On Pause

Saturday afternoon—one of those rare spaces during the holiday when the warehouse is almost empty, totally silent. Nothing ships today. This is our sixty foot pick line, completely still. One hundred people will arrive at ten tonight. They'll send a box of food out the door every ten seconds.

A Lot of Coffeecakes

We'll ship something like 14,000 cofffecakes this month. They're stacked up all over the place, ready to depart. This afternoon we got a huge delivery of gingerbread coffeecakes. You can smell the ginger and cloves from outside the building, through the snow.

Holiday Cover Winner

 

The winner of our catalog cover contest begins arriving in homes this week. This was the voters' favorite—and mine. Ryan let go and Saul Bass got a little bedazzled.

Courtney Love says don't melt your cheese

"If you're gonna eat cheese, take it out on a picnic,
cut it up carefully, and really taste it—with wine or something.
Don't melt it on shit."

Courtney Love

Olive Oil: Do Not Heat Before You Eat

 I've always thought it was good advice to save your best, most fragrant olive oil for the end of cooking, not to use it during sautéing or frying. Heat drives away aroma, which is what your paying for in a great oil. Harold McGee confirms the logic in this article where he heats different oils and holds a taste test.

McGee finds that all the oils pretty much end up tasting the same after heating. He doesn't talk about texture, though—better oils have a luscious, not greasy, texture—so I'm not sure if that changes. He also fails to clearly underline that olive oil's unsaturated fat is better for your health than the saturated fat in some of the other oils. You may want to stick with olive oil, just use a less expensive one for cooking.

> Read the article.

McGee's landmark book, On Food and Cooking, is one I recommend without hesitation. There is no better book on science in the kitchen that I know of.

Writing about Flavor: Problems with Subjectivity

This note by Ed Behr in the Art of Eating summarizes a specific way of writing about flavor. Rather than a flowery story or purple prose, Ed's wine reviews are attempting to get at the non-subjective elements of drinking a particular bottle of wine.

Our wine reviews are a direct reviews are a direct response to the failure of conventional ones to provide a reader with practical, more or less objective information that will help at the table: capacity to refresh (weight, especially percentage alcohol and how evident), acidity and sweetness, the intensity of taste together with an idea of key flavors (more the broad indisputable area than subjective metaphor). Some comment on aroma and taste is required in any useful writing about wine for consumers, but we try to avoid "tasting notes," which are often so dangerously close to satire.

It may not the most romantic way to write about wine but that's OK. I think too many writers assume that food is so subjective that they quit trying to give useful information. Their reviews are entirely subjective, entirely useless. And the 100 point scale for wines, which gives a false sense of objectivity, is, in my opinion, a farce.

I like Ed's practical wine reviews. That said, I'm not against romance. For a slightly more lovely side of wine writing I opt for Kermit Lynch's newsletter. Someone put my name on the mailing list ten years ago and, for some reason I  can't fathom but greatly appreciate, Kermit still mails me an issue every month. In my view it's just about the best sales driven writing on wine—or any food, for that matter—in America.

A Different Way to Look At Unemployment

Unemployment Rate by Income Level 
On the left, unemployment rate as a percent (.1 = 10%, .2 = 20% and so on). 
On the bottom, income level (<20K = earning under $20,000 per year)

This graph tells a much more interesting—and stark—image of unemployment than the usual 10%  number you hear. Lower income levels are far more likely to be unemployed. In fact at the lowest income levels, under $20,000 per year, the unemployment rate is over 25%. That's almost the same as the average rate during the Great Depression.

We've been starting to think about how to offer job skills classes to the 300 people we hire each holiday at Zingerman's Mail Order. This picture makes that work even more urgent.

The graph is from a study by Andrew Sum and Ishwar Khatiwada, with Sheila Palma, of Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, funded by the Mott Foundation of Flint, MI.