Billion Oysters And Counting

October 12, 2018October 12, 2018 / Organikos / Leave a comment

Our school programming puts students at the center of the movement to restore oysters to New York City waters. Explore our Billion Oyster Classroom program, currently in 70+ New York City schools, and high school at the Harbor School.

Every week or so since we started this platform in 2011 we have had too many opportunities to highlight water-based ecological challenges and they seem to outnumber solutions. But it has been our goal to balance the highlighting, neither hiding our head in the sand nor claiming false equivalence between bad news and good.

Given all the challenges facing our oceans and waterways we are always heartened to hear of another initiative that involves collaboration between enterprise, youth and civic organizations. Click the image above or the one to the right to see what the Billion Oyster Project is doing in this regard. Thanks to National Public Radio (USA) for bringing this initiative to our attention:

Oysters On The Half Shell Are Actually Saving New York’s Eroding Harbor

The shells are trucked over to Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood and once a month are brought en masse to Governors Island in the heart of the New York Harbor. Billion Oyster Project has collected more than 1 million pounds of oyster shells so far. Courtesy of Agata Poniatowski

Across New York City, more than 70 restaurants are tossing their oyster shells not into the trash or composting pile, but into the city’s eroded harbor. It’s all part of Billion Oyster Project’s restaurant shell-collection program.

The journey from trash to treasure begins after an oyster half shell is turned upside down and left on an icy tray. Once discarded, it joins hundreds of thousands of other half shells collected in blue bins and picked up (free of charge) from restaurants five days a week by Billion Oyster Project’s partner, The Lobster Place, a seafood supplier. The shells are trucked over to Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood and once a month are brought en masse to Governors Island in the heart of the New York Harbor, just yards away from both Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. There, rolling shell hills sparkle in the sun while “curing” out in the elements for one year, a process that rids them of contaminants.

Oysters at Zadie’s Oyster Room, one of the New York City restaurants participating in Billion Oyster Project’s shell-collection program.
Courtesy of Morgan Ione Yeager

The shells then get a final cleaning and are moved to Billion Oyster Project’s hatchery at the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, a public high school on Governors Island that offers technical and vocational training in the marine sciences. In an aquaculture classroom’s hatchery, student-grown oysters produce larvae in an artificially induced springtime environment. In one to two weeks, each larvae grows a “foot” — a little limb covered in a kind of natural glue — and then is moved to a tank full of the “cured” restaurant shells, which serve as anchors for all of those sticky feet. This phase is critical: If larvae can’t find a place to attach, they die. One reclaimed shell can house 10 to 20 new live oysters, depending on shell size. Continue reading →

Time As An Ingredient

October 10, 2018October 10, 2018 / Crist Inman / Leave a comment

Climate change has reared its big ugly head enough that I no longer count on seasonal consistency, but for now nine days in a row it has felt familiar, the greenest month of the green season in Costa Rica. And today, as of dawn, it looks like more of the same. “Some things never change” would be a real head in the sand cliché when thinking of seasons, but at least this October, so far, mornings have been sunny and by early afternoon the clouds roll in and the afternoons remind me of our 2010 to 2017 Kerala life, until dinner time. The photo above was from our second monsoon season there. Just up the hill from where I am writing at this moment, in Tarrazu–the Costa Rica equivalent of Munnar’s tea region–you might see something comparable, like this:

DCIM/100MEDIA/DJI_0482.JPG A few years ago Seth and James worked to restore a coffee plantation across the valley from the home where Seth grew up. The coffee they restored had been removed two decades earlier, a moment in time when coffee prices had crashed, even for the premium arabica that grows in Costa Rica. As it happens the same is true of the property where I am writing from, which had been a coffee plantation for most of the last century. In 2019 a restoration project will bring coffee back to this land, with tree shade for both the coffee and for the sake of restored bird habitat, and I look forward to sharing that progress here. And it is with this in mind that time, as an ingredient, is a theme for today. Work that Seth and James did demonstrated, with the passage of time, the fruitfulness of restoration and conservation. Now a replica project is ready to roll.

Time as an ingredient during green season is also a theme. Reading and cooking pass the time pleasantly during such afternoons, at least when the weekend schedule permits. Time for reading was on my mind a couple days ago, and the author featured in this podcast gets me thinking about time as an ingredient in the cooking I have been doing recently–almost all vegetarian and with the conscious effort to cook as minimally as possible to retain nutrients and flavor. As a bonus, this episode of a podcast we have been listening and linking to for two years shares the story behind espresso, so worth a listen:

One Week to Whiskey

A Los Angeles distillery aims to speed up a 10-year aging process to a matter of days.

Why does fish cook so fast? What’s the “wasabi window”? And can you really make 20-year-old aged whiskey in six days? This episode, we’re looking at the role of time in food and flavor: what it does and how we’ve tried—and sometimes succeeded—to manipulate that. To explore these questions, we visit a whiskey time machine tucked away in a low-slung warehouse in downtown Los Angeles and meet its inventor, Bryan Davis. And we speak with Jenny Linford, a food writer and author of a new book, The Missing Ingredient, all about time and food. Listen in now—this one’s well worth your time! Continue reading →

Banana Blossoms, A Novel Approach To Vegan Fish & Chips

October 7, 2018April 10, 2019 / Crist Inman / Leave a comment

There are a variety of bananas trees outside my window at different stages of growth from baby to blossoming to bunches hanging low with the weight of near-readiness.

I realize that, although we have had some initiatives related to bananas, and I get motivated to learn more every time someone on our team has proposed such an initiative (regardless of its possible zaniness), I have not personally learned enough about bananas to know: how did these trees get here? What species are they? How long is the life cycle of the tree from sprout to fruit maturity? Thanks to Ceylan Yeginsu for this idea on what to do with the blossoms:

In London’s Vegan Fish-and-Chip Shop, Banana Blossoms Play Cod

LONDON — A newly opened restaurant in an East London neighborhood is aiming to make waves by serving what looks like the perfect presentation of fish and chips, that quintessential British dish: a piece of glistening plump batter, chunky chips, mushy peas and a slice of lemon.

But one major ingredient is missing.

“There’s no fish in our ‘fish,’ ” says Daniel Sutton, a fishmonger and restaurateur who opened what he says is London’s first stand-alone “vegan fish” and chips restaurant, Sutton and Sons, in Hackney this week.

Diners enjoying lunch on Thursday at the shop, where vegans could not seem to get enough of the fake fish. Credit Olivia Harris for The New York Times

For lovers of succulent fried cod, that concept may be hard to grasp.

“What do you mean there is no fish?” Christopher Haddon asked the restaurant’s manager with a puzzled expression on Thursday. He seemed confused and left the restaurant, or chippie, shaking his head.

Vegans, however, could not get enough of the fake fish.

“It’s amazing, delicious. Mmmmm,” said Dan Margetts, 53, as he took a bite. “It’s the same look and texture but less oily, cleaner — and no ammonia.” Continue reading →

Grandparents’ Approach To Avoiding Food Waste

October 2, 2018September 28, 2018 / Organikos / Leave a comment

‘Whatever’s in the fridge’: a traditional cottage pie. Photograph: neiljlangan/Getty Images/iStockphoto

This time of year, harvests finishing in many places, abundance is about to give way to the longer lean season. Maybe that is the perfect time to start thinking about stretching the ingredients at hand:

How to avoid food waste: top chefs on their grandparents’ favourite dishes – and what they taught them

Angela Hartnett, Fergus Henderson, Raymond Blanc and many others describe the frugal simplicity – and delicious flavours – that inspire their cooking today

Summer pudding with ‘beautiful glossy purple juice’. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose for the Observer

It is all too easy to romanticise the past, particularly with food. In Britain, rationing created a postwar generation that was very well-nourished, but also utterly bored by the meals it ate … or endured. Similarly, for all the criticism levelled at processed foods (“Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food,” as the writer Michael Pollan famously advised), food has never been cheaper, nor easier to access and prepare. In 1957, as a proportion of their weekly income, UK households spent roughly double what they now spend on food – 33% of their money. There is a kind of liberation in the Pot Noodle.

Yet among many chefs and campaigning food writers, the sense persists that on a number of issues – particularly food waste, but also obesity, nutrition, cost, pleasure even – there is much to admire in how our grandparents ate. In an era of limited choice and tight budgets, they made a virtue of the necessity to cook with whatever fresh ingredients were available. “My grandparents didn’t cook ‘sustainably’, but they did cook every day, one of life’s best skills, and they didn’t throw leftovers away. To that extent, they were thrifty,” says Tom Hunt, the self-styled eco-chef and Guardian columnist.

To examine that idea, we asked a number of top chefs to choose a meal that encapsulates how their grandparents cooked and to explain how, in its frugal simplicity, it still influences them. Call it going back to the future. Continue reading →

A Big Purpose In Utah

September 28, 2018March 19, 2019 / Organikos / Leave a comment

Utah used to be home to the largest national monument in the continental United States. Now the owners of Hell’s Backbone Grill are fighting to restore it. Photograph by Jim Mangan for The New Yorker

We wrote once prior, a couple months ago, on this book but we see reason to post a bit more on it here. Here is a New Yorker profile-length detailed description of the story briefly mentioned in the prior post. Thanks to Kathryn Schulz for keeping our eyes on the prize that these two chefs have decided to fight for:

Why Two Chefs in Small-Town Utah Are Battling President Trump

The owners of an improbably successful restaurant at the gate of a vast wilderness are fighting to keep it unspoiled.

Blake Spalding with two of her seven goats. Photograph by Jim Mangan for The New Yorker

In south-central Utah, where the topography is spectacular, desolate, and extreme, the pessimistic tradition in place-names runs strong. Head south from Poverty Flat and you’ll end up in Death Hollow. Head east from Dead Mare Wash and you’ll end up on Deadman Ridge, looking out toward Last Chance Creek and down into Carcass Canyon. During the Great Depression, when the whole state turned into a kind of Poverty Flat, the Civilian Conservation Corps sent a group of men to the region to carve a byway out of a virtually impassable landscape of cliffs and chasms. The men nicknamed the project Poison Road: so steep that a single drop would kill them. Midway up, the ridge they were following gaped open and plunged fifteen hundred feet to the canyon floor. They laid a span across it, and called it Hell’s Backbone Bridge.

Today, the entire route built by those men is known as Hell’s Backbone Road. Still largely unpaved, still treacherous in bad weather, it connects the town of Escalante to the tiny hamlet of Boulder, long reputed to be one of the most remote settlements in the continental United States. As late as 1940, the mail there was delivered via an eight-hour trek by mule team; the first lights did not flicker on until Christmas Eve, 1947. Until the nineteen-seventies, locals had to spend up to forty-eight hours in transit to obtain any number of essential goods and services: a new pair of socks, medical care, anything beyond an eighth-grade education. Continue reading →

Green Food, Tech Model Solutions

September 27, 2018September 27, 2018 / Crist Inman / 2 Comments

Derek Thomson and his Crazy Genius crew over at the Atlantic’s podcast division have hit on a winning formula, at least for me. They take a big issue question we hear about and think about frequently, like the question of what to do about meat consumption–as in what to do about the extremely obvious problem of meat consumption levels–and they apply some creative pod knowhow. One of the best motivators for going meatless, or at least eating less meat, that I have come upon in ages.

Will We Ever Stop Eating Animal Meat?

Americans eat more meat now than ever. That’s a problem for the planet’s future. Animal farming takes up 30 percent of the earth’s landmass (the equivalent of Asia), and livestock causes one-sixth of global greenhouse gas emissions. We need more than moral arguments against meat. We need a technological revolution in better, cleaner food.

If you do not have half an our for the podcast, take five minutes to read the summary here:

There are two big truths about eating meat from animals.

First, animal flesh imposes a high moral and ecological price for a tender medallion of food. Factory farming incurs the torturous treatment of millions of chickens, cows, and pigs each year. This constitutes a rolling moral catastrophe. What’s more, one-sixth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are directly attributable to raising livestock, and the figure is rising as more countries enter the global middle class. For most Americans, cutting meat out of their diets would reduce global warming more than giving up driving. Continue reading →

Celebrating Labor Day, Usual Style

September 3, 2018September 3, 2018 / Crist Inman / Leave a comment

The chef Alvin Cailan made his name on eggs—in sandwich form, at a food truck called Eggslut, in L.A. At the Usual, he has graduated to chicken, battered and fried so that its crust is as craggy as a mountain range. It’s served with blueberry muffins and house-made ranch, plus a garlicky hot sauce on request. Photograph by Christaan Felber for The New Yorker

The photo above is an immediate trigger for me, in that today is Labor Day in the USA. It is a holiday I recall with fondness from my youth. It signified the end of summer, which was never in itself to be celebrated, but it also signified the beginning of school. And for me school was the center of life, so the closing of summer meant back to all good things. This year, as summer closes, not so much. But the photo above allows me a moment of solace.

Amie and I recently passed through Los Angeles en route to a wedding, and came across this “questionably named”restaurant (not the one pictured above, but the one referred to in the first paragraph below). I do not think of myself as a prude, but when I see a name like that I immediately become uninterested. The shock of the new is not the problem. Coarsening of language and culture is the problem. Enough. A good rule of thumb might be something like this question: would you be happy telling your young child(ren) the name of this place where we are going to eat?

But then again I am occasionally surprised by how, after judging a book by its cover, I can reconsider and think otherwise. In this case the cover of the book (i.e. the name of the restaurant) is still one I would rather have been different, but the contents of the book have my full attention. Thanks to Hannah Goldfield for providing this case in point:

Standout Fried Chicken Amid Familiar Fare at the Usual

At Alvin Cailan’s first sit-down restaurant, in the Nolitan Hotel, the Eggslut creator graduates to the full bird.

For the chef Alvin Cailan, the egg came first. The egg sandwich, to be specific, a messy, photogenic one on a brioche bun, first served in 2011, from a food truck, questionably named Eggslut, in Los Angeles. Eggslut became a pop-up in New York (since popped down) and then a mini-chain, with several outposts in the L.A. area and one in Las Vegas. Cailan built his name on the egg. Now, at the Usual, his first proper sit-down venture, recently opened in the Nolitan Hotel, he has graduated to the chicken. Continue reading →

Sending Aloha Poke A Message

August 14, 2018August 12, 2018 / Organikos / Leave a comment

Aloha Poke Co.’s corporate strong-arming has struck many observers as the most blatant kind of cultural appropriation—an effort not to celebrate another tradition but to own it. Photograph by Katie Rothstein

A few of our team members were just in the last week or so talking about poke, after a visit to a shop on Venice Beach, in California, that has some of the best-reputed poke on the mainland. Little did we know, something big was happening in the poke world, having to do with bullying tactics and cultural appropriation, a topic we have long been sensitive about considering the work we do. So, after reading this news, we pass this along and encourage all our friends and colleagues to consider where their poke dollars go:

The Chicago Poke Chain That Tried to Stop Hawaiian Businesses from Using the Word “Aloha”

On July 28th, a Hawaiian activist named Kalamaokaaina Niheu appeared in a Facebook Live video to discuss a “disturbing message” that she had received in her in-box that morning. It was about Aloha Poke Co., a restaurant chain based in Chicago that specializes in fast-casual versions of poke, a traditional Hawaiian dish made of chunks of seasoned raw fish. Niheu, who represents Hawaii in the Pacific Caucus at the United Nations and lives in Honolulu, had been hearing from Hawaiian business owners who had received cease-and-desist letters from the Chicago company, claiming that it had trademarked the phrases “Aloha” and “Aloha Poke,” and that any food business using those words in its name was infringing on its federal trademark.

To Niheu and other kanaka maoli—native Hawaiians—Aloha Poke Co.’s claim was ludicrous: How could a business, let alone a non-Hawaiian one, claim a right to something as fundamental to Hawaiian culture as the word “aloha”? The term, which can mean “hello” and “goodbye,” also signifies a spiritual connection between the Hawaiian people and the world around them, Niheu explained. Now it was being used as “a legal, blunt hammer for profit, so that Aloha Poke Co. can compete in a market that was never theirs to begin with,” she said. Several shops had already been forced to rebrand their poke businesses, and front the cost of doing so—redesigning their logos, tossing infringing merchandise and menus, and changing their social-media handles. One restaurant owner in Anchorage, Alaska, changed her business name from Aloha Poke Stop to Lei’s Poke Stop after receiving a cease-and-desist letter. “We just weren’t prepared to do that,” she told Eater. “We were already struggling as a small family business.” Continue reading →

Read About This Place, These People, Their Food

July 31, 2018April 10, 2019 / Organikos / Leave a comment

Thanks to Blake and Jen for all their awesome work. Also thanks to Sara Ventiera (a new food and travel writer for us to follow!) and her colleagues at National Public Radio (USA) for keeping us connected to such heroics:

Meet The Restaurateurs Fighting To Save The Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument

Hell’s Backbone Grill is located in Boulder, Utah, about 250 miles south of Salt Lake City. The restaurant’s owners are fighting Trump’s plans to slash the size of nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by more than half. Ace Kvale

Standing between peach and cherry trees on her 6.5-acre Utah farm, Blake Spalding points to the Kaiparowits Plateau. The looming bluff is dotted with thousand-year-old pinyon pine and juniper trees.

“That is one of the areas they’re hoping to mine,” she tells a group of visiting chefs from Salt Lake City. “It’s full of dinosaur fossils and more than 650 documented species of wild bees.”

The remote and sustainable restaurant has become a destination for travelers seeking a taste of its terroir-driven fare. Ace Kvale

Nearly 20 years ago, Spalding and her business partner, Jen Castle, founded Hell’s Backbone Grill in Boulder, Utah, on the edge of the then-newly designated Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, about 250 miles south of Salt Lake City. The remote and sustainable restaurant has become a destination for culinary travelers seeking a taste of its terroir-driven fare. It’s an amalgam of Mormon pioneer, Western range cowboy and traditional Southwest flavors, like juniper lamb posole or grilled pork chops with Boulder crabapple barbecue sauce. Continue reading →

Latinovegan

July 21, 2018July 20, 2018 / Organikos / Leave a comment

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Pesto and pulled jackfruit tacos. In Southern California, working-class Mexican-American chefs are giving traditionally meaty dishes a vegan spin. Evi Oravecz/Green Evi/Picture Press/Getty Images

We are happy to see another story posted by Gustavo Arellano in the salt files at National Public Radio (USA):

Carne Asada, Hold The Meat: Why Latinos Are Embracing Vegan-Mexican Cuisine

Loreta Ruiz (center) runs La Vegana Mexicana, a food pop-up based in Southern California, with her children, Loreta Sierra (left) and Luis Sierra. Gustavo Arellano/for NPR

Tall, dreadlocked Josh Scheper knew he was out of place as he surveyed the scene at a Santa Ana, Calif., parking lot on a Sunday morning this past April. And the 46-year-old loved it.

Hundreds of people waited in line at stalls for vegan food, but few people looked like the Los Angeles resident. Nearly everyone in the crowd was young and Latino, as were the chefs. The food on sale was Mexican — but not hippie-dippy cafe standbys like cauliflower tacos, or tempeh-stuffed burritos. Instead, chefs reimagined meaty classics that were honest-to-goodness bueno. Continue reading →

A Taste Of The Place

July 18, 2018July 18, 2018 / Crist Inman / Leave a comment

llustration by Rebecca Mock

Adam Davidson recounts the best sandwich he ever ate—a local specialty of the ancient city of Aleppo, Syria—and Dan Pashman sets out to re-create it.

Uptown Funk

In the last couple of months, Amie and I have focused on how to more effectively evoke the taste of a place. We have specifically been thinking about the future of a family dairy farm in Costa Rica. Click the image above to hear, in just under one hour, a story told by a few people we admire about how important taste can be to our experience of a place.

In addition to dairy, which is a shorter term initiative, we have been working with coffee for some years. All those years have been beta, which has worked well as a complement to our hospitality projects. Now we are preparing to go from beta to live. And that description of a sandwich in Aleppo, and the obsessional hunt to ensure that its very particular culinary heritage is not lost, is a motivational tipping point to get that coffee to your kitchen sooner.

We have tasted coffee from one of the regions of Costa Rica that gets less attention than others. And we have tasted the “natural” form of this coffee, which has very little in common with the monsooning accidental innovation in India but gives us a new way to enjoy coffee. And we have tried chilling it. Wow. We’re calling it Uptown Funk. Hopefully you can try it soon.

Progress Envisioned, Clabbered Cottage Cheese Looks Promising

June 28, 2018June 28, 2018 / Crist Inman / Leave a comment

Clabbered cottage cheese at Cowgirl Creamery’s Sidekick Cafe at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times

The dairy farm where Amie and I are living currently is in some ways typical of others in the Poas region of Costa Rica. First, it is beautiful. And the surroundings feel much the same as when we moved to this country in the mid-1990s, whereas many other locations in the country feel different.

The sustainable development of this country has been inspiring, if imperfect on some dimensions (commuter traffic comes to mind, even if it affects only a small geographic area and its local population). There is something comforting about the familiarity of places that look the same decade after decade. But regardless of how you define progress, it implies change.

And our business is about doing what we can to advance progress. So as we think about the future of this dairy, we think about progress by asking what could it be doing differently? What else, besides producing a high quality milk and selling it in bulk, can these hardworking and dedicated farmers be doing to add value. That question is the context in which my reading my daily news feed is a pleasure when articles like this one come along:

Is America Ready to Love Cottage Cheese Again?

After languishing in yogurt’s shadow for decades, cottage cheese is back, sporting new flavors and small-batch appeal.

During World War I, cottage cheese was promoted as a protein substitute. Credit National Archives

By Kim Severson

Cottage cheese began life in America as an easy, economical way for colonial cooks to make use of milk left over after they skimmed off the cream. By the 1970s, its amicable presence in recipes and on diet plates had made it a star.

Fame is fickle, and so are the nation’s eaters. Cottage cheese fell out of favor, and now spends its days hanging out in stodgy pint containers near the sour cream, while yogurt sprawls out across acres of the dairy case, dressed up in cute little tubes, flip tops and French glass jars.

America loves a comeback, though, and there are plenty of people who are betting that cottage cheese is primed for one. Continue reading →

Apricots, Comfort & Inspiration

June 13, 2018June 13, 2018 / Crist Inman / Leave a comment

Apricots were often featured in the intricate dessert displays of 18th-century France. Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Two seemingly opposed ideas can, sometimes be compatible. For example, even though this post made me think about traveling to taste the place, I can also relate to Yotam Ottolenghi’s opening paragraph, entirely:

A tart made with poached apricots, marzipan, pistachios and pastry cream was inspired by the elaborate pastry-making at Versailles. Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

People tend to belong to one of two opposite camps: those who like their food to impress and surprise and those who want it to comfort and delight. These days, I find myself steadily drifting from the contrived faction to the comfort camp. This, I suspect, has to do with age and a certain wish to reconnect with my childhood.

But my interest in that other extreme was recently piqued by the exhibition “Visitors to Versailles,” which is on view through July 29 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I am hosting an evening there this month to celebrate the exhibition, and I asked a group of world-class pastry chefs to create highly elaborate cakes inspired by the court of Versailles. Continue reading →

Food Items Not On Our Radar Until Now

June 12, 2018August 19, 2020 / Crist Inman / Leave a comment

The razorbill Wellington at Koks, a Michelin-starred restaurant in the Faroe Islands. Chefs wrap the seabird in a pancake and serve it with a sauce made from beet, elderberry, and rose hip.
Photograph by Anne Golaz for The New Yorker

The dish above is not one we would likely think to offer in our hospitality operations, which may explain why we have not (yet) developed any entrepreneurial conservation initiatives in the Faroe Islands. Nonetheless, this is the type of reading that makes a Monday morning full of thoughts of where to travel next:

Koks, the World’s Most Remote Foodie Destination

People are flocking to a Nordic archipelago to sample cuisine—like fermented lamb tallow—that challenges even the most adventurous palate.

By Rebecca Mead

The Faroe Islands, a mountainous archipelago two hundred miles north of Scotland, has a landmass of only five hundred and forty square miles, and is sparsely populated with fifty thousand people and seventy thousand sheep.Photograph by Anne Golaz for The New Yorker

The Faroe Islands, an austere, mountainous archipelago marooned in the North Atlantic two hundred miles north of Scotland, has a landmass of only five hundred and forty square miles, and is sparsely populated with fifty thousand people and seventy thousand sheep. But, looked at another way, the country, an autonomous outpost of the Kingdom of Denmark, is much larger: its territorial waters extend for more than a hundred thousand square miles around nearly seven hundred miles of coastline. Only one village, Vatnsoyrar, isn’t on the coast, and wherever you are on any of the Faroes’ eighteen islands you’re never more than three miles from the crashing, frigid ocean. Like the human body, the Faroes are mostly water.

Fermented lamb, a Faroese specialty. “Fermented food is maybe the most important cultural heritage we’ve got,” Johannes Jensen, the entrepreneur behind Koks, said. Photograph by Anne Golaz for The New Yorker

The inhabitants of the islands, which were settled by Vikings in the ninth and tenth centuries, have always depended on sustenance from the ocean. But the local diet is surprisingly selective. The waters of the Faroes teem with edible creatures that the Faroese do not eat. They don’t gorge on the mahogany clams, buried in underwater sand, that can live for centuries. They ignore the abundant mussels that cling to coastal rocks, and consider langoustines and sea urchins to be revolting. It’s a favorite game among Faroese children to pick up sea urchins and hurl them at one another, because they make a satisfying splat on impact.

The Faroese do eat cod and haddock—masses of it, typically prepared in one of two ways. When eaten fresh, the fish is subjected to prolonged boiling (or “killed twice,” as some locals put it). Continue reading →

Alternative Foodstuffs For Healthier, More Sustainable Meals

June 11, 2018April 10, 2019 / Organikos / Leave a comment

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Several of us who contribute here recently tested homemade pizza using the product pictured below, we pass the story along to our foodie friends, vegetarian and otherwise. Our thanks to Anahad O’Connor for this:

The Ascension of Cauliflower

Food companies are capitalizing on the low-carb, gluten-free trend by using vegetables like cauliflower to replace flour, rice and other simple carbs.

Pizza made with a cauliflower crust.

For Gail Becker, a former marketing executive who has two sons with celiac disease, finding gluten-free pizza that her kids could enjoy has long been a challenge.

So a few years ago, Ms. Becker started making her own, using a crust that contains cauliflower instead of white flour. Her sons loved her cauliflower creation so much that in 2016 Ms. Becker quit her job and launched her own company, Caulipower, which sells frozen cauliflower pizzas and cauliflower baking mix.

Cauliflower pasta looks like pasta made from wheat.

What Ms. Becker did not anticipate is how quickly it would catch on. Caulipower is now a multimillion-dollar brand, with cauliflower pizzas sold in 9,000 stores nationwide, including Whole Foods, Walmart, Safeway and Kroger.

“One thing that we were very insistent on when we started our brand is that we reference cauliflower in the name,” said Ms. Becker, who lives in Los Angeles. “We want to celebrate the vegetable. We’re not trying to hide it or sneak it in.” Continue reading →

The Spoon, The Fork & The Hand

June 4, 2018June 4, 2018 / Crist Inman / Leave a comment

Photograph by Francis Amiand / Spoon /Pointed Leaf Press

Hannah Goldfield, in this short piece about the spoon, reminds me that Bee Wilson’s book about the fork came to my attention about three years into our Kerala, India experience. I tend to favor stories about the history of something taken for granted. When it is involves foodways, I’m in. Five years ago, when that book came out, I was firmly entrenched in a new way of eating, namely with my right hand and no utensils. Today, reading about the spoon, I can relate to the author’s preference because, given the choice between spoon and fork I will choose the former. Given the choice between a meal that favors one or the other, I will choose the spoon-forward meal. But if I am somewhere eating something that hands-on is okay, keep the spoon and fork off the table.

In Praise of Eating Almost Anything with a Spoon

The introduction to the most recent version of Emily Post’s Table Setting Guides includes the following mandate: “Only set the table with utensils you will use. No soup; no soup spoon.” Sounds pretty reasonable, as far as Emily Post rules go, but I beg to differ. Who says that soup spoons are only for soup, or should even be called soup spoons at all? I have long admired the way utensils are used in parts of Southeast Asia, including Thailand: the spoon is the most important instrument, held in the dominant hand and used to bring food—soupy or otherwise—to the mouth; the fork plays a supporting role, used only to push morsels onto the spoon, and chopsticks are generally reserved for noodles. I’ve been eating Thai food this way ever since I learned about the custom, dipping spoonfuls of rice into coconut curries, herding green-papaya salad, spangled with peanuts, chili, and tiny dried shrimp, into the curvature of a spoon. It feels elegant, efficient, economical—nary a drop or a morsel is wasted. Continue reading →

The Foods Immigrants Offer

May 15, 2018March 27, 2023 / Crist Inman / Leave a comment

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Tacos at a restaurant in Nashville. Credit Christopher Berkey for The New York Times

Margaret Renkl, Contributing Opinion Writer for the New York Times, shares an opinion that I am, as a son of an immigrant, inclined to agree with. Even if I was not so closely related to the theme, it would still make sense to me:

Eating Without Borders in Nashville

NASHVILLE — Not quite two weeks ago, I was driving down Nolensville Road, Nashville’s “international corridor,” looking for a restaurant called Tennessee Halal Fried Chicken. In the passenger seat was John T. Edge, the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance and author of “The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South.” He was telling me that this particular approach to dining out, in one way of looking at it, could be considered a form of exploitation: “To patronize a restaurant of people who are different from you can be a kind of booty call,” he said.

This is an idea Mr. Edge has been considering for some time. The historically complicated nature of cross-cultural dining goes back to black-owned barbecue joints in the age of Jim Crow: “White Southerners patronized those restaurants,” he said. “They got in, they got what they wanted, and they got out.” Continue reading →

Rehabilitation Of A Vilified Umamifier

April 30, 2018May 1, 2018 / Crist Inman / Leave a comment

Ajinomoto, the world’s largest manufacturer of MSG, produces umami magic at its panda-themed headquarters. Photograph from Alamy

In the new issue of one of the sources we draw from weekly there is an article–An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami, by Helen Rosner–that gives a refreshing splash of cold water on the face. My kitchen counter looks like the one she describes, sans MSG. And for the reasons she lays out. Always happy to be corrected, I recommend this to others who may have suffered the same culinary fate as me until now:

On my kitchen counter, to the side of the stove, there is a jagged skyline of jars and bottles, featuring the condiments and oils and spices that I use too often to ever properly put away. A few are ingredients so key that I buy them in bulk, storing the multi-kilo mega-packages in the back of the closet and decanting them for daily use into more countertop-friendly vessels: olive oil, kosher salt, and monosodium glutamate, or MSG. In one combination or another, this holy trinity ends up in almost everything I prepare—the MSG, with its savory chemical magic, is particularly useful as rocket fuel for dishes of raw fruits and vegetables. I whisk it into vinaigrette before dressing a salad; add it by the teaspoon to the relish of fresh plums and jalapeños that I make each summer; and, whenever I’m feeling snacky, sprinkle it on chopped cucumbers. Continue reading →

Thinking Outside The Vegetable Box

April 25, 2018April 23, 2018 / Organikos / Leave a comment

Arugula tops a pecan pear cake with blue cheese mousse at Gramercy Tavern. Credit An Rong Xu for The New York Times

We try not to source from the same medium two days in a row, but an exception is made today, going from wind turbine technology to a rethinking of when and how to eat vegetables (thanks to Tara Parker-Pope):

A Surprising Way to Eat Vegetables: For Dessert

At Blue Hill in New York City, colorful sorbets rely on the natural sweetness of purple sweet potatoes and carrots. CreditBlue Hill

Struggling to cut down on added sugar and get more vegetables into your diet? Take a lesson from some of the best chefs in the country and try eating vegetables for dessert.

Chefs are pushing the culinary boundaries of traditional desserts, reducing added sugars and experimenting with the natural sweetness of corn, carrots, fennel, squash, sweet potatoes and other vegetables. At the restaurant Gwen in Los Angeles, a deliciously sweet roasted artichoke, celery sorbet and green olives with crème fraîche cheesecake have appeared on the dessert menu. At Blue Hill in New York City last fall, diners delighted in the natural sweetness of a honeynut squash with ice cream, parsnip cake and naturally sweet carrot sorbet.

A popular green curry ice cream sundae at Gramercy Tavern gets its kick from chiles, cilantro and lemongrass.

“We’re shooting for a pastry kitchen that doesn’t gratuitously use any sugar because there is so much natural sweetness in the fruits and vegetables we use,” said Dan Barber, the Blue Hill chef and co-owner who works with the pastry chef Joel De La Cruz to create veggie-focused desserts. “We like looking at vegetables in a new way.”

At Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan, pecan pear cake is served with arugula and blue cheese mousse. A grapefruit panna cotta includes cilantro and avocado, and a popular green curry ice cream sundae gets its kick from curry made with chiles, cilantro, lemongrass and other traditional Thai ingredients. Continue reading →

Entrepreneurial Conservation & Armenian Foodways

April 18, 2018April 18, 2018 / Organikos / Leave a comment

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Motal cheese is a fresh goat’s milk cheese made primarily in remote mountain areas in Armenia. Cross of Armenian Unity/Ruslan Torosyan

We are on the lookout for stories that combine our interest in topics such as conservation, and entrepreneurship, and traditional foodways, and innovation (among other things) and this story touches on several of our favorite themes. Thanks to the salt team at National Public Radio (USA):

Armenia’s Ancient Motal Cheese Makes Its Way Into The Modern Age

In the mountains of eastern Armenia, about 75 miles north of the capital Yerevan, motal means change.

Motal cheese is like a business card for our region,” says Arpine Gyuluman, who owns Getik Bed and Breakfast in Gegharkunik. “[Because of it], we’re seeing more and more visitors annually.”

Motal is a white goat cheese flavored with wild herbs that is similar to homestyle country cheeses in Iran and Azerbaijan. Motal is prepared in locally made terra cotta pots sealed with beeswax ― a method that dates back at least 5,000 years. A little more than a decade ago, it was in danger of disappearing. That is, until a local university student named Ruslan Torosyan embarked on a personal crusade to save motal. Continue reading →

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