Gastronomique: Meta Food Post
We are living vicariously this week, but those who do get to eat belong to four different media, in some kind of meta-food marathon. On the menu: a newspaper article, a magazine, a book, and a TV show.
The book first: Peter Mayle and Gérard Auzet's Confessions of a French Baker. The title is saucy, but do not judge the book by it, it will teach you no dirty secrets about French boulangers. What it will teach you is how to make your own baguette. We haven't tried any of the recipes in it, we would have had to source the right flour and some baker yeast and such, but for those into this kind of things, we can only recommend this little cute fascicule. Peter Mayle weaves a few introductory chapters with the light and elegant prose which made him famous, and the book then moves onto recipes for all kind of breads: baguette, pain de campagne, olive bread, and so on. Gérard Auzet is an actual baker, so the book is kneaded by good hands. There is no link to SF, besides Peter Mayle visiting the city last week, but we are French and we certainly miss the bread such as the one described in there.
It is hard to deny a link to SF to the new magazine, Edible San Francisco, a quarterly edited by Bruce Cole. Bruce Cole is the force behind Sauté Wednesday, a pioneering food blog whose RSS feed we subscribe to. Edible SF focuses on the whole food chain from the producer of vegetables, or the wine maker, to the restaurant to the end user, the consumer, as they are all part of the food chain. It compiles a selection of interesting articles and interviews, such as an interview by Bruce with Paula Wolfert or a virtual debate between the chefs at Hawthorne Lane and ACME chop house on the merit of grass vs grain fed beef. We particularly enjoyed the essay "Happy Donut" which quotes a highly logical nine year old: They call it Happy Donut, but that's a lie, because I'm not happy. You can find the list of locations where Edible SF is available for free here. Good luck to this newcomer on the local food magazine scene!
A nice topic for the next issue would be the debate started by Daniel Patterson in the NYTimes. He wrote an article denouncing the negative impact of Alice Waters on the SF food scene: he respects her for sourcing splendid vegetables and meats from the best organic local farms, but finds the simple preparations favored by Alice and her disciples (a category which includes pretty much every chef in SF!) predictable and boring. He wants chefs to show their technique and creativity instead of just hiding behind the "let the ingredients shine" dogma. While we agree on the gist of the article, we found a few things quite ironic:
We actually contacted Chef Patterson, because we really wanted to give him an opportunity to follow up on his criticism with a constructive proposal for what SF chefs should be doing to evade the Chez Panisse dogmas. And we feel so journalistic writing what follows: he declined to comment for this article.
Controversies abound, as we just saw, but not on the new food TV show for KQED. Check Please!, which aired last Thursday for the first time, and we watched the show with great curiosity. We had applied to be a participant, and really wanted to know who had bested us. Well, we were spurned, so we won't even acknowledge them. The principle behind the show is to get three random participants, ask each one for their favorite SF restaurant, and send the other two to check out the place. They all discuss their visits with the host in the studio. We were nicely impressed by the selection of the restaurants in the first episode: Old Krakow, Hard Knox Cafe, and Incanto. These are places we were glad to hear about. The participants were nicely articulate and spoke eloquently about the places, but we were a bit disappointed by the studio discussion: they all went too easy on each other. We were hoping for some kind of celebrity death match, and we only had a soft consensus, with the word "authentic" being used and abused. After hearing authentic for the 17th time, we did feel like screaming, and pretty much to all three participants: Did you live in Texas AND in Italy AND in Poland? No? So how the f*ck can you assess that all three places are f*cking authentic! After the 23rd time, we decided to make it a drinking game for the next show, tonight. Drink a shot for each authentic!
Check Please
KQED Channel 9
Thursdays, 7:30pm
Saturdays, 1:30pm
Video here