Sourdough Focaccia (and what ‘sourdough’ is and is not)

So, in the wake of my trip to Barcelona and some home improvement, I have cooked and eaten, but not photographed much in the recent weeks. This all changed yesterday when I was baking this and realized that it’s too gorgeous not to photograph and tell about.  And it tastes (I write this anticipating the very last piece of this for lunch!) amazing – the bottom crust is browned and lovely with olive oil, the top is golden, the crumb is chewy and moist and aromatic, with just a touch of the sourdough tang to it – which sets the herbiness of rosemary and oregano off really, really well.  In short, if you like baking, you need to bake this.  If you have only tried the common cafe ‘focaccia’ (which tends to resemble dry toast more than anything, at least hereabouts), you truly need to try this.  There is just no comparison – this wins on every count (unless you compete in ‘dry’, then maybe not – but then it’s not a cracker!).

There are no complicated techniques involved here (other than owning some sourdough starter – more on that shortly), and the entire process is very very easy – and really, so very much worth the fairly small effort!

The other thing which spurred this post is feeling that I really ought to get the rant about what sourdough is and is not off my chest. Because, really, people (whom I, per usual, will not name) who have food shows and are supposedly ‘bakers’ seriously ought to get their heads out of where the darkness reigns supreme, and maybe take a class in microbiology. Or, barring that, at least one in sourdough baking.  Or do something else to acquire a friggin’ clue.

What I refer to, is the rather common phenomenon I see permeating both, cookbooks and online recipes and cooking videos, whereby a celebrity (or a blog writer, or whoever) goes something like “this recipe calls for a sourdough starter… if you don’t have your own sourdough starter, you can easily make it overnight by mixing some water, flour and bakers’ yeast…”  and proceed with the recipe without batting an eye.  This, frankly, annoys me – not because the recipe in question is not good (it may well turn out fantastic!), but because it’s not sourdough.  It’s a simple recipe with a ‘sponge’ or ‘biga’.  Which could be a sourdough sponge, but unless it’s made with actual sourdough culture rather than baker’s yeast, is not a sourdough sponge.

Why does it annoy me?  Because it muddles terminology, and I have a science education.  Things have names for a reason.  When a doctor prescribes you some antibiotics, your pharmacist doesn’t just go “have some antihistamines, they’re also pills and sort of sound like that too”.  When a reader or listener wants to bake sourdough, they imagine the sourdough flavor, or perhaps they want it for the health benefits (lowered GI, easier to digest), and instead they are being handed a recipe based on baker’s yeast is simply false advertising.  Oh, and I guess it annoys me as a student of food law, too.

Why is this common?  My guess would be, because foodie culture is making sourdough bread more popular again, people want recipes for sourdough that’d taste like that fancy levain bread they had at a cafe, or that sour-tangy loaf they bought at a bakery.  But… giving ‘difficult’ recipes or advice regarding making starter (7-14 days) aren’t going to sell food shows, or cookbooks – because, sadly, people who grew up with the 70s, 80s and even 90s idea that a béarnaise sauce can come out of a dried packet, don’t take well to being told something takes time and you can’t get around it by using something you have on hand as a shortcut.  And so, the “sourdough-but-you-can-just-use-any-bought-yeast” recipes proliferate.  And people try them, and they never taste the way sourdough did and they give up on sourdough baking before they even actually tried it.  So, the practice annoys me as a food blogger, too.  Make it trifold annoyance, then.  Sigh.

The really silly thing is, these days you can get sourdough starter from a bakery, or you can mail-order it dried, or you can even buy it at some of the better gourmet shops – at which point you can simply perpetuate it forever without the effort of making your own.  Or you can make your own like I did over a year ago – and mine is going strong despite me frequently leaving it in the fridge for a month without any feeding (or even checking to see what it is doing).  In fact, I think I need to write a better summary of making and care of starter after a year of experience with mine – note for the near future.  Either way, sourdough starter is not hard to make (or get), and it’s not at all hard to keep alive if you have a refrigerator (and most of us reading this online do – or I hope so, anyway).

But, back to the title of the post – what sourdough starter is, is a culture of lactobacilli (bacteria which sour milk to create yogurt, for example), acetobacteria (bacteria which make vinegar), and an acid-tolerant species of yeast (one of a few, none of which are the species sold as baker’s yeast commercially) living symbiotically in a mix of water and flour, together comprising the greyish gloop that is referred to as “starter”.  Because it is a living culture, it needs to be fed occasionally – daily if it is kept at room temperature, monthly or so if it is kept in the fridge (which is what I do).  Why is it special and different from regular yeast?  Well, the thing is – the “sour” in sourdough – the part that makes it both, taste great and helps preserve it for days on end when regular bread would just go moldy – are organic acids (lactic and acetic) which are produced by the aforementioned bacteria.  And the yeast that is living in the starter must, in order to raise the bread, be able to happily live and reproduce in a very acidic environment that these bacteria create – which baker’s yeast generally can’t do.  Hence the symbiotic culture of the right yeast which can naturally coexist with the bacteria in question.

The above also answers the other implied question – by process of elimination, what sourdough starter isn’t, is anything which is made by mixing baker’s yeast with flour and water and whatever else.  Whew, good to get this bit off my chest.

And now that I’ve hopefully not confused you at all, I will proceed to the really lovely focaccia that I have baked yesterday that begged to be shared with other people (food is happiness, happiness is bigger when shared – platitude, but not a bad one).

This recipe, somewhat unusually for me, uses both, a sourdough starter (for its flavor and preservative qualities), and a tiny bit of dry yeast to help this bread rise faster and to make it practical – and no, I do not contradict myself here.  The sourdough overnight sponge does not involve any dry baker’s yeast – that is added in the final dough mix, where acidity is reduced by mixing in a lot of ingredients.  So in a way, this recipe is the best of both worlds, though not one for the snob bread-baking purists (maybe, who knows – I certainly don’t talk to those types!).

This recipe includes an overnight pre-ferment (sponge), and it obviously does require a sourdough starter.  If you don’t have one, don’t use regular yeast – it may turn out ok, but the flavor and the lovely texture won’t be the same at all.  Instead, consider making your own starter (link leads to first in a series of my posts about making my starter with some observations.  Like I said, I will write a better guide soon – and will update the post accordingly).  Or buying it, or asking a friend for a piece – anything goes.

So, what do you need?

• A couple of bowls, a kitchen scale (recommended for weighing flour), a hand or stand mixer (unless you have strong arms and are really good with that wooden spoon, then you’re fine with a spoon), a half-sized oven pan to bake this in or equivalent (two square or large round cake pans may do).

Day 1:

• 1 heaping tablespoon of sourdough starter (mine worked fine from a jar in the fridge last fed maybe 2 weeks ago)
• 110ml cold tap water
• 85g flour (white, I mixed in about a tablespoon of rye because my sourdough starter loves the rye and goes crazy-bubbly when it gets some)

• Whisk the tablespoon of sticky starter into the water in a large bowl.  Add flour, mix until thick batter-like consistency, scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula, cover with a plastic wrap (clingfilm), and leave overnight.

Day 2:

• All of the above sponge (in its bowl where it should be bubbly by now)
• 325ml cold tap water
• 1 tablespoon good extra-virgin olive oil + a lot more for pan and brushing
• 1.5 tsp dry yeast of any description
• 1-2 tbsp rye flour
• 450g white bread flour + a few tablespoons more if needed
• 1 tbsp dry oregano, crushed in a hand a little
• 1 tbsp coarse salt

For Topping:

• You can really use whatever you like here, but in the picture I used:
• 1 package of tiny baby plum tomatoes (I happily ate the last four or five that didn’t fit on the focaccia)
• 100g chopped feta-style fresh cheese (I buy a German cheese which is less salty and not technically ‘feta’ as it is not from Greece)
• Three sprigs of rosemary cut off my potted bush, leaves stripped.
• Olive oil, flaked sea salt

What to do:

• Combine all the dry ingredients in a clean bowl, mix a bit with a random kitchen implement (whisk or wooden spoon both work).
• Add water to the sponge and whisk to mix.  Add 1 tbsp olive oil.  Add the dry ingredients and mix with a mixer and dough hooks (I use a handheld mixer) until all flour is incorporated.  At this point the dough will be very wet and sticky.
• Continue mixing, turning the mixer up to medium speed, and adding white flour by tablespoonful at a time (I think I might have used 3-4 extra tablespoons) until the dough is still very wet (it won’t achieve the smooth elasticity normal bread dough gets when well-kneaded), but sort of pulls away from the sides of the bowl with the mixer hooks, though leaving sticky bits still, and sticking right back to the bowl.
• Clean and very generously oil the other bowl and your hands.  Transfer the sticky lump of dough into the oiled bowl, and turn it over so it’s all coated.  A tiny bit of oil in a ring around it is good.  Cover with cling film and leave for 2-4 hours (I went out for about 3 hours to shop and then fussed with the dough maybe 40 minutes after coming home).  It should have at least doubled in size during this time.
• Oil hands, lift the film, and stretch and fold the dough a few times right in the bowl, without taking it out on the counter (less mess!).  It’ll degas and be far more amenable for being made into a ball at this point.  Put the ball back into the bowl, cover and leave for another hour.
• Pour enough olive oil into your pan(s) to have a couple of mm of oil on the bottom, and use a pastry brush to brush the oil up on the sides, covering those thoroughly.  If using more than one pan, cut the dough lump in half.  I didn’t, so I just transferred it to the rectangular half-oven pan as it was.
• Use your hands to stretch and poke the dough into the shape of the pan.  If it resists too much, give it five minutes to relax and continue.  Be gentle and avoid deflating the dough – you want those air bubbles in there.
• Take your toppings and push them deep into the dough, as far down as they’ll go, making little wells.  I pushed the rosemary leaves in with bits of cheese and tomato to help them stay stuck in.
• Brush the top of the dough with more olive oil, and turn the oven to 225C to preheat.  Allow to rise for 30-40 minutes – the dough will become puffed up.  You may need to shove the toppings down again in places.
• Place in the middle of the oven and bake for 15 minutes, then move into lower part of the oven to avoid scorching the top and turn heat down to 210C.  Bake for another 10 minutes or so (for me it was total of 25 minutes) until the top is golden brown and internal temperature reads 93C (200F) on instant-read thermometer (fantastic way to tell when bread is done, by the way – get one, they are cheap as chips at IKEA!).
• Remove from oven, brush the top with more olive oil (I am not kidding!), and use a metal spatula to tease the bread out of the form and onto a rack to cool.  Wait as long as you can and then devour!

We had ours with roast pumpkin-and-garlic soup topped with fresh bacon bits and some chopped flat-leaf parsley.  You do as you will – you can just eat it as-is with a cup of tea or coffee.  Trust me, it won’t disappoint.

Submitted to Yeastspotting!

Two-Fifths Sourdough Rye, and Some Baking Myths

This week, winter has finally and properly come to Stockholm.

We have -15C in daytime, sparkling white snow everywhere – it only really sparkles when the temperature outside is way below 0C – and the city is bright and beautiful and inviting to wander out and around in, now that there is no more horrible wet and dark November muck that lasted entirely too long this year – about two months too long if you ask me.

This sort of weather calls for comfort food, but not the heavy rainy-day fare, no – this calls for satisfying textures and earthy flavors; and the fact that there is NO way to overheat the apartment (all it takes is opening the kitchen vent and the problem is solved!), it is also a fantastic excuse to indulge in baking.

Rye bread is both, healthful and enormously satisfying to eat, and I happen to adore the flavor of it – nothing, nothing beats real and heavily buttered rye bread for things like pickled herring, Skagen seafood salad, charcuterie or smoked salmon.  Unfortunately, good sourdough rye is not that easy to find in even an average Swedish supermarket (it’s easy to find average quality there, heh!), and I can imagine that in most English-speaking countries it is a specialty item, and many people consider wholemeal rye flour difficult to bake with.

I know, I have been there myself when I tried to make the 100% wholemeal Finnish rye.  It turns out great, but it is a pain in the head dough to work with, really.  Now, that one is a traditional recipe so not up to me to change (I may well come up with a better way to make a high-percentage rye bread later), but this specific recipe I came up with on my own the other day.  And, guess what?  It is easy to make.  Really really easy.

Two things which gave rise to this recipe are my incessant reading on the subject of food, and my recent experiments (the failed and the successful) with no-knead bread.  I wanted rye bread.  I have read that rye flour works far better after a long sourdough fermentation, and I have seen how well and easily gluten develops in long, sourdough no-knead method fermentation.  The difficulties with bread that has a large part of rye are normally:  1. that it does not rise very well because rye gets in the way of gluten development, so you get a brick or a doorstop; and 2. that the dough is awful to work with and even look at – it is unattractively grey, gloopy and it is sticky above and beyond all reason, to the point of resembling actual carpenter glue.  So the problem is that you really don’t want to knead rye bread – and you have to knead to get the gluten to develop… oh wait – the no-knead method… Eureka!  And so this recipe came to be.

As the name suggests, the recipe is two-fifths rye and three-fifths wheat, although that is approximate.  I will test a half-and-half one at some point later and let you know whether that works as well, which I think it will.

The method used for this bread is simple, and is described in detail in the (successful) no-knead post.  I suggest you read that once as then you will not have to ever read it again (it makes sense).  The only things I can add that are specific to the rye bread are that:

• I was really really generous at covering the banetton with wheat bran (fearful of the stickiness).
• The first rise for this much rye is longer than I suggest for wheat – this bread was left for approximately 18 hours (from late afternoon and overnight till next morning).
• The 2nd rise (in banetton after folding) can also take longer than the 1.5 hours for wheat – I left mine for 5 or so hours in a cool kitchen and then baked it.
• The baking time after the 30-minute mark removal of lid or bowl (whatever you are using), is minimum another 20 minutes, but I watched the bread for about 10 minutes after those 20, and simply took it out when it reached the right color for my liking.  Since the ovens and baking dishes vary, so may your mileage.  My advice is that if this is your first rye bread, watch it.  It should get beautifully deep chestnut-golden brown (rye bread color), and if it is too light it is underbaked.

The recipe is even simpler – and here is where I would like to kick a few of the things you commonly read on the internet, and even in reputable baking books about baking bread, where it hurts.  Why?  Because among a lot of good and useful advice, there are also sites and books (no names or links as usual, you will know them when you see them), that tell you that unless you do X in exactly Y way, your bread will not work and it’s your own fault for being a bread sinner not doing it as the holy internet church of bread bakers preaches.

In my opinion, all four myths mentioned below (I think I will probably point things like this out as I go along, but only four of them make an appearance in this recipe) are so much of what comes out the back end of a cow.  If you do one of those and your bread does not work, something else is wrong (weak starter, wrong flour, etc.).  It is not because you have sinned against the holier-than-thou principles which are nothing but so much hot air being blown where the sun don’t shine.

So, recipe!

• 100-150g sourdough starter, (I feed mine with mix of about 2/3 rye and 1/3 wheat flour before baking rye, half-and-half for wheat breads).  100% hydration (1:1 ratio of flours to water).  It should have been taken out of the fridge and fed at some point within the past 48 hours.  Myth: a lot of baking purists say you should feed your starter every 8 or 12 hours or oh god oh god it will die and nothing will work… that’s a load of [unmentionable substance].  If you have a strong and healthy starter (one that wakes up and rises within 12-24 hours of being taken out of the fridge and fed), then it is more than fine to do like I do:  I keep my starter in the fridge, and a day or two before I want to bake, I take some and mix it up and let it rise.  It is then fine to bake with the next day or two.  No, I am not hallucinating all those well-risen breads on this blog.
• 350ml cold tap water.  Myth:  you must gather the first morning dew from the petals of lilies, or get the purest mountain spring water you can find, because the chlorine in tap water kills your yeast!  No, it doesn’t.  Your water does not need to be bottled, brought in a wooden pail from a mountain spring, or filtered unless you live in an area where it is otherwise not safe to drink (like London).  But if you can enjoy drinking your tap water, so can your starter.  People who go on about how you should use bottled water for baking bread are… let’s not go there.
• 500g flour (200g wholemeal finely ground rye and 300g bread-quality high-protein wheat flour).  Myth:  you must always sift your flour.  No you don’t need to sift any of it for bread-baking – weighing it and dumping it into a bowl, adding salt and spices, and swirling around a bit with a dry whisk or a spoon before adding liquids is also just fine.
• 2 teaspoons salt.  Use a measuring spoon.  Myth:  you should use un-iodized salt of one fancy and expensive variety or another or it kills your yeast!  Truth – no; regular iodized table salt is fine.  The trace amount of iodine in it is not enough to kill the microorganisms in the starter.
• 1 tablespoon caraway seeds.  If you don’t love caraway as much as I do, use 2 teaspoons.  Or none, if you don’t want any.  (No, I do not feel the need to toast mine before adding it, but you can if you like.)

Method (the post linked above details it better, but here is the summary):

• Mix starter and water.  Mix all the rest in a bigger bowl.  Mix liquid into flour mix.  Cover with clingfilm and let stand for 18-20 hours.  Dump out onto a VERY well floured board.  Fold, rest 15 min, stick into banetton to rise.  I left mine to rise for nearly 5 hours but it may have been ready before I came home from my walk, so when it is puffed up, it is ready.  May be as little as 1.5-3 hours for the rye.  Bake, cool on rack, do not cut until completely cooled (more important for rye than wheat breads for flavor development).

Enjoy.  And don’t take [manure] from those who tell you baking bread must be difficult.  It really, really does not have to be.

Submitted to Yeastspotting.  :)

Of No-Knead Bread and Unmitigated Disaster

Edit:  If you don’t want the story or the moral and want to go directly to the successful no-knead bread recipe that I have tested since, go here.  Else, keep reading and enjoy!

Today I will tell you a story with a moral.

Or perhaps even a few of those (morals).  And no pictures.  And no recipe.  No, not today.  You’ll see (or not see, as it may be) in a minute.  But, you do get a moral, which is something I tend to like in my stories – hope you do too.

… Once upon a time, so it came to be that after being largely absent from the blog (and my kitchen) for a while, I figured that I would ease back into cooking after the essay-writing and being somewhat ill with something no more complicated than ordering a pizza or frying a few sausages to eat with a pile of arugula.  Something simple.  Easy.  Something everyone has been saying works, and is oh-so-easy to do – even a four-year-old can do it!

Yes, you’ve guessed it – I have decided to try that no-knead bread that virtually every food blogger wrote about in the past six years or so since it came out.  There are whole websites, with videos, dedicated to this and its apparently utter effortlessness.   So, I thought, this is the ticket – let me make this lazy bread and enjoy the fruit of my [not] labor tomorrow.

Now before I get into this… I have lived in USA.  I own a food scale which measures in metric and in pounds/ounces, and I own a measuring cup with American volume measures too.  Down to 1/4 cup.  And a calculator.  And a brain, too, though sometimes I do feel that might have misplaced it.

I faithfully wrote the recipe down – the version adapted for sourdough starter – and checked it against the original New York Times recipe.  Looked rather close, so I did not worry.  I did as the recipes suggested (and the video demonstrated) – mixed the dry ingredients, then whisked my sourdough starter into the water, and added that to the bowl.  Mixed further.  The dough became sticky and shaggy – and looked remarkably like what the video showed, to boot.  Ok, thought I, I’ve got it made.

But no.  None of the above has, apparently, helped.  Yesterday morning, I happily bounced into the kitchen anticipating carefree bread baking.  I floured my board and scraped the dough… I mean, poured the dough out on it.  It immediately stuck like glue despite my generous flouring (more so than the video demonstrated), and was nowhere near the consistency it would need to be to be stretched, and folded.  I tried to panickedly flour the board some more, scraping the dough off it, and add more flour to my hands, but to no avail.  While I was flailing about, the dough attempted to leak off the board and onto the counter.  That was the final drip (haha), and so after a few feeble attempts to get it to behave, I poured it off the board back into the bowl and contemplated it.  I really do not like throwing away food, and it did look fixable.  And not actually that far off from a really wet-but-possible-to-handle dough.

So I sighed, got out my handheld mixer and dough hooks, and more flour.  In all, I had to add 2.5 ounces (that’s about 90g) of flour before the dough could be handled.  With effort and a lot of flour on surface, hands, and virtually my entire kitchen, I heroically managed a stretch-and-fold, and allowed the dough to rest.  Then I said a quick prayer to the kitchen gods that it would not stick to my well-covered in wheat bran banetton, pre-shaped the dough gently and stuck it into the banetton.  The kitchen gods were, apparently, merciful, or else they were particularly well-disposed to my faithful banetton this day, for it was not ruined.  The dough did not stick.  So I proofed it, preheated my cast-iron pan, and baked it.

It was a total and unmitigated disaster.  The bread looked sort of ok, but once it has cooled and I cut into it, I found a combination of giant (not large, large is good – but giant!) holes and bricky, gluey crumb.  Which left me truly scratching my head and wondering what in the seven hells went wrong with it.  Other than my attempts to fix it by adding more flour later (likely at least a contributing factor), that is.

Having slept on it (well no, on my bed actually – I did end up tossing the bread out, as the results of this failure weren’t even fit to make croutons!), I have decided that I am going to do this again, until I have gotten it right.  Many photos of gorgeous no-knead bread beckon from the google image page, and besides, I am just too damned stubborn to let a recipe defy me in my own kitchen.  And gawdamnit, I am good at baking bread!  I should be able to deal with this touted-for-beginners recipe!  [insert foot stomp here]

So I did some more research, and I think I have pinpointed what went wrong – too little flour in the initial mix (I did follow the instructions, but I guess Swedish water is just a lot more wet *snicker snerk* – another site said that the consistensy should be adjusted if it looks too wet, thank you that first site for not telling me to begin with!), and possibly a too-long fermentation time as well (some authors suggest 12-14 hours, not 18-20, or else a refrigerator overnight – that makes sense to me, my levain usually does rise in about 8-10 hours and this is just a salted version of levain, essentially).  Some more photos of the mixed initial dough suggest it should be more solid.  In short, there will be a rematch, and this time, this time I will master and overcome!

And so the moral of today’s story is this:  Don’t believe all you hear.  This is really rather important, and I normally do follow my advice – shame on me for failing!  And, I really should know better, and remember that it applies to everything, including “trusted” cookbooks.  I’ve been there before.  Trust your gut feeling – if it [whatever it is you are making] looks like it’s too [something] for what it should be, it probably is.  It’s not true just becase you’ve seen it on tv/read it on the internet.

In the words of Arnold the Governator of the State of California, I’ll be Bach.  And next time, no-knead bread, I will return victorious!

Of Food Scares and Fads

I have a pet hate to do with food and media.

Not one, but TWO poisons? (And there isn't any sugar in there!)

Why food?  Because I love food.  Why media?  Because media sells itself by sensationalism, and when they apply this to food, I hate the inevitable result.

The reasoning here is simple and unambiguous:  you can’t make headlines by telling people what they already know – say, that a pile of green veggies is good for your digestion, or that protein or vitamins are good for you.  People will just look at it, shrug and go “so what else is new?”  It is a simple and sad truth of newsmaking, that what doesn’t create a stir, doesn’t sell articles.

Add to this the fact that obesity epidemic is real, and that whatever the times, people always have to eat, and food becomes a field ripe for the plucking for media scaremongering with a sprinkling of political lobbying here and there.

We have all seen it.

• Some of us who are old enough to remember it, remember the “eggs are awful and full of fat and cholesterol and no one should eat them or you die of heart disease!” scare of approximately 20 years ago.  (According to British Heart Foundation some years later – no, not really.  And in actuality, as the site states, eating cholesterol does not raise cholesterol levels in the bloodstream.  In little-known fact, cholesterol molecule is too large to pass the intestinal/blood barrier and is broken down before it reaches the bloodstream.  So where does it come from there?  Well, eating sugar is what creates excess triglycerides in the bloodstream – by stimulating production of insulin which triggers synthesis of fat, including excess cholesterol.)
• I doubt there are many people alive now who remember the campaign to replace all natural saturated fats with hydrogenated shortening (aka trans fats) in the 1930s “because it’s cleaner and healthier than lard and [what they euphemistically called] tropical oils“.  I don’t even need to add a source here because by now (40 years after it was discovered in the 70s and hushed up, by the way!) everyone knows trans-fats are deadly.  Washing the stain off reputations of the very healthful saturated coconut and red palm oils will take longer.
• And a couple of years ago there was a “eating red meat causes cancer!” (2007) headline too.  Actually, the study noted it was a “modest” increase if processed meat was also consumed, and that the relationship between meat intake and mortality is ambiguous, as the increase in cancer risk is associated with increased and excessive consumption of iron.  In layman’s terms, the relationship cannot actually be established, and is only examined in the study due to the fact that red and processed meat are sources of iron.  (By the way, so is spinach.)
• There is a piece of actual legislation (2008) enforcing that a bunch of chemical food colorings when used in food, should carry a warning label (which I do not disagree with in spirit, as I think they don’t belong in the food), that does absolutely nothing for its professed goal – the reduction in children’s ADHD.  Why?  Because they removed the colors from sugary drinks and candies – three guesses whether that also removed the “sugar high” (which, incidentally, has the same symptoms as ADHD – inability to focus and hyperactivity).  Moreover, the actual study which led to this legislation (via media scandal) was, simply put, bad science – there were no control tests performed properly, etc.  But, media picks up on it, and there you go – legislation!

Now, it appears, it’s the dairy’s turn to take a beating.  All around articles have cropped up in newspapers and press releases about how dairy is awful, and causes prostate cancer, and we just should not eat it.  My reaction to this newest craze is the same as to all the previous ones – a healthy dose of scepticism.  So, what gives?  The actual scientific papers (here and here) regarding dairy consumption, calcium and prostate cancer essentially say that in cases of really high (above-recommended) intake of calcium from milk, there may be a possible small increase in prostate cancer risk in older men.

Sounds familiar?  Yes, the same wording as was used on the “red meat causes cancer!” scare, actually.  Scientists postulate a possible link, and then media writers take it and create a headline – because nothing sells better than telling people that something they eat every day and think healthy is actually GIVING THEM CANCER OH MY GOD, OH GOD THROW AWAY THAT MILK, MARIE!!!

*cough*  Excuse me.  I tend to react harshly to such fearmongering.

A conversation I had with someone about this the other day ended (on my side) when I had pointed out that he ought to read the actual scientific papers behind the populist article and make his own conclusions.  His response was (more or less verbatim) that “he does not feel the need to read the scientific papers because the article sounds good and in agreement with what he already knows”.  Sadly, this is the response of many people when faced with an easy-to-read article vs. a head-numbing paper chock-full of biochemical and clinical terminology.  Doubly sadly because said paper usually contains little or NO support for the populist garbage that is being spewed in such headline-producing articles – and yet, no one lets the science get in the way of a good story!

So, have you heard about the cucumbers?  Every human born in 1603 that ate cucumbers – they all died!  100% mortality rate!  Screw the science, cucumbers WILL kill you, people, you hear me?!

*cough again*

So, what should we believe, if not the newspapers and the paid-for articles?

For some of us, the solution is to read and follow the actual science.  Read the papers being published, preferably the ones not funded by someone with some sort of interest – which are few and far between.  However, I am aware that the average consumer would struggle to make heads or tails of the studies.  This is not a put-down, it’s a fact, like with any technical text.  Heck, I’d not make heads or tails of a text in theoretical physics myself nor do I expect to.  So what to do?

To begin with, take all sensationalist articles with a large sack, not a grain, of salt.  The actually dangerous things, such as the finding of carcinogen and poison acrylamide in French fries cooked at too-high temperature caused immediate WHO (World Health Organization) action in response – because the scientists when they find something scary enough, tend to scream pretty loud.

The second thing to do is to take it in moderation.  Even trans-fatty acids are not actually that dangerous (and even beneficial for some things if they are natural, like trans-palmitoleic acid) in small doses.  Eating them as blocks of hydrogenated fats kills you.  Calcium and iron are good for your health – but overdo them, and they aren’t anymore.  It’s a well-known fact that overdose of iron (such as from iron supplement pills) can be lethal, and the bottle will carry that warning.  I am not surprised that overconsumption of calcium beyond daily recommended intake level is not healthy.  For that matter, taking too may vitamins and supplements also carries a health risk – but the key words here are “overconsumption” and “too many”.

So what to do?  Eat your egg.  One egg, or two but not every day.  Not six of them a day, maybe.  Eat your steak.  Eat it once a week or maybe twice, not half a cow daily.  Drink your milk.  Drink a glass of it, not two litres a day.  Think about what you are eating.  Avoid chemically processed foods.  You don’t need me to tell you that those are not healthy.  Use your head, and for the love of gods and little green apples, don’t listen to people who want to make food a political issue, a politically correct issue, or a matter of a fad.

I will leave you in closing with a funny which ought to illustrate the stupidity of the press pretty well.

Here is an article from BBC News about the discovery of the fatty acid in dairy (the aforementioned trans-palmitoleic acid) which supposedly may reduce the risk of metabolic syndrome, diabetes and obesity, sensationalizing it.  So far so good?  It even links to the actual study it refers to.  But, reading through the article, it is sadly and abundantly clear that the journalist is not only not a biologist, he doesn’t even have the common sense he ought to have writing for the public.  It says:  “…Milk and dairy foods can be high in fat, which if eaten in excess can contribute to weight gain. So it’s advisable to choose lower-fat dairy foods instead.”  Way to go Einstein – which part of the fact that it is a fatty acid did you miss?  Or was it the political correctness that stuck in your craw and made you feel the need to negate the point which is being made – that full-fat dairy consumption is associated with lower adiposity and lesser chances of diabetes?  I suppose I will never know.  But here you go people  – this is about how much credit you ought to give those who write for the press where it comes to food and scientific discovery.

The scientific papers tend to take a longer, less sensationalist view of their own findings – and, speaking of the recent issue, dairy, here’s one:  “Children whose family diet in the 1930s was high in calcium were at reduced risk of death from stroke. Furthermore, childhood diets rich in dairy or calcium were associated with lower all-cause mortality in adulthood.  Replication in other study populations is needed to determine whether residual confounding explains part of these findings.“  (65-year-long study by Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Australia)  Yet do you hear screams of mandatory milk which ought to be forced on children?  No.  Because 1. it’d be bad science to, and 2. it doesn’t sell a newspaper.

So in the end, all you can do is learn critical thinking, and not believe every populist piece of news garbage you read, even if it sounds like something someone said that you’d like to believe.  Learn to use your own head.

The Bloggers Who “Like” Everything

Do you love it when people  comment on, and “like” your posts?

Image courtesy ihavesynth.com

I certainly do.  I think, most bloggers in their right mind do. (No, I am not talking to you Mr. or Ms. Introverted who are just happy all alone with your blog, if you like it that way, that, too, is totally fine – just, you know, don’t feel upset if I read it and occasionally say something!)  But realistically, most of us write on the net in order to get our message out to the general public and hopefully interest them in it, whatever that message may be.  It is a way to interact with the entire world (or well, the internet-connected part of it), and reach out.

So far so good.  WordPress (with whom I have no quarrel on this subject whatsoever, just so we get this clear!) provide us with a lovely (and free to use, unless we want extra perks) platform for our blogs, and among the features they have very kindly built in, is the “like” button.  When it was initially introduced, I thought it was a great idea.  In fact, I still think it is, except it is in relation to the sadly common (and growing more so) use of said “like” button that I have developed my new pet dislike (not ‘pet hate’, hate is too strong a word for something like this).

What is it that I have come to dislike enough to write a full-blown rant about?  It is, my fellow bloggers and readers, the bloggers who sweep through categories of blogs on WordPress home page, “liking” every single new thing that comes through.  I have seen them on many a site, and I have begun to take notice, and I see more and more of them as time goes by.  Sadly.  What is it that I notice?  Well, for example, for all they “like” what must be hundreds of blogs (because I don’t read a hundred blog posts every day and even I have begun to notice the same people liking things I read – be it blogs I subscribed to, or new content that I get from browsing the WP “Food” category), they never, ever comment.  Ok, that may be an exaggeration, but I haven’t, in all of my reading and noting things like that (In case you are wondering, I have a very good visual memory and an eye for patterns), seen even a single comment by those people.

Before I go any further, simply “liking” and then not commenting is fine.  That is perfectly fine.  The “like” button is there for a reason and that reason is so you can just show appreciation of something in a single click.  This is not the behavior I am describing – what I am talking about are the people who “like” things immediately, and without any apparent pattern and in all-encompassing numbers.  The ones who couldn’t possibly have read and had reason to like all of those immense numbers of blogs it took for me to notice that it is all they apparently do.

They are usually the first to silently “like” new posts (on random blogs), and when I go back to said blogs if I have left comments, there are never any by them later on, either.  I mean, it’s easy to “like” something quickly if you don’t need to read the thousand-or-more words in the post, right?  How hard is clicking a button?  First!

So they like everything, but bother to comment on none of it?  What gives?

My misantropic side is the one which has, sadly, suggested the answer which I assume (for the moment) to be correct.  I can’t stand it when my misantropic self is right, for the record.  I’d love it if it was always wrong.  Basically, these are people who have decided that the “like” button is their new free ticket for blog traffic.  No need to do lengthy things like read, comprehend, evaluate and comment on posts anymore!  That’s for suckers!  These uber-clickers have ascended to a new level and can just breeze through the blogs, clicking the little star buttons, and if they click enough of them, surely at least some gullible souls would go to their gravatar to see who this person who routinely “likes” their articles (or even liked one once) was.

It’s not, technically, a violation of any rule that I can think of.  It’s just the electronic equivalent of such full-of-carp (and I don’t mean the fish here!) social tactics as approaching someone at a large corporate event or party, handing them your business card and saying “you do great work, we have to network!”, never bothering to find out what it is they even do, in hopes of having some business come your way for no more effort than that.  It is the cheapening of the point of blogging, very much in a similar vein as the blog content guild do – by trolling the gullible.  Only the “pay” in this case is less in money for having their links inserted into your blog post, but in the traffic they hope to generate from the little avatar they leave stuck on your blog post.  To add insult to injury, I don’t think you can remove specific “likes” from your blog – and I don’t want to block the option entirely, since many people actually do use it well and the way it was intended.

Now, before people I don’t intend to attack get offended – I am not saying you shouldn’t like blog posts!  By no means!  I do it myself quite often.  But you know what?  If I read a blog post and I like it, chances are I also have a couple of words to say to the writer, about having liked the post, if nothing else.  About what I liked about it, or how I’d do things differently.  About the post itself.  Because I’ve read it first, before I clicked that star button.

A late disclaimer, but it fits into the closing comments – this post is not about telling anyone what to do.  In the blogosphere, it’s really none of my right, morally speaking.  But, I hold myself to a high standard of blog and general net etiquette – always linking to those I should give credit to, giving credit on images if they aren’t mine, asking people before reblogging something which isn’t obviously public, etc.  You know, common courtesy in the virtual world.  I don’t necessarily hold others to that standard – but those people who consider me so gullible that they think clicking the “like” button on my blog (and every other one among those I read regularly and randomly come across) will get my respect or interest, those people are sorely mistaken.

As I finish editing this post, a notice pops up that yet another one of those “frequent offenders” have liked something on my blog recently, and I no longer feel any doubt about writing or posting this rant.  Some things are just not ok with me, and I strongly believe in saying what I think.

Beware Of “Writers” Bearing Free Content

Today’s post is not at all about food.

Instead, the theme of today’s post is: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes“.

No offense intended to Hormel Foods, owners of this image.

Or, in other words, you get what you pay for – and you definitely should look a gift horse in the mouth.  You know, especially if it’s a free horse that someone you don’t know attempts to hand to you out of the goodness of their heart.  Especially on the internet.  The question you ought to ask yourself is – so, what’s in it for them?

We all hate blog spam.  But, thankfully, for those of us using WordPress, or Blogger, comment spam is more or less a thing of the past – the built-in spam filters place it all neatly into my “spam” box which I check and occasionally empty.  I like a tidy place.  But … that’d mean spammers are out of the blog business – or, are they?

The other day, I have received the following email via the “contact” box on my blog (names and such removed out of politeness):

Name: xxxx
Email: xxx@spammerguild.com
Website:
Message: I’ve been reading eatheroses.wordpress.com and have a story idea that might interest your followers:

We all know we should eat healthy, but, let’s be honest, low-cal food isn’t exactly mouth-watering. Either the flavors are off or the portions are too small. However, getting healthy doesn’t always have to be a drag. I will discuss creative tips for making healthy food more interesting as well as giving some recipe ideas that are sure to help you get healthy, without giving up your inner foodie.

Would you be interested in having me write a guest post for your blog?  Alternatively I could just supply you with some great trend information that you can use to write a post yourself.

Let me know if you’re interested – I think this topic will be of great interest to your readers.

Thanks for your time and best regards,

xxxx.

Spammer Guild
1015 Bee Caves Woods Dr, Suite 102
Austin, TX 78746
xxxx@spammerguild.com

(Please let me know if you don’t want to receive any more emails from me! Thanks!)

Notice how nice and polite he is, and how concerned he is with the well-being of my poor, neglected blog?  I mean, look at it, not updated in ages half a day at that point, and I clearly am neither on-trend nor do I know anything about healthy and delicious food.  I mean, who am I to be able to tell people about those things?  Someone with a couple of university degrees, work experience and a lifelong hobby?  Nah, I don’t know jack, and I clearly need help.  So, very interested in his generous offer (do you need a tissue to wipe the sarcasm dripping off the screen yet?), I write back to him.

Dear xxxxx,

Thank you for your email.  I am really curious to know who is paying you to do this, and in which manner.  Would you kindly provide me with this information, so that I can make an informed decision regarding any content that may be posted to my blog, and the reasons why it would be.

Many thanks and best regads,
Veronika

You know, normally a person would cotton on to something when you ask them who is paying for it, but I have found that if you are really polite (see his first letter above!), people tend to assume you bear them good will.  So, the next morning I get a prompt reply.  With an article draft, no less!

Veronika,

I’m apart of the Spammer Guild.

The Spammer Guild is a unique place for bloggers to get together and
exchange ideas and articles. They provide aspiring writers with a home for the
content they write.

Here is a draft of the article so you can see how it would read and look, and you can make your decision from that. (notice there are links in the article, this is how I benefit)

xxxxx

The article, which I won’t be posting for the obvious reason (why do the spammer guild as I’ve renamed them a favor?), is, to sum it up elegantly, so much drivel in the “eat healthy and low fat and use website x and website y’s products to keep fit” vein.  It is, essentially, a badly-written and outdated (in terms of weight loss and health) advertisement.  That they want me to put on my blog.  As content.  Yeah, right.  Also, the bit about how his guild is a place for aspiring writers and how they provide them with a home for content they write?  It looks like they want ME to provide them with a home for the content they get paid to write – so not as advertised!  (And copypasted from their homepage to boot!)

But my favorite bit here, you see, is that this ‘aspiring writer’ doesn’t appear to know grammar.  Note that he’s apart of the Spammer Guild.  No, oh no, he’s not assiciated with them – he is apart.  So, in the morning, feeling inspired, I reply with:

xxxx, good morning.

I have a couple of other issues which really need to be resolved, before I go forward with anything regarding this -

1. If you are an aspiring writer, why don’t you start your own blog?  They are available free from half a dozen blog-hosting sites such as blogger and wordpress and many more.  So, why not make your writing your own?
2. I am wondering what made you think that I need content from elsewhere or that I lack my own content to write?  Would you please share your reasoning with me?
3. Why should I, a food professional, post anything with links to websites of which I do not approve, that want their links inserted for-pay (not to me) in my blog?

Looking forward to hearing back from you,
Veronika

When the questions get this pointed, apparently even the small-brain spammer comprehends that something is not all happy happy joy joy.  Unfortunately he does not appear to have gotten really good reading comprehension scores on his tests, but no matter – he is now realising that I have no intention for earning his keep for him and using my blog to advertise his crap.  So, this evening, I get a grumpy and innocence-wronged reply which totally doesn’t address the first question regarding why he won’t start his own blog instead of wanting to post on mine:

Veronika,

We don’t charge for blog posts, I don’t know how you came to that conclusion. And as for what made me think you needed content, I didn’t think you needed content, I was just offering to add additional content. Anyways, I found someone interested in the article. Thank you for your time, and I wish you well! Take care.

xxxx

Thank YOU for your time and for alerting me to the fact that spammers have found a new way to advertise – gullible bloggers!  And no, dumb*ss, I did not say you wanted me to pay you – I referred to the fact that you get paid to put those links on my blog.  Of course I understand, it must have been sorely disappointing for him to have spent all that time writing polite emails to me when I didn’t really intend to let him take advantage of me.  How heartless of me, really!  I mean, spammers are people too, right?  Right?

I sincerely hope the comment about having found another blogger who wanted the article was just a face-saving remark and that no other bloggers actually bought into this garbage.  A polite spammer wanting to make a buck off your blog is still a spammer, and I really think it’s very underhanded to approach people (not all of whom are suspicioius sorts like myself) with “here, we want to help you” rather than the way honest advertisers (like Google Ads or various ad-partner firms) would.  Though, have to give them credit for the idea – using people’s vanity and laziness and desire for “free stuff” to place their products.

So anyway, I hope this has at least amused you.  I thought I would bring this to the collective attention of the blogosphere – or at least as much as my blog gets read – because after all, who wants to have someone else post low-quality advertisements on their blog and get paid for that – especially considering that that someone does not know English well enough to realise that “anyway” does not have a plural.

Beware Greeks bearing gifts, and all that.  You know how it ended in Troy, don’t you?

Carnivorous Plants, Omnivorous Thoughts

Day before yesterday, the boyfriend and I visited Gothenburg.  Gothenburg is a very nice city on the West coast of Sweden, and we were there to see our friends, go to the dissertation defense party, and while we were there, we also took the time to visit the Gothenburg Botanical Garden.  (Very, very recommended if you are interested in botany, conservation, or just like to walk around in a pretty park and look at flowers.)

Pitcher Plant (Sarracenia sp.) - aren't they cute?!

Among other things, the garden is famous for its collections of orchids and carnivorous plants, and while it was the orchid collection which originally drew me there, it was the carnivores which made me think.

These cute, fluffy red-patterned pitchers eat animals.  Specifically, they eat bugs – they lure them in, drown them, and digest them.  They photosynthesize too, like most other plants, but for their nutrients, they depend largely (if not solely) on killing and eating what flies or creeps their way.  They can, of course, survive without eating bugs – though not incredibly well – but they do far, far better if they can eat what is natural to them.

And, of course, I’ve never heard anyone say that it’s not ethical to feed them flies, or that it’s murder.  It’s – well, it’s natural, and that’s the end of it.

In general, I don’t care what other people eat, so long as they don’t hurt themselves and I don’t consequently have to pay for their health care via my taxes, and so long as they don’t tell me what I should and should not eat.

The former is an ongoing social problem.  People eat whatever the heck they feel like, and then think that others should pay for the problems they give themselves.  Rant for another time.  The latter is a problem with fewer people, but they are far more voiciferous.  I am talking about all those who scream that eating animals is not ethical and that I am a bad person for wanting to, and doing so.

The question I would like to ask is, why?  Why is it unethical and why is it bad, precisely?

A side note before I launch further into rant – I do my best to buy grass-fed meat, and free-range chickens (essentially more or less the only kind available in Sweden anyway), and I do not in any way condone bad conditions or treatment of livestock.  In fact, it is people like myself who pay a premium price for good-quality meat from well-treated animals who contribute to well-being of livestock in good herds.

Furthermore, while there is an argument that humans are not obligate carnivores, but rather omnivores, the latter term should not be taken to mean that humans can therefore subsist on vegetable matter only, or not easily or well.  In fact, omnivores cannot subsist by grazing at all – that would be the province of herbivores, which humans certainly are not (our digestive system is just not adapted to such diet).  Meaning, I am not about to give up eating fruit, grains, legumes or vegetables and greens – that’d be mad (not to mention constipating!), but I also do not see any ethical reason for me to stop eating animal tissue – so long as no animals live in horrible conditions because of it.  I mean, let’s face it – no sane carnivore would prefer a miserable and sick animal to eat to a fat and happily sleek one.  I am not mad either.  When I eat an animal, I want to know it was healthy and lived well – if nothing else, because it would taste better if so (nutrition aside).

As to nutrition – well yes, you can (with help of some intensive and environment-costly modern technology) survive on a purely vegetable and fungal diet.  But mind you, I can’t imagine that any manner of eating which requires serious industrial processing of said plant matter, and industrial-level extraction/synthesis of vitamins and other nutrietns, and heavy supplementation with those can be called anything like healthy or natural.  This is to say – ovo-lacto-vegetarians and pescetarians, for example, do just fine.  It’s vegans who have a real serious industry dependency.

The question which made me wonder is – why is it that some people (no names or links here, I am being nice!) feel the need to try to load me with guilt for wanting to eat what is natural to me?  (That, by the way, being, a nice selection of fruit, vegetables, grains, legumes, eggs and yes, meat.)  Is any of it more wrong for me to eat than for a carnivorous plant to get fed a few flies?  Why?  Because I am not red and fluffy and don’t live in a pot?  And what about the plants themselves – why is it that some people consider it to be perfectly fine to eat a cucumber but not a cow?  What makes plant life worse or less precious than animal life, precisely?  After all, plants are the reason why we, animls, have oxygen to breathe and something, anything to eat – they are the only form of life on this planet which converts inorganic matter into organic matter which the rest of kingdoms of life can eat.  I’d say that ought to make them more revered, not less!

So, here’s what I have to say – just like the adorable Sarracenia in the photo, and her many cohorts, I do not buy your “you shouldn’t eat animals because they are cute and have huge Disney-Bambi eyes“.  Animals are a natural part of my diet, they have proteins and nutrients I need (and yumminess I love), and I will continue to eat them untill and unless you come up with a better reason why me and my Pitcher plant buddies here should consider them off-limits.

P.S.  If you drive a car, then don’t even start on how it’s better for the environment – sell your car and take public transit or walk like I do, first.

Of Ruined Fondue And Unnecessary Disappointment

The following post is half a rant and half the instructions for those wishing to avoid the aforementioned disappointment.  And I will try to go gently on the rant bit, as I try to avoid those without a good cause.  Sadly, this is a good cause.

I make no secret of the fact that if I have to pick my one favorite celebrity chef for cookbook-buying (I don’t normally watch TV so I have no idea of how entertaining or useful their shows are, so I go by the reading and cooking quality of recipes myself), it’d be Nigella Lawson.  (If I had to pick two, the other would be Nigel Slater, and if I could have three, Emeril Lagasse deserves an honorable mention.  Just so you know.)  Now, as she herself says, her qualifications regarding food are not those of a chef, but rather of an eater – and, incidentally, also a cook.  Which is also fine by me.  I tend to find her recipes easy, good to eat, and generally have nothing but positive things to say of her.

Which makes last night’s occurrence all the more sad and disappointing.  The story is simple – I had some decent smooth-melting-type cheeses in the fridge which needed to be used, leftovers of a box of white wine, and a freshly-baked loaf of sourdough bread and I thought I’d make a lazy dinner of fondue.  Now, I’d not made fondue before, but being a decently good cook, I did not feel it should be too difficult if I got a good recipe and followed the instructions.  And because I like and trust Nigella’s cookbooks, I did not turn to my usual internet-scouring for tips, but opened up my Nigella Express book and found the fondue recipe I’d seen it on previous read-throughs.

Note, that I am not saying the book is bad in general – in fact, I’ve cooked out of it, and done so successfully, and the food was gorgeous as always.  But not this recipe.  I have followed it to the letter.  Unfortunately, the instructions were, simply put, wrong, and my cheese clumped despite my best efforts.  Again, I had at first thought the fault was mine, but a bit of research on the net (something I should have and would have done before ruining the cheese had I not trusted said cookbook so well) showed that there are several steps and an ingredient omitted in the recipe as it is written which actually have to do with cheese clumping prevention.

So, here are the steps you’d need to take in addition to the aforementioned recipe to make it workable:

1. Add 1-2 teaspoons of lemon juice to the white wine.  Most traditional fondue recipes have this, and one or two helpfully explain that it helps break the cheese down.  Why it is omitted from generally lemon-in-fridge-assuming Nigella book, I do not know.
2. Preheat the wine.  Nigella’s recipe says to add wine and cheese to the pot and heat it.  No, no and no!  Preheat wine with the lemon juice, specifically until hot but not quite boiling to help melt the cheese as you later add it.
3. Add cheese to hot wine in little batches and stir in figure-8 to avoid clumping.  Add cheese as previous batch more or less melts.
4. Use low heat once the wine is hot and while you add the cheese.  The recipe simply does not mention the heat setting and sadly, it really should have.
5. There is also the additional bit where the cheese should ideally be at room temperature and not straight from the fridge, but I suspect if the previous 4 items are followed, this step could theoretically be skipped as cheese does not have a very high heat capacity (unlike meat).

So there you have it.  A recipe that would have been fantastic had it been actually complete.  That is to say, it still tasted good, it just was clumped and not pretty enough that I’d have served it to any visitors.  T and I ate it, and were happy, but it was a bit labor-intensive with the long cheese-gone-stringy bits in what should have been smoothly melted sauce.

Better luck next time, and I will make it with the addition of lemon juice and the above instructions and feel confident that it will work just fine.  And taste fine again, which is why I will be reworking it.

I am by no means disappointed in the food writer herself, nor in the book as a whole, but I think – shame on you, Nigella, you really could have easily done better.  And, in my opinion, should have.

All Measures Are Approximate (All Butter Is Real)

Butter. With a side of red-hot chili flakes

If you are reading this blog in a tense diet-rules-ridden worry about healthy eating and weight loss (I am all for the former for all – and for the latter, for the people who need it only), I have one word for you: relax.  There is nothing more likely to cause you stomach ulcers than stress – and getting those stressing over food issues is just sad – not to mention totally unnecessary.

To borrow a derogatory term from one of the cookbooks from my collection, I can’t stand diet dictocrats.  Not only have they done little other than help plunge the Western civilization into the depths of an obesity and diabetes II epidemic (do the words “metabolic syndrome” mean anything to  you?), but to add insult to (the very real) injury, they have systematically tried (and in the cases of too many people, managed) to take away the joy and love of good – and healthy! – food.

Regrettably, I do not exaggerate – neither the size of the problem (individually or population-statistic wise), nor the amount of food-related neuroses I have encountered.  Oh the sad people at the supermarket, staring wistfully at the butter display and then picking up a tub of light margarine, if you only knew how much better for you that coveted block of butter is than the over-processed box of “healthy” junk you hold in your hand!

So, in the spirit of revolution against the above (and because it fits with what I like, know and believe), the recipes in this blog are written with as relaxed and anti-dictocratic and politically incorrect attitude as possible.  After all, who am I to tell you how much parsley you want in your pasta (or how much pasta you want in your fresh-ground black pepper for that matter), and in what proportion you like your bacon to your beef.  It would be both rude and presumptuous for me to try to tell you how you should like your food and what constitutes the perfect this, that or the other – and I do not hold cookbooks or cooking shows by celebrity chefs that exhort you to do things “just so, else it is a waste of whatever and time” in any sort of good regard.

Therefore, from the very start – and until further notice (nor foreseen anytime at all) – all measures in recipes are given approximately.  They are a guideline and a suggestion of good consistency and usually above-average (for a Northern European taste) amount of seasoning (the way I like it), but when following any recipe, I would strongly urge you to modify it to your own taste and preference – since it is far more likely that you will be the one eating it, or maybe your friends, rather than I.  Food, like sex, is neither a competitive, nor a spectator sport.  Or, I don’t think it should be.

In line with my education in food and biochemistry, and my hate towards political correctness – especially in food and other items of personal preference – I refuse to use butter-, milk- and meat-substitutes, regardless of whatever “ethical” and health claims (both usually unfounded beyond superficial advertisement hype) they make.  Quite aside from the fact that they all taste like… well, not like what they claim, but rather much like shit – thus violating not just the “good for you” but also the “good to eat” rules of my food philosophy.  I like my food unfucked-with and natural, and thus tasting of actual food, thank you very much.  And while on the subject of ethics, I would rather finance small dairy farmers than large vegetable-oil processing plants with my butter habit.  Loved-and-cared-for Daisy the cow tends to give far better butter than vegetable oil-and-water-plus-emulsifiers goo that comes out the pipe at said industrial facility.  I won’t even speak of meat and milk substitutes in any detail to avoid ruining your appetite for a week.

And thus the butter is real, and usually (for cooking with) unsalted.  I will use good quality gourmet salted butters for eating, especially when prepared with sea salt and the like.  Likewise, meat is preferably fresh, bloody, non-Kosher, and whenever possible, free-range and bought from someone who raises it and sells to small butcheries.  Or at least from a good butcher shop or counter – easier in Sweden than most places, with its good livestock welfare standards.

I refuse to feel guilty about eating things which were produced without inflicting undue cruelty on animals, and I refuse to make quality compromises regarding what I eat – we are what we eat (and look like it).  So please do read, try, change, cook, eat and most importantly, relax and enjoy it.  Else what’s the point, really?

Supermarket Offer Email Outrage

Normally, I have a reasonably good attitude and relationship with my local supermarket.  Yes, I dislike it for edging out my favourite tiny greengrocer on Bold Street which I loved, and with the general dislike of a food professional towards the multiple retailers, but on the other hand, it is a decent supermarket most of the time, the fresh produce is fresh, they often have things I like on offer (nice tomatoes, fruit, nuts, butter, cheese, etc.), and it is close and has good opening hours.  So, it sort of balances out.  I have one of those advantage cards for it, and I have signed up for their weekly emails with offers with the thought that it never hurts to see what they put up on sale… or does it?

I have received one such email last night, and being on a tighter budget this month, trustingly and curiously went to click through it.  “Stock your cupboard for half price!”  Great, that sounds fantastic – and I click the link to be taken to a page which details which products are actually included in this great pantry-stocking offer.  I scroll through the page, and as I do so, a sense of dread slowly overtakes me: all the products on this “cupboard-stocking” offer are, in fact, cookies, biscuits and cheap chocolates in large packs!

What the hell?!  Leaving aside the obesity and diabetes epidemic sweeping the Western world, and the governments’ attempts to do something about it (ineffectual as they are, knocking on the wrong food groups), since when it is the practice to stock one’s pantry with chuffing sweets?!

What is worse, is the insidiousness of this:  what it does, is teach people (because let’s face it, even when we do not mean to, we do tend to internalise what we read, hear or see in the media – that is what most advertising is based on, after all) that “storecupboard favourites” should, in fact, be boxes and bags of chips (what the locals call “crisps”), cookies, chocolate biscuits and candies.  And it is doing it in the times when what we really ought to try to teach the general public is that these things do not, DO NOT! belong in your everyday food consumption, and should be only purchased occasionally and in small quantity as a treat.  (Unless you are striving for obesity and related diseases, of course.  Then by all means, do stock your storecupboard with all this, and eat it daily.  It’s your funeral!)  This goes against any attempts (including the token “diet club” run by the same supermarket!) of teaching people better and healthier lifestyle in terms of food quality and consumption.

After said email, my supermarket has, again, made it to the list of my less-favourite people.  And I hate feeling disappointed in businesses I had, against all odds, actually learned to respect and like.

So, in short, after resisting a strong urge to throw the nearest shoe into the nearest wall, I resort to this:  the electronic equivalent of public screaming and shoe-throwing – in the hopes that perhaps writing this and making people aware of the insidious dangers of the supermarket and advertisement jungle, I might undo at least a little bit of the harm emails like the one I’ve received (sent out to millions of consumers, I am sure!) are doing day in and day out.