Genki to Gusto

My latest Food Studies post on Grist walks you through at-home smell training, so you can enjoy wine tasting sans snobbery.

Photo by fellow classmate Isabelle Pinzauti. 

I’m not the only one in food school. Check out the Food Studies series on Grist! I’ll be sharing my experience at UNISG along with ten other guest bloggers in food programs around the globe. 

I wrote this piece for a Food & Pop Culture class assignment. Pretty fun.

Months ago, I got this email from my boyfriend: “You now a have subscription to Lucky Peach! It’s a new food magazine from McSweeney’s.”  

When I found the magazine shoved into my mailbox, the first thing I notice is the image on the back cover: a gorgeous, perfect bowl of ramen. My boyfriend is a writer not a foodie, so he failed to mention that Lucky Peach is the work of celebrity chef and New York restauranteur, David Chang. I’ve been studying food in Italy for three months and my craving for spicy Asian food is off the charts. Looking at the photo is torturous.

I pass it around to some of my classmates –not unlike sex-deprived teenage boys might pass around a single copy of Hustler– and we all groan at the sight of noodles, nori and runny egg yolk. But the lust-inducing recipes and raw nudity on the cover (ok, maybe naked chickens don’t count) is where the porn comparisons end. It is a food magazine, but not like one you’ve seen before. This one’s from the cool kids, the bad boy of the culinary world, indie publishing darling McSweeney’s and star contributors like Anthony Bourdain, Harold McGee and Ruth Reichl.

At worst, Lucky Peach is a piece of pop culture created to stroke the egos of its narcissistic creators and encourage the god-like worship of chefs. At best, it’s a high-caliber literary work from creative food professionals doing cool things with their friends. Either way you look at it, the magazine is created in the image of its makers –unruly, testosterone-driven, egotistical, inventive and obsessive. And ultimately it’s the makers, not the food, on display in Lucky Peach.

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I bookmarked this recipe at 101 Cookbooks more than a year ago, but I never got around to making it in San Francisco. 

Since I moved to Italy, I’ve made it six times! Inspired by good, inexpensive olive oil, it’s become my regular contribution to our potluck class lunches.

The cake is super simple, and it must be fool-proof. I’ve used a bunch of different flours (mostly because Italian flour labels confuse me) and sometimes screw up the measurements (because metric conversions confuse me), but the cake is delicious every time. It’s made with lots of olive oil and whole milk, flavored with chocolate and rosemary, and baked in a loaf pan.

You know what I like to do? Use really dark chocolate (85% cacao or so), then sprinkle the finished cake with chunky sea salt. It becomes almost savory. I’ve also swapped the chocolate for lemon zest, which is also tasty.

I’m not going to cut and paste the recipe here for you. Nope. Because once you see the 101 Cookbooks site, you’ll thank me.

Note: This cake recipe from Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks was adapted from Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce, which I hear is a fabulous book.

Last week I spent more hours than I care to count cramming for an exam. See, this really is school. After a near all-nighter studying enzymes, bacteria and amino acids –digging deep to uncover shreds of buried high school chemistry– I’m now confident in the technical process that turns mammalian nectar into that thing we know and love: cheese. It is but milk –prepped, acidified, curdled, cut, drained, shaped, salted and then ripened.

Aced it. 

Robiola from Mondovi, Italy. Aged 3-4 weeks. 

But it turns out, that was the easy part of cheese class. Tasting cheese is tough in its own way (seriously!). More on that soon.

Today I impressed my German flatmate, Ulla, with real American pancakes. Now, I don’t particularly love this classic breakfast staple (throw a little lemon and ricotta in there, then we’re talking!) but they do pack a punch of nostalgia. My father was a pilot in the US Air Force, serving abroad for much of my childhood. But when he was home, Dad always made Saturday morning pancakes.

This morning I served Ulla the pancakes with peach puree and chestnut butter, apologizing for the lack of maple syrup that would make them truly authentic. As I’m eating American pancakes with my German friend in Italy, it dawns on me: tomorrow is the 4th of July.

Maple syrup or not, I declare the making of these pancakes a patriotic act! And eating them takes me back to my childhood kitchen with the family together and Dad at the stove. 

In the Piedmont region of Italy the Rondolino family grows Carnaroli rice, preserving Colombara Farm and its history of rice production, which goes back to the 16th century. Carnaroli rice is prized by Italian for its texture. The rice retains its starch during cooking so it keeps its texture and doesn’t stick together - perfect for risotto. But the Rondolino’s Acquerello rice is special for other reasons, too. 

First, the organic rice is aged before milling. I’d never heard of aging rice, but apparently it stabilizes the starch in the grain. Acquerello is aged in the husk for a least a year after harvest. 

Second, they have their own mill onsite for removing the bran and germ (making the rice “white”) using a very gentile process, which results in consistent, unbroken grains for even cooking. Most rice is processed in huge quantities at industrialized mills, where less care is taken. 

But here’s where it gets interesting. This small rice farmer figured out how to put the germ back into the white rice -and he patented the process.  You can read more about the process here, but basically the rice and germ are spun together, the germ melts and is absorbed by the rice grains. What you get is the versatility of white rice and the nutrition of brown rice.

Now, I’m a little skeptical of just how much “nutrition” is put back in in kernel. The Acquerello package doesn’t list out the fiber and other minerals. Either way, it is really delicious. At the farm we were treated to lunch and a taste test. The rice has a slightly sweet taste and firm texture.

A few other notes: Acquerello is popular with chefs in high-end restaurants. Thomas Keller uses it. So does Jamie Oliver. You might be able to find it soon at Williams Sonoma, but it will likely be pricey. 

Thanks to Maggie Symes for the top photo. 

The Turks grind coffee beans with cardamom. In Yemen the brew is flavored with saffron and ginger. America is infamous for weak drip coffee. The Italians have espresso. 

We smelled coffee the moment we stepped off the bus at Lavazza’s headquarters in Turin, Italy. We got a history of world coffee production, a tour of the roasting and distribution plant, and drank a lot of coffee. 

Until the early 1900s, Italians bought green coffee beans, and roasted and crushed them at home. Luigi Lavazza, a small grocery owner, began roasting beans for purchase and by 1910 he was the largest importer of coffee in the country. Lavazza is still one of the biggest Italian coffee companies. It’s still family owned, and the world drinks 14 billions cups of its coffee every year. 

As we sipped and compared single-origin arabica and robusta brews from Vietnam, Brazil and Africa, we learn that Lavazza’s line of espresso is made by the expert blending of these two coffee varieties, which are sourced from all over the world. (When asked, our host stated unapologetically that less than 1 percent of the beans they purchase are fair trade.) He was emphatic that precise and consistent blends can only be achieved by human taste, not computers or technology. 

While the blending of Lavazza coffee might require a human palate, the rest is all machine. The production plant is huge (no cameras were allowed). The plant blends, roasts, packages and ships eight thousand tons of coffee every 20 days. To be clear, this is seriously industrialized coffee.

We started on the top floor where beans are roasted and ground in massive drums. The packaging floor below is a dizzying array of mechanized assembly lines and robots (seriously). The entire plant is spookily absent of people. 

I like my independent roasters back in the States - the Stumptowns and Blue Bottles. Sipping Lavazza’s industrially-produced, unfair trade espresso, I think: man, why can’t Americans make coffee like this?