Author: Nick Bergus

The affectionate slapping of ingredients

In Michael Pollan’s recent Times piece on how we Americans have stopped cooking for ourselves and now just watch people cook on TV, he mentions Julia Child, the cooking-show pioneer. It was one line in particular that caught my attention: his mention of Child’s “deep sensual delight” in the “fondling and affectionate slapping of ingredients in their raw state.”

I have affectionately slapped ingredients and witnessed other cooks doing the same on many occasions, though almost always meat. (I apologize in advance for what, at least to my immature mind, are unavoidable, snicker-inducing descriptions of meat rubbing.)

When I was turning a pork belly into bacon, I spent an inordinate amount to time flipping and massaging the 12-pound hunk of pork.

When I hung out with the Lincoln Café crew as they broke down whole pig, I noticed both Matt Steigerwald and Andy Schumacher rub the pig lovingly and absentmindedly.

And there was the serrano ham hanging in a Barcelona market that I felt compelled to smack, leaving a stench that was nearly impossible to wash off my hand. (I assume because of the hindquarter’s age or cheapness or both.)

What is it about ingredient slapping that is so pleasurable?

Perhaps it’s because cooking and food are, by their natures, sensual experiences, even though there is clear science to it. Cooking well means recognizing fine differences. A good sense of touch can be difference between perfect and overcooked steak. Or under-kneaded and perfect dough. Or a perfect or broken emulsion.

Touching seems, at least to me, one way a cook reinforce the art in the science that is cooking.

Not exactly soup from a stone, but along those lines

We were going to have pasta for dinner, use up some leftovers: an open jar of pasta sauce and some shitake mushrooms mostly. But we stopped by the store on the way home to get some bread to fill the meal out. Then we got some cheese. And some pesto. And olives.

By the time all was said and done, we scrapped the pasta.

An additional note: I’ve decided that unlike my friend Emily, whose photos taken at home always have attractive, clean and hip-looking things in the background, I just don’t live that way. Hence this morning’s coffee mugs and the laptop and various papers in my photos. Luckily I was able to crop out most of the crap on our dinning table.

A Six Pack Of Beer For Summer

When I asked for the summer beer recommendations, one friend simply suggested “a lot.” Yes, very clever. Here are six beers particularly good for summer.

Anchor Steam Beer, Anchor Brewery
When I worked at the New Pioneer Co-op as a bagger and cashier so many years ago, I was intrigued by this bottle. This was before the huge rise in microbrews (which then grew so popular that they were bought by major brewers and the brews became not-so-micro), so there was novelty to a beer you couldn’t buy at a gas station.

Steam-style is the only beer style native to America, invented, at least the story goes, by European immigrants living on the West Coast (it uses a lager yeast yet doesn’t ferment under refrigeration the way a lager does). Anchor is the only brewery that produces it commercially, mostly because they own the trademark.

Oberon, Bell’s Brewery
Last summer, when I was working for The Tampa Tribune, I covered a craft beer expo. It was a popular event to cover; Jeff Houck, the paper’s food writer, and Rommie Johnson, editor of the paper’s Friday Extra entertainment section, had press credentials, too. And cover might be the wrong word since it ended up getting about a single paragraph in the paper.

So while it might just have been an excuse for the three of us to drink on the job, we did get some great beer out of it, including Oberon, from Michigan’s Bell’s Brewery. I did spend much of my afternoon elbowing drunk Floridians wearing “beer wenches want me” T-shirts out of the way to get more of this this fruity and well-hopped wheat ale out of the freebie Samuel Adams glasses. Still, it couldn’t make up for the number of times I overheard someone say they were “just here for the beer.”

Odd that I had to go to Florida to try this Midwestern brew.

Dogfish Head 60-minute IPA
Dogfish offers three different IPAs, short for India Pale Ale because it was traditionally produced to last the long ship voyage from Britian to India and so needed to be heavily hopped. Each version is named for the length it is boiled when still raw wort (the state before it is fermented). The 60-minute version is the least alcoholic (since less water is boiled off than the 90-minute and 120-minute brews).

Boulevard Ales Smokestack Series Saison
I like all four of Boulevard’s Smokestack Series ales but because of Iowa’s arcane alcohol laws, which treat high-alcohol beers like hard liquor despite having alcohol content similar to wine, makes them harder to find.

The brewery’s Saison is light and wheat-y and therefor the most summer-y. But really, if you find a place that has all four you should buy one of each.

ESB, Red Hook
Readily available, reasonably priced and reliably decent, Red Hook’s ESB (which the brewery used to label “Extra Special Bitter” until it learned was a turn off to mass-market beer consumers) is as good a stand-by as any.

Pabst Blue Ribbon
Everyone — even beer snobs — have a favorite cheap beer. PBR is the beer of my childhood. OK, teenage years.

It was the beer of choice for us hard-core punk-rock kids. (One night, drinking under a train bridge, I impressed my future sister-in-law with my ability to vomit and then return to drinking. Classy.) So it’s nostalgic for me.

What else do you like for summer?

Breaking down a pig at Lincoln Cafe

There’s a reason Matt Steigerwald and the Lincoln Cafe crew won the pork extravaganza that was Cochon 555 in Des Moines: they know how to deal with a whole pig.

Recently, I witnessed Steigerwald and his sous chef, Andy Schumacher, break down a 250-pound pig (that’s on-the-rail weight, or the pig less guts, hooves and blood).

While they are certainly no master butchers (they occasionally would stop and double check with each other before making key cuts), they have more practice than most cooks in Iowa.

The restaurant started buying whole hogs last fall, Steigerwald said, because he wanted to learn how to break them down and Schumacher was interested, too.

“It’s given me a greater respect,” said Schumacher.

Steigerwald points out that the financial risk is pretty low, too. The scraps, turned into sausage and served as a lunch special, for example, can pay for the $330 pig.

But it’s also the only way to get a lot of specific pig parts. Want to make head cheese? Pork-liver pate? You better buy yourself a whole hog and then figure out what to do the rest of it.

“There are a lot of good parts that aren’t being utilized,” said Steigerwald. Well, at other restaurants, anyway.

Update
The story I wrote about Lincoln Cafe for Corridor Buzz has been posted.

Metaphors: Genie

A Loose Genie
Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore, quoted in Peter Kafka’s Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore: Let’s Put the Digital “Genie Back In the Bottle”

Poor John Squires. The Time Inc. SVP seems like an affable fellow. So what has he done to deserve this impossible task–figuring out a digital strategy for Time Warner’s (TWX) publishing unit? Or, to put it in Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore’s words, figuring out “how to put the genie back in the bottle”?

Metaphors: Migrating Tribe

A Migrating Tribe
Jay Rosen’s Migration Point for the Press Tribe

And like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them, when to leave, where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life, and which parts were well adapted to the old world but may be unnecessary or a handicap in the new. They have to ask if what they know is portable. What life will be like across the digital sea is of course an unknown to the migrant. This creates an immediate crisis for the elders of the tribe, who have always known how to live.

Metaphors: A Café

A Café
Daniel Bachhuber’s Newsroom as a cafe

It’s not just about using a different industry to add to reporting revenue, but rather repositioning the news organization as the information hub for the community. The newsroom as a cafe should be an 18th century salon, or space for the leading discussions of the day to take place, ferment, and spawn action.

David Cohn’s Journalism Business Idea – the Newsroom Cafe

What I imagine is a newsroom that is also a cafe. Of course the reporters would have desks somewhere private to do work (a 2nd floor would be ideal), but the front of the newsroom would be a public space where people could get coffee, eat a bagel, use the wireless, etc. At least one reporter would be on-hand to talk with members of the public during business hours. These would be publicly announced “office hours.” We wouldn’t make a big pony-show of it, it would just be a part of the cafe’s appeal. You may just be hanging out – but perhaps you’ll end up in a news story!

Metaphors: Ships, Williamsburg

Last Ship Afloat and Colonial Williamsburg
Bill Keller, The New York Times‘ executive editor, and Jason Jones in The Daily Show‘s “End Times”

Keller: It’s always been one of the higher asperations in the business to work for The New York Times. Nowadays, we’re a little bit like the last ship afloat. So we have all these lifeboats floating around underneath us and people dying to clamber on board.

Jones: Your lifeboat is made of paper.

Jones: You guys are like a walking Colonial Williamsburg

Metaphors: Waves, Coral Reef, Planets and Goliath

You can read the premise behind this in the orginal news metaphor post, which was linked to by Jim Romenesko, Jay Rosen and The New York Times‘ David Carr, among others. That post has grown unmanageably large so I’ve created a category for it. You can still suggest metaphors via e-mail, Twitter, Publish2 (tagged “newsmetaphors”) or the comments.

Pushing Back at the Ocean
Steve Outing’s No solution to news problems? Hah!

The newspaper industry is seeing bankruptcies, layoffs, the loss of serious watchdog journalism, and a sickening decline in quality because of the “situation.” While a sour economy is clearly a big part of the problem, the biggest problem is that the industry’s leaders seem to think there are no good solutions other than wading in the ocean and pushing back the waves (i.e., tectonic changes in consumer behavior and advertiser spending patterns).

A Coral Reef
Jay Rosen and Dave Winer’s Rebooting the News podcast No. 12

(I haven’t had a change to pull the exact quote. I will.)

Planets in Orbit
Dan Pacheco’s Newspapers Need A Galileo

It’s not that different from the geocentric view of the universe that Galileo correctly identified as false, but the Catholic Church fought until the bitter end. Likewise, newspapers, and many large media companies, still assume that they are at the center of the local universe, when in fact they’re really planets spinning around suns which orbit galaxies. They still have an important role, but until they realize that they’re one part of a larger system they’re operating out of an illusion.

David and Goliath
Charles Arthur’s David v Goliath in the newsroom, and why we need new wrappers for journalism

OK: now see the publishers of Gizmodo, Engadget, Gawker, TechCrunch et al as the Davids, fighting the Goliaths of the New York Times and, of course, the Guardian and all the other papers. Should they fight on the same terms? If they want to get beaten, sure. They’ll never be able to find the experienced journalists, the experienced sales people, the special something that the papers have been able to build up over decades. The papers have the news process down pat. They can get those stories into paper-sized parcels and out to people so effectively there’s no room left.

So the blogs have to create their own battlefield, their own rules, and fight there.

Armies of Unequal Strength
Jeff Jarvis’s David, Meet Goliath

Right. They have things to learn from each other if they can stop sniping long enough to notice how few of them are left standing on the battlefield. But their culture expectations get in the way. To continue Charles’ war metaphor: It’s the Redcoats vs. the rebels; the GIs vs the Vietcong. When the new guy breaks the rules, protesting that they’re doing it wrong does no good. Learn. That’s what I was trying to say.