Playing with Your Food
As a child, I always played with my food. Ok, so I still play with my food. There’s something about turning one thing into something else, maybe something better, toying with my strong kinesthetic senses, indulging my (possibly misguided) creativity, and seeing how flavors work together on the palate, on and off the plate. Maybe it’s gross, but maybe it’s important too, because it led me here.
When I tell people what I’m studying in grad school, the normal response goes something like, “You study astronomy? That’s awesome!” To which I respond, “No, gastronomy, with a ‘g’” only to be met with confused looks and a need to quickly explain my academic career. While home for Thanksgiving my own father called me a “gastroenterologist.” Not quite.
Gastronomy, a relatively new field of study concerning itself with how we, as humans, relate to food, perplexes many, and understandably so. When I applied to Boston University’s Gastronomy program, I barely knew what I was getting myself into. I was looking for direction or a peek into something I wanted to do with my life. I knew I wanted to be involved in the culinary world in one way or another: I wanted to play with my food. And although I’m only heading into my second semester in this program, it’s easy for me to say my education is much more than that.
My course of study includes a focus on food communications, which includes everything from writing to PR, marketing, and advertising. I’ve been lucky enough to have an internship in hospitality PR at 451 Marketing to supplement my education. But even though communications is my focus, my education through this program is full of history, sociology, science, and government policy, to name a few. Though I can’t be sure of the direction I’m headed towards, these experiences within different fields of the food studies world are extremely valuable. I came into this program hell-bent on becoming Alton Brown’s successor. That piece of me that wishes to indulge myself in food science is still very present, but I also wonder what a career doing PR for chefs and restaurants would be like, what it would mean to do advocacy work for food pantries, or how I would begin to start my own food business.
These considerations within any field of study are an essential part of one’s education. The Master’s in Gastronomy program at Boston University allows me to explore aspects of the food studies world of which I previously held no knowledge. It’s introducing me to hundreds of new ways to look at food. From the anthropological significance of certain kitchen objects to the philosophical and psychological beginnings of our personal palate, there are no limits on what’s possible. In its essence, this program teaches me new ways to see, to feel, to taste, and most importantly, to understand. It allows me to turn one passion into something else, toy with my senses, indulge my (well-guided) creativity, and have a better understanding of what works for me and what doesn’t. It teaches me all the new ways I can play with my food.
Hungry For Words
By Rachel DeSimone
In the second grade, I wrote an elaborate “scary story,” complete with colorful illustrations and as much suspense-filled detail as a seven-year-old could muster up. My family praised my work on high, fulfilling their parental duties, and it was set—I was going to be a writer. After about six more imaginary career changes between the ages of 10 and 23, I have come full circle back to pen and paper (I do still write things out on paper). This time, however, the topic isn’t ghouls and monsters, it’s savories and confections.
In my junior year at Boston University, I applied to be a writer for the new chapter of Spoon University at BU. Spoon University is a national food publication written by college students for college students sharing their love of food; the site has gained much recognition over the past year. Little did I know that I would become the Editor-in-Chief of the BU operation just three months after sending in my application and crossing my fingers that I’d be taken aboard. Although I was skeptical at first about my ability to handle the weight of this position, soon enough it all came naturally, and I found myself filling the Editor-in-Chief shoes with ease.
This was my first experience in a structured editorial environment, and I had just hoped to dip my toe into the buttercream. Consequently, it became the jumping off point for my future in food writing and becoming a grad student in BU’s Gastronomy program. I faced some challenges trying to popularize the BU Spoon University chapter and influence such a large student body with fast-paced schedules and widely-varying interests. With seven members to start, our team rapidly expanded to 20, then 50, people. We became a familiar name on campus and shot up from the 39th-ranked chapter within the Spoon University college network to number two.
Over the full year that I spent as Editor-in-Chief, I learned not only about 
food in the Boston area, but also how to manage a large team of people, maintain a website with up-to-date and captivating food content, and create a fun and positive work environment. I also learned that the food writing field is where I need to be. As I realized this, I was simultaneously applying to the Gastronomy program. After watching my best friend and co-leader of Spoon University BU, Laurel Greenfield, go through her first year as a Gastronomy student, I awaited my own acceptance. Upon receiving the exhilarating news that I got into the program, I knew that there was nothing better I could do for my future food writing career.
I am currently taking two core classes this semester, the first being Introduction to Gastronomy: Theory & Methodology with Karen Metheny. It which covers an array of disciplines related to the field of gastronomy, along with giving students a solid understanding of what gastronomy actually is. The second class I am taking is History of Food with Kyri Claflin, where students gain an understanding of historical method while exercising it through class work and a culminating final project. I plunged right into things as I often do with these two courses, which both demand a high quantity of work, but I have found myself advancing each week. Class readings and discussions have elevated my way of thinking when it comes to a piece of theoretical or academic writing, and I have learned to critically dissect these works while drawing parallels between them.
Taking these two classes together has been an eye-opening experience, allowing me to understand what the gastronomy program and grad school in general are all about. I have found that it is about digging deeper than you thought you had to, or thought you could, into your work, and as a result, being able to draw your own conclusions and form your own opinions with certainty. In terms of writing, I have begun to find my academic voice, and I know that further classes with help me hone in on that skill. I am looking forward to taking the Food Writing class with Corby Kummer in the spring and having the opportunity to bring some focus to my writing. I hope to inform my food writing and create a foundation for myself to move forward in the editorial field in a meaningful and scrumptious way. Each day I wake up I am hungry for words (and ice cream).
Neurogastronomy: A Flavorful Awakening in the Scientific Community
By Sophie Schwinn
What do you get when you combine the expertise of world class chefs, medical doctors, neuroscientists, agricultural scientists, and lovers of food? Why, the Inaugural Symposium of The International Society of Neurogastronomy, of course! The International Society of Neurogastronomy (ISN) held its first conference on November 7th in Lexington, KY, drawing speakers and attendees from across the country, as well as Canada and the UK.
Neurogastronomy is a very young discipline – the term was coined in 2006 by Dr. Gordon Shepherd -- so every session at the symposium brought something completely new to the table. Chefs talked about the importance of making healthy food available to those who need it most and of simply making healthy food taste good. Clinicians spoke about the need to overhaul the food systems in our hospitals. They pointed out that patients can’t thrive by eating tasteless food on plastic trays when what they really need is food that tastes great, brings them joy, and makes them want to be healthy again. Bench scientists shared their findings about how our sense of flavor is 
created in the brain and how our other senses can influence our sense of taste. Agricultural scientists contributed information on how they could provide better quality food to chefs by implementing their new research findings as well.
Several speakers also shared personal stories about loved ones battling illness, especially cancer, and how diet was a key component in their treatment. Clinicians shared the struggles their patients face with extreme treatment plans. Some examples include the success of the ketogenic diet in treating epilepsy and the extreme difficulty of maintaining it, the challenges of chemotherapy, which essentially destroys the patient’s sense of flavor, and the struggle to increase appetite in patients in memory care who have diminished taste and difficulty eating the bland hospital food. Chemotherapy was an ongoing theme, with discussions ranging from whether neuroscientists could uncover more about why it causes an overwhelming metallic taste, to whether chefs can come up with a way to make that metallic flavor palatable, to how we can help chemo patients deal with constantly changing taste aversions.
The progress we could make just by facilitating this interdisciplinary collaboration is astounding. One very basic example was a recent finding that simply serving food on a blue plate can lead to increased appetite in dementia patients because the greater contrast between the food and the plate makes it appear more appetizing. This may seem like an insignificant detail, but for those who have a loved one wasting away in the hospital due to lack of appetite, it’s a ground-breaking discovery!
After the conference sessions were over, the lecture hall was abuzz with interdisciplinary conversations. Hospital nutritionists were thanking scientists for sharing their work and discussing how they could implement new findings in their practice right away. Chefs were meeting with scientists to see how they could help facilitate more research and swapping business cards with doctors to start getting food that actually tastes good into hospitals. Scientists were talking with clinicians about their biggest research needs. ISN’s first symposium was an incredible first step to getting the latest scientific findings into the right hands so they can make a positive difference in people’s lives.
Yeast
By Sonia Dovedy
The dense odor overwhelms my nose while walking down the supermarket aisle. I'm looking for a simple bottle of water so that I can quaff my thirst in this wind-chill. Turns out, the bottled water section just so happens to share shelf space with...the bread section.
You know, ten weeks ago, I would have just described this scent as "bread," and I would hardly have been irritated by the fumes. But today, I know that this smell is something deeper than that, something I have smelled so often these past weeks. And that pungently unpleasant, suffocatingly sharp group of molecules emanating from the packages across from me is quite plainly yeast.
I dash out of there as fast as I can.
Did you know that yeast is the catalyst in the chemical reaction that turns lovely little sweetheart grapes into alcohol and CO2? Also known as vin, VINO, wein, vinho, and oh yes, wine.
It feels amazing to be back in school! I just finished my first summer course of my program, An Introduction to Wine Level 1. Doesn’t that sound like fun?
So, yes, I tasted a ton of wines, but this class went far beyond simply enjoying wine. (In actuality, we hardly consumed any wine, as spitting is essential to bringing out the residual tastes and textures in the mouth.) This course was about meeting the wine, sensing its personality, understanding its roots, its values, its character, and tapping into our own sense organs.
For example, I now understand a dry spicy Riesling. It likes to be chilly, thriving in regions such as Alsace, France, and prides itself on being quite sour, crispy, and refreshing. I also understand that if a red wine is harshly astringent, it is probably just too young and excited. It needs some time to grow up. Age and maturation will soften the tannins.
I could share cool things with you about wine all day, but what I really want to talk about is the evolution that took place within me during this course.
Let me back up a little.
--
Class One. We all arrive. I have just come from yoga class, so naturally I am in yoga attire. Behind me is a stay-at-home mom. There are two disheveled-looking boys who have just gotten off their shifts at a restaurant, a few girls my age. There is a wine-expert-in-suit and a gentleman-in-light-pink-lacoste-shirt-and-boating-shoes. Very eclectic crowd. We line up our glasses as our professor passes around our first wine, showing us how to observe, smell, swish, sip, and spit.
So the first thing I notice is that this wine is definitely red. Well that was a cinch. I put my nose in the glass, and I am getting the smell of, hmm, well...honestly it just smells like the smell of wine. This is a silly class, I think.
Meanwhile, I glance around to see wine-expert-in-suit furiously swishing his wine in the glass and making chewing noises as he spits out into the spit cup. Strange. Disheveled #1 is scribbling and scratching his disheveled hair. What is so fascinating to note? Stay-at-home-mom is in deep contemplation. Boating-shoes raises his hand and affirmatively states, "I smell cherry cola, good leather, and a hint of pepper."
What?!? I look at him in disbelief and submerge my nose back into the wine, trying to pick up anything, anything at all. That doesn't work, and instead makes me sneeze. I doubt whether I will ever be a decent wine taster. Oh boy.
--
Slowly, surely, effortlessly, the world around me has started to change for my little nose. I open my cupboard and at once, the aromas of dried figs and those dried currants hidden up in the corner jump out at me -- YES, I remember these scents from my red Bordeaux wine. The dust of cocoa powder that flutters up when I open the box instantly brings clarity to that bitterness that I sensed in the Chilean Cabernet. Green bell peppers, olives, nutmeg, cumin, new tennis balls, grass, green apples, and more come to life. I've started to pause during my day and pay attention to different things that I perceive in the nose, making little mental notes in my olfactory's factory.
I like to close my eyes and visualize different things that I have smelled before, when I search for what is "in the nose" of the wine. A little conversation takes place, of memory, recollection, and the present moment.
Do I sense those lemon piths that make me wrinkle my nose? Or is it oxidation from a browned apple core that was sitting out on the counter today? Cooked fruits from Thanksgiving pies? Or fresh fruits from the springtime? Yes, this one takes me back to kindergarten, to the peach syrup from those canned peaches Mom used to pack me for school. This one reminds me of mildewy sweat from the yoga room. That one of wet-wipes -- yuck. I smell gushers and Robitussin cough syrup. Yuck again.
Fast-forward to Class Five, and I am really starting to get the hang of this. Together, my comrades and I enter into a deep discussion about the nuances in each glass. As my nose opens up, I become more chatty and daring, sharing what I actually do smell, even if it's something silly, like "a forest". Sometimes, people even agree with me, which is something I never thought would be possible in Class One! Our disagreements are what really make things interesting. We stimulate new ideas and we laugh at the crazy things that come up in our noses. For instance, Disheveled #2 always finds a way to smell "basement" and "cigars". And sometimes he is right. It's a subjective study indeed.
What I realize is that in order to taste wine properly, you have to pay attention to the fragrances that surround you. It requires a keen sense of imagination. And it is much more enjoyable with a friend to bounce ideas off of.
What's more, I find the practice of wine tasting to be much like yoga.
Let me try to explain.
Yoga postures, or asanas, exercise each cell in the body to sharpen and sensitize your physical awareness. Wine tasting exercises my nose and my brain's power to remember and recall smells. In just nine short weeks, my nose has become sharper and pointier, like Pinocchio minus the telling lies part. I've realized that I rely so much on my sense of sight, and that perhaps sight is overrated. Smelling and tasting sense organs on their own are far more incredible in the details of information that they can provide.
Learning wine has strengthened something within and is starting to teach me a bit more about myself. Just like yoga, this study is refining my insides like a pencil sharpener. My goodness. This world is too exciting. I think it calls for a celebration, don't you?
Cheers to wellness, spontaneity, and refreshing imaginations.
You can find this post and others on Sonia Dovedy’s food, yoga, travel blog at Bake with Sonia.
A Dish through Time & History: Cauliflower Soup 1901-2015
By Louise Beck Brønnum
Have you ever wondered why your grandmother’s stew tastes ten times better than the one you try to make yourself? It’s all bound to tradition, the context of time and place. By making a very simple recipe from two different time periods, a reflection of these influences becomes clear, and even enables us to not only understand how people once ate, but also why and where. As part of the Culinary Laboratory Arts class, we were challenged to find a recipe from two different time periods and cook them. This is my experience of cooking a dish through time and history.
Cauliflower Soup
I am an exchange student from Denmark, and the whole new Nordic cuisine movement inspired me to cook something from a Danish cookbook. Many traditional recipes in Danish cuisine require specific ingredients. I wanted to relate an older recipe for cauliflower soup to one found in the new Nordic Cuisine to give a time perspective. From participating in the Culinary Arts Lab course and by looking at different recipes over time, I’ve found that soups have gone through the most remarkable changes, both in cooking techniques and methods.
Finding the Recipe
It all started on a rainy Friday afternoon. My classmate Erica and I decided to visit the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard. With help from the librarian, we found cookbooks from the 17th and 18th century. I found cookbooks based on French cuisine that were written by Americans, on Southern food, Chinese food and even Danish food. I could have chosen an American recipe, but I found it harder to understand them from a food-making and cultural perspective, so, I decided on one from a Danish cookbook.
Frøken Jensens Cookbook (1901)
The classic Danish cookbook I found is almost an institution in itself, written by Kristine Marie Jensen. She was a housekeeper and cookbook writer who lived from 1858 to 1923. When she died, her cookbook, “Frøken Jensens kogebog”, had been edited 27 times and sold 15,000 copies during the first year of publication it! It is still one of the most acknowledged cookbooks in Danish food culture and within Danish bourgeois cuisine. Jensen stated that the Danish housewife had forgotten the responsibility of providing a home with tasteful and caring food. She explained and included all the classical and traditional techniques and methods of Danish cooking in the cookbook. Any housewife would be able to use it to cook her husband dinner, says Jensen, “without feeling like it is a huge burden, but a great mission to keep the home with hygge.” Under the white thickened (lier) soups in the second part on supper dishes, I found a cauliflower soup recipe. To complete it, I had to make a standard “savings stock.”
Ny Nordisk Hverdagsmad Cookbook (2011)
An obvious choice for finding a modern recipe was a cookbook based on the manifest of the New Nordic Diet. A huge research project named OPUS was conducted in cooperation between Copenhagen University and Claus Meyer. Meyer is a food entrepreneur who started catering companies, delis, food schools, and food-related projects promoting seasonality, sustainability, and health. He was one of the people behind NOMA, rated the top restaurant in the world, and will soon be opening a huge Nordic store at Grand Central Station in New York City. The New Nordic Diet cookbook is a small cookbook that includes 60 recipes of simple and easy-to-make dishes that follow the principles of the New Nordic diet. The cookbook is divided into parts depending on ingredients, including soups, vegetables, fish, meats, bread and sweets. I found a cauliflower soup under the chapter for soups.
The Shopping and Preparing Process
The biggest difference between the two recipes is the way they are presented. In Frøken Jensen’s cookbook (FJ) the only ingredients listed are two cauliflower heads and five pots (liters) of stock. In the Ny Nordisk Hverdagsmad cookbook (NNH), the ingredient list is very precisely stated -- including the salt and pepper used for seasoning. Furthermore, the FJ recipe serves 12 and the NNH serves two, which reflects family size and the norms of eating in different time periods.
The FJ recipe calls for a homemade stock, cauliflower, butter, flour, egg yolks and suggested using grated parmesan cheese. In NNH, the ingredients include cauliflower, onions, garlic, semi-fat milk, salt and pepper, and a blender was needed to puree the soup in the end. I realized that the recipes exemplify two different techniques, one a white, thickened soup and the other a pureed soup. FJ does have pureed soups, but she used a chinoa to mash them. This is a clear indication of the evolution of cooking technology over time; blenders did not exist in the 19th century.
When shopping for ingredients, the garnish for the NNH recipe (a wild herb from the Danish forest and whole hazelnuts) where the most difficult to find. Though they suggested tarragon instead of the wild herb if it was not available, it seemed contradictory to the concept of easy-to-make. This also shows how cooking a dish from a different cuisine in another country can include constraints, especially in terms of finding the exact ingredients.
The Cooking Process
I started off with preparing the stock for the FJ recipe, which is described as “savings stock.” You basically make it out of leftover meat and vegetables, adding a “visk” (mire poix) and herbs. After boiling you put it in an “høkasse,” an old method of Danish slow cooking which is similar to a low simmer. While making the stock, I boiled the whole cauliflower head in salted water until just tender. Afterwards, I separated the small florets and preserved some of the cooking water for later.
I found a terrine-style pot, which was required for the recipe. This is where I got confused in the cooking process. I needed to bake off butter and flour and then add stock and the preserved cooking liquid, but I wasn’t sure whether I should do it in the terrine with the cauliflower or in a separate pot. Perhaps it’s an indication of culinary wisdom lost in time. I decided to bake the flour and butter first and then add stock, water and the small cauliflower florets all at once to the terrine. Again I was confused about the process. When should I add the egg yolks to thicken the soup? I decided after 15 minutes of slow simmer to lower the heat and add the egg yolks. Stirring it all together, it turned out to be a wonderful and very rustic soup, with a clear taste of cauliflower and texture from the small cauliflower florets. The soup was liquidy, but had structure from the egg yolks and roux. This balanced the mouth feel so it became almost like silk contrasting with the small bites of cauliflower .
The pureed soup from NNH was easy to prepare and took me almost only 10 minutes to mise en place. Following the instructions, I sweated the onions and garlic in oil until tender, then added the cauliflower florets. After that I added milk and set the pot to simmer until the cauliflower was tender. I used an immersion blender to puree the soup and seasoned it with salt and pepper. An additional garnish was made with tarragon, peanuts, scallion and apple cider vinegar, some of which substituted for ingredients I couldn’t find at the supermarket. The texture of the soup was creamy, and the fresh and sour flavor of the tarragon was a great accompaniment. Crunchiness from the nuts was delicious, but a clear flavor of the actually cauliflower was not as pronounced in this soup as in the FJ soup.
The Overall Comparison
Taking into account how I searched for, prepared and the two soups, the most significant difference between them was the expected cooking knowledge of the people preparing them. The cooking methods and equipment were also different, which shows the evolution of technology over the past 110 years. I served both soups to people with gastronomic and non-gastronomic backgrounds, and their preferences were split. Personally, I loved the freshness of the NNH, but on the other hand, I also loved the clear flavor of cauliflower from the FJ recipe. It seemed like one’s general palate and mood at that moment made the greatest influence on taste preferences. Timewise the NNH seemed like it was the easier one in the sense of following the recipe, but for me both were easy and applicable to my level of cooking.
Alumna Emily Contois Explores Icons of Australian Food Culture
By Amanda Balagur
Despite the wet and windy weather last Thursday evening, a lively crowd attended the third Pépin Lecture of the semester to learn about “Icons of Australian Food Culture: Vegemite, Kangaroo & the Flat White”. Emily Contois, who graduated from the MLA in Gastronomy program at BU in 2013 and is in her third year as a PhD student in American Studies at Brown University, greeted the audience warmly and dove into her topic with enthusiasm.
While she grew up in Montana, Emily’s father is Australian, and she and her sister were born Down Under. So it should come as no surprise that she feels a connection to the food and culture of her homeland. There are quite a few iconic dishes from Australia, including meat pies and desserts like pavlova and lamingtons. However, Emily chose to focus on three slightly polarizing foodstuffs: kangaroo, the flat white and Vegemite.
According to Emily, kangaroo is a lean gamey meat that has been eaten by Australia’s indigenous population for thousands of years. Since it’s considered to be ecologically friendly and nutritious, there has been a recent (and mostly unsuccessful) effort to get more Australians to incorporate it into their diet. However, kangaroo meat is often associated with road kill and pet food (it’s largely exported to Europe as an ingredient for the latter), and the trend has been slow to catch on. But creative marketing, such as 2008’s Taste of Kangaroo/Roocipes campaign, may be making a dent in the Australian market -- kangaroo is now more widely available, and sales may be increasing.
While Aussies may be slow to embrace eating kangaroo meat, the same can’t be said for the iconic treat Emily spoke 
about next. The flat white was described as “Australia’s greatest contribution to global gastronomy” by Australian food history scholar Michael Symons. Stemming from European coffee culture, this popular hot drink is a product of 20th century immigration. It consists of a double shot of espresso and micro-foamed milk, resulting in a coffee drink that’s velvety sweet without the fluffiness of a latte or cappuccino. Traditionally served in a 165ml tulip cup, it’s also enjoyed at a slightly colder temperature than other coffee/milk specialties. From Emily’s point of view, the flat white is uniquely global, created as something new in Australia based on Italian coffee culture. Members of the audience at the lecture who had enjoyed the flat white while visiting Australia agreed it was a truly enjoyable part of their daily ritual while traveling there.
The
last featured food of the evening seemed to spark the most interest from the crowd: Vegemite. Developed in 1923 due to the decreased availability of Marmite from England during World War I, Vegemite is made from yeast extract left over from the beer brewing process and is seasoned with salt and vegetable extracts. From the start, it has been promoted as a health food that is “packed with B vitamins”. Emily shared some impressive statistics, including that Vegemite can be found in 80% of Australian kitchens. It’s also rumored to be many Australian babies’ first solid food, and many Australians don’t leave home without it (because, of course, it comes in convenient 
travel-size tubes). She pointed out the culinary tie to the British Empire and explored marketing campaigns in Australia and the U.S., noting the correlation between the first successful sales of Vegemite in America and the Aussie pop culture wave that occurred here in the 80s.
The evening ended with a Vegemite tasting; each audience member received two Ritz crackers with a thin coating of the inky spread, which garnered some spirited reactions. Overall, it was a fun and informative presentation, and the audience was keen to participate. For more information on Emily’s work in food studies, visit her website or follow her on Twitter @emilycontois.
Sustaining Stillman’s: Turning a Profit at the Boston Public Market
Outside the Harvard Square Sunday Market, rain drizzles on a row of vendors as they advertise their assortments of produce, cheese, and baked goods to passersby. In a small, unassuming stall in the middle of the market, Rebecca Stillman sells a variety of meats on behalf of her daughter Kate, owner of Stillman’s Quality Meats.
Kate’s father started Stillman’s Farm over 30 years ago. Eager to find her own niche in the family business, Kate initiated Stillman’s Quality Meats on her father’s land in 2005, selling at markets all over the greater Boston area. Through the direct marketing made possible by the Massachusetts’ Farmer’s Market Association, small family farming has maintained a sustainable income for Massachusetts farmers. The ability to build relationships with customers has allowed the Stillmans to ensure their customers that they exercise the highest standards of care out of respect for nature rather than to appease third-party certifiers.
While seasonal farmer’s markets have given Kate the opportunity to start and grow her business by selling “conscientiously raised, grass fed, pasture raised meat and poultry,” it is her new stall at the year-round Boston Public Market that will give her company the space to turn a profit. Rebecca eagerly tells of the new value-added products available for sale there. From beef kebabs and peach-stuffed pork chops to house-cured charcuterie, the spread is sure to entice the crowd.
In an attempt to find new ways to sustain the business of farming in a post-agrarian culture, small farmers are turning to value-added products to boost profits. A produce farmer might, for instance, be able to sell quarts of fresh concord grapes for $5 a basket. At the end of the day, any leftover grapes will likely not make it through another market. With the addition of just a touch of sugar and half an hour over the stove, however, the farmer can sell those otherwise unusable grapes for $10 a jar in the form of jelly. By transforming their original products into something new and more valuable, farmers are finding ways to widen the scope of their sales. Creating a forum to introduce value-added products revamps the playing field for local small farmers.
Kate Stillman has eagerly joined in the game, but in the end, it is her customers who truly win.
“[Kate] survives, but it’s tough. She provides for her family,” says Rebecca . But when asked if customers are increasingly happy, Rebecca smiles demurely and nods. “Absolutely. Oh, absolutely.”
Sampling Scientific Cooking with Kenji Lopez-Alt at Harvest in Cambridge
By Jerrelle Guy
A private luncheon was held at the historic Harvest restaurant in Harvard square on Monday, October 26th, and a few 
people from the Gastronomy program attended. You all remember Chef Kenji Lopez-Alt from his column in Serious Eats, right? Well, Chef Kenji Lopez-Alt has taken his M.I.T. degree and brought that proficiency into his kitchen. He's managed to deconstruct many of the common cooking approaches taken toward some of our favorite recipes (All-American Meatloaf, Classic Baked Ziti, Big, Fat Juicy Grilled Burgers, and more) and boil them down to a simple scientific method. He even went one step further and made his science-based techniques accessible to the home cook.
The luncheon was a tiny taste of what scientific cooking could offer. Chef Kenji Lopez-Alt partnered with Harvest’s Executive Chef Kinnet to prepare a simple yet elegant menu: Slow-Roasted Pumpkin Soup, Spatchcock Roast Chicken with Scalloped Potatoes, Broccoli Rabe and Delicata Squash, and one can't forget the array of mini desserts that included a life-altering Earl Grey and Caramel Cream Puff!
Along the top of a wide-stretched table dressed in white linen rested his thick new cookbooks, waiting to be doled out to the lucky guests in attendance. Within their pages the chef offers extensive explanations and pictures, and for those who could attend the luncheon, living proof why we as cooks should reconsider the way we think about cooking. The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking through Science is as monumental in size as an encyclopedia, and it behaves like one as well. It's a necessary resource that should take a place on all of our cookbook shelves.
Harvest is celebrating its 40th anniversary all November-long with a special tasting menu, and inviting and honoring chefs from the Boston area who are shaking up the contemporary culinary scene. You can find more information on future events here.
Butchering Lamb at Lightning Ridge
By Lindsey Barrett
After a sunny forty-five minute Sunday drive from Boston to Sherborn, Mass., my Sous Chef Josh Turka and I arrived at a 
small white poster paper sign with a thin black arrow pointing us to 38A Bullard Street. The narrow gravel path, surrounded by thick green brush, opened up to a single-story grey ranch home with three wood-paneled barns behind it. Lightning Ridge Farm is a modest, family-run business dedicated to raising purebred Corriedale sheep and lamb for auction and wholesale.
“It’s named lighting ridge because a few years ago, right down the street, 24 cows were all killed by one strike of lighting,” said owner Nancy Miniter. She and her husband John, along with bostonchefs.com, invited restaurant owners and staff to visit the farm, have lunch and watch a whole animal butchery demonstration. This offered a unique and educational experience, bringing chefs out of the kitchen and closer to the products and people they work with. Over twenty chefs, general managers and restaurant owners from Massachusetts and Rhode Island wearing sneakers, full arm tattoos and some even in socks and kitchen Crocs, gathered to learn about purchasing local lamb directly from the farmer.
Nancy and John started the farm with just two small sheep as 4H projects for their son and daughter in 1990. Today they have 45 ewes on 15 acres. “If you can get a lamb to produce three times in two years she is a keeper,” Nancy advised. Lamb and sheep have a gestation period of five months, and most animals will “lamb” twins.
Lightning Ridge does most of its retail selling at the Wayland Winter and Natick farmers markets, where the lamb is broken down into loin, rib and chop primal cuts for customers. Nancy sells every part of the animal. "I do pretty good selling testicles at the farmers market," she said. "Testicles, hearts and tongues -- I can't keep them."
The farm produces lamb year-round, which is uncommon for a small farm. The animals are butchered at 120-140 pounds and will hang sheered, skinned and head-on at 60-70 pounds. It takes roughly six to seventh months for the animals to reach this weight. Hay made on site by Nancy and John, both animal science graduates, is used for feeding along with a 16% protein enriched grain feed. "I don't like seeing thin sheep," Nancy admitted.
After the grounds tour, the chefs sat down in the shade to whole roast lamb, smoked over peach wood, and Jacks Abby. It was welcome refreshment from the blistering heat that beat down from a piercing blue sky littered with a few sharp white clouds. Sitting around six plastic tables under white peaked tents, chefs chatted in true competitive culinary form. They
compared who had been working the most hours, what was on their current menu, how often it changed and who did what with lamb, each silently sizing up their fellow chef and quietly judging their practices and procedures.
The butchery demonstration was given by Savenour’s butcher shop manager Adam Lucia. Although the conditions were not ideal -- it was warm, the meat was getting soft and the hand saw was not breaking bones as easily as it would had the meat and air temperature been cooler -- Adam did his best to demonstrate how to break down a whole lamb. "It's not magic, it's just a lost art," he said as he delicately taps his boning knife with a steel mallet between rib bone and muscle. He explained what he uses the whole animal for and how nothing should be wasted. "The lard inside the lamb, it's a shame not to use,” he said. “It's like white gold." He went on to suggest we use it to sear proteins in pans.
Three days prior, sweat slowly creeped down the small of my back and my thick black chef pants stuck to my thighs. It was a Thursday night and it felt like the entire dining room at The Salty Pig had all sat down at once. At 6 p.m. in the middle of picking up and plating three pork tastings, two buccatini and clam pastas and a small agnolotti, I heard my chef yell my name. “Lindsey, talk to Josh at the pass,” my head chef barked as he finished garnishing a plate with toasted sunflower seeds and five vibrant sunflower pedals.
Josh leaned over the shiny black counter and asked what I was doing Sunday. Really? I thought. You want to know my Sunday plans when I'm frantically trying to plate six entrees on a space no bigger than a standard kitchen sized cutting board? "Um nothing chef, what's up?" I respectfully answered. Over the clanking of plates and beeping of timers, thoughts continued going on in my head: Was my loin resting? Was the garlic burning in the pan or did I have enough time to turn around, bloom in the Aleppo and deglaze with white wine?
He told me he wanted to tour a lamb farm and talk about purchasing a whole lamb. "Sure chef, sounds fun, text me later about details,” I spat out as I whirled back around to the six burner range. With a towel in hand, I grabbed sauté pans and heated up the black garlic purée. I then stole the crispy charred wax beans off the grill, aggressively chopped parsley to finish the pasta and tossed the finished plates to the pass.
Back at Lightning Ridge, as the butchering demonstration continued, Josh and I chugged down our third beer each. A welcome breeze blew in and the faint smell of dried hay and barnyard animal wafted through the tented tables. The shade, icy beer and farm scents were soothing, giving way to a moment to sit back and enjoy the simplistic Sunday setting. “Well,” Josh whispered over the tiny tapping of mallet to knife, a small grin forming out of the 
corner of his mouth, “now I want to get a lamb.”
If you go: Nancy encourages anyone to visit the farm, take a tour and see what they do daily. "We like when people visit,” she says. “We always tell people from the farmers market to visit the farm. They never do but we like it.” For more information, email jnene@aol.com or call 508-653-3212. Lightning Ridge Farm, 38 A Bullard Street, Sherborn Massachusetts
Dr. Ari Ariel’s Talk on the Hummus Wars
By Kendall Vanderslice
On September 30th, a rainy Wednesday evening, Dr. Ari Ariel presented the second Pepin lecture of the year, titled “Hummus Wars: Buying and Boycotting Middle Eastern Foods.” The new head of the Gastronomy program began his presentation with a slideshow of the Guinness World Record competition between Lebanon and Israel, each vying for the award of producing the largest hummus dish. A 9,000-pound dish in Israel was quickly defeated by a group of Lebanese chefs. After a few rounds of back and forth battling, the record for largest dish of hummus was won by Chef Ramzi Choueiri and students in Lebanon for their 23,000 pound serving.
While this might sound like nothing more than friendly competition between neighboring countries, Dr. Ariel says he views the hummus record as an extension of the political climate. It is set, he explains, within “a rhetoric of violence that turns cooks into combatants.” Since 2008, Lebanon has been seeking a legal claim to hummus. By trademarking hummus in the European Union, they aim to regulate the proportions of ingredients allowed in the tasty dip and require Lebanese recognition on every label.
The history of hummus is largely unknown. In Arabic, the word simply means “chickpea,” but the dish hummus bi tahini has become so popular around the world that it is commonly referred to as simply hummus. The exact origin remains a mystery – the earliest recipe is found in a 13th century cookbook – yet several countries claim ownership of the dish. Because hummus exists between multiple foodways and constructions of identity, this attempt to trademark the dish raises questions of authenticity and gastro-nationalism. Who has a right to regulate claims to authenticity? Is authenticity a product of, or a producer of, identity and nationality?
According to Dr. Ariel, the hummus wars prove that, while food can serve to reconcile, it can also push things in the opposite direction. Far from a bridge to peace, this culinary rivalry creates a new space within which political conflict can work itself out. Whether this non-violent space will remain such is yet to be discovered. So the next time you reach for some hummus, remember that the dish is a little deeper than you thought.