Cheap Stuff That Works Vol. 4--The Best Sauté Pan

Ok, I'm not going to mince words here. I've done the work. I've tried everything. And I can say, without a doubt in my mind that these French carbon steel pans from de Buyer are the best you can get, even if you spend twice what they cost.

Calling them "cheap" might be a bit of a stretch, but considering how they compare to the really pricey stuff that's comparable in quality, they're a great value and well deserving of being tagged as part of my Cheap Stuff That Works series.

I got a big load of All-Clad LTD pans for my first wedding. They're extremely high-quality pans and I still have them, some fifteen years later. They look great and function well. But the French carbon steel pans leave them in the dust, and the All-Clads are roughly double the price.

Check it out. This 12" pan is going for just shy of a hundred bucks (marked down from the ludicrous $155 list price) over at Amazon.com. That's a good price that you'd have to shop around for. But the same size on the French steel can be had for $69.95 from the Chef's Catalog website.

And it's a superior pan!

Ok, some things to know: first, the French carbon steel pans require, like cast iron, seasoning. That means they arrive clean and you have to dirty them up before you can use them. It's a really easy process that I've touched on before. There are tutorials all over the internet on how to do it, so I'm not going to get into it in much depth here. Basically, what I do is wipe the inside of the pan down with an oil-soaked paper towel, and then throw the pan in a 400° oven for a few hours. I try to do it when I'm using the oven for something, so I'm not wasting too much energy. You can do it over a burner as well, which is what the picture above shows.

The main way to season your pans is to cook with them. There's really no way to quickly get the seasoning that repeated usage over time produces.

Second, you shouldn't use soap to clean the pan. But if it's well-seasoned, you won't need to. A rinse with hot water and a good wipe with a wet scrubbie (or, alternately, salt) will do the job.

In order to allow the seasoning to set, you should avoid cooking food with a high acid content or deglazing with wine for the first few months. This is all part of the normal seasoning process, though, and once you've got a nice well-set crust on the pan, you can do anything you want (even use soap) and the seasoning won't go anywhere. It just takes a while for it to build up.

But once it's there, it's a thing of beauty. A well-seasoned pan is more non-stick than the best Teflon pan, and without the dubious chemicals found in the non-sticks. Pictured to the right is my big, honkin' 14-incher that I've had for about four years. The patina on there is so solid that I can use soap, scrape it with metal tongs, deglaze, whatever, and the seasoning isn't going anywhere. They're not pretty, these pans, but they work. If you want pans to hang on your pot rack and look shiny, these aren't the best choice. They're for cooks that use their gear for cooking.

The thick, heavy construction of these pans is wonderful for heat conductivity, comparable to cast iron, but they have the traditional shape that cast iron lacks, and can be manipulated a lot more easily. They also have just the most perfect slope to the sides, which causes a quick back-and-forth shake of the pan to flip the food nicely without having to actually pick the pan up off the burner.

There are quite a few products out there that are labelled "French steel" or "blue steel", and they're all pretty good, but I've had the best experience with these de Buyer brand pans which are part of a line this company is calling "Carbone Plus". They have a few lines, but this is the heaviest of the bunch, which, for the purposes for which this pan is suited, is what you want.

Eight to ten years ago, it was almost impossible to find these pans in the US. I worked in a restaurant back then which had them shipped in from France at great expense. Now, they're everywhere. I see them at Williams-Sonoma, Sur la Table, Chef's Catalog, and lots of the online shops. Shop around, though, because some of the fancier places are charging 25% or more over what discount outlets charge. The deal at this link, where you get an 8", a 10" and a 12" inch for $140, seems pretty good, considering that's still less than the list price of ONE 12" All-Clad.

Check them out. You'll thank me later.

Peoria Packing Butcher Shop

I referred briefly to my recent visit to Peoria Packing in my review of the bacon I bought there, but didn't really get into the whole experience of the place itself, which is a real trip and very thought provoking.

Most Americans are pretty squeamish about meat, despite the fact that we eat more of it than any other country in the world. At this point, we are really insulated from the process. Meat is fully broken down into only the most desirable parts, fully trimmed, and ready to go from the shrink-wrapped styrofoam tray right into the pan. Or fully cooked on the plate, if consumed in a restaurant. It's been like that forever, for most of us, and we really don't think about it too much.

Until we're confronted with something different, like a European market where piles of offal or whole animals are just out in the open, for all to see. Even for someone like me, a chef who's been dealing with larger primal cuts of meat for years, these cruder, more "real" displays represent an off-putting paradox, because I find myself curiously attracted and also, at the same time, repulsed.

I think this is true for most Americans, with varying degrees of attraction/revulsion, of course, and most simply avoid the revulsion side of the equation, which results in a sad state of affairs. We've managed, as a society, to hide and sanitize the reality of meat. Perhaps that's why we eat so much of it.

A visit to Peoria Packing will cause one to ponder these things, because once you enter the butcher shop wing of this small grocery store across the street from their commercial packing house, you will be confronted with MEAT in a way that not too many Americans are accustomed to.

PP's meat section is a large refrigerated room with big long tables running the length of it. The various cuts of meat are just piled onto the tables and customers (wearing the required latex gloves) just kind of rummage through the piles until they find what they're looking for. The meat is very fresh, very inexpensive, and they carry cuts that are difficult to find elsewhere. I went specifically to get "packer cut" brisket for smoking. I also picked up some pork bellies (to make homemade bacon) and a few other things.

A lot of people have trouble handling this set-up. The online reviews of PP are mixed, with quite a few folks stating they'll never go back due to the way the meat is just right out in the open for anyone to sneeze or cough on. This is true, of course, but I didn't see this happening and I like to believe that people have enough sense not to do that. Most people do a pretty decent job of covering their mouths and not coughing or sneezing directly on me, so I'm not sure why expecting them to do the same in a roomful of meat is any more of a leap.

I think this sort of revulsion is how people deal with the fact that they are just not used to seeing meat displayed this way. It is jarring, I will admit, and seeing whole cow's feet, pig's heads, and other less common animal parts is definitely a bit of a shock as well. I think a lot of people are simply put off by the sheer real-ness of it, and so they use the "unsanitary" claim as a rationale for their revulsion, and as a justifiable reason to avoid that experience in the future.

Revulsion, however, is natural when confronted with meat. Revulsion is normal. Meat is a dead, decaying animal. It's bloody, gruesome, and serves as a reminder of our own mortality. Yet most people eat it every day. I'll go out on a limb and say that NOT feeling revulsion at the sight or thought of meat is what's, in fact, abnormal.

We're so unaccustomed, though, to this feeling, because the meat industry has done it's level best to eliminate any and all reminders of death, blood, and the idea that these are animals we're eating. And they've been very successful, with the full compliance of a willing populace, who values avoiding the cognitive dissonance of feeling both hunger and revulsion far more than it values coming to terms with our carnivorous impulses.

Up until recently, the luxury of not getting to know one's meat up close and personal just wasn't a real possibility for most people. It's only in the last hundred years or so that we've acquired this new found squeamishness, which has gotten to the ridiculous point where some people act all grossed out even by chicken served on-the-bone, or with skin. Grow up, folks.

The conflict intrinsic to eating meat has long attracted deeper thinkers. Cultural anthropologists and sociologists like Mary Douglass and Claude Levi-Strauss have written reams on this fascinating subject. It's human nature to be both repulsed and attracted by meat, and people have been dealing with it since back in the hunter-gatherer days. It's just that here in modern-day America, we've made a new art form out of figuring out ways to avoid dealing with it.

The flip side of this is the head-to-tail movement that's been steadily gaining momentum among chefs. In Chicago, chefs like Paul Kahan, Jason Hammel and Amalea Tshilds, and Paul Virant have been sourcing whole animals direct from the farmers who raise them and utilizing all of the various cuts, including the organs. There is no better way to pay tribute to an animal that has been slaughtered for food, these chefs say, than to ensure that nothing goes to waste.

These chefs feel it's their responsibility to close the awareness gap created by the commercial meat industry, and they're bypassing it entirely by going direct to farmers, buying whole animals, and doing the butchering themselves in their subterranean restaurant prep kitchens.

So the head is used to make pâté, the cheeks to make guanciale or braised for ravioli filling, the neck for coppa, the bellies are cured for bacon, and the feet used for cotecchino or for their natural gelatin. Blood sausage, tripe, and kidneys are making a comeback among foodies.

Before you wince and get all squeamish, stop and think for a moment that the bacon you enjoy is also attached to lungs, a heart, a head, and feet, and ask yourself what happens to all that stuff once you've eaten your ribs and bacon. If you're not a vegetarian, animals are being killed to support your meat habit, and if you're not eating anything but the prime cuts, you're wasting big chunks of the animals that were killed to feed you.

The Reader's Mike Sula did an extensive piece called The Whole Hog Project (scroll to the bottom and check out the reader comments to get a taste of how strongly people feel about the subject) which documents the paper's purchase of a rare mulefoot pig, and follows Dee Dee's (yes, they named it) life over the course of a year and a half, culminating in its slaughter. It was a fascinating and courageous exercise in journalism which cut right to the heart of America's schizophrenic relationship with meat, and it was recently nominated (along with Mike Gebert's Sky Full of Bacon video podcast that accompanied the Sula piece) for a prestigious James Beard Award.

It's extremely thought-provoking stuff, and it's a subject that most people would prefer to avoid thinking about. But it's also perhaps a subject that we must consider more often, considering our love/hate relationship with food, the growing national obesity issue, the extent to which we consume highly processed foods and fast foods, and the myriad other ways in which we're all dysfunctional in our relationships to what we eat. Myself included--I'm certainly no exception.

I'm not claiming, mind you, that I have the answers here, or that a visit to Peoria Packing will solve all your problems. But I do think that burying our collective heads in the sand and continuing to buy grocery store trays with shrink-wrapped beef tenderloin and BSCB is the exact wrong thing to do.

So, instead of mindlessly purchasing your animal proteins from the grocery store, take a trip over to PP and check the place out. Bring your kids and do your part to kind of de-mythologize the process for them, and start closing, if only by small increments, the awareness gap that the meat industry has spent decades building in their attempt to try and insulate us from the inner conflicts that are inherent in being carnivorous.

I was actually somewhat concerned that it might bother Henry, my four year old son, who made the trip with me, given that, in many of the books we read him, piggies and cows are cute barnyard animals that talk, sing, or drive the school bus. But it didn't. After we got back, my wife asked him what he liked best about the place and he said, enthusiastically, "the pig heads!"

Henry, 4, surveys the carnage

So there you go. This little field trip can be an opportunity to start grappling with these deeper issues of morality, mortality, and animal rights, or you could just look at it as a good, cheap option for bulk burgers, hot links, and ribs. Either way, Peoria Packing is worth a visit. Don't forget to bring a cooler.

Chinatown

First off, let me just say that I will admit to having huge blind spots. I tend to get intimidated by big-deal "things"--subjects or areas that are just massive and deep, or require a decent amount of expertise that others possess, but I don't. And what happens, as a result of this, is that I avoid diving in, or even dipping my toe, into that particular arena, due to my reluctance to play the role of novice.

Such is the case with Chinatown.

Until recently, my only experience in Chinatown was as a kid, going to Phoenix for dim sum with my parents a few times, and, as an adult, driving through the area, lost, on my way to or from McCormick Place.

Thankfully, I found a mentor; someone even more food-obsessed than I, someone with extensive Chinatown experience, into whose hands I could place myself for, at least, my initial experience. An acid-trip "spirit guide" of sorts, only instead of metaphysical hallucinations, we'd be dealing with live turtles, sharkfin, and spicy tofu.

I met Mhays (a fellow denizen of LTH forum) at the mac and cheese sMACkdown, and immediately connected with her and her family, so we made tentative plans for a dual family outing, which happened last weekend. With the logistical barriers of where to park, explore, and eat taken out of my decision-making equation, the novice factor was effectively addressed, and my sense of being completely intimidated by the sheer scope of Chinatown became much less of a consideration.

I realize that this is a silly reason to avoid exploring culturally rich areas, but it is what it is. I have this somewhat obsessive need to thoroughly research and investigate EVERY little aspect of something in order to feel that I've experienced it as fully as I'd like to--I'm the guy who reads five guidebooks cover to cover before going on vacation, if that helps you to understand the mindset. So sometimes it's easiest to simply limit my horizon, rather than attempting to take on an entirely new genre.

By putting myself entirely in the hands of someone else, however, someone who's already done the work, conducted the research and fieldwork, I can sidestep my (admittedly unhealthy) maximization tendencies, and become a mere follower who's simply about just enjoying whatever happens to float across his field of vision.

So, that's what I did, and my Chinatown spirit guide did not steer me wrong.

We essentially skipped the main drag along Wentworth that I was expecting would be our focus, in favor of the more easily-accessible Chinatown Square, which is essentially a closed-off open air mall, which kind of turns its back to Archer Avenue. We found plenty of gift shops loaded down with swords, fake fountains, and lucky buddhas, quite a few medicinal herb shops in which we stared at one glass jar after another wondering what the hell you're supposed to do with THAT, and food markets like Mayflower market where we bought bagfuls of weird-sounding candy, frozen barbecued pork buns, and checked out tanks of live fish and reptiles.

We did quite a bit of wandering, so we worked up a pretty good appetite for lunch, and after checking in at Phoenix and finding a half hour wait for their dim sum, we took Michelle's advice and headed over to Lao Sze Chuan.

We were seated immediately at a large corner table, and promptly given hot tea (which was very welcome on this snowy late March day) and a plate of spicy pickled cabbage on which to munch while the kids played around with chopsticks and bugged us to open the candy we'd just bought.

The food was, as expected, very good, with the specialties of Dry Chile Chicken, Dry Chile Beef, and the Szechuan Green Beans being the standout dishes. We also had Salt and Pepper Small Fish (essentially deep fried whole smelt), Pot Herb with Pork, a soup with clams and tofu, a tripe dish which wasn't what we ordered, and some steamed buns and crab rangoon for the kids.

And while the food was worth returning for, what I really enjoyed was the place itself. It was bustling on a Sunday afternoon, jammed with people, all of whom seemed to be celebrating something--if nothing else, the fact that they were in a great restaurant feasting on well-prepared spicy dishes instead of out in the snowy cold. But, beyond that, I found the service to be just excellent. We had at least four different people at our table refilling water and teacups, whisking away empty plates, bringing more chopsticks to replace the ones the kids kept dropping, and just generally making sure that we were well cared for.

At one point, I managed to extract my nose from my plate of spicy chicken long enough to notice that one of the servers had commandeered our seven-month old, Nora, and was standing next to the table, rocking and holding her, grinning from ear to ear and showing her off to the other servers, who had all gathered around. And Nora, who can be skittish with strangers, was loving it. (Yes, the server did ask my wife if it was ok before snatching up my kid.). It's this kind of personal attention--genuine, caring interest in people--that really underscores what hospitality is all about. These women really enjoyed having us as guests in their restaurant, and they made it clear in no uncertain terms.

So, yeah, the food was good. But what stood out more was the actual experience. It's that kind of stuff that transforms restaurants with good food into Great Restaurants.

More importantly, what I got from the trip was some level of knowledge, so that I no longer feel intimidated to tackle this kind of outing all on my own. The easy in and out logistics of the Chinatown Square section make it seem much easier to just zip in there for a quick lunch and an afternoon of browsing, and I'm looking forward to checking out some of the other places, like Spring World, BBQ King House (which is where the first picture of this piece was taken), or (Little) Three Happiness (the namesake of LTH forum).

So, thanks, Michelle. It was great to get our families together and I hope this will be the first of many of these kind of outings (stay tuned--we discussed a Maxwell Street Market outing once the weather gets nicer).

The Bacon List--Niman Ranch Applewood Smoked

When I spotted a pack of Niman Ranch Dry Cured, Applewood Smoked Bacon on the shelf at my local Trader Joe's, I knew that I'd have to buy it and do a review for my ongoing sweeping epic series, The Bacon List. Niman is an interesting company that's gone through some recent shakeups, so it makes sense to dig a bit deeper into the back story before reviewing the bacon.

Niman Ranch was the first "boutique" farm name to garner national recognition by appearing on high-end restaurant menus as a descriptor for the center-of-the-plate item. When chefs such as Zuni Cafe's Judi Rogers and the iconic Alice Waters started name-checking Niman on their menus back in the late '80's, a trend was born. A foodstuff's provenance suddenly became important. Chefs and savvy diners around the country took notice.

Back then, Niman-Schell Ranch (as they were known at the time) was doing something quite extraordinary; raising beef and pork naturally, without hormones or antibiotics, and with all natural vegetarian feed. Further, these animals weren't being sent to finishing lots, as the overwhelming majority of commercially-raised animals are. They were finished and slaughtered within Niman's system, which valued humane treatment, sustainability, and sought to ensure that the products were good for those who ate them and for the planet as a whole.

This sort of thing was appealing to some chefs, who, like Waters, took a dim view of the commercial meat industry for a number of very valid environmental and political reasons, but most chefs using Niman's products were interested almost exclusively in the end result product itself; bottom line, the meat just tasted better.

As more and more foodservice operators and chefs jumped on to the farm-to-table bandwagon, Niman's growth was exponential, and by the late '90's, as McDonald's corporation's Chipotle Grill contracted to purchase all their pork from Niman, the operation grew so big so quickly that the folks at Niman Ranch had little choice but to purchase much of its pork from a network of like-minded farmers rather than raising it all on their own.

They were, however, still committed to finishing and slaughtering their animals in their own facilities, and so were forced to truck thousands of hogs across the country, from the farms in the midwest where they were raised, to the Niman finishing/slaughter facilities in Northern California. They refused to outsource beef, however, and were simply unable to keep pace with demand for their naturally-raised, pastured, grass-fed product. The beef cattle--fed on the less calorie-dense grass, and without the growth hormones that sped up the process--took twice as long to reach market weight and cost about twice as much to get to market. Chefs raved about the superior marbling and flavor and demand was very high, so prices could be set accordingly.

(Yes, this post is about bacon. Be patient. This is important stuff.)

Despite the fact that the methods employed by this company influenced a major movement in the world of gourmet food, and built an incredibly strong brand identity, the company was never profitable. Bill Niman, the company's founder and ideological leader, explained that he was "consciously deferring profitability to expand the brand." In other words, he was less interested in building a profitable company than he was in changing the way that people look at meat, and food in general. The money was less important to him than the message.

But, as commendable an ideology as that might be, it's not a formula for running a successful business. Despite the fact that Bill Niman had built his modest cattle ranching hobby into a business with $65 million in annual sales, the company was losing an average of $3 million per year and began veering dangerously close to bankruptcy.

Enter Chicago-based Natural Food Holdings, LLC, a division of massive equity company Hilco. The company owned Sioux-Preme Packing, which processed all of Niman's pork, and in 2006, purchased a 56% stake and took over four of the seven spots on Niman Ranch's board of directors. The company immediately began to make changes in an effort to "streamline the operation" and become profitable.

But "profitable" in food production almost always means cutting back in ways that impact the quality of what's on the plate. Niman fought the new owners' plans for shutting down their finishing lot and slaughterhouse and outsourcing these tasks to larger, more efficient companies (that might not continue the humane and environmentally-friendly practices so integral to Niman's vision). The Niman feedlot was sold in 2008.

The new owners began using "antimicrobials", which technically aren't antibiotics, but yield the same end result while still allowing the company to proudly proclaim their products to be free of antibiotics. Niman only gave the animals medicine when they were sick, but the new owners were using it as a matter of course, the same way commercially-raised animals are treated.

The new owners also locked horns with Niman over the distance that animals were being transported, the conditions of their transport, and the changes in the cattle operations. In 2007, Bill Niman left the company and in January of this year, the changeover became complete. Natural Food Holdings and Niman Ranch merged, giving Natural complete ownership of the company, all its holdings, and exclusive rights to the brand name. Bill Niman is no longer legally permitted to use his own last name in any commercial endeavor.

Niman has moved on. He's into heritage turkeys now, and is raising them commercially on the 1,000 acre Northern California ranch that he managed to keep separate from the company that he now has no share in. He made news recently by announcing that he is boycotting his namesake company, due to questionable practices that he claims compromise their natural, environmentally-friendly, humane ideals, and that he can no longer consume their products in good conscience.

The whole thing's really a sad story. It leads one to wonder whether quality-driven, humane, ethical food production can ever possibly be economically viable.

Anyway, that's the back story. Let's get to the bacon. Since I've already gone on so long about the company's history, let's go straight to the rundown:

Designation--Fancy or Grocery Store? Fancy. But take everything you read above, and the sheer size of this supposedly artisanal company into account and judge for yourself. The package says 'dry cured', and, to be honest, it tastes like it's made the old fashioned way.

Price--How much did I pay per pound for the bacon? $8.65/lb. I purchased a 12 oz. package at Trader Joe's for $6.49.

Uncooked appearance--Color, texture, wet- or dry-ness, mushy or firm, etc... Great looking. Nice bright red on the lean meat, perfect fat-to-lean ratio with nice streaking, all slices are center-cut and thick. Texture is very firm and dry, indicative of a true dry cure.

How it cooks--Tendency to curl, how much it shrinks, tendency to spatter... Very little shrinkage. Typical of artisanally-produced bacon that is dry-cured and smoked over a longer period of time, it hardly shrank at all. This is due to the fact that the meat isn't injected with any saline, sugar, or phosphate solutions like the factory-produced stuff, and the long hot smoking pulls all the moisture out during the production process. The end result is more meat on the plate after it's cooked.

Cooked appearance--Color, shape, texture. Wonderful, deep red-brown color, almost no curling, a bit of darkness on the outer edge indicating a true hardwood smoke. Texture is perfect--nice crispness when cooked well, but strips cooked a bit short of totally crisp are nicely yielding with awesome melting fat.

How does it taste--Sweetness, saltiness, smokiness, texture (melting, chewy, flabby, spongy), "porkiness". Among the best I've tasted. Great real smoke flavor, which you can smell strongly while it's cooking. Great balance of flavors. This is a perfectly balanced bacon, with equal parts smoke, salt, sweetness from sugar, and pork flavor. The fat is wonderful, giving that great melting quality you get from bacon of this caliber, and the texture is very good; crispy yet with a nice chew. This is a really well thought-out, well put-together product. You can really tell that this product has evolved over time. Many, many tweaks have been done to the curing/smoking process that have brought this product to where it is today. Really excellent.

Overall rating--All bacons reviewed will be given an overall rating from 1-10, with 1 being practically inedible (I say "practically" since, you know, it's bacon--how bad can it be?), 5 being a perfectly serviceable bacon for use in cooking or on a sandwich, and 10 being....well, let's be honest; there won't be a 10. 8.5. This bacon lacks the character of a Broadbent, but it's really not far off. I have to wonder whether knowing what I do about the company has influenced my opinion, and if it might have scored higher if it came from some small farm in Virginia wrapped in brown paper and burlap with the name hand-stenciled on. What can I say? I do my best to remain objective and to taste purely on the basis of taste, but I am only human.

Bottom line, this is a very, very good bacon. Right up there in the upper echelon of real small-batch, old school producers. It's worth purchasing, especially since it's widely available at Trader Joe's, but the price makes it fairly cost prohibitive, so it's more of a special occaision/splurge bacon. Certainly worth the money every now and then, though.

The Bacon List--Dutch Farms

One thing I'm learning with this exercise I'm calling The Bacon List is that cheap bacon often tastes as good--or better--than pricey bacon. A lot of it depends on where you buy it. Now, that being said, I've yet to review an artisanal bacon for The List (got one coming up for the next post, I promise), so once those reviews start coming down the pike, that observation may be refuted. We'll see. Suffice to say that in the world of grocery-store bacon, price and quality don't seem to be very closely related.

The bacon that I'm putting under the microscope for this entry is Dutch Farms brand "bacon". No embellishing adjectives. No mention of the wood used or the cure flavors. Nada. It's bacon. What more do you need to know? Nothing, I guess...

I picked up a pound of this at Lincolnwood Produce, which is quickly becoming my favorite grocery store (if you'll remember, that's also where I got the Andy's Deli slab bacon I reviewed). It cost $2.50 for a pound.

The package indicates that the bacon is "distributed by Dutch Farms, Chicago, Illinois". Which leads me to believe it's probably Oscar Mayer or Hormel bacon that's sold to a smaller company and then packaged under the Dutch Farms brand name. But that's just a guess. As far as I know, it could be the same stuff that's sold under Costco's Kirkland brand that I also already covered. It's possible. It's pretty similar. I need to keep this in mind for future purchases, since I really don't need to be wasting time reviewing the same bacon over and over again.

A quick google on Dutch Farms turned up a nice-looking website that tells me that the company is a pretty large distribution house serving most of the Midwest, that they're down on 107th street on the South Side, and that they've been around for about 80 years, but that they've just started carrying packaged meats like bacon in the last 10 years. I searched for some more specific info about their bacon, but although they have a pretty extensive online catalog, the listing doesn't give me any additional knowledge about the product.

Ok, so on to the review; how'd it taste? Pretty damn good. It's a quite serviceable inexpensive grocery-store bacon. For $2.50/pound, it's almost as good a deal as the Kirkland brand stuff, but you can buy this one pound at a time vs. the four pound minimum purchase at Costco. It also doesn't require making a special trip, which is probably worth the extra fifty cents. I'd say the bacon ranks right up there in all the categories. We liked it.

Here's the rundown:

Designation--Fancy or Grocery Store? Grocery Store.

Price--How much did I pay per pound for the bacon? $2.50/lb. purchased in a 1-pound pack.

Uncooked appearance--Color, texture, wet- or dry-ness, mushy or firm, etc... Nice looking slices, medium thickness. Nice fat/lean ratio. Nice color.

How it cooks--Tendency to curl, how much it shrinks, tendency to spatter... Some shrinkage, but not huge. An appealing amount of curl. Just enough to give it that nice, rippled bacon-y look and improve the texture and bit a little.

A note: I have officially changed the cooking technique that I'm using to cook bacon reviewed for The List. Using the rack just became too annoying because the bacon always stuck to it and it was really hard to get it off the rack without breaking it all to bits, since I cook my bacon crisp. I have now switched to a straight parchment paper method (which can be viewed in the two pictures in closest proximity), which consists of placing the raw bacon strips onto a piece of parchment paper (a much utilized product in restaurant kitchens that has recently surfaced amidst the plastic wrap and tin foil at the grocery store--it's about time!) on a sheet pan, placing in a cold oven and then turning on the oven to about 300-325º. With this method, you don't need to flip the bacon strips over at any point, as the rendered fat will cook them on both sides evenly, but you do need to rotate the sheetpan to account for any uneven heating of your oven, and I actually move the strips in the center of the tray to the outside so that they cook evenly. This is now the new Official Cooking Method of all bacon reviewed for The Bacon List.

Cooked appearance--Color, shape, texture. It's fine. Attractive curl. Nice color. Some loss due to shrinkage, but nothing major.

How does it taste--Sweetness, saltiness, smokiness, texture (melting, chewy, flabby, spongy), "porkiness". Great texture. Salty. Salt is the first flavor you get and it's by far the strongest. There's some smoke flavor, and some sweetness, but not sugary cure sweetness, more porky sweetness. The fat is very melting and tender, which is lovely. The texture is great. Crisp, with a little chew, but not too much, and a luscious amount of melting fat that just disintegrates on the tongue. We enjoyed it very much with our breakfast, especially as a foil to sweet breakfast items, like the frangipan pancakes that we ate with maple syrup.

Overall rating--All bacons reviewed will be given an overall rating from 1-10, with 1 being practically inedible (I say "practically" since, you know, it's bacon--how bad can it be?), 5 being a perfectly serviceable bacon for use in cooking or on a sandwich, and 10 being....well, let's be honest; there won't be a 10. 6.0 Overall, this is a completely decent bacon for everyday use, especially considering the price. It's a good value. Nothing to go out of your way for, but if you see it in your store for the price I paid or less, pick up a few pounds and stow them in the freezer.

Istanbul Photos

Istanbul is a bustling city with street vendors everywhere,
people running by with giant loads on their backs,
and seemingly endless markets where you can get lost for days.
It's worth the trip just to visit the famous Spice Bazaar.
I feel lucky to have made it there in my life. Enjoy.

Fresh Chiles at the Spice Bazaar


This guy would scurry into a crowd, set up his stand and sell half his stack in about two minutes.



Persimmons



Haggling at the Spice Bazaar



Where the Spice Bazaar gets its name.



Doner vendor



Gotta love a market where you see offal just glistening in the sun!


In Italian, corn is referred to as Granturco, or "Turkish Grain", because it was first introduced to the Italians via Turkish trade routes. Istanbul was and still is a world crossroads, serving as a gateway between Asia and Europe.

The Bacon List--Andy's Deli Smoked Slab

My latest entry in the epic porcine voyage that I'm calling The Bacon List was purchased from the deli counter at Lincolnwood Produce, which is a great alternative to the ultra-lame (and ridiculously expensive) Jewel and Dominick's. It's a great mid-sized grocery store with a really excellent produce section, a huge deli, and a pretty good assortment of dairy and fresh bread products, as well as some very interesting pantry items that lean towards Eastern European and Middle Eastern clienteles. I started out going there just for the really well-priced, fresh, high quality produce, but I find myself gravitating more and more to their other items, including a great bulk foods section, and wonderful ethnic breads like an authentic Armenian lavosh and the highly-touted Italian bread from D'Amato's bakery on Grand, which is delivered daily.

Andy's Deli is a Chicago-based retailer, meat market, and sausage-maker that has been serving primarily the Polish market since 1918. The deli case had this item marked "smoked slab bacon", so it was sliced to my specifications. I instructed the guy to do it on the thick side. I paid $4.99/lb.

I wasn't really sure what to expect from this stuff. I'm not familiar with Polish bacon, so I wasn't sure if it's made in a style that differs from the American product that I'm more familiar with, but I figured I'd give it a go. (Judging by Andy's website, they're not really all that familiar or concerned with the American market either--they list "Pork Lion" as one of their products) Anyway, it certainly looked good in the case, with it's dark, smoky-looking outside and bright pink and white fat streaked interior.

Worlds away from the FreshLock container detailed in my last post, this bacon came in a no-frills plastic deli sack, secured with a computer-printed price label. Which suited me fine. This is about the product, not the package.

I had high hopes. Given the small-scale production, the non-uniform appearance, an expectation of ethnic authenticity, and the strong smoke smell emanating from the pack, I figured I might be onto something good with this stuff.

I was wrong.

Despite the fact that this appears to be an artisanally-produced bacon, made with an authentic dry cure and smoked with real hardwood, it's just lacking. On multiple levels.

I'm going to go ahead and assume some cultural differences here--maybe Poles enjoy a milder, more chewy bacon than us USA'ans have come to expect from a high-quality bacon--so it's not like I can fault this product too much. For all I know, Andy's Deli has made the exact bacon it intended to make.

It does not, however, suit my tastes.

The main fault with this bacon is that it's chewy. Despite cooking it up with the rack-over-a-sheetpan method (I did remember to spray my rack this time, thankyouverymuch), and achieving a crispy-seeming dry finished product, the bacon does not snap and crumble when you bit into it. You have to work on it. Gnaw, even. I don't think I'd be out of line by describing it as jerky-like. Jerky-esque. Not good.

The flavor is just so-so. Not much there there. It's not at all sweet, so I'm guessing the cure didn't include sugar. It's lacking in salt and smoke as well, so the prominent flavor is straightforward pork. Which isn't bad...it's a nice fresh pork flavor with a sweetness to it, even, but bacon, done right, is an ethereal combination of sweet, salt, smoke, and pork. This was a one-dimensional bacon. With the chew of leather.

My guess is that this bacon was not left to cure long enough. That would account for the almost fresh-pork-belly flavor and lack of tenderness. And, again, I'm wondering if that's a conscious choice based on Andy's attempting to appeal to Polish and/or Eastern European tastes.

So this review is a mixed bag. I certainly didn't like this bacon very much and I'm not going to give it high marks, but I'm not going to rip in to it too much, since doing so might reveal my admitted cultural ignorance.

Anyway...on to the rundown:

Designation--Fancy or Grocery Store? Special designation--Ethnic. Purchased in a grocery store (although not a big, mainstream chain store), but apparently produced using fancy artisanal production methods.

Price--How much did I pay per pound for the bacon? $4.99/lb. sliced to order per my specifications.

Uncooked appearance--Color, texture, wet- or dry-ness, mushy or firm, etc... The slices are dry and firm. The shape is irregular and uneven, indicating a belly that has not been compressed or trimmed to achieve a uniform shape. Some slices had a nice mix of lean and fat, others were overly lean. Colors are on the pale side.

How it cooks--Tendency to curl, how much it shrinks, tendency to spatter... Not too much shrinkage. No curling. I should just get rid of this specific criteria, since the way I cook the bacon pretty much gives me a uniform result regardless of the product. Nothing significant to note here.
Cooked appearance--Color, shape, texture. Strangely-shaped slices. Some streaky, some (the straighter ones pictured on the right) very lean with almost no fat at all. Lean meat is a deep, dark red, fat is an orangey-red. Texture is somewhat rubbery or tough-seeming.

How does it taste--Sweetness, saltiness, smokiness, texture (melting, chewy, flabby, spongy), "porkiness". Very chewy with a near-exclusive pork flavor. Bordering on tasting like fresh pork. Lacking in sweet, smoke, and salt. Fat doesn't 'melt' in the mouth at all. I had to chew hard and vigorously to eat this bacon. Not pleasant.

Overall rating--All bacons reviewed will be given an overall rating from 1-10, with 1 being practically inedible (I say "practically" since, you know, it's bacon--how bad can it be?), 5 being a perfectly serviceable bacon for use in cooking or on a sandwich, and 10 being....well, let's be honest; there won't be a 10. Overall rating: 4.0 As I explained above, I'm reluctant to give this bacon a really low number, despite the fact that I didn't really enjoy it. I'm willing to extend the benefit of the doubt due to the fact that it's produced by a Polish company and, presumably, marketed to a Polish/Eastern European clientele which has, perhaps different tastes and expectations of what bacon should taste like.

It's too bad, because ethnic markets/products can sometimes be a very economical option for high-end products. Since they're often produced locally for a relatively small customer base, you're likely to get a more artisanally-produced product that can arrive at the retailer more quickly and therefore, fresher, than an equivalent mass-produced mega-mart item.

I wanted to like it. I really did. If I'm ever interested in stocking up on pork jerky, this will be my go-to bacon.

But, in the meantime, the quest continues.....

Casteel Coffee in Evanston

I had grand plans of plumbing in a professional espresso machine while I was remodeling the kitchen in our new home. I had been pricing refurbished machines, spoken to the plumbers about running water supply and drains to the buffet area we were building off our eating area, and was all set to go, justifying the indulgence within the larger expense of the entire project.

Then, the espresso machine that we had at the restaurant where I was working failed; water leaked everywhere and when it was opened up for servicing, I saw what a big mess of lime scale and mold it was inside, and had visions of what a similar water leak would do to my new cabinets and wood floors, and decided that a "pro-style" residential unit with a water reservoir instead of direct plumbing would be ok after all.

Framing it in that context allowed me to more easily justify the purchase to my wife (who is the practical one in our family and is forever reining me in) as a net savings of a couple thousand bucks. Pretty slick, eh? It was via this process that I came to be the proud owner of a Rancilio Silvia espresso machine and a Rancilio Rocky grinder.

I'll save my treatise on making coffee with the Silvia for another entry, though. That's a whole long thing in and of itself; suffice to say that people have devoted thousands of pages to discussing
it.

This post is about the coffee I feed my Silvia.

Of course, part of the fun of making espresso at home is trying all sorts of different coffees. I tried all the big commercial brands--Starbucks, Lavazza, and illy, for instance--and then quickly moved on to the smaller, more artisanally-minded roasters.

The Silvia is famously wonky and sensitive, according to the experts over at CoffeeGeek and their discussion boards, so the consensus over there is that the freshness of the beans is of capital importance. The beans must not, I'm told, be more than 10-14 days old (post roasting) or the finished product will suffer.

Someone in one of the discussion threads advised me to find a local small-batch roaster and get to know them...ask them questions, talk about what machine I'm using and what I'm looking for, and learn a bit about the process. A quick web search clued me in to Casteel Coffee in Evanston, which, despite my having lived pretty close by for years, I had never heard of.

What a find they are. It's a small, funky little double storefront on Central right where Evanston turns into Skokie, not too far from Old Orchard mall. They do the retail and cafe out of one side and the roasting is done on the other side. You can look in the window from the sidewalk and see all the roasting equipment, and, if you catch them at the right time, watch the coffee being roasted.

The key is that they roast every day, meaning that regardless of when you go, you'll get beans that are about 5-10 days out. This is worlds away from the big industrially-roasted and packaged brands mentioned above which, who knows when they were roasted and, more importantly, how long they've sat in a warehouse somewhere?

Casteel's employees will tell you when each type of coffee was roasted, so you can choose for yourself, and they write it right on the bag, so you know what your window of opportunity is. I usually buy a few pounds at at time of Lee's Espresso Roast, have them split them up into half-pound bags, pack them into a ziploc, and freeze them until I'm ready to load them into the hopper of my Rocky.

They have a nice little cafe set-up there, and do sell food, although I've never eaten there so I can't vouch for it, and they have a pretty huge assortment of coffee and espresso equipment and accessories. They also have a good selection of organic and fair trade coffees and do a nice cardless coffee club thing where you get a free pound for every nine pounds you buy.

In short, it's a nice little independently-owned place that has been a part of the local community for the past 15 years or so, and it's a pleasure to support places like this.

Oh, and the espresso absolutely rocks. It dribbles out of my Sylvia with a nicely fruity flavor, strong coffee aroma and taste, with great undertones of chocolate and hazelnut. It's never bitter (well, not more than it's supposed to be, anyway) and it's got a wonderful thick, creamy texture and a great rusty red/brown color. It's simply fantastic coffee.

We have a few other well-known roasters in the Chicago area. Intelligentsia is probably the most-often cited by coffee aficionados, and their black cat espresso is a great tasting blend, but Intelligentsia has grown quickly, moving from their original storefront on Broadway to a Bucktown location and then to their current 25,000 square foot facility on Fulton street. They offer tours and barista training classes there, which is very cool, but they're no longer considered a small-batch roaster, and although their coffee is very good, I prefer the personalized service and overall "small"ness that Casteel offers.

I've also tried Metropolis, a Chicago roaster, and Alterra, which is up in Milwaukee, with excellent results. But Casteel is a good fit for me. They're conveniently located, the espresso suits my personal taste, and I get a feeling of satisfaction from supporting a small, independent place where you know that they care about doing things right and you can develop a personal relationship with the owner, the roaster, and the people who work there.

In a world filled with huge, industrialized manufacturers of any foodstuff or comestible you can think of, I try to support little guys who are doing it the old fashioned, artisanal way, and employing local people. Casteel is a fine example of that and so, besides getting very good espresso beans at a fair price, I get to feel like I'm doing something worthwhile and socially redeemable while I'm feeding the caffeine monkey jonesing on my back. Go check them out.

It's a win-win. Yay, coffee!

Sicily Pictures

These were taken, for the most part, at Il Capo market in Palermo.

Enjoy. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year.


Making ricotta




Polleria



A cheese and salumi vendor



A friendly fruit-seller



Butchering a chicken



Chanterelles (not sure what they're called in Italian)


I swear, this was a real butcher stall in Palermo--it's not a scene from a Scorsese movie.


Old guy with crates

(Relatively) Inexpensive Vanilla Beans

I've been finding these vanilla beans at my local Costco recently--they come in glass tubes with six beans (or pods, as they're sometimes called) per tube. The package comes with two tubes and I think it's $13 or so. This means that using vanilla beans is not much more expensive than using vanilla extract.

A lot of people probably don't know what to do with whole vanilla beans, but they're super easy to deal with. They can be easily used in any recipe where liquids are involved--creams, custards, puddings, and the like. The main thing to know is that you need to split the bean lengthwise and then scrape the inside part with the back of a knife to extract the pulp, which consists of lots of little black specks--the same little specks (or grains) you see in good quality vanilla ice cream or in creme brulee.

So, in any recipe where you're scalding milk or cream, simply toss the black pulp into it as it comes up to temp. Throw the spent pod in there too, for good measure. It's still got lots of flavor in it.

Or don't. You can also save the scraped bean and bury it in a container filled with granulated sugar, and in a week or so, you'll have some really nice vanilla sugar. You could also slip it into a bottle of vodka. Nice.

The thing about having vanilla beans available for such a good price, is that you can use them to add a little decadence in spots where you wouldn't have thought to do that previously. I've taken to using them in oatmeal. I use half a bean for a pot of oatmeal that will serve the three of us (Nora's only four months old, so she's not quite ready for oatmeal). And the vanilla really adds a lushness and richness to a bowl of oatmeal.

Having them around has also served as inspiration to cook things I don't usually make. I just up and decided to make creme brulee one day, just because I stumbled upon the little torch someone gave me for Christmas one year and I knew that my trusty vanilla beans would be up to the challenge. Take a look:




This week, I'm planning on making chocolate pudding from scratch and I'll certainly be adding some of my wonderfully fragrant vanilla to that as well.

I'm not being paid by these people or anything. I just like finding a good product that sells for a good price. It's a thrill. I almost feel like I should stock up while I can--that they can't possibly keep selling these things for the price they're asking. Get'em while you can, especially now that we're full-on into holiday baking season.

For those who are interested, I found them at the Costco in Niles off of Touhy. They're marketed by a company called Rodelle Vanilla, which, I see after Googling them, is based in Fort Collins, Colorado. The beans are being sold as "Bourbon Madagascar" Vanilla beans and the package looks like this:


Incidentally, for those that care about this kind of arcana, "Bourbon" doesn't refer to the alcohol, but to the specific cultivar that is grown in Madagascar, which produces almost 60% of the world's supply of vanilla. Interestingly, the orchids from which the vanilla beans are harvested are indiginous to Central America--more specifically, Mexico and Guatemala--but today, although Mexico still cultivates vanilla orchids to produce the beans for market, some 85% of the world's vanilla is produced by Madagascar and Tahiti.

Vanilla is a subtle flavor, and it's one that's nearly ubiquitous in processed sweets, but real vanilla flavor isn't nearly as common. Artificial vanilla products contain artificial vanillin, a synthetic substance that's produced as a by-product of paper production and also in the coal-tar industry. Vanillin is the lead note of vanilla flavor, but while artificial vanilla contains only a few flavor components, natural vanilla contains more than 200 organic components in addition to vanillin.

So it's worth going the extra mile and getting the real deal. You probably won't be knocked over the head by the difference, but the flavor of the finished product you use it in will seem to be richer, rounder, and more fully-developed. It's one of those flavors that everyone is completely familiar with, to the point of thinking of it as bland, boring, and, well...."vanilla", yet very few people have actually stopped to consider it--to really taste it.

Photos--Boqueria Market, Barcelona

These are photos I took while visiting the Boqueria market in Barcelona. It is perhaps the best market in Europe. Just an amazing place to eat, buy, watch people, and be. I spent a LOT of time there when I lived in Barcelona in '97-'98, and learned a lot about the local ingredients and how to best prepare them. I only wish we had markets like this in Chicago.

Food can be so beautiful. Enjoy!

Embutidos

Fruit Vendor

Snap Peas

Tocineria

Mackerel

Drying sardines in a hoop basket