Best Food Writing 2015 (2 page)

Introduction
Introduction

I hadn't been to that Columbus Avenue restaurant in over twenty years, not since we moved twenty blocks north. Frankly, I was surprised it was still there, given New York City's rapid restaurant turnover rate. But there it still stood, and, luckily, they even had a table for us at the last minute.

The menu was the same, too. (Quite possibly, the very same sheets of laminated paper we'd been handed back in the last century.) I ordered
pappardelle al ragu
mostly because the name of the restaurant is Pappardella. I figured, you can't stay in business twenty-plus years if your namesake dish isn't pretty reliable.

My first bite released a flood of taste memories. I realized that this was the same dish I had always ordered—no doubt using the same logic—when we came to Pappardella. I literally closed my eyes in pleasure to savor it. The pasta was toothsome and meltingly fresh, the ragu sauce rich, meaty, and satin-smooth. It warmed my soul in places I hadn't known needed warming.

“I could make this,” I thought to myself. “Sure, it would probably take all day. But it would be
worth it
.”

For the next week, I hunted down ragu recipes. Almost all of them called for ground meat, which baffled me—surely that had been shredded meat in Pappardella's hearty ragu. I asked the local boutique butcher for advice. “So improvise,” he said blithely. “Throw in chunks of chuck instead of ground beef, and shred them with a fork once they've cooked to tenderness. Sounds pretty good to me.” I've never been one for following recipes to the letter; his encouragement was all I needed. Of course he also wanted to sell me an imported brand of pappardelle that only he carries, but I went along with that, too.

And yeah, it took all day, but the pay-off (why do I always forget this?) was that the apartment smelled of glorious meat and garlic and spices for hours, and my family was ravenous by the time I served
dinner. “Mom, this is amazing,” my younger son said. And then, the clincher: “Why don't you always cook like this?”

Why not, indeed?

Does anybody cook like that all the time? You'd think so, judging from the artfully composed dinner dishes that crowd my Facebook feed. At 6:30 on a busy weeknight, when I still don't know what I'm going to throw together for dinner that night, those photos make me feel so inadequate. That dialectic—between the obsessive quest for flavor and the demands of just getting something on the table—runs throughout this year's edition of
Best Food Writing
. In my yearlong search through websites, magazines, newspapers, bookstores, and blogs, I found the gulf between the culinary haves and have-nots running deeper than ever.

On the one hand, there's the high end of America's food culture, where top chefs are celebrated like rock stars. Several writers in this year's
Best Food Writing
profile high-level chefs of all stripes, from Ryan Sutton's look at Chicago's inventive Phillip Foss (
page 84
) to Allison Alsup's portrait of New Orleans's “queen of Creole cuisine” Leah Chase (
page 113
). We join Jeff Gordinier for a road trip with Rene Redzepi and Danny Bowien (
page 103
), sit with Tom Junod at the closing night of Wylie Dufresne's wd-50 (
page 76
), and experience an eye-opening event at Dan Barber's Blue Hill with
New York Times
critic Pete Wells (
page 72
).

For today's food-obsessed audiences, dining out is the ultimate indulgence; foodies compete for a reservation at a “hot” restaurant like birders trying to complete their life list. Other writers in this book scrutinize the ever-shifting paradigms of high-end dining—the essence of service (Oliver Strand,
page 54
), the subtle racial message of upscale restaurants (Todd Kliman,
page 63
), and a trend toward focus-group-driven menus (Besha Rodell,
page 46
). We also get tantalizing (or maybe scary) glimpses of dining's high-tech future from Rowan Jacobsen (
page 2
) and Emily Kaiser Thelin (
page 14
).

Gourmet excesses aren't confined to restaurants, of course—home cooks can be just as perfectionistic as chefs. As Russ Parsons (
page 134
) and Daniel Duane (
page 138
) meticulously parse the details of such simple foods as roast chicken and a hamburger, other writers travel
far and wide in their personal quests for culinary traditions—Keith Pandolfi's gumbo pilgrimage (
page 187
), Karen Coates's world-wide chicken journey (
p. 179
), and Matt Goulding's hunt throughout Italy (
page 194
) for the most authentic ragu. (A man after my own heart!)

Yet there's a counterpoint to all this as well, as a rising chorus of other writers reject the gastro-elite's standards and insist on the local, the simple, the handmade, the just-plain-folks end of things. (It's telling that this year, the
New York Times
changed the name of its Wednesday section from Dining to simply Food, to embrace a much wider range of topics.)

As both Molly Watson (
page 40
) and Tamar Haspel (
page 35
) argue, the truth is that daily meal prep can be a thankless chore, even if your kids aren't as bad as the picky eaters Sara Deseran describes (
page 31
). And as Debbie Koenig reminds us (
page 224
), the aspirations of modern foodie-cool culture can be downright depressing to a regular home cook.

Luckily, some of this year's writers share their solutions: J. Kenji López-Alt (
page 128
) demystifies cast-iron cookery, Sarah Grey offers a template for easy family-style entertaining (
page 227
), David Leite (
page 284
) meditates upon the therapeutic value of bread-baking, and Chez Panisse chef Cal Peternell (
page 144
) crafts a shortcut ragu recipe for his son. (Yes, it's officially the Year of Ragu.)

In contrast to high-end dining, we can also admit to loving chain restaurants and takeout joints. John DeVore justifies his passion for Taco Bell (
page 271
), Jane and Michael Stern rave about Nashville hot chicken (
page 167
), John Birdsall longs for Mexican street food (
page 287
), and Jim Shahin swears to the life-giving power of a hoagie (
page 278
).

When it comes right down to it, it's liberating to confess that our appetites are governed by a great deal more than just a discerning palate. Some foods we love simply because of family connections—like Kim Severson's coconut cream pie (
page 237
), Steve Hoffman's sausages (
page 242
), or Zainab Shah's
nihari
stew (
page 251
). Yet that taste-memory trigger is often complicated—witness Nicholás Medina Mora's yearning for carnitas (
page 209
) or Elissa Altman's conditioned reflexes about anything high-cal or high-carb (
page 267
). For Anthony Bourdain (
page 291
), it's not a single dish but the entire gestalt of cooking and eating at the Jersey Shore.

“Why don't you cook like this all the time?” It was my mistake, of course, to read that as a complaint about my customary culinary repertoire. What my son had really been telling me was that he'd loved the
pappardelle al ragu
that night. Nothing more, nothing less.

The night after the ragu dinner, of course, nothing had changed. I was on a tight deadline, and no one in the family seemed to know when (or even whether) they'd be home for dinner. I slung a pan of prepackaged chicken meatballs into the oven and poured bottled dressing over green salad from a plastic bag. Everyone sat at the table more or less at the same time, and gobbled it down while watching
Chopped
on the kitchen TV.

Still, no one complained. It was a good-enough dinner.

And I'm learning to live with that.

The Way We Eat Now
The Way We Eat Now

The Perfect Beast
The Perfect Beast

B
Y
R
OWAN
J
ACOBSEN

From
Outside

          
Rowan Jacobsen, the author of
American Terroir, Apples of Uncommon Character
, and
A Geography of Oysters
, is our go-to guy on issues of how what we eat impacts the planet. Here, the multitalented reporter, science writer, and environmental journalist—visits a futuristic food lab.

I dumped meat a few weeks ago, and it was not an easy breakup. Some of my most treasured moments have involved a deck, a beer, and a cheeseburger. But the more I learned, the more I understood that the relationship wasn't good for either of us. A few things you should never do if you want to eat factory meat in unconflicted bliss: write a story on water scarcity in the American Southwest; Google “How much shit is in my hamburger?”; watch an undercover video of a slaughterhouse in action; and read the 2009 Worldwatch Institute report “Livestock and Climate Change.”

I did them all. And that was that. By then I knew that with every burger I consumed, I was helping to suck America's rivers dry, munching on a fecal casserole seasoned liberally with E. coli, passively condoning an orgy of torture that would make Hannibal Lecter blanch, and accelerating global warming as surely as if I'd plowed my Hummer into a solar installation. We all needed to kick the meat habit, starting with me.

Yet previous attempts had collapsed in the face of time-sucking whole-food preparation and cardboard-scented tofu products. All
the veggie burgers I knew of seemed to come in two flavors of unappealing: the brown-rice, high-carb, nap-inducing mush bomb, and the colon-wrecking gluten chew puck. Soylent? In your pasty dreams. If I couldn't have meat, I needed something damn close. A high-performance, low-commitment protein recharge, good with Budweiser.

I took long, moody walks on the dirt roads near my Vermont house. I passed my neighbor's farm. One of his beef cattle stepped up to the fence and gazed at me. My eyes traced his well-marbled flanks and meaty chest. I stared into those bottomless brown eyes. “I can't quit you,” I whispered to him.

But I did. Not because my willpower suddenly rose beyond its default Lebowski setting, but because a box arrived at my door and made it easy.

Inside were four quarter-pound brown patties. I tossed one on the grill. It hit with a satisfying sizzle. Gobbets of lovely fat began to bubble out. A beefy smell filled the air. I browned a bun. Popped a pilsner. Mustard, ketchup, pickle, onions. I threw it all together with some chips on the side and took a bite. I chewed. I thought. I chewed some more. And then I began to get excited about the future.

It was called the Beast Burger, and it came from a Southern California company called Beyond Meat, located a few blocks from the ocean. At that point, the Beast was still a secret, known only by its code name: the Manhattan Beach Project. I'd had to beg Ethan Brown, the company's 43-year-old CEO, to send me a sample.

And it was vegan. “More protein than beef,” Brown told me when I rang him up after tasting it. “More omegas than salmon. More calcium than milk. More antioxidants than blueberries. Plus muscle-recovery aids. It's the ultimate performance burger.”

“How do you make it so meat-like?” I asked.

“It is meat,” he replied enigmatically. “Come on out. We'll show you our steer.”

Beyond Meat HQ was a brick warehouse located a stone's throw from Chevron's massive El Segundo refinery, which hiccuped gray fumes into the clear California sky. “Old economy, new economy,” Brown said as we stepped inside. Two-dozen wholesome millennials tapped away at laptops on temporary tables in the open space, which looked
remarkably like a set that had been thrown together that morning for a movie about startups. Bikes and surfboards leaned in the corners. In the test kitchen, the Beyond Meat chef, Dave Anderson—former celebrity chef to the stars and cofounder of vegan-mayo company Hampton Creek—was frying experimental burgers made of beans, quinoa, and cryptic green things.

The “steer” was the only one with its own space. It glinted, steely and unfeeling, in the corner of the lab. It was a twin-screw extruder, the food-industry workhorse that churns out all the pastas and Power-Bars of the world. Beyond Meat's main extruders, as well as its 60 other employees, labor quietly in Missouri, producing the company's current generation of meat substitutes, but this was the R&D steer. To make a Beast Burger, powdered pea protein, water, sunflower oil, and various nutrients and natural flavors go into a mixer at one end, are cooked and pressurized, get extruded out the back, and are then shaped into patties ready to be reheated on consumers' grills.

“It's about the dimensions of a large steer, right?” Brown said to me as we admired it. “And it does the same thing.” By which he meant that plant stuff goes in one end, gets pulled apart, and is then reassembled into fibrous bundles of protein. A steer does this to build muscle. The extruder in the Beyond Meat lab does it to make meat. Not meat-like substances, Brown will tell you. Meat. Meat from plants. Because what is meat but a tasty, toothy hunk of protein? Do we really need animals to assemble it for us, or have we reached a stage of enlightenment where we can build machines to do the dirty work for us?

Livestock, in fact, are horribly inefficient at making meat. Only about 3 percent of the plant matter that goes into a steer winds up as muscle. The rest gets burned for energy, ejected as methane, blown off as excess heat, shot out the back of the beast, or repurposed into non-meat-like things such as blood, bone, and brains. The process buries river systems in manure and requires an absurd amount of land. Roughly three-fifths of all farmland is used to grow beef, although it accounts for just 5 percent of our protein. But we love meat, and with the developing world lining up at the table and sharpening their steak knives, global protein consumption is expected to double by 2050.

That's what keeps Brown up at night. A six-foot-five, pillar-armed monument to the power of plant protein, with a voice that makes James
Earl Jones sound effeminate, he became a vegetarian as a teenager growing up in Washington, D.C., after his family bought a Maryland dairy farm. “I began feeling very uncomfortable in my leather basketball shoes,” he says. “Because I knew the cows. I'd pet them all the time.”

In his twenties he became a vegan. “It wasn't emotional. It was a question of fairness,” he says. “‘Why are we treating our dog so well and not the pig?' As you get older, you try to become more coherent.” He was already thinking big. “I wanted to start a plant-based McDonald's.” Instead, he went into the alternative-energy business, working on fuel cells for Vancouver-based Ballard Power Systems. “Somehow energy seemed like a more serious thing to do. But the food idea kept eating at me, until finally I said, ‘You know what, I gotta do this.'”

Brown's aha moment came in 2009, when the Worldwatch Institute published “Livestock and Climate Change,” which carefully assessed the full contribution to greenhouse-gas emissions (GHGs) of the world's cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, horses, pigs, and poultry. An earlier report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization had pegged that contribution at 18 percent, worse than cars and trucks. That's shocking enough, but the Worldwatch study's authors, two analysts from the World Bank, found that the FAO hadn't taken into account the CO
₂
breathed out by our 22 billion livestock animals, the forests being felled to make room for pasture and feed crops, or the total impact of the 103 million tons of methane belched into the air by ruminants each year. When everything was tallied up, Worldwatch estimated, livestock were on the hook for 51 percent of GHGs.

That was all Brown needed to hear to put the plant-based McDonald's back at the top of his agenda. Forget fuel cells. Forget Priuses. If he could topple Meatworld, he thought, he could stop climate change cold.

Brown's first breakthrough came when he discovered Fu-Hung Hsieh, a food scientist at the University of Missouri who had perfected a way to turn soy protein into strips that chewed like chicken. (Top secret, can't tell you, but it has to do with heat, kneading, and cool water.) Brown founded Beyond Meat in 2009, and in 2012, its inaugural product, Beyond Chicken Strips, began wowing the gatekeepers of the food world.

“Most impressive,” said Food Network geek Alton Brown. “It's more like meat than anything I've ever seen that wasn't meat.”

“Fooled me badly,” Mark Bittman admitted in his
New York Times
food column. It also fooled Twitter cofounder (and vegan) Biz Stone, so he invested in the company.

So did Bill Gates, whose Gates Foundation backs potentially world-saving innovations. “I tasted Beyond Meat's chicken alternative,” he wrote online, “and honestly couldn't tell it from real chicken.” Gates quickly realized the blockbuster potential. “Our approach to food hasn't changed much over the last 100 years. It's ripe for reinvention. We're just at the beginning of enormous innovation.”

Gates sat down with Brown in 2012 and gave him some tips, which the entrepreneur took to heart. As Brown recalls, “He said to me, ‘If you get this thing to cost less than meat, and you get international quickly enough, then this is huge.'”

The scalability is there: Beyond Meat's manufacturing process uses a small fraction of the land, water, energy, crops, and time that making real meat does, and it requires no new technology. And the timing is right. Whole Foods has enthusiastically sold Beyond Chicken Strips, which retail for $5.29 for a nine-ounce bag, from the very beginning. And although Brown wouldn't disclose sales numbers (“Our competitors definitely make use of this type of information,” he says), Beyond Meat expanded from 1,500 to 6,000 stores in 2014, including mainstreamers like Safeway.

Even the fast-food industry is coming around. When Chipotle added shredded-tofu Sofritas to its burrito options at a few California restaurants in 2013, sales outstripped expectations. Half the Sofritas buyers, Chipotle found, were meat eaters. Chipotle is now rolling them out across the country, the first new item it has added in ten years. One rapidly growing restaurant chain, Veggie Grill, an all-vegan West Coast eatery, offers seemingly familiar fast-food items like Mondo Nachos and Crispy Chickin' with meat replacements made from soy and gluten.

But you can't fix climate change with fake chicken. Although the 21 billion cluckers around the world consume vast amounts of crops and choke waterways with their manure, their impact is dwarfed by the 1.5 billion head of cattle. It takes about 9,000 calories of edible feed to produce 1,000 calories of edible chicken and 11,000 calories of feed
for 1,000 calories of pork—a far cry from the 36,000 calories required for 1,000 calories of beef. More important, cattle and their ruminant cousins—sheep, goats, buffalo—produce geysers of methane during digestion. One molecule of methane traps 25 times as much heat as a molecule of CO
₂
, so each cow produces the annual GHGs of a car driven about 9,375 miles. Per pound, that's eight times more than chickens and five times more than pigs.

There are, of course, lots of good arguments for raising cattle sustainably: it's easier on both the animals and the land. But it's no solution when it comes to global warming. Grass-fed beef generates significantly more methane and has nearly twice the carbon footprint of its grain-fed kin.

If Brown was going to tackle climate change, he had to hack beef.

Beef flavor has never been all that difficult to approximate—some salt, some aroma molecules, and bingo. The juiciness and the chew are the real challenges. The meat industry acknowledged as much in a 2006 trade publication: “Meat texture is supremely important. Texturized vegetable protein, something that could be quite a commercial threat to us . . . has, so far, made little impact,” wrote the meat scientist Howard Swatland, author of
Meat Cuts and Muscle Foods
. “This is because food technologists so far have been unable to extrude their plant proteins into anything resembling real meat. The taste and colour can be faked quite easily, but the texture cannot. In a way, therefore, it is the texture of meat, and the fact that many of our customers love to eat it, that keeps us all in business.”

Muscle is made up of bundles of long, thin fibers wrapped in tough connective tissue, like shrink-wrapped logs. Scattered through the fiber packets are tiny pockets of fat, which the body draws on for energy. A lot of the joy of meat is the feeling of your teeth punching through these bundles, the fat and juice squirting as you chomp.

Plant proteins, on the other hand, are not aligned or bundled. They're more like random piles of sticks. They have none of the tensile strength or moisture-retention properties of muscle, which is why earlier generations of veggie burgers fell apart and lacked the release of rich, juicy fats. The only exception is gluten, the protein found in wheat, which has some amazing qualities. It forms a spring-like structure that can expand
and contract, making dough stretchy and retaining moisture in its matrix of interlinked proteins. But those long proteins also like to curl in on themselves like a nest of snakes, which prevents digestive enzymes from getting at them. When that partially digested gluten makes it into the gut of someone with celiac disease, the immune system mistakes the intact proteins for evil microbes, freaks out, and strafes the intestine with friendly fire. Even those who don't have an adverse response to wheat often find the concentrated gluten in veggie burgers to be digestively challenging.