Standing Up for Every Little Taste Bud!

Standing Up for Every Little Taste Bud! 1200 797 David Rosengarten

The classic philosophers may have missed it, but most of us have long known about the great palate/soul dichotomy: those who live to eat vs. those who eat to live.

Count me in the former group, for sure! The eggs-istentialists!

For us, life here in America has never been better. The transformation of our country, over the last 20 years or so, from a sleepy gastronomic backwater to a roaring center of culinary mojo, has been nothing short of amazing. When I was growing up, I mostly had to settle for tasteless, dumbed-down food from the supermarket, plus the occasional foray to the only types of restaurants not serving American blandness: Italian-American and Chinese-American restaurants…which, compared to what we have today, were pretty bland themselves.

But old habits die hard. Despite so many thrilling changes in our food supply, the 1950s and ‘60s American approach to food still has a hold on us. Not good. If you live to eat, every little taste bud must be served by every little morsel—and not by just the fancy stuff, or the esoteric stuff, that you can get in today’s top restaurants. I want every day, all day, to be filled with maxed-out 21st-century taste experiences for all of us! Otherwise, you’re not truly living to eat.

One of my favorite all-time food observations comes from Ferran Adrià, the rock star chef whose Catalan restaurant El Bulli dominated the world food scene for over twenty years. I once heard Adrià muse about the opposite effects that fresh truffles and fresh oranges have in the kitchen. “Give a chef a fresh truffle to work with,” said Adrià, “and he or she goes into a creative trance, working so hard to get everything possible out of the expensive ingredient. But,” he went on, “give the same chef an orange—and his creativity won’t be engaged, his excitement remains low. It’s only an orange!” Adrià, of course, feels just as much miracle in the orange as in the truffle—and encourages his chefs to take everything seriously, to find the thrilling flavor in all foods.

Starting with a plain old orange, the following list looks at eight wonderful things that are part of our contemporary food lives—along with a recommendation or two for standing up against our rooted American indifference to food. My goal is to charge every bite or sip with new-found energy!

 

  • The Orange (thank you Ferran!)

    Patricia Yoe orangesThis whole rant, in fact, was started by an orange…namely the viral image of pre-peeled oranges recently for sale at Whole Foods. Pre-peeled! Surely Americans have noticed that when you sink your teeth and your fingers into the rind of an orange—there’s an eruption of citrus oil into the air. It’s not the same flavor as the flavor found in the fruit. It is richer, spicier, sharper…well, zestier! I would never want my citrus pre-peeled—that’s flavor larceny! In fact, in recent years I have taken to cutting oranges into rind-on segments at home (made familiar to me from good Chinese restaurants). Oh, man! The step up in flavor when pulling the fruit off of every wedge of rind and into my waiting mouth! I will never eat peeled orange segments again (unless I must). And please note: you can make your home-squeezed orange juice a million times better by resting it in a pitcher for a few hours, with chunks of orange rind macerating in the juice!

 

  • The Take-Out Coffee Cup

    No aroma, no intimate contact with texture. Now that we’re drinking much better coffee in America, you can’t treat it like a styrofoam cup from Chock Full o’ Nuts.

    I have two big problems with the standard cup o’ joe to go. For one thing…I hate that the automatic procedure is to fill the cup up to the top! Drinking coffee should be like drinking wine—you want to smell the liquid, even immerse your head in its aromas! That top-o’-cup strategy gives you nuthin’ but a burned lip! I often ask the serve for “a small cup of coffee, please, in a large cup filled halfway.” The other de rigueur procedure in American take-away coffee is putting a plastic cover on the cup with a tiny sip hole…and that’s how most people drink it, sipping through the hole. No aroma, no intimate contact with texture. Now that we’re drinking much better coffee in America, you can’t treat it like a styrofoam cup from Chock Full o’ Nuts at Toidy-Toid and Toid.

 

  • The “Big Glass is Only for Red Wines With Big Prices” Syndrome

    I have a gripe similar to the coffee gripe…this time with wine, especially red wine. As you well know, there are amazing, voluminous wine glasses out there that allow air to plump up the wine, allow room for lots of swirling, and facilitating the development of aroma. But usually it’s only the old first-growth Bordeaux that ends up in the “important” glasses, or the old Grand Cru Burgundy. What most wine geeks don’t realize…is that cheap young reds also have aroma! Why not reach for maximum flavor and aroma in all wines? At my house, I like to use a big Burgundy balloon glass for many things. I love it especially for simple young reds, bursting with simple young fruit like Robusco, a Lambrusco made by the Ca’ Berti winery in Emilia-Romagna. When you pour it into the big balloon, it fills the glass with its foamy purpleness—then fills your nostrils with that mirthful cherry-strawberry-banana aroma that unpretentious young reds have. You’d miss 75% of the joy if you poured it in a small, narrow glass!

 

  • The Ventless Cherry Tomato Box

    More “packaging” issues…this time an actual package! I buy lots of cherry tomatoes in the winter because where I live (the Northeast) that’s our only January hope. The reality is that sometimes the little guys are pretty damned good, with lots of flavor. And sometimes they’re not. How do you know at the market? Sniffing is always your best evaluator at the produce stand. However…the tomato producers don’t always allow you to sniff their damned plastic boxes! Sometimes the boxes have vents—next to which you can stick your schnozz and figure out if these guys are alive. But sometimes—oy vey—the plastic packages have no slits! You’d have to be psychic to figure out the condition of the pomodorini inside!

 

  • Peeled Shrimp

    Deveining ShrimpAnother convenience-related problem. Yeah, I know, if you’re making a party for 100 people, and shrimp cocktail’s on the menu…the sore temptation is to avoid all the peeling/deveining of that many shrimp, and just buy ready-to-cook raw shrimp. But have you ever tasted those shrimp, cooked by you, side-by-side with peel-on shrimp, cooked by you, that you have also peeled yourself? Good god, the difference in flavor! I even like to cook shrimp with the shell on for ever deeper crustacean flavor! The pre-peeled ones have a wateriness to them, a blandness. Listen, pal…if you’re only cooking a pound or two of shrimp…IMHO you have no excuse!

 

  • Prime Rib at Restaurants

    Because the painful truth is this: when a prime rib is perfectly done (rare to medium-rare, of course), and it comes out of the oven…it’s ready! Now!

    In case you didn’t know, I’ve got a big beef-lovin’ side. I live in New York City, and I love me my NY steakhouses (the good ones, that is). Most anytime I’d rather have a great porterhouse at, say, Peter Luger, than one cooked at home (they have the overhead firepower to do it right!) However, when it comes to another beef love—prime rib of beef—I’d much rather do it myself, please. Why? Because the painful truth is this: when a prime rib is perfectly done (rare to medium-rare, of course), and it comes out of the oven…it’s ready! Now! But at a lot of restaurants, the standing roasts come out of the oven at, say 5pm…and held! That means if you order prime rib at, say, 8:30…it will either not be hot, or, heavens forbid!…it may have been reheated! Bye, bye to that lustrous, just-cooked texture! Worst of all is reheating in a pan! One side only, so if you pick up your slice on the plate, you see a browned side underneath. Horrible, horrible, oh horrible!!! I’ve often suggested to restaurateurs that they establish a time every evening for prime rib. I’ve even given them the marketing idea: put the dish in a box on the menu that says “Prime Time.” No takers, so far.

 

  • The Problem With Chopsticks

    Beth Burdick 2010_04_04 ChopsticksOh wow, has Chinese food exploded in this country. Where we can go today, restaurant-wise, is so much better, more varied, than where we could go 30 years ago. Incredible. And yet, some cognitive dissonance has arisen. Carried along by the Chinese boom, many Americans now eat their Chinese food with chopsticks—a great thing, when you’re eating real Chinese food. Real Chinese stir-fries, generally, are much less saucy than their Chinese-American ancestor dishes in America, and the chopstick pick-up works perfectly. The problem is that many of the newly chopstick-waving Americans are breaking out their chopsticks at old-fashioned Chinese-American restaurants—where the stir-fries are still very saucy! Imagine eating Shrimp with Lobster Sauce…with chopsticks only! All you get are the shrimp! I have two solutions in mind: 1) eat your saucy Chinese-American dishes with Western utensils; or, 2) keep evolving towards real Chinese food in our American Chinese restaurants where chopsticks really make sense! Remember…I don’t want you to miss a drop of what’s being offered!

 

  • The Salt-and-Straw Margarita Conundrum

    Lauren Topor MargaritasHelp me figure this one out! When you order a margarita (an activity I heartily endorse!)…the bartender will usually say “Rocks? Salt?” I usually say “yes” to both. And then it comes—ice cubes bobbing through the foamy yellow-green stuff, rim encrusted with salt, and…a frickin’ straw sticking out of the drink!!! Look around during your next visit to El Gringo or wherever…the folks who ordered that drink are usually sipping through the straw! Whaaaa? Why bother to ask for salt on the rim if you’re going to sip through a straw??? This margarita should be drunk by raising the glass to your lips—where the Mexican mad juice can spill over the rim, carrying that precious tequila-laced salt into your mouth! Why do we do some things so illogically, robbing ourselves of flavor? Get it right, gringo!

(I must add, however, that many Mexicans eschew margaritas while the drink has become a religion in America. So in the most fundamental way…we gringos have gotten it right.)

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