A Culinary Videos Series Shows Every Conceivable Way to Cook Eggs, Potatoes, Pizza, Bacon & More

in Comedy, Food & Drink | April 28th, 2023

So you think you know your way around a pota­to, eh?

No doubt you excel at boil­ing, mash­ing, roast­ing, bak­ing and twice bak­ing …

You may make a mean pota­to chip or pomme frite…

Per­haps you’ve per­fect­ed some tricks with a microwave or air fry­er.

But before you’re puffed too full of brag­ging rights, have you ever thought to sub­ject this hum­ble root veg­etable to a blow torch, an iron, a dish­wash­er, a juicer or a gaso­line pow­ered gen­er­a­tor plugged into a giant dim­mer switch?

No?

Con­grat­u­la­tions on hav­ing avoid­ed some tru­ly dread­ful meth­ods for prepar­ing a pota­to, judg­ing by the results of some of Bon Appétit Con­tribut­ing Edi­tor Amiel Stanek’s more out­ré, tongue-in-cheek exper­i­ments, above.

Wait, maybe there aren’t real­ly 63 ways to cook pota­toes?

The prepa­ra­tion we’re legit­i­mate­ly eager to try is pick­ling, for spuds Stanek declares “very sweet, salty, acidic”, a wel­come addi­tion to a cheese board or a cru­dité plate.

And there’s an argu­ment to be made for turn­ing a waf­fle iron into a dual pur­pose device by mak­ing hash browns in it.

Stanek fares less well, pip­ing pre-mashed pota­toes into a Rol­lie ® Eggmas­ter, “a weird, made-for-TV device that is made express­ly for cook­ing eggs:”

Ewww, no, why is it like that? This is dis­gust­ing!!!

If you’re won­der­ing how that Rol­lie ® does with its intend­ed ingre­di­ent, Stanek’s got an answer for you:

Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, oh my god, it looks like it’s in a con­dom. This is the most dis­gust­ing egg thing we have made all day…it tastes like bad seafood. I don’t know why, it tastes plastic‑y. This is hor­ri­ble!

Mean­while, those in long term rela­tion­ships with part­ners hold­ing dif­fer­ent views on the best way to scram­ble, fry or poach an egg may find them­selves feel­ing vin­di­cat­ed by this episode.

Either that or hor­ri­bly betrayed.

Oth­er than pota­toes and eggs, the only episode of the 10 in the Almost Every series not exclu­sive­ly geared toward cook­ing flesh is the one devot­ed to piz­za, which at 32 meth­ods, ties with chick­en breast. (Only whole chick­en, at 24 meth­ods, has few­er options.)

Veg­ans will like­ly feel unim­pressed, in addi­tion to left out, giv­en that there’s near­ly that many sug­gest­ed hacks for melt­ing plant-based cheese.

Per­haps a vis­it to Moon­burg­er, a meat­less Hud­son Val­ley chain where Stanek is Culi­nary Con­sul­tant and the shakes are dairy free is in order?

Those crav­ing ever more off­beat attacks, how­ev­er, will find them­selves enter­tained by Stanek’s efforts involv­ing an Easy-Bake Oven (yeah, nope, not good at all),  a Teenage Mutant Nin­ja Tur­tle Piz­za Machine (the whole cheese sitch looks a lit­tle bit demented…bummer, dude), and a crust that’s baked around a sil­i­cone cone, then filled with a “molten, dan­ger­ous slur­ry” of sauce and cheese (this thing looks demon­ic to me, like an ani­mal horn meant for a Satan­ic rit­u­al…)

If that’s not our cue to seek out a restau­rant with a wood burn­ing oven, per­haps it’s a sig­nal we should order out.

Watch a com­plete playlist of Bon Appétit’s Almost Every here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

10,000 Vin­tage Recipe Books Are Now Dig­i­tized in The Inter­net Archive’s Cook­book & Home Eco­nom­ics Col­lec­tion

The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Avail­able Online: Japan­ese, Ital­ian, Thai & Much More

The Recipes of Famous Artists: Din­ners & Cock­tails From Tol­stoy, Miles Davis, Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe, David Lynch & Many More

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Why the Ancient Romans Had Better Teeth Than Modern Europeans

in Food & Drink, History | April 21st, 2023

The cas­es for trav­el­ing back in time and liv­ing in a past era are many and var­ied, but the case against doing so is always the same: den­tistry. In every chap­ter of human his­to­ry before this one, so we’re often told, every­one lived in at least a low-lev­el state of agony inflict­ed by tooth prob­lems, to say noth­ing of the unimag­in­able unsight­li­ness of their smiles. But as jus­ti­fied as we prob­a­bly are in laugh­ing at the pearly whites on dis­play in Hol­ly­wood peri­od pieces, the his­tor­i­cal record con­flicts with our belief that the fur­ther you go into the past, the worst every­one’s teeth: ancient Romans, as explained in the Told In Stone video above, actu­al­ly had bet­ter teeth than mod­ern Euro­peans.

That’s hard­ly a high bar to clear, a mod­ern Amer­i­can may joke. But then, the Unit­ed States today takes den­tal care to an almost obses­sive lev­el, where­as the cit­i­zens of the Roman Empire had prac­ti­cal­ly noth­ing to work with by com­par­i­son. “The stan­dard, and often sole imple­ment employed to clean teeth was a tooth­pick,” says Told in Stone cre­ator Gar­rett Ryan. These “were paired with tooth pow­ders, which were rubbed over the teeth and gums with an enthu­si­as­tic fin­ger.” Ingre­di­ents includ­ed “pumice, pul­ver­ized bone, pow­dered glass, and crushed shell,” or some­times “sheep­’s sweat and the ash of a wolf’s head.” — all a far cry from any­thing offered on the tooth­paste aisle today.

“Bad breath was a chron­ic con­di­tion in the clas­si­cal world,” and “toothache seems to have been almost equal­ly preva­lent.” The treat­ment most com­mon­ly prac­ticed by Roman den­tists was extrac­tion, per­formed with­out anes­thet­ic. Yet only about a third of the pre­served skele­tons recov­ered from the ruins of Pom­peii and Her­cu­la­neum were miss­ing teeth, “and rel­a­tive­ly few had cav­i­ties.”  Though many soci­eties today take den­tal con­di­tion as a mark­er of class, in ancient Rome the rela­tion­ship was, to a cer­tain extent, reversed: “A young girl wear­ing expen­sive jew­el­ry, for exam­ple, already had five cav­i­ties, prob­a­bly because her fam­i­ly could afford to give her plen­ty of snacks smoth­ered in expen­sive and sug­ary hon­ey.”

Indeed, “in the absence of processed sug­ar, oral bac­te­ria were less aggres­sive than they are today.” Romans got cav­i­ties, but “the per­va­sive black­ened teeth and hol­low cheeks of ear­ly mod­ern Europe,”  an era at the unfor­tu­nate inter­sec­tion of rel­a­tive­ly plen­ti­ful sug­ar and rel­a­tive­ly prim­i­tive den­tistry, “were near­ly as dis­tant from the Roman expe­ri­ence as they are from ours.” Some of us here in the sug­ar-sat­u­rat­ed twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, with its con­stant pur­suit of den­tal per­fec­tion, may now be con­sid­er­ing the poten­tial ben­e­fits of shift­ing to an ancient Roman diet — with­out, of course, all those tiny, enam­el-abrad­ing stones that had a way of end­ing up in ancient Roman bread.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Try the Old­est Known Recipe For Tooth­paste: From Ancient Egypt, Cir­ca the 4th Cen­tu­ry BC

Explore the Roman Cook­book, De Re Coquinar­ia, the Old­est Known Cook­book in Exis­tence

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er an Ancient Roman Snack Bar in the Ruins of Pom­peii

Bars, Beer & Wine in Ancient Rome: An Intro­duc­tion to Roman Nightlife and Spir­its

The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved: Why Has Roman Con­crete Been So Durable?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Historical Italian Cooking: How to Make Ancient Roman & Medieval Italian Dishes

in Food & Drink, History | April 11th, 2023

Italy is wide­ly cel­e­brat­ed for hav­ing vig­i­lant­ly pre­served its food cul­ture, with the result that many dish­es there are still pre­pared in more or less the same way they have been for cen­turies. When you taste Ital­ian food at its best, you taste his­to­ry — to bor­row the name of a Youtube chan­nel whose suc­cess has revealed a sur­pris­ing­ly wide­spread enthu­si­asm for the cui­sine of bygone eras. But some of Italy’s most glob­al­ly beloved comestibles aren’t quite as deeply root­ed in the past as peo­ple tend to assume: there are no records of tiramisu, for instance, before the nine­teen-six­ties; cia­bat­ta, the Ital­ian answer to the baguette, was invent­ed in the ear­ly nine­teen-eight­ies.

Nei­ther of them appear any­where in His­tor­i­cal Ital­ian Cook­ing, a bilin­gual blog in Eng­lish and Ital­ian that teach­es how to par­take in far more ven­er­a­ble culi­nary tra­di­tions. A vari­ety of peri­ods are rep­re­sent­ed: the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry (Neapoli­tan cala­mari, tagli­atelle and beef stew), the Renais­sance (cros­ti­ni with guan­ciale and sage, elder­flow­ers frit­ters), the Mid­dle Ages (monk’s stuffed-egg soup, quails with sumac), and even the time of ancient Rome (cut­tle­fish cakes, Horace’s lagana and chick­peas).

You can also see these and oth­er dish­es pre­pared on His­tor­i­cal Ital­ian Cook­ing’s Youtube chan­nel, which offers playlists orga­nized by era, region, and chief ingre­di­ent: Medieval Tus­can recipes, ancient fish recipes, ear­ly medieval recipes at the court of the Franks.

His­tor­i­cal Ital­ian Cook­ing’s most pop­u­lar video shows every step involved in mak­ing “the most famous ancient Mediter­ranean sauce, garum.” The recipe comes straight from De Re Coquinar­ia, the old­est known cook­book in exis­tence, which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. If you’d like to try your hand at mak­ing this bold condi­ment, make sure you’ve got the time: you’ll have to let the fish it’s made of it sit for at least a few days, stir­ring it three or four times per day, though some recipes sug­gest con­tin­u­ing this process for three or four months before the garum is ready to eat. If, on fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion, you’d pre­fer to make a piz­za, His­tor­i­cal Ital­ian Cook­ing can help with that as well: just make sure you’ve got enough lard and quails.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Free Course from MIT Teach­es You How to Speak Ital­ian & Cook Ital­ian Food All at Once

The Futur­ist Cook­book (1930) Tried to Turn Ital­ian Cui­sine into Mod­ern Art

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

When Ital­ian Futur­ists Declared War on Pas­ta (1930)

Explore the Roman Cook­book, De Re Coquinar­ia, the Old­est Known Cook­book in Exis­tence

Ital­ian Advice on How to Live the Good Life: Cig­a­rettes, Toma­toes, and Oth­er Pic­turesque Small Plea­sures

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How to Develop Photographs with Coffee

in Food & Drink, Photography | April 5th, 2023

James Hoff­mann knows some­thing about cof­fee. He’s authored The World Atlas of Cof­fee and runs a pro­lif­ic YouTube chan­nel, where he cov­ers every­thing from mak­ing cof­fee with the Aero­Press and MokaPot, to brew­ing the per­fect espres­so and also pro­vid­ing basic cof­fee mak­ing tips & tricks. Pret­ty bread and but­ter stuff, if you can use that expres­sion when talk­ing about cof­fee. But he also cov­ers some sub­jects at the mar­gins of the cof­fee world–like how to devel­op pho­tographs with cof­fee. Above, Hoff­mann intro­duces you to Caf­fenol, a process where­by pho­tographs can be devel­oped with cof­fee and some­times Vit­a­min C. To take a deep­er dive into the sub­ject, you’ll want to explore PetaPix­el’s primer, Caf­fenol: A Guide to Devel­op­ing B&W Film with Cof­fee.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Every­thing You Ever Want­ed to Know about the Bialet­ti Moka Express: A Deep Dive Into Italy’s Most Pop­u­lar Cof­fee Mak­er

The Birth of Espres­so: The Sto­ry Behind the Cof­fee Shots That Fuel Mod­ern Life

Deep Fried Cof­fee: A Very Dis­turb­ing Dis­cov­ery

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Understanding Espresso: A Six-Part Series Explaining What It Takes to Pull the Ideal Shot

in Food & Drink | March 28th, 2023

It does­n’t take long to learn how to pull a shot of espres­so. Search for that phrase on Youtube, and you’ll find hours’ worth of sound instruc­tion, most of it in the form of brief and eas­i­ly digestible videos. All of them cov­er the same basic stages of the process: grind­ing, dos­ing, tamp­ing, and brew­ing. When exam­ined close­ly, each of those stages reveals a for­mi­da­ble body of knowl­edge to mas­ter. If any one Youtu­ber can lay claim to hav­ing mas­tered all of them, it must be James Hoff­mann, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his videos on sub­jects from deep-fried cof­fee to the clas­sic Bialet­ti Moka Express. In the six-part series above, he offers view­ers an overview of all they need to know to achieve a true under­stand­ing of espres­so.

Episode by episode, Hoff­mann explains how to choose the right dose of cof­fee, ratio between the amount of ground and liq­uid cof­fee, brew time, grind size, brew tem­per­a­ture, and pres­sure. Of course, there is no sin­gle uni­ver­sal­ly cor­rect set­ting or amount of any of these things: each is a vari­able with its own range of effects on the shot of espres­so ulti­mate­ly yield­ed.

Each drinker, too, has a dif­fer­ent con­cep­tion of the taste and tex­ture of the ide­al espres­so shot, and con­sis­tent­ly real­iz­ing those qual­i­ties — or at least get­ting close — neces­si­tates no small amount of tri­al and error. But those who lis­ten well to Hoff­man­n’s expla­na­tions will sure­ly end up with few­er errors, and in any case get more enjoy­ment from the tri­als.

Watch “Under­stand­ing Espres­so,” and you’re going to want to know how Hoff­mann pulls shots for him­self. This he address­es in a bonus episode — unsur­pris­ing­ly, the longest one of the bunch — which shows his entire process in detail, from prepar­ing the beans to stir­ring and sip­ping. Along the way, he also intro­duces the vari­ety of spe­cial­ized devices he uses: a strong draw for his many cof­fee-gear­head sub­scribers, but one he presents with the caveat that you real­ly don’t need to go high-end all the way in order to live your best espres­so life. Even so, the ded­i­cat­ed home enthu­si­ast must put in con­sid­er­ably more time and atten­tion than the aver­age chain-cof­fee-shop barista. “Cafés want to make good espres­so as quick­ly and eas­i­ly as pos­si­ble,” he reminds us. “We want to make incred­i­ble espres­so every time.”

You can watch the entire playlist, from start to fin­ish, at the very top of the post.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Birth of Espres­so: The Sto­ry Behind the Cof­fee Shots That Fuel Mod­ern Life

Cof­fee Col­lege: Every­thing You Want­ed to Know about Cof­fee Mak­ing in One Lec­ture

All Espres­so Drinks Explained: Cap­puc­ci­no, Lat­te, Mac­chi­a­to & Beyond

Every­thing You Ever Want­ed to Know about the Bialet­ti Moka Express: A Deep Dive Into Italy’s Most Pop­u­lar Cof­fee Mak­er

Life and Death of an Espres­so Shot in Super Slow Motion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Jancis Robinson’s Wine Course: Explore the TV Series That Introduced the Wines of the World (1995)

in Food & Drink | March 15th, 2023

“The word ‘con­nois­seur’ is not an attrac­tive one,” writes Jan­cis Robin­son in her mem­oir Tast­ing Plea­sure: Con­fes­sions of a Wine Lover. “It smacks of exclu­siv­i­ty, pre­cious­ness and elit­ism.” Indeed, “con­nois­seur­ship is not a nec­es­sary state for wine appre­ci­a­tion. It is per­fect­ly pos­si­ble to enjoy wine enor­mous­ly with­out real­ly under­stand­ing it. But a con­nois­seur sees each indi­vid­ual wine in its his­tor­i­cal, geo­graph­i­cal and soci­o­log­i­cal con­text and is tru­ly sen­si­tive to its pos­si­bil­i­ties.” Those who drink wine too care­less­ly or too strin­gent­ly, “those who will not meet a wine halfway, and who con­sis­tent­ly ignore the sto­ry each wine has to tell, deprive them­selves of a large part of the poten­tial plea­sure asso­ci­at­ed with each bot­tle.”

How best to expe­ri­ence that plea­sure — or rather, how best to attain the state of con­nois­seur­ship that makes it acces­si­ble in the first place? One could do worse than start­ing with the works of Robin­son her­self, who’s not just one of the most respect­ed wine writ­ers alive today, but also one­time super­vi­sor of the lux­u­ry wine selec­tion on British Air­ways’ Con­corde and advi­sor for the wine cel­lar of the late Queen Eliz­a­beth II.

Since she began cov­er­ing wine pro­fes­sion­al­ly near­ly half a cen­tu­ry ago, she has pro­duced a great deal of work in print as well as for the screen. Among the lat­ter, per­haps the most ambi­tious is Jan­cis Robin­son’s Wine Course, whose ten episodes orig­i­nal­ly aired on BBC 2 in 1995 and are now avail­able to watch on Robin­son’s own Youtube chan­nel.

With this $1.6 mil­lion pro­duc­tion, Robin­son was “set loose on the wine world, far too much of the time in full make­up, with fresh­ly done hair and clothes sub­si­dized by an offi­cial BBC bud­get.” Ded­i­cat­ing each episode to a dif­fer­ent grape vari­etal “allowed us with­in a sin­gle pro­gram to vis­it more than one region — and there­fore vary the scenery, archi­tec­ture and cli­mate. It also reflect­ed my pas­sion­ate inter­est in grape vari­eties and my con­vic­tion that com­ing to grips with the most impor­tant grapes pro­vides the eas­i­est route to learn­ing about wine.” The year­long shoot took her and her team around the globe, vis­it­ing wine­mak­ers wher­ev­er they could be found: France, Ger­many, Aus­tralia, Chile, and even north­ern Cal­i­for­nia, where they man­aged an audi­ence with auteur-vint­ner Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la.

“The con­flict between the New and Old Worlds of wine was com­ing nice­ly to a head at just the right time for our series, Robin­son notes.” Those worlds have set­tled into a kind of rel­a­tive peace in the decades since — as has the “Chardon­nay boom” of the mid-nine­teen-nineties, about which Robin­son lets slip some frus­tra­tion onscreen. Despite her vast knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence of wine, Robin­son sel­dom shows any hes­i­tan­cy to crack a joke, and sure­ly her con­tin­ued promi­nence as a wine edu­ca­tor owes some­thing to that sense of humor, on dis­play in the Talks at Google inter­view about her 2016 book The 24-Hour Wine Expert. More recent­ly, she entered into anoth­er col­lab­o­ra­tion with the BBC, specif­i­cal­ly the new BBC Mae­stro online edu­ca­tion plat­form, to cre­ate the course “An Under­stand­ing of Wine.” In all pur­suits, under­stand­ing is the basis of plea­sure — but in wine, even more so.

Episodes of Jan­cis Robin­son’s Wine Course:

 

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Vin­tage Wine Course (UC Davis, 1973)

High-Tech Japan­ese Cam­era Proves That the Shape of a Wine Glass Affects the Fla­vor of Wines

Sal­vador Dali’s 1978 Wine Guide, The Wines of Gala, Gets Reis­sued: Sen­su­al Viti­cul­ture Meets Sur­re­al Art

Storm: New Short Film Cap­tures the Artistry of Wine­mak­ing

How to Open a Wine Bot­tle with Your Shoe

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Cookery Course: Free Video Lessons

in Food & Drink, Television | March 6th, 2023

Our def­i­n­i­tion of bud­get cook­ery may dif­fer from celebri­ty chef Gor­don Ram­sey’s.

True, the world famous restau­ran­teur and cook­book author speaks of cheap cuts with mes­sian­ic zeal, but the episode of Gor­don Ramsey’s Ulti­mate Cook­ery Course ded­i­cat­ed to Food on a Bud­get, above, also finds him pay­ing a call to Lina Stores’ SoHo loca­tion to dis­cuss ham, sausages, and sala­mi with the late “deli mae­stro” Anto­nio Sac­co­mani.

It’s not exact­ly Cost­co.

Nor can we buy bone-in Lamb with fried bread as a cost con­scious dish, though the accom­pa­ny­ing milk soaked fried bread — home­made crou­tons real­ly — will cost slight­ly less to make this year, as the USDA is pre­dict­ing that dairy prices will fall after 2022’s his­toric lev­els.

As long as we’re at peace with the idea that the man is not ever going to be found stretch­ing rice and beans to feed a fam­i­ly of four for a week when there’s left­over risot­to to be res­ur­rect­ed as aranci­ni, the series is a gold­mine for chefs of all bud­gets and expe­ri­ence lev­els.

It’s not so much the final dish­es, as the short cuts and best prac­tices on the jour­ney.

His “chef in Paris” might indeed kill him for ugly­ing up a dish with deli­cious­ly hum­ble pan scrap­ings, but his iron­clad max­ims to waste noth­ing and use avail­able ingre­di­ents will ben­e­fit home chefs with an eye on the bot­tom line, as well as pros in high end restau­rants where prof­it mar­gins turn on a knife’s edge.

In an age when any fool can Google up dozens of fool­proof meth­ods for cook­ing rice, some­times it’s reas­sur­ing to get this sort of intel straight from the lips of a glob­al­ly rec­og­nized expert. (We’re big fans of Julia Child’s scram­bled eggs…)

How does your method mea­sure up against Ramsey’s freely shared secret for cook­ing per­fect rice?

Weigh out 400 grams of rice on a kitchen scale

Rinse with cold water

Sea­son with salt and pep­per, and — going up the food chain a bit — 3 pierced car­damom pods and a star anise

Add 600 grams of water (that’s a 1:1.5 ratio for those play­ing along with­out kitchen scales or the met­ric sys­tem) 

Bring to a boil, and steam, cov­ered for 8–10  min­utes 

No peek­ing!

Remove pot from heat and fluff

Such uni­ver­sal tips are the most per­sua­sive rea­son to stick with the series.

Ramsey’s rapid fire deliv­ery and lack of linked recipes may leave you feel­ing a bit lost in regard to exact mea­sure­ments, tem­per­a­tures, and step by step instruc­tions, but keep your ears peeled and you’ll quick­ly pick up on how to extend fresh herbs’ shelf life and keep cut pota­toes, apples and avo­ca­dos look­ing their best.

Oth­er episodes reveal how to grease cake tins, pre­vent milk from boil­ing over, remove baked-on residue, peel kiwis and man­gos, deter­mine a pineapple’s ripeness, seed pome­gran­ates, skin toma­toes, and keep plas­tic con­tain­ers stain-free…

Seri­ous­ly, who needs Tik­Tok when we have Gor­don Ram­sey 2012?

Ramsey’s advice to bypass expen­sive wine when cook­ing those com­par­a­tive­ly cheap cuts of meat low and slow gets a chef’s kiss from us. (In full dis­clo­sure, we would hap­pi­ly swig his brais­ing vin­tage.)

As to the slow-cooked duck, truf­fles and caramelized figs with ricot­ta, we must remind our­selves that the series is over 10 years old. These days even eggs feel like a splurge..

Per­haps some stress free cook­ing tips will low­er our stress lev­el over this week’s gro­cery expen­di­tures?

Here too, there seems to be some dis­crep­an­cy in Ram­sey’s def­i­n­i­tion and the gen­er­al pub­lic’s. His idea of stress free is achieved through lots of prep­work

If your idea of de-stress­ing involves skin­ning & debon­ing a salmon or mak­ing home­made fish stock, you’re in luck.

Obvi­ous­ly the end prod­uct will be deli­cious but the phrase “chili chick­en with gin­ger & corian­der” acti­vates both our sali­vary glands and our impulse to order out…

Watch a full playlist of Gor­don Ram­say’s Ulti­mate Cook­ery Course here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Watch Antho­ny Bourdain’s First Food-and-Trav­el Series A Cook’s Tour Free Online (2002–03)

Watch 26 Free Episodes of Jacques Pépin’s TV Show, More Fast Food My Way

How Cook­ing Can Change Your Life: A Short Ani­mat­ed Film Fea­tur­ing the Wis­dom of Michael Pol­lan

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Discover Pemmican, The Power Bar Invented Centuries Ago by Native American Tribes

in Food & Drink, Health, K-12, Nature | March 3rd, 2023

Out­door enthu­si­asts of a non-veg­e­tar­i­an stripe, do you weary of gar­den vari­ety ener­gy bars and trail mix?

Per­haps you’re feel­ing adven­tur­ous enough to make your own pem­mi­can, var­i­ous­ly described by Tast­ing His­to­ry’s Max Miller, above, as “history’s Pow­er Bar” and “a meaty ver­sion of a sur­vival food that has a shelf life not mea­sured in months but in decades, just like hard tack.”

Per­haps you’re already well acquaint­ed with this  low-carb, keto­genic portable pro­vi­sion, a culi­nary sta­ple of the upper half of North Amer­i­ca long before the first Euro­pean traders set foot on the land. Many indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties across North Amer­i­ca are still pro­duc­ing pem­mi­can for both per­son­al and cer­e­mo­ni­al con­sump­tion.

Back in 1743, Hudson’s Bay Com­pa­ny fur trad­er James Isham was one of the first to doc­u­ment pem­mi­can pro­duc­tion for an Eng­lish read­er­ship:

 [Meat] beat between two Stones, till some of itt is as small as Dust…when pound­ed they putt itt into a bag and will Keep for sev­er­al Years, the Bones they also pound small and Boil them…to Reserve the fatt, which fatt is fine and sweet as any Butter…Reckon’d by some Very good food by the Eng­lish as well as Natives.

Per­haps now would be a good time to give thanks for the plen­ti­ful food options most of us have access to in the 21st-cen­tu­ry (and pay it for­ward with a dona­tion to an orga­ni­za­tion fight­ing food inse­cu­ri­ty…)

A time may come when know­ing how to make pem­mi­can could give us a leg up on sur­viv­ing, but for now, exe­cu­tion of this recipe is like­ly more of a curios­i­ty sat­is­fi­er.

To be fair, it’s not designed to be a del­i­ca­cy, but rather an extreme­ly long last­ing source of calo­ries, four times as nour­ish­ing as the same weight of fresh meat.

If you want to try it, lay in 2 pounds of meat — bison is his­tor­i­cal­ly the most pop­u­lar and most doc­u­ment­ed, but deer, elk, moose, beef, fish, or fowl work well too.

You’ll also need an equal amount of suet, though heed Miller’s advice and add just enough to make things stick.

Bump the fla­vor up a notch with ground dried berries, sug­ar, or salt.

(Miller went the tra­di­tion­al route with choke­ber­ries, pro­cured in an extreme­ly 21st-cen­tu­ry man­ner.)

In terms of appli­ances, feel free to use such mod­ern con­ve­niences as your oven, your blender, and a small pan or mold.

(Please report back if you take the old school route with fire, direct sun­light, mor­tar, pes­tle, and a bag formed from undressed hide.)

Giv­en Miller’s response to the fin­ished dish, we’re hunch­ing most of us will rest con­tent to feast on his­tor­i­cal con­text alone, as Miller digs into the Pem­mi­can Procla­ma­tion of 1814, the Sev­en Oaks Inci­dent and the unique role the bira­cial, bilin­gual Métis peo­ple of Cana­da played in the North Amer­i­can fur trade…

Those still up for it should feel free to take their pem­mi­can to the next lev­el by boil­ing it with wild onions or the tops of parsnips, to pro­duce a ruba­boo or rechaud, as bushcrafter Mark Young does below.

You can also get a taste of pem­mi­can by order­ing the Tan­ka Bars that Oglala Lako­ta-owned small busi­ness pro­duces on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reser­va­tion.

Watch more of Max Miller’s Tast­ing His­to­ry videos here.

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday. 

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