How to make strawberry jam from scratch, WITHOUT SUGAR OR ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS
I started this blog to help people do kitchen things that are different, unusual, or downright difficult, things that are neglected topics in the world of food instruction. With the plethora of book, blogs, YouTube videos, etc out there, it’s usually pretty easy to find information and/or instructions on many, many things, even if actually doing them isn’t exactly easy.
Making traditional strawberry jam (or even novel recipes with sugar as sweetener) is one of those topics that’s extraordinarily well covered. While I hesitate to say there is nothing new to add to the subject, it’s safe to say that *I* personally have nothing new to add to the subject.
But making strawberry (or other fruit) jams without sugar, and without artificial sweeteners, well, that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish. While I have no health reasons for wanting sugar-free jam, I personally just don’t like how sweet traditional jams are. For a few years, I tried reducing the amount of sugar in traditional recipes, and wound up with tasty syrup. My jam just wouldn’t set. I tried recooking it with more pectin, to no avail. For two years, I poured my strawberry jam onto toast and sandwiches instead of spreading it with a knife. So in 2010, I made my last batch of strawberry jam. Until today.
What happened between then and now was a simple but life-altering discovery: Pomona Pectin. It is different than the pectin you can buy most places – that pectin only works if the correct amount of sugar is added, so that after cooking there is not enough water present to keep added pectin dissolved, and thus upon cooling, the pectin will gel. Pomona is a calcium-activated pectin, so when calcium (included with the pectin) is added, it will gel regardless of the amount of sugar present. Now that you know the secret, you can Google it and read up on the topic yourself. What I will tell you is that while Pomona pectin works like magic, it IS different to work with and requires some experience and experimentation if you want to wander off the reservation and make your own recipes.
Let me show you how I made some strawberry jam with honey today. Note that it is NOT my intention to teach you to make jam, or to do basic canning; I assume you are competent in this regard already. I’m also not trying to teach specific recipes, though I hope you will like mine and the variations of it described here. The point of this post is to teach you how to do what you know how to do already, except WITHOUT SUGAR.
Here are the main ingredients: 3 lbs strawberries, some mint from the garden, local honey, and the Pomona pectin with its calcium activator (more detail on that on a minute). Not pictured is a little lemon juice and some Meyer lemon rinds. I also added cracked black pepper and balsamic vinegar (separately and together) to a few jars.
My friend Katie sent me some Meyer lemon rinds from her tree. I use them in everything. They are beautiful and tasty.
OK, this snap technically has little to do with making jam, but I wanted to point out the difference in waste you achieve by using a huller instead of a paring knife. the difference is about 4 grams per berry. Doesn’t sound like much, except when you consider that for every hundred berries, you wind up with almost an extra pound of fruit using the huller. That lesson is consistent with the other thing we want to teach here: how to minimize waste and thus cost.
This post isn’t really about the basic mechanics of making jam, but at this point I mashed the fruit (3lbs), added 2c honey, 3 TBSP chopped mint, and a few TBSP lemon juice, then cooked gently for about 10 minutes. If you are planning to use sugar, don’t add it just yet – you can use it as a carrier of sorts for the pectin powder. Now we’re ready for the pectin, but adding it is a multi-step process that definitely *is* possible to screw up, so pay attention.
First you will need to dissolve the pectin powder (NOT the calcium) in hot water, mixing well to dissolve. IF YOU ADD THE POWDER DIRECTLY TO THE FRUIT IT WILL CLUMP AND RUIN YOUR JAM. Seriously. Guess how I know? If you are adding sugar, you can mix the sugar and pectin powder at this point, and fold it into the fruit, but that is still potentially problematic for clumping. Dissolve in water and you will be happy. In this case, I used 6 tsp pectin powder and 3/4 cup very hot water.
Here’s what it looks like dissolved – like a thick paste. Fold the paste into the cooked fruit.
Now you need the calcium activator. Add 1/2 tsp calcium power to 1/2c water and mix well.
Here’s the calcium water. You won’t use it all at once, and it keeps for months. I add about 4x as many tsp calcium water as I do pectin. In this case I used about 20 tsp calcium water – just add it to the fruit mixture containing the pectin. You should notice the jam begin to start setting. It won’t get stiff. Use the plate test to judge whether the set is sufficient – before starting, put a ceramic plate in the freezer. When you reach this step, take the plate out, and shmear a tsp of the jam on the plate. It will set to the consistency you will get in the jar. If set is insufficient, try adding more calcium water. If that doesn’t do it, add more dissolved pectin. Iterate till it’s right.
Jar your jam in the usual way. Here’s the batch I made today. This jar had a little cracked black pepper and balsamic vinegar added. The set was perfect, and the jam is delicious – not too sweet!
I do try to include costing info with each post to refute the notion that cooking with fresh, high quality ingredients is expensive. I bought the strawberries at the farmers’ market for $12. I buy my honey by the half gallon, and estimate I may have use about $3 worth. My mint was free from my garden, but if you bought it I would have paid about $1. The lemon juice and pectin may have been $1. So for about $17, I got (12) 4-oz jars and one large (32-oz) jar (ran out of small jars!). So 80 ounces of jam for $17 is $0.21 per ounce. That’s about $1.70 for 8 ounces, which is a typical supermarket size that will run you from $3-5. And the store jam won’t taste as good, or be as good for you.
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How to make turkey soup from scratch – and can it!
Our Thanksgiving bird was, once again, wonderful. We go to a lot of trouble to buy a high-quality bird (a Bourbon Red in our case), from a farmer we know. And we pay a lot, compared to that insipid supermarket stuff they call turkey – $87 for a 12 lb bird, to be precise.
I get as as much as I can out of that bird. It’s not just the money, either – it’s a matter of respect for resources. And one of the ways we stretch the use is to start a big pot of turkey soup while we’re cleaning up from dinner. Literally, I’ll break up the roasted carcass into a soup pot, add water, put the pot on a small hob and lowest flame, and start a simmer that will last nearly 24 hours. Here’s the pictorial.
Here's our bird out of a two-day buttermilk marinade. 12 lbs or thereabouts.
Three hours later, heat has worked its alchemy. Once dinner is over, I remove all the meat from the carcass and save for sandwiches, pot pie, etc. But I retain the carcass, too. While we're cleaning up, our tradition is to start making soup. Simply break up the carcass and put it in a soup pot full of water. Put it on a small hob, with a low flame, and start a simmer that will last about 18 hours.
Here's the stock after an 18 hour simmer. I did not add any meat - that's all what comes off the carcass (and there's more, as you'll see in the next photo.
Here are the bones pulled out of the stock pot. There is nothing left of them. In case you're wondering, these bones weigh 641 grams, or about 1.5 lbs of the 12 lb turkey weight. The pink plate is full of bits of skin and such that will go to the dogs (250 grams). So of a 12 lb bird, we're looking at 1.5 lb bones, 0.5 lb dog scraps, so that leaves about 10 lbs of usable turkey.
Here are the vegetables we'll add. The stalks are retained from bok choy we steamed last week. It's every bit as good as celery, and we have it around, why not use it? We also added lots of root veg which are on season now - rutabaga, carrot, turnip and Jerusalem artichoke (not pictured).
Here's the veg chopped. Add it to the soup, simmer for another 30 minutes or so. Ladle soup into sterilized jars (half solids, half broth), leaving 1" head space. Close jars tightly.
Put the jars in a pressure canner, add a few inches of water, and take it to 15 PSI.
Process at 15 PSI for 1 hour.
Yields about 20 servings of soup.
One awesome quart jar of soup for the pantry.
Note that you need lots of headspace – 1 inch, no kidding, if you want to assure all jars seal (one in this batch did not).
Costing notes: This turkey yielded about 30 individual meals, which is fairly unheard of for a bird this small. Total cost, then, is $2.90 per serving (that does not include dog food). The trick is to not waste any. We hope this post helps you do that.
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How to make pancetta… starting with a five-hundred-year-old pig
OK, the pig itself was not 500 years old. But my pancetta project started 5 centuries ago, give or take.
Pancetta, for the uninitiated, is an Italian version of “bacon”. It starts with a pork belly, but unlike American bacon, it is salt-cured (along with garlic, pepper and other spices), not smoked. Pancetta is typically cubed and rendered to provide flavor for any number of dishes, and to my taste is more enjoyable than American bacon, mainly because it tastes more “porky”.
Ossabaws at Cane Creek Farm, the place we bought our breeding stock.
Before I became determined to make pancetta, I became infatuated with a hog. Not just any hog, an Ossabaw Island hog. These pigs are descendants of the legendary Iberica swine, and were deposited by the Spaniards on Ossabaw Island, off the coast of Georgia, in the 1500′s. As an isolated, feral herd, they are now the most genetically pure European swine on the planet. These are not your ordinary industrial hogs.
Fortunately for me (who lacks a farm), I have a friend as crazy as I am. Bruce is the fourth generation on his Hillsborough, NC farm, and he agreed to raise a some Ossabaws. We bought some gilts from Cane Creek Farm in Snowcamp, NC, later found a boar from another farmer, and soon enough we had piglets. Bruce’s young son took care of the piglets, and in October we harvested the pig that was subject of this post.
While our piglets were bulking up, a couple of food bloggers created the Charcutapalooza Challenge. The gist of it is that they proposed one charcuterie challenge per month, and dangled a big prize for the person who completed all the projects in an exemplary way. They managed to get Michael Ruhlman, author of the amazing book Charcuterie, to be a consultant to the project. As soon as I saw the project I knew I needed to be involved.
Sadly, however, I’ve only had time for one challenge – duck prosciutto – till now. I posted on that one several months ago. In some ways, knowing that I can’t compete for the prize was liberating. I am now free to focus on my art, the way I want to. And I thought that it would be pretty unusual for anyone to make Ossabaw pancetta, let alone from a pig they’ve grown. In addition, I decided I would do the hog processing myself. Here’s the photo tutorial.
It all starts with a hog. Bruce wisely talked me into letting him take the hog to be killed, scalded, and halved. The harvesting itself isn't such a big job, but the scalding is. So this half hog is how I took delivery of the pig. Note the beautiful fat on this pig, including the leaf lard in the viscera.
Here's the mid-section of the hog after I liberated the ham and shoulder. Since this isn'a post about how to butcher a hog, I'll focus just on the task of separating the belly that we'll turn into pancetta. Note that you don't need a lot of heavy cutting equipment to butcher an animal - a sharpening steel, a good boning knife, and a bone saw will do the job.
We start by separating the loin from the belly. We'll separate out the tenderloin, then turn the loin itself into three roasts.
We isolate the belly by removing the ribs. I also trimmed off a lot of the excess fat (which I retained for more lard). This belly is now ready for curing.
Bruce was enthusiatic to have me turn his half of the hog into pancetta, too, hence there are two bellies here. Bruce's is a little oddly shaped because he was a little more aggressive about separating the ham from the loin. The glasses contain the curing spice mixture specified by Ruhlman: Instacure #1, pepper, garlic, bay leaves, nutmeg, thyme and crushed juniper berries. Ruhlman also calls for brown sugar, which I forgot. But I was very happy with the outcome, and would probably omit sugar on the future, too.
Here are the bellies with the curing rub on them. From here they went into a giant Ziploc, and into my reach-in to cure for a while. Ruhlman said a week, but I let them go for three weeks, just because I didn't have time to take them out sooner. I did take them out once or twice for overhauling (rubbing the spices into the meat).
After three weeks in the reach-in, the meat was ready to roll and cure. First step was to rinse off the spice mixture, and trim them to an appropriate size for rolling.
Pretty simple now... cut, and roll tightly. You could add extra seasoning now, but I didn't.
Now tie the roll TIGHT. If you don't know how to tie a roast, see this video: http://video.about.com/homecooking/Tie-a-Roast.htm
Once they're all tied, hang them in a cool place out of direct sunlight. Ideal conditions are 50-60F and 50-60% RH. Because pancetta is cooked, hanging to cure can be an inexact science.
Because the weather in NC is highly variable (and warm for several days at a time), I built a simple curing chamber out of a dorm fridge. Basically I hijacked the controls and added humidification capability. It needs dehumidification, too. Next project.
After two weeks of curing, they were ready to slice and store. The vinegar was used to wipe off small bits of chalky white mold. I checked them every few days while curing and wiped off small mold spots when they popped up (which they did, because of the high humidity while I was curing). White mold is no problem. Green and black mold is the stuff you worry about, and I didn;t see any of that.
Here it is, all sliced up, ready to package. Beautiful, isn't it?
Couldn't resist a close-up.
Vacuum seal and store for 6 months, easy.
Now that you see how to make the pancetta, let’s do something with it: pasta carbonara.
Cube a wheel or two of that pancetta.
Render it.
Cook some pasta. Yes, I was lazy and used boxed pasta. Sue me. Be sure to reserve a little of the water from boiling the pasta (maybe 1/2 - 1 cup), you'll need it later.
Get some other stuff ready: a big hunk of butter (1/8-1/4 lb), a big mound of hard cheese (2 cups pecorino romano), a couple eggs, and wine (optional, for drinking, not cooking).
Heat a big pan in the oven while the pasta is cooking. When pasta is al dente, throw the butter in the hot pan to melt.
Add the pasta, cheese, and eggs to the hot pan with butter. Yes, one of my eggs was a double-yolker. Bonus.
Mix well, adding a little retained pasta water till consistency is correct. Normally I would have added pancetta in same step, but I have one vegetarian in the house, so I mix it up veg and plate hers first.
Add the pancetta, mix well.
Plate and enjoy!
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Slow Food USA $5 Challenge
Slow Food USA laid down the gauntlet: Prepare a slow food meal from whole foods, for less than $5 per serving. At $5, these meals are less expensive than fast food, and support the ideals and the budget many of us have for feeding our families. I’ve been looking forward to posting a meal for a few weeks now.
Given that the challenge date falls on Saturday, there was no question how I was going to approach my challenge. Saturday is farmers’ market day for our small business, and we would be covering two markets, Western Wake Farmers’ Market and The Saturday Market. Our family MO is we split up to cover these venues, and each of us does a little shopping, with no consultation with the others (except to make sure we don’t duplicate items) – this way everybody gets to have something that they wanted during the upcoming week. Sometimes we have meal ideas when we buy, other times the ingredients just speak to us. I was simply going to work with whatever we brought home today, with no preconceived notion about what to prepare.
Today turned out to be a banner day for fresh food. It’s change of season, so our market bags were overflowing with loot: first-push mustard greens, Sungold cherry tomatoes, shitake mushrooms, pears, whole chicken and chicken livers, fall asparagus, flounder and swordfish, eggs, queso fresco, butter beans, okra, and a few things I’m sure I’ve forgotten. In the end, two things spoke to me: fall asparagus, because I have never before encountered it (the vendor told me that when asparagus plants become very mature, they produce a little in the fall, in addition to the usual spring harvest), and the swordfish steaks, because we don’t really enjoy frozen seafood, so our habit is to eat seafood starting Saturday evening and keep eating it every night until we finish what we bought on Saturday (so weekends are usually fish nights, as is Monday about half the time).
The final dish wound up being Homemade Pappardelle Pasta in Brown Butter Lemon Cream Sauce, with Lemon-Caper Swordfish Steaks and Autumn Asparagus and Sweet Red Peppers.
After a long, raw day at rainy farmers’ markets, we were all in the mood for a more hearty meal than the summer fare we’ve enjoyed till now. My thoughts turned to pasta. While I have no moral objection to boxed pasta, after a long week I needed the kind of therapy that comes from making pasta from scratch. And while I love making pasta dough, I lose patience with tedious preparations on Saturday nights, since I usually don’t start making dinner till after 5 PM. Pappardelle noodles are lazy man’s noodles: rich and delicious, but quick and easy to make: literally 5 minutes to prepare dough, and about 10 minutes to roll and cut after the dough has rested for a half hour.
I also don’t want to fuss with sauce after working all day, so a brown butter sage lemon cream sauce was just what the doctor ordered. It’s a simple, delicious way to dress pasta in no time flat.
Swordfish steaks were a last minute addition to my market basket from Not Lin of Locals Seafood, after I realized the the single whole fish he reserved for me was not going to be enough to feed four people well. We had a quick negotiation about them, a calculus that involves the exchange of market goods and cash in varying amounts each week. I’ve adjusted my meal cost calculations to account for the true street price of the ingredients I used, however, so you can rest assured that you can reproduce my meal for the amounts I quote.
The star of my meal, however, was fall asparagus. Gertrude’s Garden Gems had this unusual offering, and it could not be passed up, or passed over this evening. Asparagus is a spring treat with a short season, and having it in the fall was an extraordinary treat. I decided to pair it with peppers from Redbud Farm.
Here’s the photo blog on how to pull the meal together:
Make a basic pasta dough by combining 3 cups of flour, 2 tsp salt and 3 eggs. Knead by hand or with a machine until you achieve a compliant ball that isn't sticky. You may need to add a few tablespoons of water - add them one TBSP at a time till the dough comes together. If you add too much water, don't panic, just dust in a little more flour to compensate. When the dough is kneaded, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least a half hour.
Cut off hunks of dough a little bigger than a golf ball, and roll them on a well-floured surface (or with a pasta machine) till they are a few millimeters thick. Cut noodles about 3/4" wide.
While the pasta dough is resting, marinate the swordfish in lemon juice (the juice of half a lemon). You can add some white wine, too, if you like.
Here are the noodles, asparagus and peppers. Trim the woody ends of the asparagus (about the bottom inch or two) and blanch for about a minute, then shock in cold water. You'll reheat them in the pasta water immediately before serving. Cut the peppers in a coarse dice.
Pan sear the peppers in some EVOO. Just a few minutes is enough. Retain the oil in the pan as the base of the cream sauce.
Pan sear the swordfish in EVOO and cook gently until cooked through to desired doneness. About 5 minutes per side was enough for these steaks. Meanwhile, get the sauce started by melting half a stick of butter in the pepper pan with the zest and juice of 1 lemon, and add about 1 TBSP dried sage.
Boil the pasta till al dente, about one minute or maybe two. It's fresh, so it needs hardly any cooking. Also, add capers and caper vinegar to fish (about a TBSP of each). Turn the cooked pasta out into the browned butter, and add about 4 ounces of half and half or heavy cream. Toss gently till noodles are coated and warmed, about 2 minutes.
Plate the meal as you like. This is one suggestion.
That’s all there is to it. It was about 30 minutes of prep, 30 minutes of waiting for dough to rest, and maybe 10 or 15 minutes active cooking.
Here’s the costing:
| Total Cost | Portions | Cost per Portion | ||
| Protein | fish | $ 13.50 | 4 | $ 3.38 |
| Capers | $ 0.20 | 4 | $ 0.05 | |
| Pasta | flour | $ 0.52 | 5 | $ 0.10 |
| eggs | $ 1.14 | 5 | $ 0.23 | |
| Sauce | Butter | $ 0.27 | 5 | $ 0.05 |
| Lemon | $ 0.33 | 5 | $ 0.07 | |
| Cream | $ 0.28 | 5 | $ 0.06 | |
| Veg | Asparagus | $ 1.75 | 4 | $ 0.44 |
| Peppers | $ 1.00 | 4 | $ 0.25 | |
| Marco Polo | EVOO | $ 0.25 | 5 | $ 0.05 |
| Salt | $ 0.04 | 4 | $ 0.01 | |
| Pepper | $ 0.04 | 4 | $ 0.01 | |
| Total per portion: | $ 4.69 |
We achieved the Slow Food criteria pretty easily, and had a luxurious meal for less than the cost of a fast food meal. You can do it, too!
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How to make cioppino (fish stew) from whole fish
Yesterday was perfect for soup, as we watched the rainy tail of hurricane Irene move north.
Earlier in the day my fishmonger, Not Lin, hooked me up with my usual weekly fix of whole fish. (I call him Not Lin because after months of calling him Lin, his wife one day said to me “his name’s Not Lin”. Actually, his name is Ryan, so you don’t have to call him Not Lin.) Yes, sadly it’s gotten to the point where obtaining whole fish is a special-order proposition. And that, in fact, is the reason for this post.
Because I don’t understand why people prefer to buy fish filets. So much waste! So much expense! And why? It takes just minutes to filet a fish, and there are so many nice things you can do with fish heads and carcasses. Even if you can’t use the heads and carcasses immediately, they freeze well, or make stock from them and freeze the stock. (Funny aside: my daughter turned on the Food Network show Chopped after dinner last night, and one of the mystery basket ingredients were fish heads. No kidding. If any of the wanna-be chefs had ever worked with whole fish before in their lives, which apparently they had not, they may have made a respectable showing. The judges had to select the one that was least bad, in my opinion.)
So I thought we would use this blog, whose point is to teach people how to deal with “difficult” ingredients and teach lost (among the average eater) techniques, to teach how to begin with a whole fish (OK, ours were gutted before we got them), and turn them into filets, fish stock, and a beautiful cioppino. Cioppino is fish stew, usually credited to San Francisco fishermen of Italian descent. Traditionally, it has a tomato base. Making cioppino is kind of like making chili – there are lost of recipes out there, and there is really no right or wrong way to do it. Following a recipe is likely to lead to frustration, because so many of them have exotic, or at least lots of diverse ingredients. Who buys like 5 kinds of seafood in a single shopping trip? Not me. So feel free to adapt and use whatever YOU have on hand.
I started with three fresh fish from my local fishmonger, Locals Seafood. I have a standing order for three whole fish every week. I never know what they are going to be. This week it was Sheepshead (sort of like the lovechild of Snapper and Grouper), a Sea Trout (like a freshwater trout but not as delicate), and a flounder. Note my knife sharpener in the background - fileting fish is best accomplished with a very sharp, flexible knife.
Start by slicing perpendicular to the torso, from behind the gill up to the spine - almost like you're going to cut the head off, but not so deep (cut until you encounter the resistance of the spine). If you've never done this before, you need to know that fish are generally fileted one side at a time, so you're going to work on one side, obtain one filet, then repeat on the other side. Note also that my fish were gutted and scaled before I got them. It's unlikely you'll ever encounter a fish for sale that hasn't been gutted, because that's necessary just after catching. If your fish isn't scaled, search this blog for a post called "Best fish scaler ever" to see how to scale a fish.
Now repeat that 1st cut, but across the tail.
Now slice along the back, keeping the knife edge as close to the bony middle as possible. It will be more obvious in the next photo. Slice from the 1st cut you made along the head, all the way down to the 2nd slice across the tail.
Now filet the fish by continuing to cut away the filet from the carcass. Work your way from head to tail, slicing down an inch or two at a time, then go back to the head and start again. repeat until you have fileted the fish.
Another angle on the fileting process. Pile of pin bones from previous fish on edge of cutting board (read next photo caption).
Some types of fish (like Sheepshead, and Salmon), have bones called pin bones that need to be removed. You can feel them by running your finger along the filet - they will prick you like a pin. Get yourself a pair of pliers - I have stainless pin bone pliers, but regular needlenose, or even a pair of kitchen scissors would do the trick. Just grab each pin bone you find and yank it out. Some of the flesh will come along with it. One of the fileting photos above has a pile of pin bones on the edge of the cutting board for reference.
Here are the beautiful filets of three fish. You can use them however you like, and they will freeze well, too. We'll use the Sheepshead and Sea Trout tonight in the cioppino, and we'll save the Flounder for tomorrow night. This took me about 5 minutes, literally. Now granted, I have a lot of practice. It might take you 15 minutes. But the price of these filets would have been about $45. I paid $30 for the whole fish. Is it really worth an extra $15 to you to save 15 minutes? If you make more than a dollar a minute in your spare time, I'd like to join your MLM. And, you would be robbed of the fish carcasses and heads which will make the lovely fish stock we need for the cioppino, and it would cheat the dogs out of about a pound or two of food (see later pics). No, pre-cut anything is a mystery to me.
Now take the carcasses, and cut them into pieces that will fit into your stock pot. A knife or a pair of kitchen shears will do the job.
Into the pot with all of the carcasses.
Add a few quarts of water to the carcasses, as well as whatever soup herbs you like and have around. In this case, I threw in some bay leaves, peppercorns, and thyme branches. Simmer the mixture for a couple hours, stirring once in a while. I like my strainer pot because it makes it easy to separate the fish parts from the stock later, but a collander will do the job just as well after the fact.
Here's the finished stock, before straining.
Here are the fish carcasses. We'll turn this into dog food later.
Here's the strained stock. The straining basket in the pot does most of the work, but I still poured it through a finer strainer to catch any small chuncks that got through the post strainer, which is quite coarse. We'll need about 1.5 liters for the cioppino (that measuring cup is 1 liter).
Now to start the cioppino. Saute some aromatic veg and a can of tomato paste until soft and well mixed. In this case I used onions, peppers, and garlic because it's what I had around. All together, it was probably 2 cups of veg. Once the veg is soft, add a quart (or 28 oz can) of crushed tomatoes, and about 1.5 liters of the fish stock. I forgot to photograph that step.
Once you have the aromatics, tomatoes and fish stock simmering, add some seasonings. Now don't be too dogmatic about this - whatever you like and hav is just fine. In my case, I added about 1 TBSP smoked salt, 1 TBSP smoked paprika, the zest of a lemon, a couple teaspoons of dried oregano, a pinch of saffron threads, and a big pinch of dried lemongrass.
I added a couple pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes, sliced, because I happened to have them and the skins were starting to turn green. I pan fry them first before adding to soup, as it improves the texture. Add them to the soup only after the soup has simmered for at least an hour, because you don't want the taters to overcook. Add them about 15 minutes before you want to serve, because that's all the longer they'll take to cook.
Skin the filets in preparation of going into the soup. This step isn't mandatory if you like fish skins (I do, my family doesn't). Start from the tail, and with your fileting knife cut the filet free from the skin. Should take about 20 seconds per filet.
Coarsely cut the filets. This is the filets of the Sheepshead and the Sea Trout.
Add the filets to the simmering pot. they will cook through in about 5 minutes. Stir gently once or twice while they are cooking.
Finished dish! Enjoy!
After dinner, separate the meat from bones of the carcasses you boiled, and cook the skins in a little extra stock. Chop them up for the dogs. No waste!
Now for a little costing analysis.
The fish were $30. They made 8 portions of cioppino, and 4 portions of flounder filets. $30/12 portions = $2.50 per portion. And that doesn’t account for the dog food I got out of it, or the extra fish stock I froze.
The cioppino used probably $3 worth of aromatics, $2 worth of potatoes, and let’s say $1 for tomato paste and herbs. The tomatoes we canned; I used one jar, and we get about 9 jars out of a $25 box of tomatoes, so that jar was worth $2.77. Total for ingredients exclusing fish is 3+2+1+2.77=6.77, divided by 8 portions is $0.84.
Add $0.84+$2.50 = $3.34 per portion. You can’t buy a fast food meal for that amount.
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The cult of local: a cult of one
Hi. My name is Jim, and I’m a locavore.
Last week, we had dinner at my Mom’s house. She made asparagus.
Last night, we had dinner at my in-laws. They made a salad. With lettuce.
Tastes like chicken. A couple heritage breed birds from one of our coffee customers. You can tell just by looking these are not your ordinary supermarket chickens. One bite and you'll never go back to those insipid birds made ubiquitous by Perdue and Tyson.
A decade ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about either of those meals. Both were good, but not great. This month, they both seemed wrong. Because neither asparagus, nor lettuce, is in season right now where we live.
Today, a friend sent me a link to this article, about the challenge of eating locally. Not to spoil it for you, but the author concludes that eating well locally is becoming more difficult because consumers are demanding cheap food, and industrial food is cheaper food, a theory that used to resonate with me. (After 5 years of operating an artisan food business, I now think most consumers are just stupid – at least a little – when it comes to food, which is not exactly at odds with the article, just a little more cynical. We agree that whatever the root cause is precisely, stupidity or cheapness or both, that our shitty industrial food supply our own Goddamned fault).
I was also inspired by an opinion piece in Lucky Peach on what constitutes “authentic” food.
This series of events caused me to think a little harder about WHY I eat the way I eat.
So first, how do I eat? Well, I haven’t purchased fresh food at a traditional store (e.g., a grocery store) in many years. Whole Foods gives me the heebie jeebies. Trader Joes is an utter fucking mystery to me, with their shitty, over-packaged, over-processed food they try to pass off as “gourmet”. When it comes to meat, I’ve started buying whole animals from farmers who will allow me to dispatch them myself, because even farmers’ market meats come without offal, and the mediocrity of the butchering makes me insane. Our vegetables come from purchase or barter at farmers’ markets and CSAs where we sell our coffee. I obtain raw milk whenever I can, conveniently, and when I can’t, I don’t drink milk. It’s safe to say that I should be a poster boy for the local food movement, and on some days, I am.
Usually, when I encounter a locavore, it’s a person who has a cause, a mission, to convert others to their way of thinking. “Don’t you get it, man? Industrial food is ruining everything!” is the usual refrain. I suppose that, in the beginning, I bought into that, to some extent (and I still believe it’s true). But as I come to accept, and even embrace my particular style of obtaining and eating food, I realize that “the Cause” is not what motivates me.
Selfishness motivates me. There, I’ve said it.
I eat the way I eat because it’s in my own self-interest. I really do believe it’s better for the planet, it’s better for small farms, and it’s better for communities. But at the end of the day, it’s better for my family, and for me. That’s why I do it. I feel better (physically), and it’s less expensive (really, it is). But perhaps most importantly, it tastes better. People like to eat things that taste good, and locally produced fresh food almost always tastes better than industrial alternatives transported from far away.
Why do I promote local eating? Because in order to serve me, producers need some critical mass of customers. So it’s in my best interest to be sure they have them.
Does this make me a bad person? Maybe, in some circles. But I’m guessing that if the cause-oriented locavores abandoned their missionary work for the sake of missionary work, and acknowledged their self-interest, the Cause would advance more rapidly, too. Because all of those esoteric arguments about local economies, healthier planets, etc, etc , while likely true, are not as effective as SHOWING somebody that by eating locally, they will feel better, have more money, and oh by the way, enjoy the taste of their food more.
Just sayin’.
GMOs and your right to know: be careful what you wish for…
Photo credit: http://www.staggeron.org/images/frankenfoods2-300x263.jpg
FRANKENFOOD.
That’s probably the most alarmist description I’ve heard to describe Genetically Modified Organisms. GMOs, for the benefit of those who don’t know, are organisms (food plants are the subject of most of the current debate around this topic) whose genome has been specifically modified to result in some desired characteristics. For example, Monsanto has developed GMO crops whose genome prevents them from being killed by their herbicide, RoundUp, thus allowing fields to be sprayed with RoundUp, killing weeds while the crop survives. There are many other motivations for GMOs, too.
People around the world have expressed concerns that GMOs may result in the law of unintended consequences, with downstream damage outweighing the benefit years from now. Everything from environmental damage from herbicide overuse, to the dilution of the gene pool of native species are very reasonable concerns.
Accordingly, consumers around the world have either prohibited the sale of GMO food (Europe), or are pushing for specific labeling of GMO foods (USA). In any case, GMOs are a source of very vocal debates.
I’m not advocating one way or the other on GMOs. As a technical person myself, I have mixed emotions on the topic. My intention here is not to lobby one way or the other. My intention here is to advise you that if you are in favor of bans, or labels, be careful what you wish for. Because the Law of Unintended Consequences may just jump up and bite you in the behind.
As a small food manufacturer myself, I can tell you that bans and increased labeling requirements WILL have a negative impact on small manufacturers. The only way for me, as a manufacturer, to say definitively whether a product is, or is not, a GMO is to have it tested. The GMO test is a central lab test (you have to send a sample out to a lab), which takes a week or two and costs about $250.
Now that may not sound like a big deal, and for General Mills, making Cheerios, it’s not, really. But for a company like ours, it is. Because we deal in micro-lots of things. We may buy a two-bag lot of coffee (about 250 pounds). We may obtain just a ton of corn for our artisan corn products (that’s actually a small amount for most mills). We buy these small lots because they are unique and tasty. Customers like them. And usually, they are not accompanied by any substantial pedigree, other than perhaps an oral history from the grower. And a testing requirement would add about two dollars per pound (or more) – about 18% – to many of the products we sell. The number is that high because not only do we have to get the testing done (that’s the easy part), but we also have to maintain the records… for years.
If GMO labeling becomes required, I can predict one thing with certainty: your food choices will diminish.
Because it between the two extremes of “yes, it is GMO”, and “no, it’s not GMO”, is the middle ground that much of the food from small producers will occupy: “I don’t think it is, but I’m not sure”. And getting from there to either of the other alternatives will destroy the economic viability of the enterprise. I know this as surely as the sun rises in the East.
What I’m proposing is an alternative to the current label proposals. The current proposals are essentially one proposal: GMOs must be labeled as such. By default, then, things not labeled as GMO are not GMO. Very tidy, but unrealistic if you want small producers to survive. Because a proposal that all GMOs be labeled inherently requires that all products be tested – because the only way to know whether somethings is, or is not, GMO, is to test it.
What I propose then are three labels:
- Tested, found to be non-GMO
- Tested, found to be GMO
- Untested.
In practice, you will only ever find labels 1 and 3, because there is really no contingent of customers I know of who go around saying “I’d rather eat GMOs”. But I suspect there are an awful lot of people who don’t care much one way or the other, and don’t want to incur the expense of testing (because ultimately it is passed on to the consumer), and/or don’t want their favorite small suppliers going out of business over it.
So if you’re one of those people advocating for GMO labeling, make sure you think through the consequences of what you’re wishing for.
