concentrated salt can kill the yeast cells). I have not found this to be a problem, but it is pretty easy to add them to opposite sides of the bowl. Add the flours and stir until thoroughly mixed. If you have made bread before, you may find that this dough is wetter than you expect. Don’t worry it is designed that way. A wetter dough (within limits) makes a lighter loaf.

Kneading: This is one of the places where I firmly disagree with most home bread recipes. The famous “No Knead Bread” recipe from the New York Times a few years ago popularized a method called folding used by professional bakers, especially for wetter doughs, for years. I believe this method can be used for any bread recipe and will save a lot of time and effort (or electricity if you choose to knead in an electric mixer). If you don’t believe me, or really like the stress release and forearm workout of kneading, just knead this dough for about 10 minutes, adding a little flour to keep it from sticking. Use as little flour as possible, as too much will get you back to that denser consistency, and a denser loaf.

For those who are willing to step off the cliff with me, here is what you do: Plan to let this bread rise for about two hours (this will vary a bit depending on the freshness of your yeast and the temperature in your house) For the first hour, every twenty minutes, sprinkle the counter lightly with flour, pour the dough out, and fold it into thirds (as you would fold a letter). Rotate it 180 degrees and fold it again. Return it to the bowl to continue rising. After the third fold, just let it rise unmolested for the next hour. It should about double in bulk by the end of the rise. If it is done sooner, skip to the next step. If it is rising slowly, put it in a warmer place (on top of the dryer, while a load is drying, is a good place, or on top of the refrigerator).

Divide the dough into 4 approximately equal pieces (you can, of course, cut this recipe in half for 2 loaves). Oil 4 loaf pans lightly with spray oil or butter. Shape the pieces into loaves and place them in the pans. Oil the top of the loaves, cover with a clean towel or saran wrap, and leave in a warm place to rise. When the loaves have risen such that the part of the loaf contacting the pan is about even with the top, slash the tops with a sharp knife (serrated works well), and place in a preheated 350F oven. If you are pressed for time, about when the top of the dough is level with the edge of the pan, slash the loaves and place them in an unheated oven. Allow it to preheat to 350 with the loaves in there. They will continue to rise as the oven heats, cutting part of the time off of your baking day. Bake until the loaves are golden brown and sound hollow when thumped (the best way to test this is to use an instant read thermometer and bake them to between 180 and 190 degrees). Remove them from the pans, and place on a wire rack to cool. The bread cognoscenti say that you shouldn’t cut it until it has cooled to room temperature (it lets some steam escape, resulting in drier bread). I, on the other hand, am a firm believer in cutting one loaf right away, while it is too hot to touch, spreading some butter and honey on a piece, and enjoying it immediately with a cold glass of milk. This moment is about 50% of why I make my own bread.

* I call for instant yeast (also called bread machine yeast sometimes). The only difference between this and you traditional Active Dry yeast is that the instant is pelletized in smaller pellets at the factory, allowing it to be mixed directly with the dry ingredients. If you can’t find it (big box stores or places that cater to caterers often sell yeast in 1 pound bags for far less than your regular supermarket) Active Dry yeast is fine. Use about 1/3 more yeast (there are fewer living cells in Active Dry than instant) and mix it with a small part of the water (about ½ cup) to dissolve before adding the other ingredients.

** White whole wheat flour is whole wheat flour milled from white wheat berries, rather than red wheat, which is what most whole wheat flour is made from. Because it has a thinner seed coat, it does not have the strong flavor most people associate with whole wheat flour, and produces a lighter loaf without losing the nutritional value.

*** I use bread flour in this recipe because it has more gluten than all purpose flour, which helps make up for the high proportion of whole grain flour. If you can’t find bread flour, all purpose will work (though your loaves may be a bit denser) or you can add a little bit (up to ¼ cup) vital wheat gluten to compensate. Alternatively, you can substitute more white whole wheat for the bread flour (up to the whole amount for a 100% whole grain loaf). A little added gluten, again, will help with the fluffiness of your bread.

**** I used to try to use uncooked grain here, and some might work (cornmeal for instance, adds crunch without absorbing a lot of water). I ran into trouble with uncooked oats and bulgar, in particular, absorbing water out of the dough and changing the consistency of the bread. Feel free to experiment here if you have more patience than I did. You can also add things like a cinnamon sugar swirl, dried fruit, nuts, etc. I like my bread pretty plain so I have written the recipe this way.