BU Guest Chef: Chef Roy Choi of Kogi BBQ
Throughout the year, the BU Gastronomy blog will feature occasional posts from special guest writers including current students, recent alumni, professors, and more. The following Guest Post and photographs are brought to you by Gastronomy student Amy Allen.
Roy Choi, who ignited the food truck revolution when he brought his Kogi Korean taco truck to Los Angeles hipsters, came to Boston University on November 8, 2013, to talk about his new book, “L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food.”
Choi trained at the Culinary Institute of America and worked at Le Bernardin and other restaurants before he launched the Los Angeles food truck that draws crowds of customers who wait in line for hours for a $2.29 Korean taco, with the most popular being homemade corn tortillas filled with caramelized Korean barbecue, salsa roja, cilantro-onion-lime relish, and a Napa romaine slaw tossed in a chili-soy vinaigrette.
Choi was engaging and honest when he talked about the overwhelming situation he found himself in five years ago when his life took a “strong detour” and he became a celebrity of sorts for his taco truck food. He wasn’t ready for the attention, he said, acknowledging the backstage role he held as a chef. “It’s hard for chefs to celebrate things and be out here and have a great time. We don’t have great times. Our job is to make sure YOU have a great time.”
When he was initially approached to write a book, “all I wanted was to get back to the truck and cook tacos,” he said, Daily, people would stop him, he said, “not to ask for an autograph, not to hang out with me, and not to sleep with me, but to ask, ‘How did you come up with this flavor?’ and then they would start crying or hug me.”
Choi admitted that he didn’t know how to deal with all the attention. “I did a lot to destroy it,” he said. “But sometimes when you step on a garden, it grows tenfold.” Finally, two and a half years ago, he says he woke up and was in the right state of mind to write the book. But, he didn’t want to write “the Kogi book” of taco truck recipes.
He describes the book as very personal and says it “is not about the food I do as a chef.” The recipes show the inspiration for Choi’s cooking and illustrate his history. With dishes such as kimchi and pork belly stuffed pupusas, ketchup fried rice, and spam banh mi, the recipes also reflect Los Angeles’s diverse cuisines. Choi says conceptually, the book is like Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” in its continuous flow; each chapter of the autobiographical book concludes with recipes that embody the life story you just read.
Choi said he grew up in Los Angeles in an immigrant Korean family that cooked food that “looked nothing like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or a pizza.” His mother was “an underground queen” in the Korean community for her kimchi, which she would sell out of cardboard boxes out of the trunk of their car. In a nod to his mother, Choi demonstrated the technique for making her braised short rib recipe. “Everyone says their mom’s galbi jim is the best,” he said. Choi said that even though the recipe has three components, that it is simple and anyone can make it. One of the keys, he said, is to soak the short ribs in water overnight to remove the impurities.
While preparing “ghetto Pillsbury fried doughnuts”— biscuit dough removed from the paper tube, fried in Crisco, and rolled in cinnamon, toasted sesame seeds, and sugar--Choi told the story of the recipe’s inspiration: He had decided to travel cross country to surprise the girl of his dreams. But his feelings were not reciprocated, and soon after, Choi had a lost week crack smoking bender in New York City. These doughnuts are what he would have wanted to eat at that time, he said.
When asked about how attending culinary school affected his food sensibilities, Choi said it gave him discipline and a way to deal with anger, and it developed his palate. “It changed everything about me,” he said. “I was a street kid from L.A.” Most significantly, he said, it gave him a deep love and appreciation for French food and French culinary technique.
While Choi has expanded his reach beyond the food truck and opened a series of restaurants in Los Angeles, he has bigger ambitions of bringing “chef-driven restaurants into the hood.” Choi referred to his talk at MAD3 in when he outlined the problem of hunger and neighborhoods with little access to healthy and fresh food. His vision is to involve chefs in the solution by starting restaurants in neighborhoods that have few good food options. In the meantime, Choi and his coauthors Tien Nguyen and Natasha Phan are on tour promoting their book through the end of this year. You can hear Roy on NPR and get the short rib recipe here.
Are you a current student or a recent alum with a food-filled story to share? Pitch your idea to gastronomyatbu@gmail.com and get published on the BU Gastronomy blog!
Fall Lecture Series Recap: What’s Not to Like About Modern Processed Food? – A Historical Perspective
Throughout the year, the BU Gastronomy blog will feature occasional posts from special guest writers including current students, recent alumni, professors, and more. The following Guest Post is brought to you by Gastronomy student Nate Orsi.
Close your eyes…after you read the next sentence.
Visualize the history and prehistory of processed food.
Now, open them…What?! you say...
Is it difficult to do?
Well then you missed Dr. Rachel Laudan’s engaging presentation on the evolution of processed food! Have no fear, Dr. Laudan has a website, a new book, and a long list of publications and interesting academic work to use in your own research or for pure academic enjoyment. And who doesn’t want a little bit of enlightenment now and again, especially when it is food focused.
In her recent lecture, Dr. Laudan covered everything from the cultivation of wild crops to animal husbandry, and laid the foreground for the present state of packaged foods. While several people in the audience were interested in the implications of agricultural drawbacks to large scale production, ethical concerns over food production, and food safety issues, Dr. Laudan fielded questions in a poised and balanced manner. It was enlightening to see her take information from the questions she received and incorporate those tidbits into the scope of her research. This is something I have struggled with in my own work (and I am sure I am not the only one). Scope is such a fickle beast, and looking at any historical topic within a global context is bound to be a daunting task.
Refrigeration and packaging played extremely important roles in the development of processed food. It’s a little strange to think about how ice used to be something reserved for the elite classes -- royalty and the landed gentry -- so something to think about next time you ask for ice in a nonchalant run-of-the mill manner. No pun intended with the mill reference, even though there was a pretty in depth discussion about the development of milling and flour production. Bread is such an integral part of so many cultures, and Laudan made this abundantly clear with a distinctive portion of the lecture dedicated to talking about the Fertile Crescent.
There are so many modern food related examples I can think of with regard to the development of food processing, but if you look at something as simple as lemonade, you can see the processed nature of the mix, the artificially created ice, even the sweetener. These three components sort of encapsulate some of the thematic qualities of Laudan’s discussion.
She noted how people tend to romanticize certain aspects of the past when considering modern food processes, and of course she explained how it is not a perfect system. I really enjoyed having a historical perspective intertwined with large scale production of processed foods, since it is important to look at the broader picture of food in its current state. It is difficult to effectively compartmentalize food systems, because there is so much interplay between all parties of an increasingly complex foodways.
For more information on processed food and more of Dr. Laudan's work, check out her website or pick up a copy of her new book, Cuisine and Empire, out this November 2013.
Are you a current student or a recent alum with a food-filled story to share? Pitch your idea to gastronomyatbu@gmail.com and get published on the BU Gastronomy blog!
Fall Lecture Series: Markets, Supermarkets, and the Law and Politics of Food in India
This is the final installment of the Fall 2013 Lecture Series
design by KC Hysmith
Fall Lecture Series Recap: Don’t Police My Plate – Race, Gender, and the Politics of Eating the “Right Foods”
Throughout the year, the BU Gastronomy blog will feature occasional posts from special guest writers including current students, recent alumni, professors, and more. The following Guest Post is brought to you by Gastronomy student Alex Cheser.
As the clock neared the hour, the lecture hall quickly became standing room only as Gastronomy graduate students, faculty, and other members of the Boston University community gathered to hear Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson deliver her lecture “Don’t Police My Plate: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Eating the ‘Right Foods’” in conjunction with this semester’s Food and Gender course taught by Dr. Carole Counihan. This conjunction comes as no surprise as both Williams-Forson and Counihan have worked together on previous works such as co-editing Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World and consider each other friends within the field of food studies.
Dr. Williams-Forson, an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, has published multiple works analyzing the connection between race, women’s studies, power, material culture, and, of course, food with her most notable publication being Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power. This lecture contained work from a forthcoming publication tentatively titled Don’t Yuck My Yum.
Opening with several quotes from interviews with female students from various racial and cultural backgrounds, Williams-Forson quickly brought to light the negative emotional and cultural effects that stem from food policing or being told what to eat. While not discrediting their work and viewpoints, Williams-Forson established the sway of “white men telling us what to eat” and the all-encompassing dominance of the rhetoric of heralded writers such as Pollan, Berry, and others. She acknowledged that grappling with the industrial food complex is a worthwhile effort, but insisted that it is an effort that is unfortunately beyond the reaches of a large segment of the American population who still need to eat at the end of the day.
Wal*Mart, Target, Dollar General, and even the Dollar Tree serve as examples of vital providers of food in food deserts across the country. In this market model, people rely on Tyson chicken, canned vegetables, and other food products and goods that the “food elite” regularly demonize. This food elite creates the policing of ingredients and dishes that do not fit into its own management of identity and promotion of values, which clearly contain implications of differing racial and class politics. Williams-Forson proposes an amendment of a fourth pillar to the typical three pillars of sustainability surrounding food: social, economic, environmental. This fourth pillar is the sustainability of cultural vitality as outlined by UNESCO. This recognition of cultural vitality would prevent the dichotomous sorting of food choices by recognizing the strength of cultural heritage across races, cultures, classes, and genders and thus help eliminate the policing of plates and shaming of cultural foods and practices that minorities often feel.
When confronted with questions about health and food-related problems such as obesity and diabetes, Williams-Forson maintained that this information could certainly be provided to those who request it but that the creation of a prescriptive model of nutrition, however tempting, continues this act of policing that only degrades people’s understanding of food and prevents real change. If people want to eat poorly, they have every right to do so according Williams-Forson. She encouraged an expansion of the medical model to include cultural study and consideration for better solutions to bridge the gap between food elitism and the everyday food access and practices of people in our country.
Are you a current student or a recent alum with a food-filled story to share? Pitch your idea to gastronomyatbu@gmail.com and get published on the BU Gastronomy blog!
November Events: Dia de los Muertos, a Gingerbread Competition, and Dinner with the Pilgrims
We are halfway through the semester and New England has made the official switch to Fall. With leaves on the ground, a scarf around your neck, and the scent of cinnamon on the air, its clear to see that the holiday season is almost here. So take a break from the books, check out one of these delicious food-themed events, and get in the holiday spirit.
Please note that many of the following events require tickets or reservations.
Taza Chocolate Dia de los Muertos
When: Saturday, Nov. 2 from 1:00 to 6:00 PM
Where: Taza Chocolate Factory, 561 Windsor St., Somerville, MA 02143
What: A traditional Mexican celebration Massachusetts-style. Costumes, Mariachi music, delicious food and creative holiday-themed activities with the Somerville Arts Council.
27th Annual Boston Christmas Festival
When: Friday, Nov. 8, from 12:00 - 7:00 PM; Saturday, Nov. 9, from 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM; and Sunday, Nov. 10, from 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Where: Seaport World Trade Center, Boston, MA 02210
What: A huge convention of holiday decor, crafts, and gifts. Get ready for the Christmas season with specialty foods and a gingerbread competition with top chefs and celebrity guest judges.
4th Annual Local Craft Brewfest
When: Friday, Nov. 22, 2013 6:00 - 9:30 PM
Where: John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, 1 Courthouse Way, Boston, MA 02210
What: Local Craft Brewfest is a celebration of local craft brews and is a major fundraiser for the free Annual Boston Local Food Festival.
Thanksgiving Dinner at Plimoth Plantation
When: Various dates during the Thanksgiving Holiday weekend.
Where: Plimoth Plantation, 137 Warren Avenue, Plymouth, MA 02360
What: Several events including America's Thanksgiving Dinner, A Thanksgiving Day Buffet, and a 1627 Harvest Dinner with the Pilgrims.
Harvard Science and Cooking Lecture Series
When: Dates vary, but all talks begin at 7:00 PM unless otherwise noted.
Where: Harvard Science Center (One Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA, Hall C & overflow Hall E)
What: A lecture series combining the expertise of food specialists, world-renowned chefs, and Harvard researchers. Lectures vary from week to week and are open to the public.
Monday, Nov. 4, 2013
"The Science of Sweets"
Joanne Chang, Flour Bakery
Monday, Nov. 11, 2013
"Catalytic Conversion: Enzymes in the Kitchen"
Wylie Dufresne, wd~50
Ted Russin, The Culinary Institute of America
Monday, Nov. 18, 2013
"Fermentation: When Rotten Goes Right"
David Chang, momofuku
Monday, Nov. 25, 2013
Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO; co-founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures; and author of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
Be sure to share any food events you find by commenting below or on the BU Gastronomy Facebook page. Show us what you eat this month by following us on Instagram and using the hashtag #bugastronomy.
Fall Lecture Series: What’s Not to Like About Modern Processed Food? – A Historical Perspective
design by KC Hysmith
Guest Post: The Food Loft Redefines Culinary Entrepreneurship
Throughout the year, the BU Gastronomy blog will feature occasional posts from special guest writers including current students, recent alumni, professors, and more. The following Guest Post and photographs are brought to you by Gastronomy student Claudia Catalano.
What is a food entrepreneur? Those in tune with the local food movement might imagine a food truck venture, a banker-turned-baker, or perhaps an artisan working out of a culinary incubator like Jamaica Plain’s Crop Circle Kitchen. But at the Food Loft, Boston’s latest co-working space for startups, food entrepreneurship has grown to encompass more than you think.
Founded by the publishers at Harvard Common Press, the Food Loft is a shared working space aimed at attracting passionate entrepreneurs in the food and food/tech industries. Gastronomy students Samantha Shane and Claudia Catalano were guests at the official opening party held at the South End location last month. Assistant Professor Rachel Black and Barbara Rotger of the Gastronomy program were also in attendance.
The eclectic Albany Street space hosts a growing number of food-centered businesses with technology and social media at their core. Current tenants include Culture Magazine, Nosh On It, and Bakepedia. Despite their robust online presence, each of the food innovators seemed at home amongst the Oriental rugs, walls of books, and antique sculpture collections that adorn the office. Unlike the standard culinary incubator model, the space is not a shared kitchen, but rather a collaborative working environment where industry innovators can network, share ideas and discuss what’s next for food, business, and technology.
Guests at the launch party came from all over the Northeast to nibble sophisticated hors d’oeuvres and mingle with fellow cookbook publishers, food artisans, social media gurus and bloggers. Amid the 75 attendees was Jane Kelly of Eat Your Books – a personalized cookbook search engine where users can create their own virtual bookshelf. Kelly’s business idea is an example of food entrepreneurship that moves beyond food production to develop technology services for people who love to cook.
Other attendees included Boston-based food writer and speaker Jacqueline Church, Janet Morgenstern of Jute Marketing – a firm specializing in sustainable and natural brands, and Jill Danielle Fisher, social media editor at America’s Test Kitchen. Traditional culinary entrepreneurs such as Bonnie Shershow of Bonnie’s Jams also joined the food-tech startups at the event. Shershow began making small-batch jams at Formaggio Kitchen over ten years ago and now sells her products nationwide.
It is clear from the variety of business ideas represented at the Food Loft that there is a new breed of culinary entrepreneurs joining the food renaissance. While small-batch artisans, innovative chefs, and food trucks continue to tempt our palate, technologically savvy innovators are dreaming up new ways to enrich our relationship to food while carving out viable niches for themselves in today's food industry.
Are you a current student or a recent alum with a food-filled story to share? Pitch your idea to gastronomyatbu@gmail.com and get published on the BU Gastronomy blog!
Fall Lecture Series: Don’t Police My Plate – Race, Gender, and the Politics of Eating the “Right Foods”
design by KC Hysmith
Guest Post: The Controversy of the Chipotle Scarecrow Ad
Throughout the year, the BU Gastronomy blog will feature occasional posts from special guest writers including current students, recent alumni, professors, and more. The following Guest Post is brought to you by Gastronomy student Brad Jones.
When I first watched Chipotle’s new Scarecrow advertisement, the one currently going viral across the internet, I was ready to condemn it from the mountain tops. To summarize briefly, the advert follows an unnamed protagonist scarecrow through his workplace, the industrial giant Crow Foods. It is the scarecrow’s job to patch up the façade of the processing plant, ensuring that the unknowing patrons who are purchasing prepackaged 100% beefish meals and chicken-shaped nuggets at the end of the omnipresent (dis)assembly lines remain enthralled by its glossy veneer. It’s a good thing they do as inside the factory chickens are pumped full of chemical hormones ballooning to twice their size while in the next silo over a herd of forlorn cows are attached to pumping machines that resemble and probably function like an iron lung, ensuring just the bare minimum of what one might call life.
Dejected and dismayed, our protagonist commutes to his rural home, where he tends a small garden, the sight of which gives him an epiphany. He proceeds to harvest his bounty, drive into the city, and prepare it fresh for happy if inquisitive patrons amidst the looming walls of the industrial complex. Beneath a banner that reads “Cultivate a Better World,” he’s finally able to shake the omnipresent crow that has perched on his shoulder throughout. It’s seems a final act of defiance.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUtnas5ScSE&w=420&h=315]
I watched the short film over and over again. I angrily picked apart the storyline, the symbolism, the music. I was going to go on a long diatribe about the marketing efforts of big business to influence our buying decisions, in this case all the more insidious because they are subliminal (except for the conspicuous red chile pepper that started a revolution that is). I was going to attack the fact that the company had for many years an unholy alliance with McDonalds making a fortune for McD’s to the tune of 1.2 billion dollars (the two have since parted ways). I was going to comment on the irony of using a haunting version of “Pure Imagination” to silhouette the action, not because it juxtaposes utopian allusions of Willy Wonka’s candyland with the dystopic images of factory food processing and fallow fields, but because that scene from the chocolate factory has always struck me as more indicative of gluttony, consumerism, and excess than the fantastic land of medieval cockaigne.
The list goes on. I was going to lambaste the company for intentionally rousing controversy and, whether bad or good, advertently splashing the Chipotle name across the internet (even as I was aware of my own complicity). I was going to note that while scarecrows are an apotropaic symbol of farm protection, their association with brainlessness may not be the image Chipotle wishes to convey. I was going to shake my head that such a touching story did little more than prelude the release of the company’s new juvenile “The Scarecrow” cellphone ap. I was going to all but throw a fit.
But before I did so I went to their website to gather ammunition and to see if Chipotle’s practices in any way resemble what they preach. I researched the history of the company, analyzed the way they prepare their food, and scrutinized their ingredients closely. All this was surprisingly easy to do and I was forced to admit I was pleased to find such a large measure of transparency. And then I realized that they do have some things to boast about: they do lead the world in buying (and selling) hormone and antibiotic-free beef, pork, and chicken; they do buy quite a few products locally; they do prepare things fresh on site; they do provide a relatively well-rounded meal nutritionally; they do employ real-live sentient human beings.
And then I started thinking, and realized if nothing else we must agree the advertisement has got us all doing a little more thinking. The popularity of the ad (amassing over 5 millions views in less than a week) and the abundance of articles written for or against it shows that we’re talking about our food again and that we’re doing it in a critical way. Are we in large numbers finally breaking free from our industrial sopor? Are we, like our protagonist scarecrow friend, refusing to be complicit in the shame of agro-industrial food production? Are we accepting the call to arms and proactively cultivating a better world? Are ads like this (and their 2009 Back to the Start version) encouraging us to do so? I’ll hesitantly admit that I think the answer is a resounding yes.
So while the advertisement still doesn’t sit entirely right with me, I realize it may very well be an agent for good. And while I’m not likely to eat any more fast food (pardon, fast casual) I realize that at least Chipotle is the lesser of evils and at most it has the power to be a significant arbiter of change. So go get em’ scarecrow… one (million) “all natural” pork tacos at a time.
Are you a current student or a recent alum with a food-filled story to share? Pitch your idea to gastronomyatbu@gmail.com and get published on the BU Gastronomy blog!
Fall Lecture Series Recap: Sensing Microbial Diversity of the World’s Artisan Cheeses
Throughout the year, the BU Gastronomy blog will feature occasional posts from special guest writers including current students, recent alumni, professors, and more. The following Guest Post is brought to you by Gastronomy student Lauren Kouffman with photographs provided by fellow Gastronomy student Chris Maggiolo.
Boston University’s Gastronomy Program presented a lecture on Thursday September 26th, entitled, “Fall Lecture Series: Sensing Microbial Diversity of the World’s Artisan Cheeses,” in conjunction with MET ML701 (Food and The Senses), a core Gastronomy course which focuses on the physical and sensory aspects of experiencing foodways. Benjamin Wolfe, a Postdoctoral Researcher from Harvard University, presented his research to a mix of Gastronomy-matriculating students and members of the public, and later invited everyone to partake in the sensory experience themselves, with tastes of three very distinct cheeses.
via Benjamin Wolfe
Dr. Wolfe specializes in studying microbes: tiny organic particles that grow, and eventually group together into what is known as a colony, in the process of breaking down food matter. Essentially, Dr. Wolfe described, microbes are the force behind rot- but this is not always a bad thing. His current research has led him to an in-depth exploration of the microbial factors that influence the expression of various texture, smell, and taste traits of some of the most well-known artisanal cheeses, each one developed through years of precise microbial manipulation and traditional methodology.
via Chris Maggiolo
Interestingly, Wolfe and his Harvard research team have recently been at the helm of a new movement to identify and propagate uniquely North American microcultures in artisanal cheesemaking, rather than relying on imported European-native cultures or American-manufactured reproductions of the more traditional strains. The project itself might even be compared to larger national initiatives to re-popularize certain Heritage breeds of crops and livestock, based on an altruistic approach that simultaneously is concerned with preserving unique regional flavors (that is, the basis of terroir itself), and restoring diversity to the American culinary landscape. A new laboratory at Jasper Hill Farms, a Vermont dairy farm and artisanal cheese producer, has even been subsidized by the United States government for the continuation of Dr. Wolfe’s research. Evidently, the identification and taxonomy of uniquely-American microbial terroir is worth the trouble.
via Benjamin Wolfe
While identifying the individual cultures that already exist on any one style of cheese is a logical, if time-consuming, macro-approach, Dr. Wolfe explained he often takes a reverse-engineering approach to his work, attempting instead to isolate and identify each specific culture by tinkering with the conditions (quantities and varieties of salt, for example, or even the type of grass that is fed to the animals producing the milk) that might cause any particular strain to thrive.
via Chris Maggiolo
At the end of his intriguing talk, Dr. Wolfe opened the floor for questions. While he touched upon the subject briefly I was particularly interested in learning more about the influence of the DuPont-owned industrial reproduction of European-native cultures, and whether or not Dr. Wolfe’s team anticipates being at odds with the economic or political motivations of a huge corporation like DuPont. Is there the potential for a Monsanto-esque backlash in the future? Dr. Wolfe explained that since he is not actually modifying genetic material, and there’s no possible way to copyright the microbes he is studying since they appear naturally in the world, there is little threat of resistance from DuPont at this time. Still, the idea that a larger corporation might take umbrage at independent and public research isn’t out of the realm of possibility, and I am certainly interested to see how long the government will continue to subsidize this project, worthy as it may be.
via Chris Maggiolo
Dr. Wolfe’s work is equally fascinating for members of the science community, food-activists, or the average cheese-lover, and his engaging talk certainly left me hungry for more. For more information on Dr. Wolfe’s work with Jasper Hill Farms, along with his other incredible research projects, visit his website at www.benjaminewolfe.com/.
Benjamin Wolfe will be teaching a class in the Microbiology of Food during the Spring 2014 Semester. This class will meet on Wednesday evenings from 6 to 9 PM.
Are you a current student or a recent alum with a food-filled story to share? Pitch your idea to gastronomyatbu@gmail.com and get published on the BU Gastronomy blog!