Why not try a pig fat pie?

I just learned that there will be leaf lard available at the UD farmers' market this weekend. Hallelujah! It's the softest, sweetest, bestest lard a pig gives, straight from the fat surrounding the kidneys. But this stuff ain't from just any pigs - it's from Berkshire hogs raised by Wooly Pigs rancher Heath Putnam, the guy whose super-marbled Mangalitsa pork will reportedly be available next summer. This is phat pig fat.

Of course, most people want Heath's Berkshire chops and jowl bacon for their Christmas parties, but I'll be there to buy the leaf lard, because I want to make a pie.

Here's a bit of quick, oversimplified baking science: When you make a pie crust, you layer little pieces of butter, or shortening, or what have you, between layers of flour (whose gluten, when mixed with water, becomes activated . . .but that's another topic entirely). When the butter melts, it produces steam, which pushes the floury stuff apart, resulting in the little air pockets we come to know on our tongues as flaky pie crust.

But see, leaf lard is made up of bigger fat crystals than butter. In pie making, this translates to bigger air pockets, and thus a much flakier crust. Some argue that butter has a better flavor, so many recipes call for a combination of leaf lard and butter. I've always wanted to try it. Because who wouldn't love a pig-and-apple pie?

There's one little catch: When you buy leaf lard, you can't just chop it up and throw it in the mixer like butter. You have to render it yourself before using it.

But what the hay? It's baking season, when we're all game for something new. Why not try a pig fat pie?

Wooly Pigs at the University District Farmers' Market, Saturday 9 a.m. - 2 p.m.

Topics: Continuing Education Fridays

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Wolf opens tonight

How to Cook a Wolf, Ethan Stowell's third Seattle restaurant, opens tonight in a small space atop Queen Anne. With just twenty seats, and room for about ten at the bar, Wolf, as Stowell is calling it, will focus on Italian-inspired small plates and housemade pastas. His lamb shank farotto jumped out at me, not because the celery root and braising jus it's served with has me drooling on the keyboard, but because I do love a good new vocab word. Farroto (am I the only one who hadn't heard this?) is just a handy name for farro risotto, of course.

How to Cook a Wolf (full website forthcoming)
2208 Queen Anne Ave. N. (at Boston), 838.8090, QUEEN ANNE.
Open Thurs. - Mon., 5 p.m. - 12 a.m. Closed Tues. and Wed.

Topics: Continuing Education Fridays and News

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Ever been to a cheese cave christening?

According to Kelli Estrella, whose family operates Estrella Family Creamery, you can make pretty good artisanal cheese (the modesty!) by aging it in above-ground cheese "caves," like the souped-up 40-foot long cargo container they have rigged up on their dairy farm in Montesano, WA. "Technically, a cave is just any room used to age cheese," says Estrella. (Some people do it at home.)

But to make really good cheese, the very best cheese, you should have an underground cave, one dug into the earth that cools and humidifies the cheeses naturally, she says. So she built one. The new space will also enable her to separate different cheeses for more effective ripening.

"Not all cheeses like to be in the same space together," says Estrella. "It's like having 21 children and three of them don't get along. Some molds won't grow on one cheese if it's too close to another cheese." (Here's how New York's Artisanal Cheese does it.)

Such caves have been around for generations in Europe, and more recently in New England, but as far as she knows, Estrella will be the first to start using an underground cave in Washington. She traded her cave builders seven years' worth of free cheese for their labor - sounds biblical, doesn't it? - and hopes to start putting cheeses in it soon.

The upshot? Roy Breiman, the chef at Salish Lodge (for whom Estrella makes a grating cheese called Montesano Romano that I gotta try - has anyone had it?), says that cheese ages more uniformly in an underground cave because a correctly-engineered cave ceiling is curved just so, to make the air circulate perfectly. In underground caves, cheeses are also typically aged on wooden boards, rather than on plastic or metal shelving, which cuts down on unwanted chemical flavors and gives cheeses more rustic overtones.

Here are pictures from the cave christening last weekend. 

Estrella will start putting cheese in the cave in the coming weeks. See for yourself if the flavor changes when those cheeses hit the market in a few months.

Topics: Continuing Education Fridays

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4.3 Earths

Sure, I buy organic. Most of the time. I choose my bike or a bus over my car now and then, too, and we don't use that much electricity. So when a friend sent me American Public Media's new "Consumer Consequences" game, which claims to tell us how sustainably we're living our lives, I was maybe a little too cocky.

So I played. I constructed my avatar to be a dude with a giant head, curly blond hair, an eye patch, a parrot on his shoulder, and a slim body, wearing a sensitive black turtleneck. I picked a neighborhood that looks a lot like mine.

The goal of the game is to live a lifestyle that allows us to live with this one Earth we got. I lost. Turns out we'd need 4.3 Earths if everyone lived like me. Sheesh, so much for feeling like a decent person.

Eating locally and organically and recycling stuff makes you look like a more Earth-loving person, of course. If you want to cheat, I suggest you pretend to eat less meat (you can choose your eating habits) and kick the clothes-buying habit altogether.

I would love to see a map of the US, shaded to represent the average score of people playing in each state. Perhaps on a scale of red to blue? 

Click here to play Consumer Consequences.

Topics: Continuing Education Fridays

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Vegans love the placenta

Images from "The Log Blog"

For those culinary adventurers who enjoy torturing others with tales of what they ate, placentophagy is a tired gag, on the level of rocky mountain oysters or civet coffee. Yet somehow the folks behind the "Log Blog," a tangentially fitness-oriented site that pushes a defecation-based weight loss program, manage to make placenta-eating fresh again. Is placenta safe for vegans? is the question posed by our vaguely Mansonlike host "Manley," and to judge from the scraped-clean plates of a room full of extreme vegetarians, indeed it is. It’s also great fodder for g-spot jokes and killer T-shirt designs:

"As has been pointed out...it's looking rather chuffed with itself." (You can read about the end product of placenta-eating here.)

Topics: Continuing Education Fridays

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Continuing Education Fridays: Squashed

Have you been to the markets recently? Holy Zucchini, Batman. If you're shopping at Safeway, you're missing the zucchini boat.

This afternoon I spoke with Ocatavia Alvarez, from Alvarez Farm near Mabton, WA, who introduced me to the UN of squash (plus some of their entourage) at his booth at the new Phinney Market:

Italian Zucchini

Lebanese Zucchini

German Green Patty Pan Squash


Yellow Zucchini

Yellow Crookneck Squash

Eight Ball Zucchini

Grey Round Zucchini

Yellow Patty Pan Squash

Golden Boy Squash

And this one, which he couldn't remember the name of, but looks to me like a UFO:

Anyone know its name? 

Topics: Continuing Education Fridays

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Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, and Mongolian Barbecue

So, I was poking around the Web the other day, looking up the origins of the word "teppanyaki," the Japanese method of cooking meats and vegetables on a teppan, or wide, flat griddle. Some other interesting connections came up (Wikipedia alert). Turns out, teppanyaki can be traced to a number of bad food trends that have plagued two continents:

1. Teppanyaki seems to have been invented in Japan after World War 2 to serve Western food to Japanese diners, which explains why the teppan looks exactly like the griddle you find at any diner in America. (This isn't the first Japanese reinterpretation of Western food, by the way. The pork katsu you love so much? Wiener schnitzel, introduced to Japan in the late 19th century.)

2. Teppanyaki hit the United States in the 1960s, according to this 2001 article by Robb Walsh of the Houston Press. Founder Rocky Aoki didn't just teach his cooks to flip shrimp into their hats (what, you thought that was a product of their ninja training?), he realized that Americans would pay serious cash for American food with soy sauce and funny names.

3. Then the Taiwanese picked up on teppanyaki—from either the Japanese or the Americans—and invented Mongolian barbecue, which flooded our suburbs in the 1980s and early 1990s. There are still a few of these around the region, but in most places, Mongolian barbecue has been succeeded by Chinese and Japanese buffets. None of which trace their origins back to Genghis Khan.

Topics: Continuing Education Fridays

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No thanks, I just ate last week

Image from Wired

Behold the newest in diet-pill technology: breast implants. I mean, hydrogel, a material often used in breast implants. According to an article in Wired, Italian scientists have formulated a compound of hydrogel that, when swallowed in capsule form with a cup of water, "turns into a clear, gelatinous blob the size of a tennis ball that may help shrink waistlines by giving dieters a sense of satiety." And who is to blame for this dreadful thing, which I have no doubt will be the next weight-loss craze? The U.S.A., of course: The scientists were inspired by memories of obese Americans they encountered during a 1990s vacation. Commenters on the Wired site have already begun imagining potential downsides, such as "What if a globule of this gets stuck in the users throat and swells up effectively throttling them?" and "What happens if someone overdoses?" (Here's my guess.) Nobody has brought up the threat of this stuff getting into the hands of the frat community yet, so I gotta ask: If you puked up a giant sphere of hydrogel, would it be the awesomest thing ever?

Topics: Continuing Education Fridays

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To Market, to Market

Scenario: Every time you go to the farmers’ market, the ever-expanding number of choices makes you freeze like a small mammal and lose your ability to make decisions. Here are a few simple ideas:

ASPARAGUS: Steam or grill them, then top with the season’s first cherry tomatoes, halved, crumbled goat cheese, a squeeze of lemon juice and a drizzle of olive oil.

BABY BOK CHOY: Halve lengthwise and drizzle with a mixture of a little soy sauce and sesame oil and grated ginger, and roast in a 400 degree oven for about 15 minutes (same goes for asparagus).

BEETS: To roast beets, wrap them in foil and roast until you can poke a skewer all the way through the beet with no resistance – about 75 minutes for larger beets, 30 – 45 minutes for new, baby beets. Peel, slice, and add to any salad.

CHERRIES: If for some reason you’re sick of eating them straight, toss halved, pitted cherries into an arugula salad along with shavings of Estrella’s Wynoochee River Blue and some toasted walnuts. Or pan-fry a few pork chops, deglaze the pan with a little balsamic vinegar, and sauté halved, pitted cherries in the vinegar (along with a little butter) until soft, and pile them onto the pork. Cherries also make a great salsa (to top SALMON, for example), if you know someone patient enough to chop them for you

MUSHROOMS: Saute chopped shallots in more butter than you think you'll need, then add chopped fresh mushrooms (such as morels), season with salt and pepper, and cook until the mushrooms have lost most of their water. Add a bit of chopped parsley, and serve over chicken or fish, such as the HALIBUT or SALMON available at many markets.

PEAS: Boil shelled English peas for about 3 minutes, drain, stir in a bit of olive oil and chopped fresh mint, and season with salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lemon juice.

RADISHES: As an appetizer, dip in fresh butter and sprinkle with good sea salt.

STRAWBERRIES: If for some reason you're able to buy them and not eat them all by the time you get home, pile them onto [insert favorite Sunday morning bread product here], slice them into a spinach salad, or whirl them up with banana, yogurt, orange juice, and coconut milk for a killer smoothie.

For more information on times and locations, visit The Seattle Neighborhood Farmers' Markets, the site for Fremont, Ballard, and Wallingford markets, or King County's guide to farmers' markets in the Puget Sound.

Topics: Continuing Education Fridays

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Beef: It's What's for Gluttony

Credit: David Belisle

Just to put give you some context for the 72-ounce sirloin that Mike Seely attempted to down for this week's issue:

4.5 pounds of steak = 2.25 percent of body weight of a 200-pound man (figure cited as example; actual weight unknown)

Calorie content of 72 ounces of Select sirloin: approx. 3,792

Fat content: 120 grams

Calorie content of 32-ounce portion Seely was able to consume: 1,685

Ounces of meat the USDA currently recommends for 33-year-old, moderately active man to consume daily: 7

Average per capita consumption of beef in America, according to the USDA: 67 pounds (including bones)

Percentage of annual beef consumption represented by a 72-ounce steak: 7

Bonus link: no comment 

Topics: Continuing Education Fridays

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