@AcadiaCafe promotes tonight’s Beer & Beast event, @BullRunCoffee offers a new, limited edition Kenya decaf, @Celebr8nGenr8n teases about her Pi Day “Pi-nata,” and @GoodEarthRosev thanks their favorite vendor.
Susan Pagani / Heavy Table
As a food writer, Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is well known, even beloved, for her ability to tell stories about food in a voice that is as distinctly hers as it is delightful to read, providing local foodies with insight and a full portion of wit. In Drink This: Wine Made Simple, her first book, the James Beard Award-winning food and wine columnist and Minnesota Monthly editor is all that in long form. The book is an entertaining read and a first-rate plunge into, as she says, “the most wonderful drink in the world.”
Of course, wine is not simple. In fact, it’s so dadblasted confounding and complex that for many of us, approaching even the most pared down restaurant wine list is mildly intimidating — is it the good stuff or is it an inappropriate, over-priced wine, a wine in such poor taste that it reveals my despicable lack of knowledge for all to see? In Drink This (384 pages, $26.00), Grumdahl tells would-be wine aficionados that the only taste that matters is their own:
The same rules hold true for wine as for the rest of human taste: some people like chocolate cake, and some people like apple pie … The only difference is that when it comes to wine there are people at the top saying: My favorite chocolate cake, 98 points … Most people think critical scores are objective things … they’re really just some guy’s opinion, and just because some guy tells you that he likes some particular chocolate cake, or Cabernet Sauvignon, is no reason to alter your behavior … The reason you want what you want is because of your taste. The real problem with new wine drinkers is simply that they don’t know what their taste is, because they haven’t tasted all the representative wine styles.
The only way to know your own mind about wine is to drink a lot of it. Not in a drunken, messy kind of way, but in a methodical, organized kind of way. Drink This is structured around nine major wine varietals: Zinfandel, Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Sangiovese, Tempranillo, and Pinot Noir. In her approach, Grumdahl is as orderly as a primer, taking readers through an easily digestible overview including what’s to love (great $10 wines) and hate (officious wine labels!) about the wine; a brief history of the grape and its terroir and winemaking; and then a tasting, alone or with friends. Interspersed throughout these lesson plans are brief interviews with industry winemakers, chefs, sommeliers, and critics, who discuss everything from stemware to the role of an importer to terroir – the latter in a rather ponderous conversation with Bonny Doon founder Randall Graham, in which he seems on the verge of giving it all up — delicious tidbits that only make the book more insightful and enjoyable.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
In fact, the book is so very readable, so jam-packed with Grumdahl — “Put a Zinfandel next to sole in a butter sauce and you will experience something in your mouth akin to King Kong stepping on the Easter Bunny” — it’s tempting to plow right through it, gobbling up fresh perspective and wine knowledge as you go, but plan to take it again, chapter by chapter.
And here’s why: The best of the book, the key to understanding wine, is in its highly prescriptive step-by-step tastings. “The reason that wine is hard to learn about is that you can read about it for six straight years and that experience will be but dust in the wind compared to tasting it,” Grumdahl writes. “In wine, tasting is everything. It’s the most important part of wine, end of story.”
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
To increase the reader’s success in this endeavor, the author provides a guide not only to price and vineyard, but also to shopping. In the Syrah chapter, she suggests buying five bottles: A bottom shelf Australian Shiraz, a single-vineyard American Syrah, a Washington State Syrah, a real French Syrah, and a single-vineyard Barossa Valley Shiraz. That gives the reader categories to take to their local wineseller, rather than trying to hunt around for an exact bottle or cobble together a random assortment of wines that won’t provide the same comprehensive view of the varietal. The author also includes pairing suggestions and tasting markers — the better to help tasters pick out elusive fragrances like raspberry, fresh grass, chocolate, coffee, and tobacco.
Drink This is a handbook, but it’s also a veritable kickstand, propping up the intimidated. Throughout the book, but especially at the end in her “Wine Drinkers Bill of Rights,” Grumdahl advocates for the reader’s enjoyment of wine. This is as much about feeling comfortable with a limited knowledge of wine as it is about learning what you like and drinking it when you feel like it. For Grumdahl and the people she interviews, it all comes down to hospitality. Here she talks to John Ragan, the sommelier for Eleven Madison Park restaurant in New York City:
Think of a wine list as a haystack, and the perfect wine you seek as the needle in it. “It’s the sommelier’s job to dig through this haystack, not yours,” Ragan says. “All someone really needs to know is how much they want to spend, and what sort of experience they want to have — something red, something funky and earthy, or what have you. The only concerns a great sommelier should have are making friends, helping you have a good time, and creating an experience so good that people want to come back.”
That’s a nice perspective change: Good wine sellers and sommeliers are not there to make you feel silly, even if you FOO-may rather than fyu-MAY your fumé. Like the wine, they are there to enhance your experience. As Grumdahl writes: “The point of learning about wine is not to know everything about wine. The point of learning about wine is to enjoy life more.”
[4 Comments]
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
Once known as the Flour Milling Capital of the World, Minneapolis-St. Paul has no shortage of great bakeries, from Rustica in Minneapolis with its light and airy baguettes; to Don Panchos Mexican Bakery on St. Paul’s West Side where carb-lovers can load up baskets of goodies priced by the item; to humble Trung Nam Bakery in St. Paul, where Thanksgiving is the busiest day of the year as customers make the last-minute dash to fill their breadbaskets for the harvest feast.
Yet, sometimes, nothing but homemade will do. And if you want to fill your kitchen with the yeasty scent of rising dough, 2009 is your year. On Amazon, a search for “artisan bread” yields six hits on the first page alone, with titles by Peter Reinhart, whose The Bread Baker’s Apprentice was named cookbook of the year by the James Beard Foundation in 2002 and Nancy Baggett, whose Kneadlessly Simple: Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads is intriguing simply based on the author’s surname.
Two new books teeter atop my reading pile: Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day: 100 New Recipes Featuring Whole Grains, Fruits, Vegetables, and Gluten-Free Ingredients[324 pages, hardcover, Thomas Dunne Books], by local authors Jeff Hertzberg, M.D., and Zoë François and My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method [222 pages, hardcover, W.W. Norton & Company], by Jim Lahey with Rick Flaste. Both books promise that delicious, airy, crusty bread is yours for the making, with a minimum of effort and equipment (though, some essential equipment is required). Although only Lahey calls his bread “no-knead,” neither technique calls for kneading.
Lori Writer / Heavy Table (background: a loaf baked from "My Bread"; foreground: a loaf baked from "Healthy Bread")
Hertzberg and François published their first book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, in 2007, just months after New York Times columnist Mark Bittman sparked a floury explosion of home baking with his article “The Secret of Great Bread: Let Time Do the Work,” featuring Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread technique and recipe.
In their follow-up book, Healthy Bread, Hertzberg and François write that the secret to having fresh, home-baked bread is to “Mix enough dough for many loaves and store it in the refrigerator. It’s easy to have freshly baked whole grain and other healthy breads whenever you want them, with only five minutes a day of active effort. First, mix the ingredients into a container all at once, and let them sit for two hours. Now you are ready to shape and bake the bread, or you can refrigerate the dough and use it over the next five to fourteen days.”
While Artisan Bread “concentrated on ingredients from the traditional European baker’s cupboard,” Healthy Bread expands the discussion “to include whole grains, vital wheat gluten, and even ingredients for gluten-free breads.” Hertzberg and François’ recipe for high-moisture dough yields a loaf with with a chewy crust and a “custard crumb” interior that is shiny, chewy and moist. The minimum equipment required is a serrated bread knife, a cooling rack, pastry brush, a lidded plastic or glass storage container, a broiler pan, a pizza peel, and a baking stone.
In Healthy Bread, and in Artisan Bread before it, Hertzberg and François’ technique relies on baking with steam to achieve a crispy crust, although they offer other alternatives, including misting the bread with water early in baking and baking inside a cloche or covered cast-iron pot.
Lori Writer / Heavy Table (a loaf baked from the "Healthy Bread" Master Recipe)
According to Lahey, the secret to producing great bread without a huge time sacrifice is low-rise fermentation. Writes Lahey about his technique: “Applied in the modern home kitchen, it requires about 5 minutes of actual labor, followed by 12 to 18 hours in which the bread rises, developing structure and flavor on autopilot, and then another short rising time, and, finally, the brief baking in a covered pot. It’s a terrific loaf of bread, easily within reach of any home cook.” The resultant loaf is “chestnut-colored, chewy, [and] satisfying.”
Continue reading Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day vs. Lahey’s My Bread »
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Magers & Quinn will be hosting two noteworthy Heavy Table-related events we’d like to share with our readers.
On Sunday Nov. 29, at 4:30pm, Heavy Table contributors and Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin authors James Norton and Becca Dilley will appear at Magers & Quinn in Uptown to chat about their new book and sign holiday gift copies.
Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, author of Drink This: Wine Made Simple, will be MCing, and France 44 will bring a couple of terrific master-made cheeses to share.
Dara’s own Drink This event takes place at Magers & Quinn on Friday, Dec. 4 at 7:30pm.
Says Magers: “If you’ve been baffled by a wine list, stood perplexed before endless racks of bottles at the liquor store, or ordered an overpriced bottle out of fear of the scathing judgment of a restaurant sommelier, Dara is here to help.” Noted wine ignoramus James Norton will be on hand to MC.
It took a stint living out East for native Wisconsinites James Norton and Becca Dilley to realize how special their home state’s dairy business truly is. And that curiosity, steeped by a conversation with a cheesemonger on the West Coast, led the pair (The Heavy Table’s editor and contributing photographer, respectively) to collaborate on a new book that showcases the people behind Wisconsin’s world-class cheeses. Writer Norton and photographer Dilley spent their newlywed year crossing the state to interview master cheesemakers — long-time cheesemakers who have taken their craft to a higher level by completing an intense training and certification program sponsored by the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board. The result is The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin, published by the University of Wisconsin Press, in which the people who craft Wisconsin’s famous cheddars, colbys, and limburgers get their turn in the spotlight.
How did the book get started?
JAMES NORTON: Becca and I lived in Boston, and we’d be invited to a party and we’d bring cheese because we’re from Wisconsin and we know cheese. So we’d kind of find ourselves in the position of defending cheese or explaining cheese, which affirmed our dairy heritage. And then we’d moved to Minneapolis and Becca was doing a cross-country trip and I met her in San Francisco. We went to the Cowgirl Creamery, which is a well-known and much-loved cheese shop in the Ferry Building in San Francisco. And the woman who worked as a cheesemonger happened to be a blogger and a Minneapolis native. So we started talking a lot about the Midwest and a lot about cheese, and it really got us going on the subject.
BECCA DILLEY: And I had heard about the master cheesemaker program and we were talking to her about that, because there were several master cheesemaker cheeses available there.
NORTON: And we were driving from San Francisco up to Portland, and I think I might’ve said, “It’d be really interesting to meet all the people who are master cheesemakers.”
DILLEY: You know, who are these guys who love cheese so much that they go back even after they’re successful to learn more about cheese?
NORTON: And it occurred to us, well, I like to write, and you like to take photos. What if we teamed up and made a book about it? I put together a proposal and pitched it to University of Wisconsin Press and they pretty much immediately were like, “Yeah, come on in, let’s talk about this, and see if we can make it happen.” And we brought in the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board early on, and they supported us financially and in terms of setting up interviews, and that was really instrumental. We did most of the research the winter of 2007 / 2008.
Becca Dilley / The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin
When you presented the proposal to the UW Press, were they intrigued that you wanted to focus on the people rather than the cheese?
DILLEY: The Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board was really interested in that aspect, and I think the UW Press to a certain extent, because it is different from any other books they’ve done. The UW Press, in particular, has done more, like, history of cheesemaking in Wisconsin books. Several of those are quite good, which we reference, and they’re very exhaustive. I think they saw this as having a little bit more of an appeal to people who are not necessarily interested in the cheese history of Wisconsin.
NORTON: It was almost a deliberately non-academic book. It’s a contemporary documentary survey. A snapshot, if you will, of the industry, told through the biographies of individuals. I don’t know that anyone else has done a book quite like this. Because I think people get very caught up in the cheeses. And I think that’s a totally reasonable way to go and I absolutely understand why people pursue those books, but this is really about the generations of people, culminating in these amazing masters who work with the cheese, and it’s their stories and their perspectives and their challenges.
Becca Dilley / The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin
Being lifelong Wisconsinites, did you think you knew cheese before you did this book?
DILLEY: I thought I knew cheese before I went to Boston, but then I moved to Boston and we would bring cheese over and people would be like, “What’s a gouda? What’s the difference between this and this?” That made me a lot more curious about the history of Wisconsin cheese, and that’s how I found out about the master cheesemaker program.
NORTON: I’m not even sure if I really know cheese now. It’s such an incredible field. It’s a lifelong pursuit to really understand cheese. And the more experienced the cheesemakers are, the more likely they are to say, “I don’t know how it works, it’s totally crazy.”
DILLEY: There were a few people who were like, “It’s magic every time.”
Continue reading Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin »
[16 Comments]
by Lori Writer on October 20, 2009
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
Micki Sannar, author of Olive Oil Desserts: Delicious and Healthy Heart Smart Baking [150 pages, hardcover, Mikko Publishing], writes: “My own high cholesterol and a desire for healthier home baking led me to create Olive Oil Desserts.” Sannar also writes that both she and her husband noticed a drop in LDL cholesterol when they started incorporating olive oil into their daily diet.
If the looming holidays and the resultant parade of parties and potlucks leave you to ponder the effect all of those delicious buttery cookies and flaky lard-laden pie crusts might have on your own cholesterol count or whether you’ll fit into your skinny jeans come January, Olive Oil Desserts might be the cookbook for you.
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
In the six years Sannar experimented with recipes, replacing butter with olive oil, she discovered that “only that about 2/3 cup olive oil is needed to replace 1 cup of butter” in most recipes, though each recipe requires “a bit of adjusting” to get it right. She provides a brief primer on the four grades of olive oil, from extra virgin to olive-pomace oil, but says pure olive oil, which is a blend of refined olive oil and virgin olive oil, “is always best for sweet desserts.” All the book’s recipes — which include those for cakes; cookies and bars; muffins and sweetbreads; and pies and crisps — call for pure olive oil.
Sannar also suggests that if you want to substitute whole wheat pastry flour for white flour in desserts: “You can start slow by using half white and half Whole Wheat Pastry Flour or you can be very courageous and use only the pastry flour.” Recipes that are easily adapted to whole wheat pastry flour are identified.
The author also suggests: “If you plan on baking often, purchase your olive oil in bulk (in large containers). This may reduce your costs significantly.” If you plan on baking a lot from this book, we suggest Bill’s Imported Foods on West Lake Street in Minneapolis, where you can buy a gallon of pure olive oil for a mere $28.
We were curious how desserts would fare without butter. Would pie crusts be as flaky without the water in the butter expanding to form the layers? Would cakes be as fluffy? Would cookies spread too much or not at all? Would the desserts taste as rich?
Continue reading Olive Oil Desserts: Delicious and Healthy Heart Smart Baking »
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