A chronicle of the unimaginable toll the pandemic had on restaurants and bars, including how many transformed to survive
https://ny.eater.com/2020/12/30/22203053/nyc-coronavirus-timeline-restaurants-bars-2020
Bars and breweries are prohibited from serving customers indoors after 11 p.m. tonight, but can remain open for outdoor service and go-cups, or to-go drinks
https://nola.eater.com/2020/12/30/22206624/indoor-bar-service-shut-down-new-orleans-covid-new-years-eve
The businesses will pause on-site services from 10:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. through the morning of January 3
https://austin.eater.com/2020/12/30/22206212/austin-restaurants-bars-curfew-covid-1030pm-new-years-eve
How Eater editors cooked their way through quarantine
While 2020 — the year of So. Much. Cooking. — might be remembered recipe-wise for sourdough, none of us could have made it through quarantine on bread alone. Among Eater editors, shelter-in-place got us into our home kitchens like never before and, naturally, we’ve depended on some recipes more than others to keep us going, rediscovering old favorites and finding new gems.
There were some common threads among the recipes we consistently turned to when we needed to cook, yet again. Meatballs were both fun to make and wildly practical; we could always count on noodles; we finally figured out what to do when we had too many greens in the fridge; and we made time for baking projects.
Below, the recipes we relied on this year:
Broccoli and egg fried rice: I basically lived on this for the first few months of quarantine. Its virtues are numerous: among other things, it’s pantry-staple-simple, highly flavorful, and an excellent way to use up leftover cooked rice. It’s also versatile; although it says “broccoli,” I’ve made it with many a hardy vegetable. Plus, it’s essentially a ginger delivery vehicle, which is always a good thing. — Rebecca Flint Marx, features editor
Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce: This year, the recipes that have appealed to me most are the ones that are barely even recipes. This iconic tomato sauce from Italian culinary legend Marcella Hazan is so ridiculously easy that it almost feels like a scam. You just open a can of the best tomatoes you can find — spend the extra cash on real San Marzanos or imported Datterinos — dump ‘em in a saucepan, add in a stick of butter and half of a peeled onion, and let it simmer on the stove for an hour. Sometimes I throw in a few anchovy filets or whole cloves of garlic if I’m feeling fancy.
The best part, though, is that after you’ve eaten your perfectly sauced noodles, you can whiz the leftover sauce with cream in a blender for the best tomato soup of your natural life. (I got that tip from Queer Eye’s Antoni Porowski’s Instagram and maintain that it is likely the only good cooking advice ever given by that man.) — Amy McCarthy, Eater Dallas/Houston editor
Sautéed dandelion greens with eggs: My CSA sent me this recipe one week when we got dandelion greens and had no idea what to do, and it’s completely changed my relationship to dark, leafy greens in the kitchen. It works because it’s less of a hard recipe and more of a set of guidelines. Instead of leeks I’ve used onions, garlic or shallots. I used mustard greens, kale, and chard in place of dandelion greens when I had them. I’ve topped it with cheddar and parmesan and goat cheese. Use literally whatever you have in this vague order, and add spices if you want. But it has hands-down gotten me to eat more greens than any other recipe. — Jaya Saxena, staff writer
Chocolate babka: The first time I baked this recipe, which makes two loaves of intensely chocolaty babka, I fully intended to keep one for my immediate family and give one away — until I saw my fiancée and parents ravenously devour the first loaf. The next few times I baked it over the course of the year I successfully gifted a loaf — to a friend as a parting gift upon leaving L.A., to my sister-in-law as a house-warming present — and even baked it in place of a birthday cake for my partner, who literally responded, “This is the best thing you have ever made.” The babka is a lot like my 2020: arduous, messy, a chance to support loved ones, and full of chocolate. — Nick Mancall-Bitel, editorial associate
Spaghetti alla Carbonara: Though I love cooking, working at Eater means a lot of eating out at restaurants. My first forays into the kitchen, I felt a little bit like a weak baby bird, so I wanted something easy to make and comforting. That means pasta alla carbonara — which needs just pasta, eggs, pancetta (or bacon), and Parmigiano-Reggiano (NO CREAM cc: @italians_mad_at_food). Just boil the pasta, cook the pancetta, beat the eggs until they’re super foamy, and combine everything over a low flame until you have a thick, creamy sauce. I don’t have a recipe because I learned from my friends in Italy, but this one is the closest. — Erin Russell, Eater Austin associate editor
Saffron risotto: The ability to make a hands-off risotto that requires no constant stirring is one of the major appeals of the Instant Pot. This simple, yet sophisticated saffron risotto from Melissa Clark’s cookbook Dinner in an Instant has become a mainstay in our house this year, and it’s also caught on in my sister’s household, to the point where it will earn a marquee place at Christmas dinner this week. I expect further members of my family will embrace this dish: Clark’s excellent pressure cooker-focused cookbook has found its way under the tree of both my mother and my brother-in-law this year, courtesy of yours truly. — Missy Frederick, cities director
Kale-sauce pasta: Back when we all first started sheltering in place, I asked the food writer and cookbook author Jamie Feldmar to pull together the best recipes the internet had to offer when it comes to cooking with pantry staples. Brilliantly, she also included a list of recipes to turn to when it was time to eat something super-fresh, including this kale-sauce pasta recipe from Ava Genes chef Joshua McFadden, and adapted for the Times by Tejal Rao.
One of the perks of editing is getting to see a story before everyone else does, and I started cooking this recipe almost as soon as I finished reading the draft. Kale is one of things I tend to buy out of obligation, then kind of complain about having to actually do something with. But this sauce is so good. It’s lighter than a pesto, thoroughly vegetal, and calls for a whole bunch of kale. It’s also easily adaptable; I like to add lemon juice and crushed red pepper flakes, but you could experiment with different greens, too. — Hillary Dixler Canavan, restaurant editor
Spiced chickpea stew with coconut and turmeric: This may be the least original entry, but hey, popular recipes are popular for a reason. I’d spent months resisting Alison Roman’s hashtag recipes, including #TheStew (turned off by the banal ubiquity of it, as well as the somewhat culturally tone-deaf vacuum in which it was seemingly conceived). But one night in 2020, my husband (the cook of this household) finally decided to try out the spiced chickpea stew — and we promptly fell in love. As mostly-vegetarians (in the house, at least), we are suckers for any one-pot, hearty, veggie-forward dish that can function as a weeknight dinner for both of us. This one is ideal, with filling chickpeas, wilted greens that make it feel healthy, and our most-used pantry ingredient: coconut milk. — Ellie Krupnick, director of editorial operations
Somen salad: I turned to a handful of recipes on Onolicious, my favorite Hawaiian food blog, when cooking fatigue set in and it was too hot during the summer to tackle complicated recipes. But the one (chilled) dish I kept returning to was this simple, refreshing somen salad. It’s easier to make than boxed mac-and-cheese and made me nostalgic for Hawaii. — Bao Ong, Eater NY editor
Weeknight meatballs: I’ve made these meatballs upwards of ten times, always with turkey. They’re extra moist, super easy to throw together, and make for great leftovers. They’re so good I’ll be making them for Christmas eve again — so weeknight AND special occasions meatballs. — Alyssa Nassner, art director
Snickerdoodles: I am lucky enough to have Weeknight Baking author Michelle Lopez freelance for me from time to time, and her baking blog, Hummingbird High, has become my go-to spot for dessert recipes. There are quite a few knockouts in her archives, but the raspberry sumac snickerdoodles in her book are my absolute favorite cookie — they’re impossibly soft and just lightly chewy, with a lovely tang to them. For those unwilling to buy the book, her basic snickerdoodle recipe will do the trick — just roll them in a blend of food-processed freeze-dried raspberries, sugar, and a few teaspoons of sumac instead of the standard cinnamon sugar. — Brooke Jackson-Glidden, Eater PDX editor
Pasta alla norma: I admittedly made this recipe a lot pre-quarantine but it’s remained a staple in my household throughout the pandemic. I’m lucky enough to have a garden that produces a lot of eggplant, which I grilled and froze. Now, I pull it out of the freezer anytime I’m feeling lazy. Toss it with tomatoes, garlic, cayenne peppers, pasta, cheese, and lots of capers. It always comes out great. — Brenna Houck, Eater Detroit editor
Whole roasted cauliflower and whipped goat cheese: I didn’t think my repeat quarantine recipe would be a literal head of cauliflower, but here we are. I went on a cookbook ordering frenzy between March and May, and ended up falling for this charred cauliflower recipe from Alon Shaya’s eponymous Shaya, a dish that evokes the blistered and buttery heads of cauliflower stuffed into pitas at Miznon in Tel Aviv. I made this many times over the months, but more fervently so in July and August when I was experimenting with a mostly plant-based diet. The cauliflower blackens in the way that it should when you crank your oven up to 500 (I go a little hotter than the recipe suggests), and gives at the first touch of the knife. I don’t usually make the whipped goat cheese, but I do sometimes dust the head with grated parm for a sharp, salty bite. — Nicole Adlman, cities manager
Sheet pan chicken meatballs with tomatoes and chickpeas: Meatballs are fun to make because there are so many iterations of the simple meaty spheres, plus who doesn’t like to mash things together with their hands? A fellow Vox Media colleague had raved about the chicken meatball recipe from Bon Appetit over the summer, so I decided to try it out. The results were delicious: the feta brought a nice brininess, the harissa added a zip of spice, and I’m generally a sucker for anything involving chickpeas and tomatoes. The recipe is already a staple in my go-to recipe collection. Once I made it with ground halal chicken thighs, which lend to a juicer meatball, honestly. — Nadia Chaudhury, Eater Austin editor
These hand-painted cocktail tools are almost too stunning to use (almost)
It was the pop of royal blue on the cocktail shaker that hooked me. The vibrant shade peeks out behind a psychedelic floral design starring a friendly looking hummingbird. Copper, which underlies the painted pattern, seems to shine through in the oranges and yellows of the flowers. It looks more like art to be displayed than a tool you should shake vigorously or regularly douse in sticky syrups and acidic juices, which is why the “Colibri Azul” set from Tepotztli — which includes a strainer, a cobbler-style shaker, a mixing glass, and a ridiculously beautiful jigger — seems like such an unnecessary splurge.
Ever since I encountered the stunning Tepotztli tools, I’ve been side-eying my shabby cocktail set, quietly suppressing the urge to throw my old tools in the trash and order my dream set. I’m too stubbornly pragmatic to ever replace a perfectly good tool (if I were to ever part with my barware, I would likely pawn it off on a cocktail-deprived friend). There’s also the matter of cost: Tepotztli sets range from $200 to $500, far too rich for my blood, especially considering you can outfit a perfectly decent bar for under $50.
None of this has stopped me from fantasizing about how the Tepotztli pieces would look displayed on my shelves or arranged on a bar cart, that pop of blue lighting up any room. I think about the other offerings from Tepotztli too. There are painted sets like the Colibri Azul, but also delicately engraved options that burst from shiny copper, mesmerizing hand-hammered sets, and the Wixarikas Collection, which features beadwork by the indigenous Huichol community of the Sierra Madres. There are chic copitas for sipping mezcal and a dashing ice scooping set too.
Tepotztli grew out of Cantina Experimental, a “self-sufficient cocktail bar” started in 2013 in the cloud forest near San Sebastián del Oeste in Jalisco, Mexico. The bar sourced tools by local artisans like the Parra family in Michoacan, who have been working copper for generations. Last year, Cantina founder Martin Kovar and his partner, Luis Armando Curaqui, decided to launch a side business to share the work of artists in their community in Southwest Mexico. The operation is modest (until recently they only took orders via email and Instagram DM), and the hand-crafted, made-to-order pieces can take weeks to create. Pieces in the Wixarikas Collection are especially time consuming, requiring up to a week of work on just the colorful, detailed bead patterns.
Production is based upon thousand-year-old, pre-Hispanic traditions of copper working from the Purépecha people. A metal worker begins with raw material, usually recycled copper, and shapes it on a lathe, washes it, grinds out imperfections, and hammers it. The piece is then tested for functionality to make sure it’s both cute and useful. Then it’s on to an artist for hand-painting or engraving. Every jigger and strainer and bar spoon passes through the hands of several artists, all compensated for their efforts before the company ever turns a profit, which may help account for the high price tag.
Maybe it’s desperation at facing down a long, harrowing winter, but I’m drawn to the sheer vitality of the Tepotztli pieces. Many of the designs — like a set painted with Rousseau-like flowers, a whimsical iguana set, an epic engraved lion design, and a bar spoon carved like a leaf — get inspiration from nature, bringing flowers and animals and lush foliage to a drab, utilitarian bar. The artists also imbue their pieces with their own styles, adding dashes of personality, spontaneity, and joy. The vibrancy seems fitting for tools used to create cocktails, which in my house usually err on the side of citrusy and fruity and peppy.
I’m not at a point in my life where I can drop a few hundred bucks on my bar. But in the spirit of the holidays, I might have to start with a little gift to myself: a ridiculously nice jigger seems about right.
Three years ago, Iman Haggag was a housewife with two kids and a seemingly far-flung dream
https://vegas.eater.com/2020/12/28/21594489/how-iman-haggag-transformed-egyptian-restaurant-pots-vegetarian-mainstay
Mitshel Ibrahim and the staff at Ombra in Hackney have spent the year responding not just to government mandates, but the needs of its customers in real time through corona-time
https://london.eater.com/21371782/coronavirus-uk-london-restaurant-ombra-mitshel-ibrahim-pandemic-success
Houston-based Southern Smoke Foundation says not enough industry members have applied for grants
https://chicago.eater.com/2020/12/29/22204442/southern-smoke-foundation-chicago-relief-fund-restaurants-covid-19-how-to-help
Much of 2020’s best food writing is in novels, comic books, and middle-grade fiction
https://sf.eater.com/2020/12/29/22193918/best-food-books-fiction-2020
Raw cacao, local coffee, and fresh sugar cane juice star in a rum-based riff on the Old Fashioned
Perched above San José’s buzzing cultural center, Distrito Carmen, a softly lit cocktail bar hides amid a forest of potted plants from the not-so-far-off wilds. Called Selvática — meaning jungle — the acclaimed nightlife destination is the ideal setting for the inspired creations of visiting bartender Liz Furlong, who has made a career out of what she calls “jungle bartending, using what we can find in the jungle, or neotropical regions, to create delicious cocktails without importing ingredients.” (Learn more about Costa Rica’s jungle-to-table scene on Eater’s Guide to the World, now streaming on Hulu.)
Furlong — who has a bar of her own, Bebedero — has created a Costa Rican Old Fashioned that swaps the whisky for rum, of course, and blends freshly squeezed local sugar cane juice, Costa Rican coffee, and local raw cacao for a funky, vegetal expression that channels Costa Rica’s unparalleled biodiversity with spectacular views of the city. Your at-home version will surely capture the mood.
Serves 1
Ingredients:
2 ounces rum, preferably Ron Centenario 12 Year or another aged Central American rum
3/4 ounce sugar cane juice, fresh pressed or store bought
1/4 ounce cacao coffee (see recipe below)
Orange peel garnish
1 orange slice (optional)
Ice for mixing
Tools:
King cube ice tray
Strainer
Pour-over-style coffee maker, V60 or other
Rocks glass
Stirring glass
Stirrer
Preparation:
Step 1: Combine the sugar cane juice, cacao coffee, and rum in a cocktail stirring glass with ice and stir until the mixture is chilled.
Step 2: Using a strainer, pour the mixture into a rocks glass filled with a square ice cube (or standard ice).
Step 3: Twist the orange peel over the cocktail, then use it to garnish the glass alongside an optional orange slice.
Makes 1 cup
Ingredients:
Unsweetened cacao bean, lightly toasted, or dash of organic cacao powder*
1 ounce coffee, ground, preferably Costa Rican
1 cup water, bottled
Place a coffee filter into any pour-over-style coffee maker. Grate a small dash of the toasted cacao bean into the coffee filter, then add the ground coffee and gently stir to combine. Boil water and pour over the coffee-cacao mixture according to device instructions. Set the coffee aside to cool to room temperature, about 45 minutes.
*You can find raw cacao powder online at most health food stores
Correction: December 29, 2020, 12:15 p.m.: This article and its headline were changed to reflect that Liz Furlong does not work at Selvática.
Raw cacao, local coffee, and fresh sugar cane juice star in a rum-based riff on the Old Fashioned
Perched above San José’s buzzing cultural center, Distrito Carmen, a softly lit cocktail bar hides amid a forest of potted plants from the not-so-far-off wilds. Called Selvática — meaning jungle — the acclaimed nightlife destination more than lives up to its name thanks to the inspired creations of bartender Liz Furlong, who has made a career out of what she calls “jungle bartending, using what we can find in the jungle, or neotropical regions, to create delicious cocktails without importing ingredients.” (Learn more about Costa Rica’s jungle-to-table scene on Eater’s Guide to the World, now streaming on Hulu.)
Furlong’s Costa Rican Old Fashioned swaps the whisky for rum, of course, and blends freshly squeezed local sugar cane juice, Costa Rican coffee, and local raw cacao for a funky, vegetal expression that channels Costa Rica’s unparalleled biodiversity with spectacular views of the city. Your at-home version will surely capture the mood.
Serves 1
Ingredients:
2 ounces rum, preferably Ron Centenario 12 Year or another aged Central American rum
3/4 ounce sugar cane juice, fresh pressed or store bought
1/4 ounce cacao coffee (see recipe below)
Orange peel garnish
1 orange slice (optional)
Ice for mixing
Tools:
King cube ice tray
Strainer
Pour-over-style coffee maker, V60 or other
Rocks glass
Stirring glass
Stirrer
Preparation:
Step 1: Combine the sugar cane juice, cacao coffee, and rum in a cocktail stirring glass with ice and stir until the mixture is chilled.
Step 2: Using a strainer, pour the mixture into a rocks glass filled with a square ice cube (or standard ice).
Step 3: Twist the orange peel over the cocktail, then use it to garnish the glass alongside an optional orange slice.
Makes 1 cup
Ingredients:
Unsweetened cacao bean, lightly toasted, or dash of organic cacao powder*
1 ounce coffee, ground, preferably Costa Rican
1 cup water, bottled
Place a coffee filter into any pour-over-style coffee maker. Grate a small dash of the toasted cacao bean into the coffee filter, then add the ground coffee and gently stir to combine. Boil water and pour over the coffee-cacao mixture according to device instructions. Set the coffee aside to cool to room temperature, about 45 minutes.
*You can find raw cacao powder online at most health food stores
Champagne and fast food are the perfect pairing to send off 2020
This post originally appeared in the December 28, 2020 edition of The Move, a place for Eater’s editors to reveal their recommendations and pro dining tips — sometimes thoughtful, sometimes weird, but always someone’s go-to move. Subscribe now.
This year, as I have for many years, I will be having fast food and Champagne on New Year’s Eve. A Shake Shack just opened in my neighborhood, so maybe I’ll get that… but then again, 2018’s Panda Express hit the right note, and I’d be very open to a repeat performance. I don’t know what fast-food options you have in your area, but chances are you’ve got a few. And I highly recommend joining in on my little tradition Thursday night.
In the Before Times, my argument was simple. Restaurants tend to be crowded on New Year’s Eve, and anyway, those special menus are generally overpriced. Ticketed parties are never as fun as they promise. So that gets us home, but, after the work of the holidays, I’m certainly not up for cooking (and cleaning up after) another big meal. Fast-food takeout, on the other hand, is cheap, doesn’t require any advance planning, and is enough outside the rhythm of my typical dinner routine that it still feels like I’m marking the occasion — especially once I add the requisite bubbly.
Champagne — or really any dry-ish, sparkling white wine you want — pairs so, so well with fried food. Like soda, the bubbles cut through the fat that’s inherent in a fast-food meal. I find it works especially well with fast-food fried chicken, whether from a Popeyes combo box, a McDonald’s nugget order, or a clamshell with Panda Express orange chicken. To really lean into the high-low energy I cultivate on New Year’s, I do like to make sure the wine itself is a good bottle. It could be a fizzy pét-nat or crémant, but on New Year’s Eve I prefer sticking to the classics: Veuve Clicquot, or, if I’ve got more money to spend, Perrier-Jouët or Dom Pérignon.
Fast food and Champagne has the same vibe as leaving a crowded party to get something to eat with your real friends. You wouldn’t turn to fancy dinner in that situation, or any place that would make you wait. Even though I’ve personally never snuck wine into a fast-food restaurant, Sideways style, the meal always conjures memories of after-the-afterparty moments from younger, wilder days. Now, I skip the party entirely and stick with the aftermath.
This year, of course, the party isn’t even an option. But at home, with whoever we have in our household or pod, we can still enjoy the best part of the big New Year’s party — the part when it’s over. And isn’t that a fitting end to 2020, anyway?
P.S. In the event you don’t polish off the whole bottle in one evening, some tools to keep that bottle of bubbly sparkling for days.
Being educated noodle consumers, we knew that there was, more generally, a pasta shortage due to the pandemic, but we were still able to find spaghetti and penne and orecchiette — shapes which, again, insult me even in concept. The missing bucatini felt different. It was specific. Frightening. Why bucatini? Why now?
https://www.grubstreet.com/2020/12/2020-bucatini-shortage-investigation.html
Restaurateurs assess the physical damage and widespread internet outages, while also helping one another pick up the pieces from the Christmas morning explosion
https://nashville.eater.com/2020/12/28/22201438/nashville-downtown-bombing-second-avenue-explosion-restaurants-bars-closed
With the right equipment, you can age your own cocktails at home
One of the biggest problems I have when it comes to making cocktails is, uhh, making them. Cocktails, even simple ones, are a pain in the ass; they require things like multiple ingredients, garnishes, measuring implements, and of course when pouring whiskey or lime juice out of whatever bottle you inevitably break the meniscus curve on the jigger and wind up with a very sticky kitchen counter. One of the main things I miss about bars is just the ability to pay someone else to make that mess for me. If I’m drinking at home, I’d prefer to stick to the simplicity of wine.
But I do love a good cocktail, and aside from getting them to-go from my favorite local bars, I’ve had to figure out how to make them on my own. And I’ve found the best bet for both ease and giving my future, lazy self a gift, is aging them. It’s all the ease of punch, without having to drink a whole bowl at once and make yourself very ill.
Things like barrel-aged cocktails have been a lure at cocktail bars for a while, with most people tracing their popularity back to Portland’s Clyde Common. But aging cocktails, no matter the vessel, has been a tradition for hundreds of years. One of the most traditionally aged cocktails is also seasonally appropriate: eggnog. Nicholas Bennett, beverage director at NYC bar Porchlight, says he always has a batch of aged eggnog in his fridge, and has experimented with aging the drink for up to three years (you can learn more about that in this video he made about it, complete with puppets). “What ends up happening is the eggs, all the proteins and protein strands in the eggs kind of break down in the alcohol, so you get this much more enjoyable, softer, just easy to drink flavor,” he says.
Bennett notes that scientists agree aged eggnog is safe, even safer than eggnog made with fresh eggs. But even if nog isn’t your thing, Bennett says nearly any cocktail can be aged. You just need the right equipment. Cocktails like eggnog or which have ingredients like sugar or citrus require a sterile, airtight glass or plastic container, and need to be stored in a fridge. But for aging something like a Manhattan, a Martini, or another high-proof cocktail, you’ll want a wooden barrel, which can be found at plenty of bar supply stores, and can just leave on your counter or bar. “You’ll get to see an interaction between the spirits and the liquid and the wood and the sugars and flavor from the wood over a very short amount of time,” says Bennett.
Some of the most popular barrel-aged cocktails have been high-proof, because the sugars in the wood help mellow some of the bitterness and bite a cup full of liquor can deliver. But aging isn’t just for things like Negronis. Sother Teague of Amor y Amargo has long experimented with aged sours, and says that sherry-based cocktails like an Adonis or a Bamboo might age well too. However, Bennett says that whatever you’re making, this isn’t the place to use up that cheap rum you don’t really like sitting at the back of your bar. “If I was going to age some whiskey that I genuinely don’t enjoy drinking right at the beginning, I’m probably not going to really enjoy it quite as much,” he says. If aging enhances the natural flavors of liquor, you probably have to enjoy those natural flavors first.
Part of the joy of aging cocktails is tasting the change over time. You can make yourself a Manhattan the night you put a batch in the barrel, and try it three weeks later, and then again in six weeks, to see how you like it. It’s a fun little project for all those months the sun decides to go away in the middle of the workday! But the biggest joy is giving yourself a gift for the future. Today I may have energy, but because of the behavior of the aforementioned sun, it is likely that in the coming weeks I will not. At that time, I will be glad that, a few days ago, I dumped a bunch of whiskey, vermouth and bitters into a barrel and that it’s ready to drink whenever I want. And that it might be better than anything I’d make fresh.
Everyone was obsessed with Valentina Passalacqua’s natural wines. Until they weren’t.
https://www.thecut.com/2020/12/the-spectacular-rise-and-fall-of-calcarius.html
In the market for Champagne for whatever reason? Start with a bottle from one of these Champagne houses.
I love Champagne — the way it smells, tastes, and bubbles up while I’m enjoying a nice full glass. As we stride toward the time of year (and what a year) when Americans consume the most Champagne, there are decisions to be made, should we all be so lucky: namely, which bottle to pick?
Champagne’s legacy of luxury and connection to upper-class marketing has created a worldwide industry distributing 300 million bottles a year. It’s also resulted in a good deal of confusion and opacity when it comes to choosing what to drink. The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated this reality, doing away with public tastings, wine bar shindigs, and the dreaded (but occasionally fruitful) inter-office exchange. Now, choosing what to accompany a Christmas dinner at home or a 2020 New Year’s Eve sendoff (also at home) can feel like a shot in the dark. My suggestion for ease of enjoyment? Start with a smart bottle from one of the great Champagne houses.
For centuries, power and money in the Champagne region have flowed through the big Champagne houses (sometimes called Grande Marques), many of which are household names: Veuve, Dom, Roederer’s rap-famous “Cristal” bottling, and so on. French luxury multinational LVMH typifies a modern take on this, formed in the ’80s upon the merger of iconic French fashion label Louis Vuitton with Champagne house Moet & Chandon, which in the 1970s acquired the cognac producer Hennessey.
But the wines produced by these houses have been snubbed over the last decade by a certain kind of drinker, typically younger, relatively new to wine, and predisposed to drinking natural wines first and foremost. I’ve been guilty of this very thing, having gravitated far more toward so-called “grower Champagnes,” humbler bottlings (in production scale, not necessarily price) in which the wines are produced by the estate that grows the grapes. By contrast, the bigger Champagne houses might source the fruit for the wines from dozens, or even hundreds of individual growers across the Champagne region, blending them together under the careful guidance of a chef de cave, a term that denotes the head winemaker and cellarmaster in charge of the whole operation.
Indie and natty they aren’t, but for pure drinking pleasure I’m convinced many house Champagnes are due for a reappraisal by anyone who likes a good glass of something nice — after all, marketing isn’t the only reason these wines are enjoyed by millions. For a drinker easing themselves into the decision-making process, it’s helpful to start by focusing on a handful of firms and their entry-level offerings, typically described as “non-vintage” (NV), meaning that they’re made from grapes across multiple years of harvest (sometimes also denoted as “reserve,” depending on the house). These house Champagnes represent a broad range of prices, each one readily available in the U.S. market.
Suffice it to say that Champagne is not for everyone this year; such is the weight of the world we inhabit. At the same time, I think there is an understandable and very human impulse behind the desire to find comfort and celebration in the relative safety of a sturdy bottle. If you’ve got the means and bandwidth to think about enjoying a bottle of Champagne this holiday season, there’s ample cause to say cheers. Here’s to a little light in the darkness.
It’s not possible to really engage with the world of Champagne houses without confronting the phenomenon of Yellow Label Veuve. Thanks to its near-total market saturation, Veuve overtook Moet in 2013 as the most widely consumed Champagne in North America. LVMH sells 1.5 million cases of Veuve each year across the brand’s various bottlings, and a cool 400,000 of these are sold to the United States, a considerable majority of which is Yellow Label. It is a global product, like Coca-Cola or Guinness beer.
There’s a good reason for that. This wine is made to a precise formula, unvarying from year to year and bottled with the inclusion of Veuve’s vast collection of reserve wines, blended into Yellow Label to ensure consistency. Yellow Label gets 10 grams of dosage, and is composed of grapes from more than 60 parcels across Champagne.
For the price, there may be more interesting wines on the market, but if your heart is set on Veuve, or it’s one of the few Champagnes available where you live, I certainly understand (especially if you’ve been pulled in by one of Veuve’s flashy seasonal boxes). There is no other wine that tastes quite like it. And about that price: Yellow Label Veuve can run close to $60 or as low as $39, depending on where and when you make your purchase. I recommend checking different shops (including grocery and big-box retail) in your area for pricing. It’s the same stuff in the bottle, no matter where you buy it.
“Budget” Champagnes are often kind of disappointing, but for the price (as low as $33 at some retailers), the entry-level wines of André Clouet punch above their bracket. Clouet’s Brut Grand Reserve is 100 percent pinot noir sourced from vineyards surrounding the famed Champagne villages of Bouzy and Ambonnay. It receives just six grams of dosage, which refers to the sugar added into Champagne at bottling to balance acidity and promote longevity.
In the glass, you’ll taste a drying, green plum malic acidity and unmistakable Champagne crispness. There’s red fruit here, as well as strawberry and Anjou pear, which makes sense — you are drinking Champagne made entirely from red grapes, after all. A portion of the wines in this blend spend time in Sauternes barrels, a style of sweet white wine from Bordeaux, which imparts pleasant thoughts of honey and pie crust. If Christmas gatherings were a thing this year, it would make a fine party favor.
Many Champagne houses have cred that goes back 100 or even 200 years, and then there is Gosset, in business since 1584. Gosset is located in the village of Ay, and was family owned for more than 400 years until being sold in the early ’90s to Renaud Cointreau, whose portfolio of French products includes cognacs, liqueurs, and ratafia.
This is a really fine Champagne for the price, offering an approachable, aperitif-style drinking experience — think Campari and jasmine tea — balanced with crisp freshness and a whiff of chimney smoke. Traditionally Gosset was known for not allowing any malolactic fermentation in the winemaking process, but this began to change around a decade ago, specifically for the Excellence bottling, the house’s entry-level cuvee. This promotes a softer, rounder experience, and results in a more accessible and easy-drinking wine. Around 30,000 cases are made each year, typically consisting of three parts pinot noir to two parts chardonnay, with a dash of meunier thrown in for weight, although this ratio changes between releases.
There is not a tremendous amount of hype or buzz around Gosset. Though owned by a conglomerate, Gosset’s marketing footprint and bottle design are decidedly measured — understated, even. Think of that no-nonsense approach as a virtue, especially when backed up by a product of such high quality. More than perhaps any other wine in Champagne, Gosset is highly versatile and cruises effortlessly across whatever activities you have planned for the holiday season, particularly if they include television, Thai food, and a second glass.
I adore the house Pol Roger, a wine long synonymous with England thanks to a history of exporting wines in a brut style, with minimum dosage, favored by U.K. drinkers. The house is still family owned, now in its fifth generation of production, and proudly sports its association with Sir Winston Churchill, who was an eager ambassador for the brand and even named one of his racehorses after it.
I think the entry level Pol Roger, known as “Reserve,” is one of the most elegant and refined NV Champagnes you can buy at any price. Pol Roger, like Roederer, straddles the line between grower and house, with more than half of the wines it makes coming from the firm’s own 93 hectares of vineyards. Every bottle is riddled by hand (“riddling” is the process of carefully turning a bottle of Champagne to collect sediment in the neck), and the wine is made of equal parts pinot noir, pinot meunier, and chardonnay, undergoing malocatic fermentation and fermented entirely in stainless steel — there are no barrels at Pol Roger. A quarter of the bottling is made from reserve wines, held back from proceeding vintages, and each bottle ages a full four years on the lees before release.
Understatement and finesse are the watchwords here, owing to Pol Roger’s unusually long respite in the house cellar before public release. Both ripe and fresh, this wine balances deep red fruits with ginger zip and buttered toast. If I could only drink one house Champagne for the rest of my life, this would be it. Pair with binge-watching the latest season of The Crown, or, if that’s already exhausted, The Great British Baking Show.
You might almost forget this was coming from a Champagne house; Jacquesson gives off big grower Champagne vibes, and feels more like the work of focused individuals — the Chiquet brothers, who have overseen the house since the 1980s — than some vast megacorp. Among wine writers, somms, and bottle shop owners, Jacquesson has a certain kind of wine geek cachet, for both the annual numbered releases and the house’s limited-edition single-vineyard bottlings (lieu-dit), which are far more expensive.
For the year 2000 vintage, Jacquesson retired its NV “Perfection Brut” bottling in favor of an ever-changing numbered cuvee based on individual vintage years. The first release was 728; we are now up to 742, a wine built from the 2014 vintage made up of roughly 60 percent pinot noir and 40 percent chardonnay, receiving a scant 1.5 grams per liter of dosage.
At $70, give or take, the wine had better be awesome, and Jacquesson 742 definitely is. There’s a ton of richness in this wine, a kind of marzipan praline thing that reminds me of a Manhattan candied-street-nut vendor, but offset by a big splash of herbal tea: chamomile, dried carrot, and especially mint tea, like how they serve it at cafes in Europe, full up to the brim of the mug with hot water.
If you’re giving Champagne as a gift this year, 742 would make an especially fine one. This wine can happily be drunk immediately, but it can also hang out for the next special occasion, or be forgotten by the recipient over the next several years — it’s built to age and will only grow more complex and complete with time.
There is an undeniable mystique around Krug, one of the best-known wine labels on the planet, Champagne or otherwise. Though the house does offer a range of single-vineyard and single-year vintage wines, it is the non-vintage Grande Cuvee for which it is rightly famous. Make no mistake: This is not an entry-level wine, with prices starting at around $160, or $78 for the half-bottle. Each modern Krug comes marked with a Krug ID on the back of the label, which allows you to quickly look up what you’re drinking and learn more about its composition. I recently tried a bottle from the 168th edition of Krug Grand Reserve, “a blend of over 120 individual wines from more than 10 different years,” per Krug ID. This particular release is a blend of dominant pinot noir (53 percent), alongside chardonnay (35 percent) and pinot meunier (13 percent).
In the glass, this wine is deeply structured and muscular, like drinking really good white Burgundy or classy California chardonnay. Wine lovers will go on and on about Krug’s finesse, balance, depth, piquant measured sweetness, and long finish. More casual drinkers might be just as happy with a bottle half the price. For what it’s worth, I think Krug is better than Dom, better than Cristal even (the top-shelf Roederer bottling), and second only to the unscalable heights of Salon for the finest house Champagne in the world. There is no other wine that’s like it. I’m a Krug truther, especially if you’re buying.
Jordan Michelman is a 2020 James Beard Award winner for journalism, and a 2020 Louis Roederer International Wine Writers’ Awards shortlist in the Emerging Wine Writer category.
Hotel restaurants like Maggie Oakes and Verses Bistro are offering in-room dining, without an overnight stay
https://montreal.eater.com/2020/12/23/22197025/lockdown-private-hotel-rooms-restaurant-bubbles-maggie-oaks-verses-bistro
Kristina Glinoga is trying reimagine butchery on her own terms
https://seattle.eater.com/2020/12/23/22196100/seattle-butcher-kristina-glinoga-butchery-101-online-classes
Owner Caroline Cho aimed to capture the essence of Korea’s tented street pubs, called pojangmacha, or pocha, but the pandemic has temporarily shuttered this quintessential spot
https://la.eater.com/2020/12/23/22196441/dan-sung-sa-koreatown-los-angeles
Nothing seemed sadder than leftover Thanksgiving turkey languishing in the freezer, so I decided to eat turkey every single day until it ran out. It ended up being a three-week affair.
This Thanksgiving, the vast majority of food writers were excited about one thing: skipping the turkey. A small gift of this shitty year was the chance to devote time and energy to cooking a duck or leg of lamb or beef Wellington or bo ssam — or anything, really, but a fussy, large, bland bird. Or, burned out on endless pandemic home cooking, one could say fuck it and order a pizza.
Meanwhile, I ordered a 17-pound heritage turkey for two people: my girlfriend and me. Coming up with a different creative cooking project sounded tiring, and honestly, I like turkey. I enjoy how mild and bland and slightly sweetish it is, and that blandness makes turkey a perfect leftover food. In fact, every component of my ideal Thanksgiving dinner tastes better the next day, or honestly, for the next week. No other holiday menu is as prescribed or ossified as traditional American Thanksgiving, and no holiday is as dedicated to overabundant casseroles. The only way to enjoy the meal’s strictures and abundance, in my opinion, is to treat it like a giant, rare beast, felled but once a year to be feasted upon with absolutely nothing left to waste.
But the day after I ordered this large, expensive turkey, I started thinking it through. The rule of thumb was, what? A pound per person? So we were getting a turkey for… 17 people? Did I actually like turkey that much?
My personal pandemic cooking fatigue manifests as decision fatigue, and honestly, it sounded like a relief to spend one intense day cooking and then ease into a long stretch when I would know what I was making: something with turkey. In late November and early December, turkey tastes best and most correct, when the failing sunlight and increasing chill makes for the most satisfying eating of pot pies, noodle soups, and other ideal leftover turkey conveyances. Nothing seemed sadder than losing pounds and pounds of turkey in the back of the freezer, so I decided we would eat turkey every day until it ran out. It ended up being a three-week affair.
Giant turkeys involve so many logistics. I knew this, and knew I would likely regret trying anything much more ambitious than making said giant turkey, but after hearing Samin Nosrat discuss her buttermilk turkey recipe on her podcast, Home Cooking, I had to try it. Even after I saw the recipe had only been tested for a bird of up to 14 pounds, I was not deterred — I left hipster grocer Cookbook with an alarming amount of extremely heritage buttermilk to make sure I had enough. Our bird arrived frozen on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, which I hadn’t counted on. On Tuesday, while it was still partially frozen, I gruesomely spatchcocked it with a pair of kitchen shears whose handles were falling apart. Next, the turkey carcass poked tiny holes in the plastic brining bag, spilling gross turkey-buttermilk juice all over the floor. I switched to brining it in a roasting pan, but our tilty broken fridge shelf made more gross juice spill, so then we cleaned half the fridge. These experiences spurred a great deal of Turkey Regret.
But then we cooked the actual turkey, and the skin came out so utterly perfectly golden and crisp and packed with flavor that we couldn’t stop sneaking bites of it while carving. For the first turkey meal, we ate it hot with a few sides (stuffing, candied sweet potatoes, green beans, my grandmother’s coleslaw my mom taught me how to make over Zoom) and a ridiculously thick gravy I cooked for too long because I detest thin gravy. We ate maybe two to three slices of turkey breast each, which, while not as flavorful as the skin, was pleasantly seasoned and only a tiny bit dry.
After dinner, I messily broke down the turkey (no guests = no stressful fancy carving), storing the legs and wings whole and shredding the remaining white meat and dark meat into separate piles. Some of the breast I sliced thin for sandwiches, too. All of this I packed into a gigantic tupperware container, and then stacked the leftover skin on top. The carcass I put into an equally giant plastic bag, and left it a bit meatier than I would have otherwise, because we had turkey to burn and a meaty carcass makes excellent stock.
In terms of how much time goes into making its components, no sandwich requires more actual work than a Thanksgiving sandwich, but because it is a vehicle for leftovers rather than the main event, making one always feels like a sneaky triumph. But every one I’ve made disappoints me slightly — I still haven’t cracked my personal Thanksgiving sandwich code. The first Thanksgiving sandwich of 2020 I built on milk bread, with sliced turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, coleslaw, mayonnaise, cold gravy, and cranberry sauce. All I really tasted was sweet potatoes, which undermined the point of the Thanksgiving sandwich: it’s meant to be a balanced bite of Thanksgiving-ness — some savoriness, some herbiness, some sweetness — while not tasting exactly like Thanksgiving dinner. I remain convinced the next one I make will be perfect.
Dinner was a slop pile of leftovers; I believe turkey was in there somewhere. This tasted exactly like Thanksgiving dinner, because it was, but at least it didn’t only taste of sweet potatoes.
After failing to relax on Friday, Saturday we declared a Day of Nothing and took to the couch, leaving it only to eat Thanksgiving sandwiches or Thanksgiving slop piles or maybe just pie, while watching a Mackenzie Davis double feature of Happiest Season and Terminator: Dark Fate. I didn’t totally manage to do nothing, though, because I threw the turkey carcass in the stock pot to simmer overnight on the stove, after conferring about how this probably wouldn’t kill us in a fire. For the first time in six days, there was no giant turkey carcass taking up space in the fridge, and I felt a mix of triumph and mild worry, as if the space opening up might mean I’d have to fill it with another big bird and start all over again.
I woke up at 4 a.m. to the entire house smelling of turkey stock, and I woke up starving. For breakfast, despite the fact that I’d eaten pie for dinner the night before because I was tired of Thanksgiving sandwiches and/or slop, I made the questionable move of using Thanksgiving leftovers, making a hash with sweet potatoes and turkey skin, and spooning some of the extremely thick gravy next to the egg. Lunch was a lazier pile of leftovers, and dinner was an open-face, gravy-heavy hot turkey sandwich, with some mashed potatoes I made that day, because I was sad we hadn’t made mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving.
I could eat a hot turkey sandwich over mashed potatoes and fluffy white bread for several meals in a row and still want more. Eating that sandwich for dinner reinvigorated my faith in the turkey plan, and instilled a sense of Turkey Triumph. I’m pretty sure this is my actual ideal Thanksgiving sandwich: It focuses on the two things you worked hardest for — turkey and gravy — and does away with all the adorning sides and their tendency to cloy. There’s a purity to the blandness of the hot gravy sandwich that somehow allows them to transcend, in part because they’re a little old fashioned and therefore novel, one of those foods difficult to find made from scratch in restaurants. If your childhood palate was heavily shaped by precision-engineered processed food, simpler, blander midcentury classics are almost a relief.
By the end of the weekend, the turkey pile had dwindled surprisingly far below the lip of the Tupperware, but the whole container still had serious heft.
Lunch was a pared-down Thanksgiving sandwich — turkey, coleslaw, cranberry sauce, mayo — scarfed in a parking lot overlooking the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, before I went on a hike. It was delicious in that messy way only eating in or near your car is; some of the coleslaw fell out onto the asphalt. Reducing the Thanksgiving sandwich components down to turkey and two acidic components made for a more successful sandwich, but I wasn’t sure it had enough Thanksgiving going on to truly count.
For dinner, I made the New York Times recipe for a Thanksgiving leftover enchilada pie, which the headnote says was developed for a children’s section of the newspaper, which made me feel a little self conscious but only a little. Making the recipe drew down some of my March food hoarding — the tortillas were the last of a huge freezer stash, from a packet given to me by a local chef when he was shutting down his restaurant those first few uncertain weeks, and the can of red enchilada sauce I’d bought from my corner store out of some misplaced fear that a supply chain breakdown would result in a long enchilada shortage.
Into the enchilada pie, I piled cooked cranberry beans, sweet potatoes, and lots of shredded turkey. It tasted mostly like sweet potatoes, again. But I had a breakthrough: I realized the thing I was mostly sick of was sweet potatoes, even though that seemed insane because sweet potatoes are the perfect food.
I was ready to move on, but I wanted to keep drawing down the turkey. For dinner, all of the beans that didn’t make it into the enchilada went into a recipe from the latest edition of the Rancho Gordo bean club newsletter, a bean soup that involves pureeing beans with aromatics, cooking arborio rice in the resulting thick thick stock, and then piling some sauteed greens on top. Maybe this is where I confess that I didn’t put much thought into how we would get through all this turkey, because I considered it as a big chicken, and about 30 percent of what I know about cooking involves using up leftover chicken and its stock. In this case, I dumped some turkey stock into the soup, and shredded up turkey meat to go in at the end, which I’m not sure improved the soup, but did use up some turkey.
The problem with the big chicken method is that turkey does have a more distinctive taste than chicken — it’s a bit richer and sweeter — and even when I make a chicken, I don’t eat the chicken every day for weeks. I guess what I’m saying is I would have been happier with a non-turkey bean soup. The rest of the turkey and the stock (there was a lot!) went into the freezer. I portioned the turkey into quarter-pound bags of shredded up meat, and the stock into two cup baggies. Is this a little late to be freezing both? I don’t know. I lived to write this piece!
Maybe this is where I confess that we’ve spent a great deal of this pandemic living off of literally the same meals for days, and often those meals are “a pile of beans over toast,” not a specific recipe. Having two real-deal leftover meals — the turkey enchilada pie and the bean soup — in the fridge Wednesday felt like a massive luxury. We had enchilada pie for lunch and the soup for dinner.
For lunch, my girlfriend and I split the last of the bean soup and pie leftovers. For dinner, I made a variation of a lazy udon soup I’ve been making off and on throughout the pandemic. This one was especially lazy: just some plumped-up dried shiitakes and a daikon radish from my farm box, simmered in turkey stock until tender, and frozen udon noodles dumped in at the end. I added a little bit of miso, too. It was fine? But a satisfying kind of fine, where you eat knowing how many different stockpiled ingredients, acquired months apart, you turned into dinner.
After about a week out from Thanksgiving, the turkey consumption dropped down to once a day, whereas the first week we had something turkey-derived for lunch and dinner. I honestly can’t believe it took that long. Lunch was leftover perfectly fine turkey udon soup. For dinner we ordered a bunch of Thai food from one of the best Thai restaurants in Los Angeles, Luv2Eat. The massaman curry came with a whole chicken drumstick, and the dish’s layers of heat and spice cleared my palate after (way) too many days of mild Thanksgiving sweetness.
One thing I’ve gotten into making from time to time lately is gravy, so for lunch I made up a new batch of gravy (if you have stock, it’s not that annoying or hard), and heated up some of the frozen turkey in it. Then, I dumped it over some pieces of toast: hot turkey sandwich! If you like mush enough to enjoy different textures of mush, there is no better pleasure than gravy and shreds of meat melting into a thick slice of white bread, softening it some places while leaving the edges firm enough to sop up the rest of the gravy after the heart of the sandwich is gone. It’s especially good if the bread is a little sweet and the gravy a little too salty, so your senses keep getting mildly overwhelmed in different ways, like going in and out of the cooler saunas in a Korean spa.
Another hot turkey sandwich? Another hot turkey sandwich. I ate this one for dinner, with a knife and fork, hunched over our coffee table while watching The Crown.
So, the reason I “got into” making gravy was I had to follow a strict soft food diet for a couple months this summer after scorching my esophagus. How did I do this? By tasting, and then swallowing, a lava-hot spoonful of bechamel for a pot pie filling. Please do not do any of these things.
Now my food tube is largely healed (alcohol and coffee are still kind of tough!), I decided it was time to face my fears and make another bechamel-involving casserole. Bechamel makes so many things creamy and good; I couldn’t fear it forever.
I went with Molly Yeh’s tater tot chicken pot hotdish, because I love a tot and also I find Yeh’s recipes charming and reliable. I cut the amount of turkey, added in some butternut squash from the farm box (maybe all of my cooking decisions come down to using things up?), and made my girlfriend, who does not cook in any way but is much tidier than me, line up all the tater tots. This dish was delicious, honestly one of my favorite things I’ve made recently. What really made it was the thyme; it was rich and herbal without tasting like Thanksgiving or Christmas, but of the cozycore time in between. The butternut pushed things a little sweet for the tots, though — it would have tasted even better with puff pastry on top.
My favorite kitchen appliance, which I use twice a day sometimes, is my rice cooker. When my mom gave me the rice cooker, she also gave me The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook, which I use often to make everything from polenta to rice pudding. I tried out the book’s recipe for turkey jook, a rice porridge made with turkey stock, which I’d never made before but had eyed over the years. You add chopped carrot and cabbage to the rice and stock, and then cook it all up in the rice maker’s porridge setting. I topped it with shredded turkey and cilantro and scallion greens and sesame oil, and it turned out pretty nicely! I think next year, when I can face turkey again, I’d like to try a more traditional stovetop version, but this made for a warm and simple lunch.
Turkey jook leftovers for lunch and hotdish leftovers for dinner. No regrets.
In a mirror of last week, we split up the last of the jook and hotdish for lunch. Before writing this, I had no idea my weekly cooking routine was so routine. At times, I have suspected that if I didn’t get a weekly farm box full of ingredients I didn’t choose, I might die of boredom in this pandemic. It does seem like without external input, I can easily eat the same thing over and over until I get sick of it; maybe it’s better to instead have to face down what I’m going to do with all these turnips this week.
This is where I hit my limit, or some kind of limit. I tried to have the last of the turkey jook for lunch, and it tasted… not good? I don’t think it had gone bad; I think I just couldn’t take turkey any more. Flavor fatigue is a surprisingly disturbing feeling. When something tastes exactly the same as it has for days or weeks, except no longer good, it feels like reality has gotten hollowed out a tiny bit, and that more could be coming. I realize food not tasting good is a symptom of depression, but it’s also the most apt metaphor for what all of depression feels like — everything is exactly the same, except now it sucks.
This weekend, we began our new seasonal cooking project: cookies. In between making six different kinds of cookies, I pulled the final dregs of the turkey and its stock out of the freezer, chopped up a bunch of carrots and a sweet potato I’d forgotten I had, and put it in a pot with some frozen homemade curry bricks. In April, when my pandemic despair was especially keen and hopeless, I threw myself into unusual kitchen projects, and none am I more grateful for than having made Sonoko Sakai’s curry bricks with her curry brick kit. All of the spices are so pungent and flavorful and perfectly balanced, and it results in so many easy and satisfying meals. We housed our curry over white rice before pulling more cookies out of the oven.
In the midst of the continued cookie madness, for lunch I microwaved the leftover turkey curry and poured it in a huge messy pile over a fluffy slice of milk bread. Curry over rice tastes correct, but curry dumped over bread was a perfect mix of familiar and slightly off. Remember what I said about hot turkey sandwiches? I actually want one right now.
For my final turkey meal, already past deadline on this turkey blog and 20 days after first cooking this turkey for Thanksgiving, I did the same exact thing for lunch I’d done the day before: dump curry over bread. I still enjoyed it, but I also had something akin to the feeling you have when you know after your next bite, you’ll be full: I was done. I look forward to eating turkey on Thanksgiving of 2021, but I do not need to see it beforehand — and despite the obvious utility of cooking a giant bird once instead of many smaller chickens, I want turkey to remain a seasonal food. Bringing it into April or July would undermine its specialness, and underline its blandness, reducing it to just another bird.
Finishing off the giant turkey took less time and work than I imagined — if anything, it made deciding what to eat easier, and there was no need to keep poaching chickens for a few weeks. But now, all I want is fish and beans, all of it topped with salsa verde or salsa or chili oil. Maybe a steak. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t considering getting a whole Christmas ham and spending a week or two living off its carcass.
City officials also asked restaurants to follow a 10:00 p.m. curfew as the city’s COVID-19 cases continue to surge
https://austin.eater.com/2020/12/23/22197290/austin-restaurant-bars-takeout-only-curfew-covid-19-stage-five-restrictions
An amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act could mean more tip pooling at restaurants, and could let employers off the hook for fair pay
The Department of Labor recently announced a final rule regarding tipped employee regulations, which could require servers to share tips with back of the house employees, and which loosens restrictions on the kind of work that can be performed by tipped workers in restaurants. It says that this will lead to greater freedom for workers and employers, and could lead to higher wages. But some advocates say could keep employers from paying fairly.
The new rule “removed the regulatory restrictions on an employer’s ability to require tip pooling when it does not take a tip credit and instead pays tipped employees the full minimum wage in direct wages,” allowing restaurants to implement tip pools that pay out to a wider group of non-tipped workers like cooks and dishwashers. “This final rule provides clarity and flexibility for employers and could increase pay for back-of-the house workers, like cooks and dishwashers, who have been excluded from participating in tip pools in the past,” Wage and Hour Administrator Cheryl Stanton said in a statement. It also prohibits managers from sharing in pooled tips. She argued this could reduce wage disparities by distributing tips more evenly.
However, the new rule accomplishes some of this flexibility by removing a previous “80/20” rule, which said tipped workers like servers had to spend 80 percent of their time performing tasks that earn tips. Any less and they’d have to be paid a full federal minimum wage, instead of a tipped minimum wage (as little as $2.13 an hour). Now, tipped workers can perform any amount of non-tipped work like cleaning or set-up and still make a tipped wage, as long as the employer applies tips to meet minimum wage laws.
Though the Department of Labor says this could raise take-home pay for many restaurant workers, especially back of the house workers, labor groups and activists aren’t so sure. The Economic Policy Institute says the new rule would take $700 million annually away from workers. “The new regulation from the Trump administration does away with [the 80/20] protection, replacing it with vague, much less protective language,” EPI said in a statement, arguing that the rule’s ambiguity will make it difficult to enforce, and likely inspire employers to shift work from non-tipped to tipped workers in order to save money. In a previous report, EPI estimated this rule could result in “243,000 jobs shifting from being non-tipped to being tipped.”
EPI also notes that COVID-19, as it does with most things, makes this rule even worse, “since non-tipped work now makes up a much greater share of work being done in establishments that employ tipped workers (for example, restaurants have shifted their services from dine-in to takeout).” The rule would mean those servers could still make sub-minimum tipped wages, even if they are more spending most of their time cleaning and packing take-out instead of waiting tables. And as has been established, the tips from take-out are not great.
The rule is set to go into effect in 60 days, though the Biden Administration could delay it, change it, or challenge it in court. Joe Biden has made implementing a $15 minimum wage, and eliminating a tipped minimum wage, part of his platform, which would eliminate the need for this rule at all by ensuring everyone earns a living wage without having to calculate and pool tips. Much simpler!
Plus, KFC’s new game console, and other news to start the day
Faced with the realities of gentrification, government intervention and regulation, aging vendor populations, and — this year — the coronavirus pandemic, major street food scenes across Asia are changing, journalist Clarissa Wei details in a new report for CNN.
In Taiwan, famous night markets like Taipei’s Shilin Night Market have suffered from a huge drop in foot traffic, thanks to an overreliance on international tourists who aren’t coming in the middle of a pandemic. But even before COVID-19, Wei reports, many of these tourist-attraction night markets were on the decline, with an increasing sense of homogeneity and an inability to adapt and evolve like more local-focused markets, such as the Ningxia Night Market, have.
What’s happening in Taipei’s night markets speaks to a larger struggle unfolding in other cities, from Tokyo to Bangkok: the tension between setting higher hygiene and construction standards, competing with global chains and cuisines, and preserving the “cultural importance of street food — all while containing its inherent chaos,” writes Wei.
One notable outlier is Singapore’s hawker centers, which have maintained cultural and culinary significance while being contained within a controlled space, complete with all the workings and regulations of restaurant kitchens.
But despite all these complications, along with a lack of continuity from older vendors to younger generations, there are also positive changes, whether that’s mobile payment innovations or attempting to institutionalize and teach the craft of street food. Wei concludes: “‘[W]hile street food may be transforming, it likely won’t go away anytime soon.”
Lorde updated her Onion Ring Rating Instagram for the first time in three years. She posted 4 new reviews pic.twitter.com/QH2ds0spB2
— Lorde Daily (@LordeDaily) December 21, 2020
• All AM Intel Coverage [E]
It doesn’t require many ingredients to get a muffin full of perfect nooks and crannies
On this episode of “Plateworthy,” chef Nyesha Arrington makes English muffins from scratch. While the ingredient list is pretty short, the techniques involved in order to achieve the main goal — a muffin with perfect pockets of nooks and crannies — requires some patience and finesse.
First, she blooms yeast in warm milk. Then she mixes it with AP flour, and kosher salt. “The dough should look kind of shaggy, you want this sort of shaggy style dough,” Arrington explains, “because that’s ultimately what will give us the best nooks and crannies.” She kneads the dough for eight to 10 minutes, pulling the dough away from her as she goes, which will help with, you guessed it, creating those pockets. She then lets the dough rest for 12 hours in the refrigerator.
After the dough has rested, she cuts it up into equal portions, folds the dough in on itself, and rolls it into a ball. She coats the outside with a mixture of semolina and cornmeal to add crunch and a non-stick coating, and allows the dough balls to proof once more. She then toasts them in a pan to get a crispy layer on the outside, and then finishes them in the oven. Once they’re done, she cuts them open to reveal the soft dough and the nooks and crannies she so desired, perfect for holding butter, jam, or in this case gribiche sauce for the ultimate breakfast sandwich. See the recipe below.
Yields 8 English muffins
Dough Mix
2 ½ cups AP flour
1/2 cup semolina flour
2 tbsp corn meal
¼ tsp instant yeast
¼ tsp salt
⅔ cup whole milk
½ cup water
1 tbsp melted butter
Pan spray
2 medium shallots, diced
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 hard boiled eggs, chopped
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 ½ cup grapeseed oil
¼ cup loose packed fresh herbs (tarragon, chives, Italian parsley)
1 tbsp capers
1 tbsp cornichons
Salt
Pepper
3 tbsp butter
Smoked Maldon sea salt
Thick but Canadian bacon
1 large fried egg
1 pre-formed deep-fried hash brown
2 slices American cheese
Putting it all together:
From liqueurs to bitters, a well-stocked bar can jazz up your home cooking
It’s not surprising to find a bartender in the kitchen. Many drink recipes call for eggs from the refrigerator, spices from the cabinet, and every manner of cooking appliance to create specialized cocktail ingredients. Bartenders at restaurants have been known to pilfer kitchen scraps for ingredients to infuse tinctures and syrups, not only reducing waste but opening up new spectrums of flavor to drinkers.
A few recipes make creative use of bar ingredients — ouzo-scented orange cake, pozole made smoky with mezcal, or sweet potato crumble dashed with Angostura — but they’re outliers among the “boozy” clickbait recipes (which inevitably cook off any alcohol) “spiked” with a dash of bourbon, rum, or vodka. Booze may affect the consistency of a dish, and readers may want to avoid cooking with pricey bottles, but blurring the line between bar and kitchen opens up all sorts of experimentation and fun. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Use Bitters in Place of Zest or Spices
The craft cocktail boom of the aughts and teens spawned a booming bitters industry that slowly, like the Blob, absorbed every herb, fruit, and wood on this green Earth. You can now zhuzh up a drink with bitters made from prickly pear or winter melon, black pepper or chile pepper, lavender or rose, oak or palo santo, mole or Jamaican jerk.
Depending on the application, bitters infused with an ingredient serve perfectly well in place of that ingredient or something similar. They offer a quick, intense hit of flavor, and since they’re powerful in such small quantities (for example, a dash or two in the dough will flavor an entire tray of cookies), you can often use them without significantly altering the composition of a delicate baked good or finicky sauce. They’re also relatively shelf stable, with alcohol acting as a preservative, though, like spices, their flavor may degrade over time. For an easy entry point, try swapping citrus zest with a few dashes of citrus bitters or putting celery bitters in your next soup.
Use Liqueurs in Sauces, Stocks, and Marinades
When you stop thinking of liqueurs as cocktail ingredients, it’s easy to see how their floral, nutty, fruity, or herbal notes could play well in a wide variety of recipes. Unless you’re dealing with a particularly finicky recipe, like a delicate sauce vulnerable to breakage, you can apply liqueurs fairly flexibly to any dish where you might add sugar or another sweetener. When a soy dipping sauce calls for honey, try amaretto or nocino. Add some nuance to a marinade with Chartreuse. Temper acidic tomatoes in a pasta sauce with a bit of Cynar. Energize your tahini dressing with a touch of coffee liqueur. Amp up salsa with ancho chile liqueur.
Look Beyond the Usual Suspects
Adding a touch of alcohol can perk up a recipe, but it’s hard to find excitement in that cheap bourbon you use in every single marinade. Many recipes default to whiskey, vodka, or rum because they’re crowd pleasers, but they’re hardly the only appealing flavors on the back bar. Swap those humdrum options for cachaça (awesome in banana bread), aquavit (great in pickle brine), or peaty Scotch (excellent for a smoky braise).
Opt for a Jigger
Stop shuffling between measuring spoons and combine all those tools into a single jigger. With a little practice, jiggers are quicker to use than spoons, and it’s easy to find a model that fits your hand well. (I personally prefer a heavier jigger, which I totally unscientifically believe prevents spills by giving the ingredient physical weight in my mind.) Converting from liquid tablespoons and teaspoons to the ounces on jiggers is pretty clean, as long as you don’t mind a little mental math.
Shake Your Cream
In addition to mixing up daiquiris, a cocktail shaker is an excellent tool for whipping cream. Unlike a whisk, which can be hell on the wrist, a shaker is a much more ergonomic and efficient tool for the task. Acclaimed barman Jim Meehan suggests removing the spring from a cocktail strainer and adding it to the shaker with the cream, which speeds up the whipping action. Cooling the cream and the shaker helps too.
Serve Dessert in a Coupe
For hundreds of years, coupe glasses were used to serve Champagne. While that horrible idea was eventually rectified (the wide opening of the glass lets all the bubbles float away), the elegant curve of the vessel still befits a post-dinner treat, like ice cream or pudding. Skip the dessert dishes and serve everything in coupes like sweet, classy nightcaps.
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