It sounds basic but I’ll just get it out of the way first: cured meat isn’t cooked. Curing was one of the key discoveries our species hit upon to make meat last for a long time at ambient temperatures and not get us sick. Curing is what differentiates a sausage (uncured) from a salami (cured).
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Take two tins of tuna: one from Ortiz, one typical of the supermarket. They came from the same animal living in the same ocean. One costs twice as much as the other. Why?
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Poor corn. Sometimes I feel sorry for it. It’s been the subject of exposés putting it at the center of America’s industrial food problems, including obesity and diabetes. In Michael Pollan’s (highly recommended) Omnivore’s Dilemma and the movie it inspired, King Corn, it’s nearly criminal.
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People have been curing meats for millennia. For most of that time, no one understood the chemistry behind the process. But for centuries before refrigeration was invented, even if folks didn’t know why curing worked, they knew that once it was done—a process that could take a few weeks to a few years, depending on […]
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The counter to the side of your stove. It’s where you keep the foods you need most often. The ones you grab every day. Your kitchen’s speed dial. Your food friends list. Here’s a written snapshot of the space next to my stove, circa late spring 2019.
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“Territorial” is a term of art for traditional regional British cheeses. As a definition it’s a bit loosey goosey. It can mean an area as big as a county where a cheese was made, like when it’s used for Lancashire or Cheshire. Or it can be as specific as the town where the cheese was […]
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I used to joke that The Netherlands only had one cheese: Gouda. Gouda in endless varieties, gouda with endless wardrobe changes. Gouda aged one year. Two years. Four years. Gouda with red wax. Gouda with black wax. To me, Dutch gouda was an enjoyable cheese, but monotonous, dull. It never got me excited. It never […]
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Molise is one of Italy’s forgotten provinces. Sandwiched between Abruzzo and Puglia, a two hour drive due east of Rome, Molise doesn’t have any fashionable cities, no luxury waterfront, zero famous foods. What it has are ingredients. Grapes, wheat, and olives, which, for the most part, are sold in bulk for companies in other more […]
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Traditional cooking, the popular cooking of countries passed down through time, is the cooking of the poor because, let’s face it, there have been a lot more poor people than rich people in history. Traditional cooks figured out how to squeeze the last bit of flavor from the ham bone, to find flavor in foods […]
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It’s a cliché to say that anchovies get a bad rap. Everyone knows they’re polarizing—and most people avoid the pole altogether. The thing is, it’s not anchovies’ fault. It’s ours. Just-caught anchovies are universally delicious. It’s mis-steps taken to cure, prepare, store and serve that cause such ruin.
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