It Takes a Village To Make a Sausage

I admit that I actually don’t know much about New York state. I could identify the shape, but I am just starting to comprehend its vastness and distinct regions. I had no idea where I was going when I took the train on Saturday morning, just that I wanted to learn more about meat. I was pleasantly surprised as the train made its way along the Hudson river, its banks gleaming with fall foliage. As I got closer to wherever it was I bought the ticket for(…was it Rhinbock, Rhineshore?), mountains appeared blue in the distance. I was suddenly filled with the urge to take the train through what I imaged were several impressive mountain ranges and on to Montreal. I’m still getting over the fact that I’m not traveling much anymore. Those Icelandair ads on the subway with a couple along Iceland’s eerie rocky shore never fail to bring a tear to my eye. Let’s not even talk about the Delta ads that beckon me to Asia and other exotic locales, even if they are tainted with the implication that I would go there to make business deals.

Despite my wanderlust, I got off at scenic Rhinecliff at the edge of the water. Soon enough I was meeting wonderful people, including Amanda and Coco of the Greenhorns posse who picked us up and drove us to Mead Orchards in Tivoli, wherever that is. Oh, and while I’m at it, maybe I should explain why I was there.

I was there because Smithereen Farm, which is run by a group of enterprising young farmers, slaughtered their Tamworth pigs and they invited a butcher to come break them down into a feast and teach everyone about pork in the process. I’d participated in the butchery of rabbits and poultry before, but not pigs and in fact I almost never cook pork. If you know me well, you probably know that I’m pretty much the opposite of squeamish and have no problem with blood and guts. When I told people in NYC where I was going some of them reacted in horror. I figure if you are going to eat meat you might as well be intimate with the process of dismantling the animal that died to give you food and to acknowledge it as an animal and not a chicken breast. I think people who can’t do that should be vegans, vegans because vegetarians eat milk and eggs and if you think old brown cow Bessy goes to a retirement home when her milk production lags you are delusional.

I guess I’m up on my soap box now. Having experience with dairy and egg production, vegetarianism never made much sense to me. In fact I feel much more comfortably eating meat, since the animals I ate spent their entire lives outside doing what they want and raising their young as they pleased. Dairy animals work every day and their young are taken away and either slaughtered or bottle fed. Some people say I’ve missed the point, which is that vegetarianism is largely symbolic, about not consuming the flesh and blood, not whether or not your diet causes death or not.

I’m curious to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Eating Animals. I’ve read Peter Singer’s pro vegan books and recently read The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food” by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. I respect vegans highly and often order vegan food when I’m eating out, but I’ve decided from my experience with agriculture and my own body that I do best with some meat and fish in my diet and I’m comfortable with eating animals.

That said, I don’t eat loads of meat because the meat I eat is expensive, and rightly so. Raising a quality animal humanely and feeding it right is hard work. There has been lots of talk about how meat is “bad” is a global context, but these pigs we broke down and ate were a perfect example of grey areas. They didn’t eat food that would have gone to humans in a third world country, pigs eat trash. There food didn’t pollute our waters, it went to fertilizer. Pigs can also live in the woodland perfectly well, so there is no need for deforesting land. In the case of this, parading around UN papers to which are largely irrelevant to small scale farm like Smithereen to bash meat consumption is disingenuous of animal rights activists at best.

Enough soapboxing. The weekend was far more than just a meditation on the eating of animals. It was a celebration of delicious food that attracted an incredibly awesome and diverse crowd of people from cooks to poets (and everything in between). The apple harvest was over, but a few apples hung on the trees beckoning us to eat them. We also gleaned these raspberries, miraculously juicy despite the late autumn chill.

The butcher, Bryan Mayer of Brooklyn’s Green Grape, showed us the process of breaking down the pigs into cuts. It was extremely useful to see that. I’ve seen diagrams, but there is nothing like seeing the dismantling happen to help you remember what comes from where. What was truly amazing was how much meat came from just two pigs. It easily fed all 20 of us during the weekend with meat to spare. Being such valuable and lovingly raised animals, every single edible part was put to use.

After the pigs were cut up, we all went to work harvesting turnips, chopping up vegetables, and cooking up the pork into a giant delicious feast. We had ragu (it’s a delicious pasta sauce made from pork!), pork belly, pie, mashed turnips, roast tenderloin…everyone was stuffed as we ate by the campfire.

But the work wasn’t done! The next day we rendered lard to fry apples and doughnuts in. I like stirring things and the process of melting down lard fascinates me in the same way churning ice cream does. It’s a defiant alchemy that things like ice cream and lard can be created. Whenever I make ice cream I can’t help staring at the machine as it somehow makes an essence of the liquid, magnifying its wonderful creaminess as it whirls rope upon rope to beckon it to become something the milk must have never dreamed possible. As I cut down the pieces of fat and we pulled them through the grinder, it seemed impossible that they could melt into clarify. But after stirring the pot over the fire and filtering out the delicious smokey crackings, a pot of clear hot fat bubbled up demands for battered apples and dough to ply its alchemy on. Anything put in the pot became a zillion times tastier. There are not many other substances that can do that.

Finally, any part not used by now went into sausage, which was expertly spiced by the team of cooks and chefs.

Awesome links to people I met
Pdo Foto
Link My Balsamic
Hudson Grown
Cricket Bread
Shafer Hall
Hudson Valley Food Network
The Greenhorns
Open Bicycle
Pound Sweet

But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

Robert Frost

A picture I discovered of the lamb takedown

Me and Julie eat an overwhelming amount of lamb

Slow Cooking and Fermenting This Week

The two themes of this week seemed to be slow cooking and fermenting. I attended several food events on both and hope to put what I learned into practice soon.

Jessica Prentice, author of the excellent cookbook Full Moon Feast, was in town to teach about her Local Foods Wheel through the lens of slow cooking and fermenting.

At the first workshop we learned about using a slow cooker to make soups, stews, and stocks. Jessica explained how a slow cooker is an excellent tool for those of us who only eat grassfed meat. Why? Well, if you haven’t been to your local farmer’s market lately, I’ll fill you in by just saying that a grassfed steak is a rare rare treat that costs a pretty penny. Most of the cuts that are affordable to people like me, like short ribs and shanks, are much tougher to cook and need a long slow cooking time. With a slow cooker you don’t need to be home for that whole time. Besides that, grassfed meat is very valuable and you want to extract as much as you can from it, so you need to learn the art of stocks.

I don’t have a slow cooker yet, but I hope to purchase one soon so I don’t have to sit around at hope worried about leaving and a fire starting to get those lamb shanks braised.

Oh, speaking of lamb, I also went to a lamb cooking contest where many of those great cheap cuts were prepared deliciously. It was a lamb Takedown and it was delicious and filling.

There were lots of cheaper cuts like shanks and shoulder. It was sponsored by the American Lamb Board and I wish they had more info about specific cuts, because really I think Americans don’t know very much about lamb (including me). I started eating it incidentally because central Illinois, where I went to college, had a couple of awesome sustainable lamb farms + a population of Muslims. Somehow they got connected, which equaled some pretty delicious Middle Eastern style lamb sausage. Lamb was also popular in Sweden, but I could never find any shanks…maybe because I didn’t know the word for “shank,” but I honestly never saw them. That was sad because way back when I had some amazing beer and a lamb shank at Elysian brewery in Seattle, which I can still remember in delicious meat-falling off-the-bone detail. Thankfully, shank and I have been reunited and I have been giving it regular, though time-consuming, baths in beer.

The lighting was very bad, so I didn’t get many pictures, but I certainly ate enough, including this lamb served with a juicy fig and mint mascarpone (why does my spell check want to turn this into mascara pone?). The winning dish as judged by famous dudes Josh Ozersky (The Feedbag), Daniel Maurer (NY Magazine), and George Motz (NY Food Film Festival) was Barbacoa Style Lamb Tacos w 3 Chile Salsa, but I was a bigger fan of other dishes. I loved the Ssam, which was lamb with spicy kimchee wrapped in lettuce, but the second place winner, Pulled Lamb Shank with Pears I loved since it was silky and displayed the best of true lamb flavor.

Anyway, back to the Prentice workshops, the second was on fermenting. I’ve never been a fan of sauerkraut. I’ll eat, but lets just say I’m pretty picky about it. I may like my beer funky, but I prefer that my sauerkraut doesn’t send me reeling when I open it….which otherwise lovingly made wonderful homemade cabbage ferments do. But I actually thought Jessica’s ferments were absolutely delicious. Maybe I’m just getting desensitized to funky things. I used to be the little girl that had to tear off and throw away the corner of my grilled cheese if it had even touched an evil pickle. But I also think it was because hers had fermented a very long time. Some of the jars she brought were over a year old.

It was very useful to learn about the proper equipment, which for sauerkraut is a special crock that prevents mold growth. I would have liked to learn more about the whey and ginger bug sodas though, since I have brewed sodas before and would like to stop using commercial yeast.

Anyway, I learned so much and I loved meeting the people from the NYC Weston A. Price Foundation. I have been a big proponent of full fat diets for several years now and it was great to connect with a similar community. I started reading her book and not only does it have interesting recipes, but her exploration of reconnecting the human body to the seasons is absolutely fascinating and a reason to buy the book to read and not just to cook with.

I also attended a workshop by Brooklyn Brew Shop on brewing beer, where I had too much good beer and was maybe a little bit convinced to take the plunge and have a bunch of crap in a jar fermenting in a hopefully discreet corner of my kitchen. But I’m not really sure, because while I like a good beer every once in awhile, it’s something I drink maybe once a week. I’m also mostly interested in weird crazy wild yeast beers and it seems I’ll need future education to be able to harness the power of crazy yeast.

Veritas Farm

Today I visited Veritas Farm for work. It was an unusually cold day and rain sputtered intermittently. I wondered how NY had skipped from 80 degree to 50 degree days.

Veritas specializes in pastured raised meat, but they have expanded their vegetable operations in the past two years too. Various fat birds like these ducks waddled around to welcome me, temporarily distracted from a pile of windfall apples salvaged from this summer’s hailstorms.

The farm is very old and was a former homestead that was overgrown when former Brooklyners Paul Alward and Stephanie Turco took over. They cleared the land with hard work and a herd of goats, but it still is very lush with forest greenery.

Large herds of highland cattle roamed looking hardy and even a little happy in the rain.

This frighteningly fat, but good-hearted Gloucestershire Old Spots pig wanted a back scratch.

Farmer Stephanie told me that they personally accompany all their animals to slaughter and ensure they get the best treatment possible.

This was a great farm and I would go here often to buy their meat. They were really serious about grass-fed, which is important to me because grass-fed meats are much better nutritionally. Grass-fed meats are much closer to the wild game humans would have hunted down for most of our existence as a species. As such,, they are higher in omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin E. I don’t really bother buying anything else and the added bonus is that farms like this are truly a wonderful place for animals to live and not fake free-range…the thick coated highland cattle live outside 365 days a year!

Le Fooding

This weekend I also went to another food event, where I ate a little healthier, knowing what I would be eating at the Vendy Awards the next day.

It’s hard to complain about Le Fooding because it was great that an event featuring such elite chefs was so affordable. But I must admit the event was bewildering in all the wrong sorts of ways.

Lines snaked through giant furry tents in PS 1 lit up warmly gold, but not providing much protection from the surprisingly bitter early autumn night chill. We got in some lines not sure where they would take us as pretentiously twee French pop lulled us to discontent.

We got in lines not knowing where they went or why we existed…wait, never mind. I soon learned to grab as much of the tiny portions as possible so I wouldn’t have to get back in line.

I was unimpressed by the pig’s head and tapioca (!!??) soup from Le Comptoir du Relais. I’m all about eating animal heads, but it was a little bland.

I am going to have to learn how to make Bo Ssäm, served up by David Chang himself. A simple concept of meat + lettuce really came together because of the spicy kimchee.

I was excited about Wylie Dufresne’s grilled chicken necks, anticipating I would discover an amazing cheap cut of meat to learn how to cook, but alas they were mostly gristle and bone.

From Paris restaurant Bigarrade came this delicious steak. It was delicious, but mostly just because steak is delicious. Same for the pork ribs from Ze Kitchen Galerie.

The most impressive flavor was the scallop butter from Brooklyn’s own Diner (no, not a diner, but a locavore place simply named Diner. I would complain, but their food is seriously very good…even locavore-hater Anthony Bourdain liked it). The combination of butter, tomato, and mint was surprising and wonderfully zesty.

Vendy Awards

I wish I had a bigger stomach, really, I do. Events like the Vendy Awards are a struggle because there is so much good food and I want all of it, but every bite brings me closer to the dreaded food fatigue.

This year’s event was held in Flushing, Queens at the former site of the World’s Fair, which unfortunately very very very far away from where I live in Brooklyn, at least by subway, which is an even slower form of transportation on the weekend when they do construction.

The Vendy Award is not just an aggregation of all the best street food trucks in NYC, but a fundraising event for the Street Vendor Project, which advocates for street vendors both by representing them in court and by lobbying for better policies. Street vending in NYC is currently not well protected or respected by the powers that be. Street Vendors are mercilessly ticketed and the permit system is punitive and corrupt to say the least. This is unfortunate, as vending represents a great opportunity for people to start a small business. Many vendors are immigrants and come from poor backgrounds and vending represents a way out of poverty.

But the Vendy Awards are fun because street food is not only a valid business enterprise that should be respected, but because the best vendors serve up incredibly delicious and creative food.

My favorite rookie was Schnitzel & Things, which brought back my memories of Austria. My pork schnitzel was perfect and the delicious creamy Austrian potato salad sealed the deal.

Cravings, the other rookie cart had some incredibly luscious gravy, but otherwise the meats and dumplings didn’t wow me. Picnick, the only cart touting local sustainable food, was also a disappointment. I thought the meat was dry, the sauce boring, and the cookie was an abomination to cookies everywhere.

I hit up the dessert trucks after that, with Wafels and Dinges being my first stop. I always thought I didn’t like waffles because the ones I had were gummy and boring, but apparently I hadn’t had the right waffle…until Saturday, when I took an incredible bite of the buttery chewy wonderful waffles served up by those genius Belgian men who topped it all off with the amazing concoction that is gingerbread butter.

I waited in line for eons for the Big Gay Ice Cream truck, but it was worth it. I also tend to look down on soft serve, but once again, I was wrong. This soft serve was creamy with real vanilla and the topping were creative and of course, delicious. I had the gobbler, which was topped with pumpkin butter. Wow.

Cupcake Stop was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The first cupcake I had, the Elvis, a banana cupcake with peanut butter icing, was salty and sweet and melted pleasingly in my mouth. However, the pumpkin spice was nauseatingly sweet.

I wasn’t much hungry afterwards. I had admittedly eating the Country Boys truck for a taco before the monster line formed and it was delicious, but I didn’t think it was anything exciting. Same for the falafel from the King of Falafel, but maybe it’s because I couldn’t manage the whole dish he made and just ate the falafel.

Mediocre Rickshaw Dumplings, buttery spicy Kati Rolls, and burnt Jamacian Dutchy were tasted, but were tasted, but at this point I was ready to pass out on the grass, so I wasn’t a fair judge.

NYC Craft Beer Week

First up was NYC Craft Beer Week, a harried week for me because my own organization had an event as part of that week. I did get to go to a few amazing events though, one being a panel on Women in Beer at the French Culinary Institute.

After eating lots of Murray’s cheese and tasting some great Ommegang and Stoudt’s beers, beer mavins dished on the state of women in this mostly-male profession. The women on the panel this year were Debbie Boening, president of Oak Beverages which distributes beer, Susan Green, sales manager of the Global Brewers Guild, Sarah Lescrauwaet Beach, Market Manager of Ommegang Brewery, Jennifer Schwertman, bar btender and beer geek, and Carol Stoudt, President of Stoudt’s Brewery and the first female Brewmaster in the U.S: The panel was hosted by Maggie Fuller, the founder of Beer Ethos.

It was a diverse group and all of them were more than willing to speak their minds. Carol Stoudt got into beer after her kids left home and started a brewery, whereas Sarah, who is Belgian, recounted growing up with good beer. They talked about how session beers are in and beer is getting new respect from gourmands.

What was clear from the panel is that the stereotypes of “girly” beer are fading and women are enjoying beer with real flavor. Indeed, when I bartended at the Vendy Awards, it was the women making a beeline for the IPA.

The best beers I tasted at beer week were Kelso’s Brett and Ommegang’s Hennepin. I definitely lean towards the Belgian styles and I am so glad I discovered beers brewed with the bacteria brettanomyces at a cool event recently called Where the Wild Beers Are.

Kombucha drinkers will immediately recognize (and love) the sour brettanomyces flavor and find it enhanced and perfected in many of the beers that utilize it.

Ommegang’s Bière De Mars is a great example of a beer that does sour right. It’s like cinnamon spiced sour windfall apples topped with a malty caramel sauce.

Let Us Eat Local

Let Us Eat Local is not just a fundraising event for Just Food. It’s a showcase of how delicious locally grown can be. Divorced from the tiring dialogue of food miles, local shows that it’s not just from X number of miles away. Local food is also about the idea of a farmer as not just the producer of commodities, but as an artisan with the magical ability to raise up succulent perfect tomatoes from the Earth. When I made the slide show for the event, which featured pictures of these farmers and their handiwork, that is what I wanted to portray. It’s unfortunate that most people at the event already know this. I would have loved to have seen locavore naysayers like Anthony Bourdain try to naysay while choking down Marlow & Son’s luxuriously fatty porkbelly with brightly tart grilled peaches. Of course local food is about other things besides pure hedonism, but this hedonism doesn’t get enough press as far as I’m concerned. Too many articles I’ve read about local food are exercises in calculating abstract reasons why we should eat one way or another.

I was happy to see Bourdain in his Outer Boroughs show chow down on the hamburger from Diner. That burger is not just made with local ingredients, it’s made with the best ingredients. You should order it rare and savor the unctuous silkiness of the beef. Grass-fed beef has its detractors, but I think they don’t get that it’s like a wine and each vintage tastes a particularly way, for better or worse, based on the life of the organism. In this case, the beef is the story of a cow from how its mother nursed it with colostrum to the particular strain of pink clover it favored while out to pasture.

Bourdain would also approve of the local food movement’s love affair with offal, which I have reluctantly become embroiled with. Whole animals raised so carefully are valuable from nose to tail. That means greater appreciation for things like kidneys, which I couldn’t say no to when chef Jacque from Palo Santo offered me them in a taco so enthusiastically. The whole taco was so delicious, so perfectly spiced and dripping with salsa, that I forgot that the offer initially gave me pause.

A picture I, sadly, did not take.

Giving up meat may calculate better in some economics spreadsheet, but in the end Boca Burgers aren’t going to support the kind of economy I want to see that fosters farmers as artisans and stewards of the soil rather than as variables producing X numbers of soybeans. And I say that earnestly, even as I proudly have as bachelors in science in agricultural economics…it’s not going to govern the way I personally eat.

Pictures of the event
Feedbag
Village Voice

Beyond Ikea: A day in Red Hook, Brooklyn

Red Hook, Brooklyn is an isolated little area below Carroll Gardens. Its main claim to fame is that it is home to NYC’s IKEA. Having lived in Sweden for a year, I had no need to go to IKEA, but I did want to explore this oft overlooked neighborhood.

Red Hook is home to some of the biggest public housing projects in the US. Nearby are ballfields where children play soccer and baseball and where many people from all over New York come to enjoy excellent cheap Latin American Street Food. I had a delicious pupusa, a thick Salvadorean tortilla stuffed with delicious fillings such as gooey cheese and tender pork. I also had tamales stuffed with delicious spicy chickpeas and potatoes. I washed it down with sweet red hibiscus tea (aqua de Jamaica).

As I walked down the street, I came across the giant glaring blue box that is IKEA, as well as a farm…yes, a small farm run by an organization called Added Value. Local children work at the farm to learn about healthy food and how to grow it for the community.

Red Hook is a very industrial area, but being a place of contradictions, it also has many beautiful garden centers. This garden center truck planted with beautiful tropical plants had a water fountain.

By another garden center water fountain, I found Steve’s Key Lime pie, which was a delicious creamy respite from the heat of the day.

Historical industrial buildings dot the coastline, the ones from the Civil War era standing out with their black shutters and stars. This one has been turned into a giant gourmet supermarket. The more modern industrial buildings are just grim boxes, I wonder why back then they made even shipping warehouses beautiful?

There are some beautiful parks by the coast with views of the Statue of Liberty. I sat in one to eat my pie while watching men fish from the pier. The sign warned pregnant women and children to avoid eating the fish (and eels!).

The area is home to many artists, antique stores, gourmet restaurants, strange dive bars, and a lobster pound.

Unfortunately, it is also fairly isolated from the rest of New York. There is no subway stop, just an erratic bus. Many suburbanites come to shop at the Fairway or Ikea and miss Red Hook’s other charms. I suggest skipping out on the mediocre Swedish meatballs when visiting IKEA and instead eating some pupusas and key lime pie.

Zurich, Switzerland

My last trip in Europe outside Sweden was to Zurich, Switzerland. I was hosted by biodynamics expert Andrew Lorand, who gave a small seminar on the basics of biodynamics. I’m very familiar with organic agriculture, but before this trip I didn’t have much experience with biodynamics.

Both biodynamic and organic agriculture are alternative methods to conventional agriculture that aim to be more environmentally friendly, but they have very different approaches. Organic agriculture might be unconventional, but to be organic you simply have to follow a set of rules and procedures laid out by whatever country you are in. There is no specific philosophy behind them and they vary between different countries. Typically, organic farmers simply use more natural pesticide and fertilizer alternatives.

Biodynamics has the philosophy of anthroposophy behind it, which was founded by Rudolf Steiner. It aims to look at farms as organisms in themselves with a goal of achieving natural balances. Unlike organics, it has a spiritual component. A biodynamic farmer consults astronomical planting calendars, for example. A biodynamic farm also is also going to emphasize being self-sufficient by growing a diversity of crops and hosting many different animals, insects, and other beneficial organisms.

In own experience, there growing disillusionment with the organic movement in the US. After learning about the Aurora “Organic” factory dairy, I realized that to get good milk I would have to do my homework and visit actual small farms to buy milk. This means I usually eschew milk altogether.

In Switzerland you can get very high quality untreated raw milk and other dairy products at biodynamic stores.

I got a chance to visit Steiner’s center, the Goetheanum. I took a tour and learned about the building and Steiner. His influence extends through many different spheres from Waldorf schools to homeopathy.

Some of the inside is painted lovely soft plant colors. Some day they will paint the whole building.