Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  The average American doesn’t have the luxury of ruminating on the intense tang of sriracha sauce at a monastery. “Most of us are not going to be Buddhist monks,” said Dr. Finkelstein, the holistic physician. “What I’ve learned is that it has to work at home.”

  To that end, he and others suggest that people start with a few baby steps. “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Dr. Cheung said. “You’re not supposed to be able to switch on your mindfulness button and be able to do it 100 percent. It’s a practice you keep working toward.”

  Dr. Bays, the pediatrician, has recommendations that can sound like a return to the simple rhythms of Mayberry, if not “Little House on the Prairie.” If it’s impossible to eat mindfully every day, consider planning one special repast a week. Click off the TV. Sit at the table with loved ones.

  “How about the first five minutes we eat, we just eat in silence and really enjoy our food?” she said. “It happens step by step.”

  Sometimes, even she is too busy to contemplate a chickpea. So there are days when Dr. Bays will take three mindful sips of tea, “and then, O.K., I’ve got to go do my work,” she said. “Anybody can do that. Anywhere.”

  Even scarfing down a burrito in the car offers an opportunity for insight. “Mindful eating includes mindless eating,” she said. “‘I am aware that I am eating and driving.’“

  Few places in America are as frantically abuzz with activity as the Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., but when Thich Nhat Hanh dropped by for a day of mindfulness in September, hundreds of employees showed up.

  Part of the event was devoted to eating thoughtfully in silence, and the practice was so well received that an hourlong wordless vegan lunch is now a monthly observance on the Google campus.

  “Interestingly enough, a lot of the participants are the engineers, which pleases us very much,” said Olivia Wu, an executive chef at the company. “I think it quiets the mind. I think there is a real sense of feeling restored so that they can go back to the crazy pace that they came from.”

  It’s not often, after all, that those workhorse technicians get to stop and smell the pesto. “Somebody will say, ‘I ate so much less,’ “Ms. Wu said. “And someone else will say, ‘You know, I never noticed how spicy arugula tastes.’“

  And that could be the ingredient that helps mindful eating gain traction in mainstream American culture: flavor.

  “So many people now have found themselves in an adversarial relationship with food, which is very tragic,” Dr. Bays said. “Eating should be a pleasurable activity.”

  Dude Food

  LEARNING TO BARREGUE HELPED MAKE ME A MAN

  By Joel Stein

  From Food & Wine

  In Man-Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity, humor columnist Joel Stein—an often controversial contributor to Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and many other magazines—adroitly deconstructs American manhood. Here he tackles the most manly of all arts: Outdoor barbecuing.

  Like most of what I do, my cooking is not manly. I fuss, apologize and occasionally—embarrassingly—look at recipes. But for the past two years, I’ve been trying to boost my masculinity, working on a book for which, finally, at age 39, I learn how to be a man. I’ve gone one round with Ultimate Fighter Randy Couture, done three days of basic training at Fort Knox, earned a badge on a Boy Scouts camping trip. But I still prepare bouillabaisse like a little girl, crying over onions and talking in French.

  The manliest form of cooking that doesn’t involve mounting the animal’s head on a wall is barbecue; if I were really going to learn to be a man, I’d have to master it. So I went to Houston, a town that specializes in the manliest meat, beef. My plan was to eat as much barbecue as was physically possible, so I could understand life-changing ’cue. Once I knew what I was aiming for, I’d get lessons from a barbecue expert and then test my new knowledge at a barbecue contest.

  I go straight from the airport to Catalan Food & Wine restaurant, where, for the moment, Chris Shepherd is chef. This fall he’ll open his own restaurant, Underbelly, which will feature a full-scale butcher room (he’s so manly, he calls butchering pigs his “happy place”). Shepherd is a heap of a man, incredibly friendly and passionate; the kind of guy who can get away with calling both men and women “baby.” Last year, he helped create “Where the Chefs Eat” tours of Houston. And now he’s going to take me on the barbecue tour, his favorite.

  We head to Gatlin’s Barbecue & Catering, where the pit boss’s mother, Mary Gatlin, tells customers to “have a blessed day.” Sitting outside at picnic tables, we eat soft, rich brisket from the pointy side of the cut, known in most places as “fatty meat.” Because so much of the tip is exposed to the smoke, it has the most “bark”—the blackened, tarry bits where smoke, fat and meat mix together. To Shepherd, this is the asparagus tip of barbecue. He prizes the top, boneless cap of the sparerib for the same reason.

  We eat our way around the city, making a detour to the legendary BBQ Pits by Klose, where Shepherd bought his $1,800 home pit. David Klose speaks quickly, delivering entirely unprovoked self-proclamations such as, “I’m a real quick draw.” He is the most Texan person I’ve ever met, in his Wrangler jeans and brown camouflage cap that says “Deer Predator.” Klose has made barbecue pits out of a phone booth, a mailbox and a police car. The more steel in the pit, the steadier the heat will be, and that, he insists, is the trick to good barbecue. This seems to justify why men are happy to spend thousands of dollars to cook $1.75-per-pound meat.

  Our final stop is Pierson & Company Bar-B-Que, where we get a mixed trinity of brisket, ribs and sausage links that are smokier and sweeter than some we’ve tried elsewhere and nearly as satisfying. Texans believe that, just as you wouldn’t cover Kobe beef in béarnaise, you don’t smear barbecue sauce on brisket that’s been cooking for 12 hours in an oven you’d need to put a down payment on. You want to taste meat, salt and spice. This is such a basic idea that I cannot believe there isn’t a Doritos flavor named Meat, Salt and Spice.

  The other lesson I learn is that barbecue is about timing: The brisket at Gatlin’s wouldn’t be nearly as delicious a few hours past its prime. Barbecue exists in time as much as it does in space. It’s why so many great, small places run out of meat by 11 a.m. Why they don’t get a bigger pit and buy more meat is something that leads me to many more questions about the South than I can possibly answer.

  My eating tour complete, I am ready to actually try cooking. I wake up early the next day to meet curmudgeonly Robb Walsh, a recently retired restaurant critic and author of the Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook. He recently opened a Tex-Mex restaurant, El Real Tex-Mex Café, with Food & Wine Best New Chef 2009 Bryan Caswell right across the street from the space that will become Underbelly. And for the past year, he’s been running a barbecue course out of his home. He’s going to give me the simplified version. The one for Northerners.

  There are three grills in Walsh’s backyard. He’s got a pricey offset smoker—in which you light a wood fire in a small cylinder called the firebox, which is below and off to the side of a big grill with an exhaust pipe on top. He’s got a “Mexican hibachi,” an oil drum cut in half—you build a fire on one side and put the meat on the other. And he’s got a gas grill, just like I do. Walsh makes it clear that I am never, ever to refer to anything I do on the gas grill as “barbecuing.” Barbecuing is cooking with smoke. Grilling is what you do to your children’s hamburgers.

  He teaches me to put some charcoal in a starter chimney, which looks like a big metal travel mug, and light it with a burning newspaper. We drop the charcoal in the offset smoker’s firebox, then add oak logs along the sides, not in a pile—exactly the opposite of the way the Boy Scouts taught me—so the fire smokes instead of roars. By controlling the amount of fuel and oxygen inside the smoker, we aim to keep the heat at around 275 degrees—a nice, slow, long cook to break down the tough, fatty cuts of meat that work best in barbecue.

  Once the temperature hits 275 degrees, we
place some pork ribs, brisket rubbed with just salt and pepper and a chicken marinated in Kraft Italian dressing on the grate. Walsh explains that bar-becue people are “weird,” spending wildly on gadgets but using inexpensive supermarket rubs and marinades. What he means is that barbecue people are men.

  Unlike the brisket my Jewish family eats at Passover, this one is half fat. We set it on the grate fat side down for two hours, then flip it fat side up so it self-bastes for the next eight hours. Because we don’t have to be there while all this cooking goes on, we head out on a long drive to pick up supplies and a breakfast taco.

  D. W. Vasbinder’s, where we stop to buy logs, looks like a junkyard, with metal sculptures of cowboys, cow skulls and a sign with wood prices that explains the honor system of payment. We pick up some oak, which Walsh says is the purist’s choice, since it imparts a neutral smoky flavor. (Mesquite can be tangy and resiny, whereas pecan gives a sweet, sooty flavor that can blacken your food.) As Walsh stops a welder to ask for a piece of metal mesh for the bottom of his hibachi grill, he says, “Places like this are why you can make great barbecue in Texas. It’s like car culture in L.A.” I pretend I am manly enough to be part of car culture in L.A.

  When we get back, we check on the meat. The chicken and ribs are done, but the brisket has stalled out at an internal temperature of 165 degrees, about 20 degrees shy of what we need. We wait another hour, during which we work hard opening and drinking local Saint Arnold beers. But the brisket is still at 165. It’s a classic barbecue phenomenon—the meat gets to a point where the internal temperature just won’t budge. We have a few choices: We can keep waiting and hope the problem fixes itself. We can wrap the brisket in foil, which will raise its temperature but might make it soggy. Or we can bring it inside and put it in the oven at 275 degrees, which could dry it out. I refuse to bring it inside, because inside is for womenfolk. Walsh decides to wrap the meat in foil for just 1 hour and leave it in the smoker. Which works. We lop the giant fat cap off the parts we’re going to eat first, leaving the rest on to keep the meat moist.

  Like most men, I feel that one day of training makes me qualified to compete, so I am headed to the World’s Championship Bar-B-Que Contest, where more than 400 competitors fill the parking lot of Reliant Stadium with tents bearing giant corporate logos. I join team Drillin’ & Grillin’, which won for the best ribs last year. The seven-man team is run by Ernest Ramirez, a pipe fitter who has built his own enormous pit. Ramirez has a good oak fire going, but he shows me a bag of pellets made out of hickory, cherry, hard maple and apple that he sprinkles on the flames to sweeten the smoke. He hands me a syringe so I can inject chickens with marinade to keep them moist; for the same reason, we place a pan of water and chicken broth on the bottom rack. But we’re mostly focused on the spareribs, which are cooking with a simple rub. There is a lot of hanging out and chatting, but we’ve got to pay attention: If we screw up by letting the fire get too hot, too cool or too smoky, there’s no chance to recover. Because starting over takes 14 hours.

  Ramirez believes ribs need a glaze to balance the sugar and saltiness, so when they’re just about finished, he pats some brown sugar on top and puts them back in the pit. Then, 30 minutes later, he brushes on a glaze of brown sugar, melted butter and pepper jelly, puts the ribs in a Styrofoam container and takes them to the judges’ tent.

  I help slice the brisket, stealing several pieces of bark for myself. At 5 p.m., a committee member tells Ramirez that our team didn’t place in the top 10 to compete for the finals. Ramirez thanks her, smiles politely and goes right back to being the caterer for his corporate sponsor’s rodeo tailgate, slicing a huge brisket against the grain to keep it tender. This is what I’ve learned about being a man. We’ve come to call it repression, but it’s really self-control. It’s a respect not just for the contest and the people you compete with, but for yourself.

  I’m going to start barbecuing at home. Not on an $1,800 pit that takes up half my yard, but on a little Weber with the wood off to the side. Mostly because nothing really tastes like smoked meat. But also because, unlike women, men need an activity as an excuse to talk. And we’re not going to talk about salad.

  MEMPHIS IN MAY: PORK-A-LOOZA

  By Wright Thompson

  From Garden & Gun

  ESPN senior writer Wright Thompson writes mainly about sports, though as a native of Clarksdale, Mississippi, he’s occasionally lured into food writing by his love of Southern food. And what could be more Southern than barbecue?

  Before a man with one leg got women to take their shirts off while he poured liquor into their mouths via an ice luge; before the wild-eyed guy who provides the pigs to the French Laundry walked around the party slipping packages in people’s hands, which at least two of us thought were drugs but turned out to be bacon; before Donald Link’s boudin for lunch and John Currence’s andouille for happy hour and Sean Brock’s soft-shell crab for dinner; before ten-year-old Jess Edge asked his daddy, the Southern food guru John T. Edge, “What’s a Jell-O shot?”; before we waited to hear if we’d made the finals of the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest; before the revolutionary act of creating an all-star team that included four James Beard Award–winning chefs, three old-school Southern pit masters, and one boozehound writer; before any of that, there was a pretentious but earnest idea: Could we rescue a barbecue contest, and maybe even barbecue itself, from a crushing sameness?

  The line was drawn. On one side, us: a cooking team called the Fatback Collective, organized by barbecue industrialist Nick Pihakis, who founded the Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q chain of restaurants. On the other, Memphis and its world-famous barbecue contest, entering its thirty-fourth year and drawing an estimated 100,000 fans. Now, Memphis in May is many things: a place for Parrotheads to gather between nautical-pun tours, a grown-up frat party with a hundred thousand pledges, a place where friends commune over a smoking pig, and, maybe most important, a driver of where our barbecue culture will go. Here’s what it isn’t: a reflection of where our barbecue has been. We wanted to turn back the clock.

  Maybe that’s silly. Maybe that’s an idea fueled by ten cases of whiskey and two thousand Jell-O shots, but from the belly of the beast, surrounded by what many of us consider to be a threat to authentic barbecue—lean pigs, tricked out with injections, cooked not as a reflection of a family or place, not as a connection to our past, but, rather, gamed to the strange tastes of the Memphis judges—we all realized the mission of the Fatback Collective: redemption.

  Redemption and about seventeen thousand calories a day, most of them liquid.

  Ready, Set, Strip

  It all starts with a screaming buzz saw and the smell of burning pig bone.

  A hog is splayed out and gutted, with a half dozen hands reaching inside its carcass. Pat Martin, a Nashville pit master, revs the blade and digs into the backbone. Pig shrapnel flies around the tent.

  When the job is done, the truly heartbreaking part begins, trimming out pounds of glorious, expensive, and carefully cultivated fat. Our team is consulting with a former grand champion, someone who is gracefully helping us understand the intractable customs of Memphis in May. He points at the thick layers of white.

  The chefs look at each other, then at the pig. Reluctantly, they start stripping. Every so often, they’ll make eye contact with one another and shake their heads. Someone mutters. Brock stands to the left of the pig, and Link on the right, each cutting back ribs to expose more shoulder meat. A pile of fat forms on the table.

  “Too much,” says Ryan Prewitt, the chef de cuisine at Herbsaint in New Orleans.

  Stephen Stryjewski, the chef at Cochon who won his Beard award just four days ago, asks the expert once more if he’s sure.

  “They don’t want marbling?” he asks.

  “You don’t find that in other hogs,” the former grand champion says. “Technically, they don’t want to see that.”

  “That’s so 180 degrees to what I do every day,” Stryjewski
says.

  Link, the mind behind Cochon and Herbsaint, watches in silence. This is what he’s thinking: Arrrgh! There are all these Beard winners with their hands in the hog, but something is being lost in translation. A chef’s job is to cook food that stays true to the essence of the ingredients. The job of a Memphis in May contestant is to deliver what the judges want, and, more important, to stay away from things they don’t. Here, as best as I can tell, are some of the things the judges don’t like:

  1. Fat

  2. Spice

  3. Pork that tastes like pork, as opposed to pork that taste like it got pistol-whipped by MSG and sugar

  4. Puppies

  Gaming the System

  The more I learn, the more I realize that winning this thing has less to do with great barbecue and more to do with anticipating the judges. They like sweet. They don’t like spice. They like tenderloin. They don’t like belly. On and on. So competitors study past winners, then go Mr. Wizard on the pigs. They fill the cavity with bricks of cold butter. They pack iced pillowcases around their tenderloins to stop the cooking. Some pigs are souped up with culinary nitrous oxide: liquid fat–laden injections.

  This isn’t happening in a vacuum. For many, these traveling cooking teams are the face of Southern barbecue. Not the guys, like the pit masters on our team, who cook pigs in the same pit three hundred days a year. The most wonderful thing about barbecue has always been its regional differences. Each pig told a story. Rodney Scott, pit master at Scott’s Bar-B-Que in Hemingway, South Carolina, uses wood he chops himself. Pat Martin was born in Mississippi but worked as a bond trader in Charlotte before realizing his calling, and his Beach Road 12 sauce, with the Carolina tang and a touch of the Memphis sweet, is a reflection of his own journey to the pit. Barbecue changes from town to town, an entire style morphing at the Tennessee River, or at the Piedmont, or when you sweep down onto Highway 61 from Memphis to Clarksdale, Mississippi. Memphis in May, the most important barbecue event in the world, rewards homogeneity. If you live in the South, maybe you’ve noticed how hard it’s becoming to find a good, simple barbecue sandwich. Traditional barbecue is fading as competition barbecue is rewarding smoke and mirrors.