The imports arrive

 

Today a truck hauling a forty foot container pulled up at our back dock. Inside were pallets of food from Italy, Spain, France and about six other countries. We directly import these ourselves, which means we send our order to the food maker abroad. It starts with an email. A few weeks later they get their food to a consolidation point near port. At that point the inscrutable, unfathomable machinery of the international shipping industry takes over. Four to seven weeks later the truck arrives with us.

It's always a very exciting day for me. These are some of our most interesting foods. For many of them we're the sole source in America. And there are always new things on the boat, like this shopped-icefish-and-red-pepper-spread from Calabria. 

I'm sure we'll either sell none of it or we'll sell out of it in two days. This is one of those no-middle-ground foods.

Joe and Lisa got the honor of checking the container in. That means they get to see firsthand the creative ways the foodmakers package for an ocean voyage. Here Lisa found a case of twenty dollar jars of Sicilian pistacho paste were tossed in loose among stryofoam peanuts. Amazingly, they survived the voyage.

One of the baffling labels that Italians attach to boxes.

No address needed, apparently.

Fra-gee-lay. That must be Italian. In fact, it is.

The best polenta I've ever had, sent in bags like on a pirate vessel.

We stopped everything to crack open a bottle of olive oil. This is the first we've tried the latest harvest. At this point the oils are still young. They can have quite a personality. The Castello di Cacchiano from Tuscany was practically vibrating. Tasting it was like slipping a razor blade across my tongue. It's an exceptional beast.

Beef in the Afternoon

Last week we brought in steaks from five different suppliers for a big tasting. I've been thinking about offering meat for sale through our catalog and website so I thought we should taste some of what's out there. We were tasting strips and sirloins. There was beef from cows that had been fed only grass (Lasater and La Cense) and from cows that had been finished on corn (Niman Ranch, Omaha and Roadhouse farm). Some was dry aged in meat lockers and some was wet aged in cry-o-vac. 

Brad and Kristie continue snacking.

We cooked them on wood fired grills and they came out in waves, twenty steaks in all, over two hours on a Wednesday afternoon. I'm sure everyone went home and took a nap. It was a gout-a-thon.

We do tastings all the time, at least once a month for dozens of foods. This was different, more complex, because there were so many moving parts. The steaks were different ages, from different animals, different thicknesses, some had bones, and they all had to be cooked to come out at the same done-ness. 

The real complication was grass fed beef. Unless you've been to Argentina chances are you've never had beef that comes from a cow entirely raised on grass. For many decades we've finished American beef on corn, which means that the animal eats grass for some of its life (all cattle start on grass) and ends up eating corn at the end. The corn adds weight to the animal up quickly, some of it as intra-muscular fat that's desirable for its texture. Corn, it turns out, makes steak soft and luxurious. 

In contrast grass fed beef is more chewy. This is not a big deal to some (ribeye lovers!) but to others (petite filet aficionados) it's less desirable. In the end, though, grass feeding is the most traditional way to raise cattle. And, in terms of the health of the environment and the cow, it's the most sustainable. People always say that we're not ready for grass fed beef. Supposedly we're all suckers for soft marshmallow steaks raised on corn and we'll never turn back. After this tasting I'm not so sure.

At the end, the Roadhouse's beef was a favorite and it is finished on corn. But several of us also thought La Cense's 100% grass fed beef was very promising. I'm going to continue to work with them since they can ship.

After tasting, we visited Chef Alex's meat locker behind the Roadhouse where they store beef cuts that are dry aging. 

 Chef Alex in the meat locker.

When beef dry ages it forms a soft white and green mold on its surface. It is washed off before being cut into steaks and cooked. The dry aging concentrates and expands flavors as well as changing the texture. Many describe the taste of dry aged beef with words like "mineral."

Each cut in the meat locker is dated by this simple, ingenious method. The beef we tasted had been aged about five weeks, which Alex things is just about best for the cattle he gets.

Two Recipes for Fava Beans

Fava beans are coming in season. Fresh, they're delicious, but they're also a pain in the ass. You've got to shell them — twice. First, from their large pods (pictured above). Secondly, from their individual wrappers after boiling for about five minutes in salted water.

Favas with Olive Oil

Start with four pounds of favas in their pods and you're left with a half pound of edible beans if you're lucky. Is it worth it? Whether the labor is what you want to spend your evening doing is a personal choice. But for me, spring favas, just boiled, glowing green, warm as lips, swimming in a glossy olive oil with a cover of coarse sea salt are totally worth it. It's not a dish I make often. But  the first time each year is a bright sign of spring. I know the mud is receding and the earth will soon be littered with grass.

Fresh favas also go well in pasta. Here's a dish I recently made with favas, spring peas and Martelli maccheroni. It's worth mentioning since it incorporates a lot of good things you find at their best in spring. 

Tender Young Thing Pasta

Chop some fresh mild sausage into small bites (I like one my butcher makes with fennel seeds). Brown it in a deep skillet, then put the cooked pasta and some of its pasta water in the pan. Add the favas and fresh spring peas (already parboiled very al dente), then a few spoons of ricotta. Stir. Add fresh young arugula and pea shoot leaves, some freshly grated lemon zest. A couple turns of the spoon and count to one hundred and it's done. Top it off with more ricotta dollops, freshly grated black pepper and Parmigiano-Reggiano and a small handful of shredded mint leaves. If you are able to nab some spring morels they'd also be welcome. I guess pretty much any tender young thing is fine to add.

Spring cooking like this can be fussy, a lot of work. There's lots of shelling and an annoying tangle of trimming since arugula and shoots are very stemmy at this time of year. But do the work and, with it, know you've broken winter's back for good.

Education is a Push

In lean terminology, there are pushes and there are pulls. Pushes are bad and to be avoided. They're when you make something for a customer — or the next process in your sequence — regardless of whether it's needed. Pulls are good. They're when the customer — or the next process — asks for something and then you make it.

Classroom education is largely done as a push. The process usually pushes a class identical units of information — lectures, homework and reading — regardless of any individual's specific need. (Sometimes you get time for questions and answers, which is an example of pull.) Anyone who's dozed through a class knows push education can be boring as hell. And often not terribly effective.

Here's some interesting news about a school that's trying to make education a pull process,  one that responds to what the student needs when they need it. They are creating classes that are customized daily. It's an interesting experiment.

I see batches: The Death Star

  

 

In Star Wars the Empire batched their military like crazy. For example, they created the Death Star. Like most batching, it was probably sold in a meeting with the Emperor as "an efficient choice." After all, why do lots of small attacks one at a time when you can do them all at once out of a laser beam as big as a planet?

We all know how that story goes. A typically tragic tale of batching. One mistake—that thermal exhaust port—was multiplied by a zillion.

More on batches here.

This is how the phone call goes when you have to tell your boss the Death Star blew up.

I see batches: Nuclear Power

  

In lean operations terminology a "batch" happens when you're not producing something one at a time. It's when you make multiples of something identical all at once. Usually batching is done to be more "efficient," efficiency being defined as the lowest production cost per unit.

Like binge drinking (another form of batching), batches have strange side effects. One is that when things go wrong they go really wrong. Any error is multiplied by the size of the batch. The bigger the batch, the bigger the error.

You can spot batches everywhere. For example, electricity is often created in large batches. Whether it's made from coal, natural gas, or hydroelectricity, almost all electricity is made in the biggest batch possible. And nuclear power plants are the biggest batchers of them all. It's not one home making electricity for itself. It's one plant making electricity for multiple cities. A typical nuclear plant produces enough power for nearly a million homes.

The nuclear crisis unfolding in Japan made me think about batches and how, when you batch radioactive power generation, you can create some horrific errors, multiplied.

Peace Corps Food Entrepreneurs

   

The Banaue rice terraces in the Phillipines are over two thousand years old.

Over the last few years I’ve noticed a number of folks enter the food industry after stints in the Peace Corps. Of course there are far fewer of them than there are artists and musicians,  the clan who form the rank and file of the food world. But the Peace Corps folks I know are entrepreneurs and, without exception, they are driven like maniacs. They start with a mission. They develop really cool food businesses from scratch. Their undertakings are almost comically difficult (making and exporting chocolate from ultra-steamy Madagascar is one). These folks show the positive side of globalization that too many in the food world overlook.

One ex-Peace Corps food entrepreneur is Mary Claire Hensley. She was in the Corps in the Philippines, circa 1976. She was the first white woman to ever set foot in her village, called Uma. Almost 30 years later she started a company to bring some of the three hundred indigenous Philippines rices to America.

The rices she focuses on are sun dried, mostly organic (though not certified), grown on a stunning series of terraces. The terraces are ancient. They look like glowing green and gold puzzle pieces, stacked in tectonic layers. The work of Mary’s company helps repair them, helps keep them in use, and helps get farmers a meaningful price for their rice.

Some numbers are important to the story. The poverty line in the Philippines is $250 per year and subsistence farmers—which this area has a lot of, since rice is the number one business—usually fail to achieve that level. The standard price for their rice is 20 cents per kilo. Mary’s company pays $1.35-$1.80 per kilo. Her price immediately guarantees a wage above the poverty line.

Mary tries to make a market for this rice. Last year she sold all they made. They’d like to make more. That’s where we come in. We’ve committed to buying a farm’s worth of rice this year between two types: Tinawon White (Mary's favorite) and Kalinga Unoy, which has a ravishing brick orange color. We just got them in and put them on the website.

JFK announced the Peace Corps from the steps of the Michigan Union in 1960.

Check out the hats.

I don’t know if there are significant numbers of Peace Corps volunteers starting food businesses. I hope there are. I know I’m kind of biased, being in a food business located in Ann Arbor, where JFK gave the speech announcing the Corps. But the social mission of the Corps plus the social mission of great, traditional food seem like a natural match.