Nixtamalnutrition

21 Apr 2020 2 Comments

by scolgin in Humor, Markets & Stores Tags: , , , , , , , ,

One of the most troubling aspects of home isolation is that it compels you to indulge your worst food-nerd impulses. I was lying in bed this morning thinking about actually making puff pastry, for example.

Unable to pop out on my various weekly forays to my favorite ethnic markets (“How is he sourcing green papaya without access to the Island Pacific Indonesian market!?” you’re probably wondering…), I find myself lurking about food websites, coveting assorted sundries but bristling at exorbitant shipping costs.

The marketers are smart. They have collected enough data on me to know exactly where and when to strike. So it was that I received an email from Anson Mills, my favorite artisanal grain mill (do you have a favorite artisanal grain mill!??) in South Carolina. There were lots of wonderful seasonal products they knew I needed. But none so essential to my current housebound predicament as dried hominy corn and calcium hydroxide (i.e. “lime”).

Among those food-nerd thresholds I had yet to cross was nixtamalization. I had just received, as a pandemic present to myself, Enrique Olvera’s new beautiful Phaidon cookbook, “Mi Casa Tu Casa,” in which the celebrated Mexican chef goes into some depth about the process of making masa, the cornmeal essential to tortillas. I had made homemade corn tortillas many times, but always with masa harina — pre-ground, instant corn dough produced in an industrial process with commercial corn. The product was always good, yet nothing — Olvera assured me — but a shadow of what you got with heirloom corn varieties produced in the traditional method. The eerily coincidental timing of the Anson Mills email (sucker) made me realize the time to take the nixtamal plunge was now.

It took a couple weeks for my Henry Moore varietal field-ripened corn and bag of lime to arrive. Soon the kitchen was filled with the comforting smell of corn steeping in burbling lime water. The next day, I summoned Flynn who helped with making masa balls and pressing them flat in the tortilla press. I had to overcome the technical obstacle of not having a fancy Molinito masa grinder, which was accomplished with the Vitamix and more water than is preferable — resulting in the need to add some masa harina after all to get the proper consistency. That night, we enjoyed spectacular Baja fish tacos and chile verde tacos, wrapped in our own deliciously rustic, corn-fragrant tortillas. A few days later, Flynn and I got in the kitchen and did it all over again.

I was now in deep. But there was further to go…

Enrique Olvera buys his hominy from Masienda — a company that has single-handedly rescued an array of nearly extinct heirloom corn varietals from Oaxaca and other points deepest Mexico. I went to masienda.com, and I didn’t stand a chance.

When I can get stacks of 50 decent, freshly made corn tortillas for $2 at the Vallarta market, is it really worth spending $13.50 plus $18 shipping and several days’ work to make my own stack of 30 heirloom varietal corn tortillas. What do you think?

Next stop: puff pastry.

Shopping in the Time of Coronavirus

21 Mar 2020 11 Comments

by scolgin in Humor, Markets & Stores, Observations Tags: , , , , , , ,

Today, I went grocery shopping.

“Don’t touch anything!” my wife suggested helpfully as I left the house.

We weren’t in “need” of food, exactly — we could’ve easily lasted a month or more on the supplies in our amply stocked freezer, pantry and garage before even resorting to turning on the chickens and pig or trying to grind acorns. But the half-and-half was running low, we were almost out of kale… And I was getting cabin fever. (My nascent experiment as a home-schooler parent in danger of going horribly awry.) So it was time.

Eerily quiet at the expensive Bristol Farms

The world was strangely quiet, like driving around on early Christmas morning. I got to the local Ralph’s supermarket, where there was a line stretching across the parking lot (although people were maintaining 6 feet between one another). I turned to leave the parking lot to try somewhere else, before realizing that the line was moving fairly swiftly, and seeing a sign that said, “Only 50 family groups allowed in at a time. Help us maintain space between shoppers.” This seemed fairly sensible, and as I was in no particular hurry, I parked and queued up.

The spirit in the line was jovial, people making virus jokes whilst keeping proper distance from their potential infector beside them. Inside, the store was sparsely populated. It wasn’t quite Soviet bread line shopping — there was plenty of food to be had, although the selection was somewhat picked over. And if you were Italian, for example, and having a spaghetti jones, forget it. A man near the deli counter sneezed, and the store froze. He raised his hands defensively, like a bank robber caught in the act, people exhaled and carried on.

Figuring I would want to hunker down at home the next few days and watch what happened with the viral numbers, I planned to get in as much shopping as I could. My next stop was the Vallarta Mexican super mercado. Aside from limits on tortillas and the requisite empty toilet paper aisle, things seemed more or less normal. I grabbed some pork and Oaxaca cheese, loaded up on my limit of Sonora rustic tortillas and headed out.

It was a different scene at Trader Joe’s. Whether they were limiting the number of shoppers or simply overwhelmed I couldn’t tell, but the line stretched around the side of the building and off into the distance toward the Target. I didn’t even slow down. Instead, I would head for the Trader Joe’s in Calabasas, where the beautiful people live and don’t put up with queueing. Sure enough, I parked and walked right in. Like the Ralph’s, there was no pasta. But I got lettuce and the prized half-and-half, plus beer and whisky; and everything after that was icing on the cake. There was a strict limit on many items here as well.

Heroic checkers at the Calabasas Gelsons

“Is he allowed to get two of these?” the young clerk asked her supervisor. The supervisor glanced at my half-and-halfs, looked at me, and looked at her. “The limit is for milk. But if you don’t really need two…” They had me — the implied guilt of depriving another shopper of their half-and-half. I slumped and pushed the second carton toward the supervisor.

I had just exited the store when I realized I had forgotten cream cheese for my son’s bagels, and ran back in (thank goodness for no lines!). I approached a different clerk with my single purchase. “Hey,” the kid said, “Quit hoarding all our cream cheese!”

I will take a moment here to offer a shout out to the humble grocery store clerk. Who would’ve ever thought this part-time gig would be praised for its heroism? But here they are, handling much-handled goods, facing shopper after potentially-corona’ed shopper, and doing so with humor and grace. Most without health benefits or sick leave, should they become infected.

There would be two more markets en route as I began to wind my way back into the mountains. The first was the uber-fancy Bristol Farms, where the customers REALLY don’t put up with queueing. Inside it was a bit emptier than usual. A friendly grocer stocking a shelf in the dry goods aisle asked how it was going. “Pretty well,” I replied, “You?” “Barely holding it together,” he huffed before shuffling off — a refreshing bit of transparency, I thought.

I noticed as I waited for my shaved finocchiona salami that there hadn’t yet been a run on caviar. “Do you need some?” the deliman asked when he saw me looking at it. “Oh, not today,” I replied.

At the Gelson’s up the road, there were at least a few boxes of orrechiete and campanelle on the otherwise cleared-out pasta shelves. “Don’t they know how good these are!?” I thought to myself, as I snatched up my two-box limit and slipped out.

A light rain was falling as I wound my way along lonesome Highway 27 toward the sea, a brief moment of contemplative solitude before I returned to my role of chef, waiter, co-teacher and activity director back home, wondering how long this very strange interlude might last…

Crab, Coronavirus and Other Tenuously Related Subjects

09 Mar 2020 7 Comments

by scolgin in Humor, Markets & Stores Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

“Shopping at Costco,” my friend Alex texted me one day a week or so ago. “People are going berserk. You should see the things they are buying. Giant boxes of Pop Tarts and cases of Gatorade.”

We both agreed that in the face of impending doom, you’d be better off purchasing big bags of dried beans and rice.

Empty hand sanitizer shelf at Smart & Final (photo courtesy my friend, R. Brody)

My wife was at Costco a couple days later and, swept up herself in the hysteria, was attempting to buy big bags of dried beans and rice. But they, along with bottled water, had been cleared out. I, meanwhile, was a Ralph’s, where I found a lovely pork shoulder on sale and made a pot of chile verde. Didn’t check to see if there were still Pop Tarts on the shelf. The beer hadn’t been cleared out yet either, so I bought some of that. Just to be safe.

*    *    *

Same friend Alex, a photographer by trade, posted a photo on Instagram of a live meat market he had photographed once years before in China. The same type of market crowded with caged creatures where pathogens such as coronavirus make the leap from bats to civet cats to humans.

“They’re nuts about wanting the animal to still be living right up until just before they eat it,” he said.

I was at the 99 Ranch Chinese market earlier in the day, as fate would have it. There are no civet cats there, but lots of tanks filled with live sea creatures. I was eying the Dungeness crabs clamoring all over each other in one tank. “And then I saw a few dead ones for half price,” I told Alex. “And guess what… It was gonna die anyway!!!”

“Where is it that they like to eat the animal while it is still actually alive?” he said. “Korea, I think?”

I recalled walking through a fish market in Busan, South Korea, where they were selling every slug, sponge, sea cucumber and other oddity scraped from the sea floor, all still alive. To prove the point, a woman poked a particularly phallic organism with her finger, and right on cue it spouted a urinesque squirt of salt water that hit my daughter in the face, causing her to scream. The woman burst into laughter.

I am reminded of a Woody Allen quote about oysters: “I want my food dead. Not sick. Not wounded.

*    *    *

“If things get really bad,” I told Alex, “come on over, we’ll be eating fresh chicken and pork chops!”

The chickens were out on the back property, scavenging insects and acorns, blissfully unaware of my plans for them if the grocery store shelves ever ran out of pork shoulders and beer. Henri, the pig, likewise ignorant, was napping in the sun.

A friend asked me once if we were planning on eating Henri. “No,” I said, “Although I did one day find him napping in the rosemary. And I thought to myself, ‘I could just build a quick mud oven around him, throw some coals in, and he’d never know what happened.'”

We’ve got a lot of acorns out back. I mean, a LOT. This year, more than I have ever seen before. The pig likes to eat the acorns, which sets my mind to Spain’s famous Iberico bellota acorn-grazed hams, the most expensive and delicious ham in the world. And I begin to rethink my commitment of non-violence toward Henri.

Iberico bellota

All day long, as I sit at my computer and work, I watch the acorn woodpeckers — Melanerpes formicivorus — flying from the branches of the live oaks to the side of our house, an acorn in their beak on each run. One exterior wall of the house is riddled with holes, made by Melanerpes formicivorus. And every day from dawn to dusk, the woodpeckers fly between the trees and the house, depositing their acorns in our wall. Nobody knows why they do it. They eat bugs, not acorns. Once I had to replace a rotted board on that side of the house. I took the board off, and a waterfall of acorns came pouring out.

I read a story about an old wooden water tank in Arizona that someone decided to dismantle. They opened it up, and some four tons of acorns came cascading out, the work of dozens of generations of acorn woodpeckers.

Once we’d eaten the chickens and the pig in my doomsday scenario planning, we could move on to the acorns. They are apparently nutritious, if not delicious. First, to eliminate their bitterness or toxicity, you must grind them then soak them in something or other. I watched a Chumash elder demonstrate at the local native American museum on a field trip with my kid once. He offered up samples, and it won’t be displacing pork shoulder in my diet. Unless, of course, necessity were to dictate that it does.

*    *    *

I think I may have already had the coronavirus. A couple weeks ago, I had a strange cough with no runny nose or sore throat that lasted two or three days.

Armed with that rationale, I venture out per usual, buying all the delicious things at the grocery store the Pop Tart hoarders pass by, enjoying the relative quietness of the streets. I don’t wear a face mask, and I hardly ever wash my hands.

The World’s Most Dangerous Foods

18 Jan 2020 6 Comments

by scolgin in Humor, Markets & Stores Tags: , , , , , , ,

One of my favorite places to be is in the coastal Mexican town of Puerto Vallarta with one of my favorite people, my pal Donnie. Admittedly, we haven’t been there in a few years. But I still think of our times there often.

One of our favorite things to do in Puerto Vallarta is to stop under a bridge on the beach route from the house into town and eat raw oysters and patas negras — blood clams — on the half shell. Blood clams — this was something I had never seen before. Housed in a dusky black and gray shell, these bivalves actually have hemoglobin, which makes them a bit, well… bloody. But they are also bloody delicious, and Donnie and I would eat them every chance we got.

Patas negras under the bridge

A couple days ago, I was marketing in the valley and stopped by my favorite Indonesian market. (Do YOU have a favorite Indonesian market where you live!??) And what should I discover in a pile of ice in the seafood section but BLOOD CLAMS! I purchased a dozen, and promptly texted Donnie:

“I got you something special. Because you are my friend and I love you.”

Donnie and I operate on a special wavelength — food. So I knew that he knew it was going to be something good. Then I sent him a photo.

“I guess I better plan to come see you soon.”

Donnie eating a pata negra in Mexico

We made dinner plans with the Schneiders — Don and wife Monica, sans their kids and our kids, who used to be a fun addition to our evenings together but are now teenagers.

I was in the kitchen prior to their arrival, and pulled out the clams. I thought I would prep them in advance, so that when they arrived, I could present a platter of beautiful, dressed bloody clams. Beautiful, at least, to Donnie and my eyes. Lacking experience shucking blood clams, I went to the computer to see if there was any particular trick I should know about. But my Google search brought up something startling. Several of the top ten hits had the same title: “The World’s Most Dangerous Foods”. A couple had the variation: “Foods You Should Never Eat & Why.”

I once did a series of posts on this very blog called “Things You Would Never Consider Putting In Your Mouth (And Why You Should)”. As trying exotic foods go, I’m pretty unskittish. I’ve not merely tried grasshoppers in Mexico — I’ve intentionally ordered them. Aside from Iceland’s popular rotting shark and Japan’s fermented squid guts, there’s pretty much nothing I won’t try out of the ocean. But this had me a little nervous.

According to Salon’s top ten list: “…the blood clam can ingest viruses and bacteria including hepatitis A, typhoid and dysentery because it lives in lower oxygen environments.” Another website cautioned: “In 1988, 31 people died from eating these clams. 15% of people who consume blood clams gain some sort of infection.”

Donnie and me in Mexico doing the Patas Negras Dance after we’ve eaten our fill

Further research revealed that problematic blood clams had originated in Asia, and those from Mexico — where I’d eaten them many times, and from where the ones in the kitchen hailed — were considered “generally” safe. The Asian variety are banned in the United States. Furthermore, also included on the list of “most dangerous foods” were things like raw cashews and cassava — not exactly panic-inducing exotic delicacies. Nonetheless, the platter of bleeding bivalves in the kitchen were looking less appealing than they had been just a few minutes before. And I wasn’t feeling like playing the odds.

“Where are the clams?” Donnie inquired when he arrived a little while later.

I pointed out the window to the woods beside our house, and then explained. I would let the coyotes and bobcats fight over them, and if in the ensuing weeks I discovered no wildlife staggering through the trees in a hepatatic stupor, perhaps I would revisit the Indonesian market and give them another try. Or, more likely, I would wait until the next time I was under the bridge in Puerto Vallarta.

Fortunately, the sting of not getting his clams was alleviated when I presented Donnie with a beautifully composed plate of plump red prawn ceviche — less exotic, perhaps, but enjoyed without any looming sense of doom.

A Roundabout Route to Baccalà Mantecato

23 Mar 2018 2 Comments

by scolgin in Markets & Stores, Recipes Tags: , , , , , , , ,

My local Vallarta Mexican grocery store never ceases to surprise and amaze me.

First of all, it’s just darned cool to have a market that actually feels — smells, sounds, visuals — like you are in Mexico. And in that regard, I have yet to need a Mexican cooking ingredient that I can’t find there.

Secondly, I find countless ingredients I need for other cuisines — the fine tripe they have, for example, that I need (yes, need) for trippa alla Romana, and a dazzling variety of fresh herbs.

Newfoundland salt cod illustration from the 1700s

A recent happy discovery was baccalà, also known as bacalao, also known as salt cod — not something I ever associated with Mexican cooking. In the past, I’ve had to travel to a Spanish purveyor in Harbor City (a heck of a drive to non-Angelenos) or wait until I’m in San Francisco to visit North Beach’s famous deli, Molinari, to get some. Not only does Vallarta have beautiful European baccala, but it’s considerably less expensive than at either of those other places. More

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