Foodies Clan

The startup SquarEat makes eating more efficient by turning your favorite foods into unrecognizably pallid squares

Anyone else looking to make life less enjoyable right now? Good, good, I’m glad I’m not the only one. Thankfully for those of us devoted to denying ourselves simple pleasures like, say, meals with texture, a new kind of “food” is hitting the market. This “gourmet, innovative 50g square,” developed by a food-tech startup called SquarEat, is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: squares of food smashed into oblivion (or something like that) and packaged for the busy worker who doesn’t have time to enjoy a full bottle of Soylent, let alone stop off at Sweetgreen to buy a salad to inhale over their laptops.

In an online crowdfunding campaign, which has brought in more than $150,000, the company describes the way it intends to disrupt the food delivery marketplace: by shipping a bunch of these squares to your doorstep. Had this concept been floated a few years ago, I probably would have reacted with more disgust and eye-rolling. But at this point, we have Soylent, we have Huel, we have so many brands that are committed to sacrificing all flavor and texture in pursuit of efficiency. Hey, at least SquarEat is saying they want you to enjoy your dinner — even if it is just six differently colored blocks of food on a sad little tray. Like a TV dinner without the kitsch! Among the sweet and savory offerings are beef square, hazelnut square, sea bass square, and quinoa square. If you put all the green blocks in a lineup and make me guess which is asparagus square and which is pistachio and cashew square, I’ll have no idea. So I really hope you don’t eat with your eyes first.

A chart on SquarEat’s crowdfunding website compares and contrasts the little blocks of compressed food with the raw ingredients they’re made of, showing in each case why the squares are actually more delicious. On one hand you have chicken, which has always struggled for popularity! “Dry, fibrous & stringy” says the chart. Below it is a beautiful, pallid block that we will just call square chicken with a “tender sausage” description. SquarEat’s review of asparagus? Dry, fibrous & stringy.” Asparagus square? Folks, it’s a “delicate patty.” And while sweet potato, a tuber so disgusting it definitely isn’t the cornerstone of cultures around the world as well as the foundation of my own career, is also “dry, fibrous & stringy,” there’s no need to worry, because the sweet potato square is “velvety & mushy potato.” Oh thank god.

The makers of these little pucks seem earnest, and like they actually believe in what they’re doing. I respect that, and with so many other efficiency-focused food-tech startups on the market, we’re way past the point where I’d root for the little(r) guy to fail. Food-tech companies are making “efficient” food whether it freaks us out or not. And there’s definitely some good here: The company claims, for instance, that they can use almost 100 percent of an ingredient in their development of these squares, which is great. Reducing waste, one salmon puck at a time!

But it seems like the presumably good people over at SquarEats are sort of missing the whole point of sitting down for a meal. Responding to criticism and jokes the company has faced online, SquarEat’s chief marketing officer Laura Vacaflores recently told Today that the company is “not the first food concept that adopted the square shape, if you, for example, think about tofu. The only thing we are asking people to leave behind is their original idea about the external appearance of the food.”

The problem here, it seems, is that Vacaflores — and probably the company as a whole — does not fully understand why people are skeptical of their product. The objection is not that these sad looking blocks are square in construction. Of course, there are lots of foods that are square-shaped and also delicious! But the difference between tofu and a SquarEat product is that one is steeped in literally thousands of years of culture and culinary tradition (and is extremely delicious in so many preparations), whereas the other one was thought up by a startup that’s younger than famous babies on TikTok. People aren’t afraid of tofu’s appearance, they’re wary of products that promise to simplify life so much that there isn’t much left to live for. Work, consume one meal’s worth of chicken square, sleep, repeat. Convenience is great, but maybe not at the cost of the history and pleasure that ties so many of us to the food we love.

Your burger or tacos or pizza could be cooked anywhere by anyone — which is what makes the ghost kitchen concept so lucrative and appealing to owners and investors

Ordering takeout or delivery is a lot like watching Netflix. You can do both things on your phone, the options are seemingly endless, and nothing looks particularly good. You scroll and scroll and scroll until you can’t scroll anymore, and begrudgingly decide on some gauzy teen drama, or defer to whatever generically named chicken wing joint paid for the best placement in the app. You hit play or pay or both, and several hours later you mope off to bed a little annoyed (with yourself, with contemporary life) and a little dyspeptic.

With growing frequency, the food you order from a delivery app is being prepared in a ghost kitchen — or cloud kitchen, or commissary kitchen, or whatever you want to call it — by cooks working for a restaurant that doesn’t really exist, at least not in the traditional sense. There is no storefront, no dining room, and no front-of-house staff. In some cases, the kitchen functions as a hub for a handful of other so-called virtual restaurants; in others, the food from the virtual restaurant is prepared inside the kitchen of an established brick-and-mortar but with a separate name and menu. Either way, your burger or tacos or pizza could be cooked anywhere by anyone — which is what makes the ghost kitchen concept so lucrative and appealing to owners and investors.

These kinds of digital-only restaurants existed before the pandemic broke out, but they experienced exponential growth as people across the country were confined to their homes for more than a year, unable to safely eat inside a restaurant dining room filled with strangers. Some of them are run by independent operators looking for a cheap and easy way to try something new (and for extra revenue to keep the lights on as the industry continues to struggle); many more are run by a number of large companies making big bets on delivery being the future of the restaurant industry.

Take the Local Culinary for example, a ghost kitchen company that operates more than 40 virtual restaurant brands with generic names like Chef Burger or Pizza Mania. The Local Culinary launches digital-only restaurants — many of which serve burgers, chicken, pizza, or tacos — and franchises them out to operators with physical kitchen space. Its founder, Alp Franko, says he doesn’t have enough revenue data to predict too far into the future, but some research he’s seen suggests the market might “double or triple” in the coming years, while other reports predict that ghost kitchens could transform into a $1 trillion industry over the next decade.

As cities and states begin to reopen and restaurants begin to offer on-site dining again, Franko’s biggest fear is that diners will stop relying on takeout and delivery. But for now, and with the realities of the delta variant settling in, he says business is booming, and that the Local Culinary’s revenues are increasing in the double digits. In Franko’s ideal world, franchisees of the Local Culinary’s brands will sign up to offer as many of its virtual restaurants as their kitchens can handle. Some will operate out of kitchen spaces rented from dedicated ghost kitchen brands like CloudKitchens and Reef, and others will operate out of existing restaurants — indies and chains alike — looking for extra revenue.

“We have plenty of those franchisees, and the reason is because they already pay the rent, they already have a kitchen, they already have all of the prep ability and equipment,” says Franko. “So for them to do a burger from Chef Burger, or any other menu item, it’s the same.”

Another major player in the virtual dining industry is Planet Hollywood founder and CEO Robert Earl, whose Virtual Dining Concepts has launched a handful of celebrity-branded digital-only restaurants in the past year. Like Franko, Earl — who says his budding virtual restaurant empire helped sustain his hospitality business during the pandemic — is looking to capitalize on some perceived spare capacity (space, time, equipment, labor) in restaurant kitchens.

None of Virtual Dining Concepts’s celebrity brands (not even Pauly D’s Italian Subs) have exploded more than MrBeast Burger, an online-only fast-food restaurant founded in conjunction with a wildly popular YouTuber named MrBeast. The digital burger joint launched with more than 300 virtual restaurants in more than 35 states last December. Now, there are nearly 1,000, and Earl says that number is set to double. About 20 percent of MrBeast Burgers operate out of brick-and-mortar chains owned by Earl Industries, like Buca di Beppo, while others set up shop in the kitchens of other chains or independent restaurants. On its website, Virtual Dining Concepts claims that restaurants that set up ghost kitchens to operate one or more of its brands can expect to see a 30 percent increase in profits.

Virtual Dining Concepts isn’t Earl’s only venture with ghost kitchens. Having previously collaborated on a fast-casual chicken sandwich restaurant called Chicken Guy, the mogul and loved/loathed chef Guy Fieri recently teamed up to launch Flavortown Kitchen. Like some outposts of MrBeast Burger and Earl’s other virtual restaurants, Flavortown Kitchen operates out of a number of chains he already owns, including Bertucci’s, a wood-fired pizza chain that originated in Boston in the early 1980s and is best known for its halfway decent pizza and warm dinner rolls. Now it doubles as a mass producer of Fieri’s “donkey sauce.”

At the end of the day, the goal of these virtual restaurants (for the franchisor and the franchisee) is no different than any other business: to maximize profits and minimize overhead. Why operate one restaurant in your kitchen when you can operate four or five or 12? The space is there and the equipment is there, after all. But then again, there’s also the cooks who suddenly have to memorize and execute all those extra menus. Does their pay increase? Will ghost kitchens add more staff to accommodate the increased volume? In conversations with C-suite and management types for this reporting, these questions went unanswered and danced around, but more than one source said issues of pay are determined by individual ghost kitchen operators. For his part, Franko was shockingly honest when pressed about labor in ghost kitchens.

“I want the franchisee making money,” he says. “So how to make money is to optimize the cost, and to optimize the revenue. So if the franchisee needs a new chef or a new line cook, or if they need to buy new equipment or more tools for prep, then for sure, they should invest to grow their revenue. But usually, my approach and the company’s approach is to optimize the current needs and the current team. We are not here to invest in more space or in bigger teams.”

Earl told Eater he initially tried to launch a cloud kitchen business to operate his virtual restaurants, but he found that “the economic model didn’t work.” Operating out of already existing kitchens with already existing labor forces was much less complicated — and much cheaper.

“When one had to have a separate labor force, the economics just didn’t add up,” says Earl. “If you look at the separate cost of labor, it kills the formula. So my thinking moved very quickly over to the realization that most restaurants in the world have spare capacity, meaning that the culinary side has capability of producing more food than that which is needed for the customers on the other side of the wall.”

Eater reached out to a number of Boston-area Bertucci’s directly in an attempt to speak with some of the cooks who are tasked with executing Fieri’s food on top of the restaurant’s principal menu. One kitchen manager said his staff was too busy to pull anyone off the line; several others declined outright; and one referred Eater to a vice president with the company. When asked if they could make kitchen workers available for comment, the vice president deflected, and instead said they could offer “something much bigger.” Several follow-up emails have gone unanswered.

Labor in ghost kitchens, like the concept itself, is often opaque. There are certainly instances when a brick-and-mortar opts into a ghost kitchen model, increases revenues, and is then better able to retain existing kitchen staff, or hire additional kitchen staff, but there are also instances when the opposite is true. Ghost kitchens put another barrier — a smartphone screen, in this case — between diners and the people making their food, hiding from view a workforce that was already next to invisible before anyone knew what a ghost kitchen was, one that has historically endured exploitation in the form of low wages, long hours, and various forms of abuse. And that’s only been exacerbated during the pandemic, especially for food service workers of color: According to a study from the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, Hispanic and Latinx food preparation and service workers in Massachusetts died of COVID-19 at a rate eight times higher than white workers between March and July 2020. Add to that the well-documented exploitation of the countless delivery drivers who work for the delivery apps — in California, apps such as Uber and DoorDash poured nearly $200 million into a ballot measure in last year’s election to deny drivers access to employment protections — who deliver all the food cooked in the ghost kitchens, or the fact that there are robotics companies that are out here trying to straight up replace workers in ghost kitchens entirely, and it’s clear that labor issues aren’t exactly top of mind in the booming industry.

Not all ghost kitchen businesses are inherently exploitative or obsessed with profit over labor — indeed, some may even be responsible for saving independent restaurants that might have otherwise gone out of business during the leaner moments of the pandemic without the extra revenue. Take Stillwater in downtown Boston, for example. During a typical dinner service, chef and owner Sarah Wade and her kitchen staff can be found whipping up plates of Ritz fried chicken or crispy Faroe Island salmon skin for the groups of hungry diners that have swarmed back to the restaurant since Massachusetts lifted its restrictions on indoor dining in May. But the Stillwater menu is no longer the lone focus in the restaurant’s kitchen — Wade and crew are also busy preparing orders for the Mac Bar, a mac and cheese-focused takeout and delivery restaurant she launched in November 2020 as a way to make ends meet.

“It’s a concept I’ve been rolling around in my head for a while,” says Wade. “And this was an opportunity to trial it and see if it worked, if we got a good bite on it, and if maybe someday I wanted to do it as a brick-and-mortar. So there were a lot of reasons why I started it. But mainly, of course, it was to make money and pay rent and staff during COVID.”

Still, Wade says she’s barely breaking even, and that she’s getting killed by the fees third-party delivery apps are able to charge. Massachusetts’s temporary cap on the fees expired in May, and city and state legislators haven’t moved to extend it. (San Francisco implemented a permanent cap in June, but the apps have already developed tactics to skirt the new regulations. Despite charging high fees that often hurt restaurants, none of the major players in the third-party delivery wars are profitable.) Wade needs to operate the Mac Bar for the additional revenue, and she needs to be on the delivery apps to market, sell, and deliver the Mac Bar product, but the delivery apps are digging deep into her cut. It’s a vicious cycle.

“It’s brutal,” says Wade. “Are you kidding me? After executing it and putting it in expensive to-go containers — because customers are very picky about their to-go containers — there’s not much left. But the way I see it is, the staff is still working, and we’re still putting a couple pennies into our pockets. And it’s all still moving along.”

She says she’s considering exclusive deals with some of the apps to get better placement and treatment. But the big players like Franko’s the Local Culinary and Earl’s Virtual Dining Concepts already do that, and have a lot more money, so it’s easy to see that those who benefit most from virtual restaurants — if they are indeed the future of the industry — are those who not only have the funds for their businesses to survive crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, but who can also afford to exploit opportunities that the crises present.

Does Robert Earl really need to partner with Guy Fieri? Does Guy Fieri really need to make an extra million or two? The answer in both cases is “probably not!” But the market is obviously there, so why not strike while the grill that is cooking 45 different things for 11 different restaurants is hot? Ghost kitchens may or may not be the future of the restaurant industry, but they’re definitely the present. And as the pandemic continues to surge, making diners more wary of eating indoors, they’re probably not going away anytime soon.

Carlos Basabe is a commerical and editorial illustrator based in Rockville, Maryland.

The chain sold 1.88 million of the deep-dish pizzas nationwide in 2021. They’ve returned by popular demand

The organization warns that Italian-style meats currently carry a risk of Salmonella infection, which can be avoided by microwaving or boiling away the flavor and texture

I have some bad news for Charcuterie Board TikTok: The CDC is currently recommending all “Italian-Style” meats be heated “to an internal temperature of 165°F or until steaming hot before eating,” if you are at high risk of complications from Salmonella. You heard that right, babe; it’s time to microwave that beautiful plate of salami and prosciutto until it’s sweating off sweet meat juice and filling your home with the aroma of slightly-off cured pork.

The notice that Salmonella-tainted “Italian-Style” meats have hit grocery store shelves was posted to the CDC’s website on August 24. Two outbreaks have affected people in at least 17 states, and 12 people have been hospitalized with links to the outbreaks. As of publication, the CDC is still working to identify the tainted products, and determine whether the two outbreaks are linked to a shared food source.

At the moment, it’s also not super clear what classifies as an “Italian-Style” meat. The CDC reports that people in both outbreaks reported eating salami, prosciutto, coppa, and soppressata, but things get a little tricky because they also consumed “other meats that can be found in antipasto or charcuterie assortments.”

I know what you’re thinking: What about my saucisson? How about my precious jambon de Bayonne?? Reader, I really do not know what to tell you about French charcuterie, as the CDC makes no mention of such a thing. Until more information is available, it might be safest to avoid pretty much all the good salty meats we use to fill the dark voids at the center of our lives. But it’s the little things that keep me going these days, so I wouldn’t judge you for risking it all for a couple slices of some salty pork and a soft slice of blue cheese.

Really, nothing quite matches the vibe of 2021 like being told that we should be heating our cured meats until they are literally STEAMING. Let me set the scene: A few fully vaccinated friends are coming over for a light bite and some chilled wine on the porch. You planned this cute little get together last week, and already bought allll that good good charcuterie. But now the CDC is telling you to microwave that shit, and you’re not one to ignore public health guidance. So you reluctantly throw the whole board in the microwave and watch as it spins and is destroyed by milky meat water collecting around the once-beautiful slices of soppressata and salami. A couple figs and some dried fruit aren’t enough to distract from the now-grey platter of meat, and everything has taken on the texture of old sponge. It’s okay though, because your friends love you, and with everything else going on right now, they just pretend not to notice the deeply disturbing pile of evidence you’ve placed in front of them. At least you surround yourself with good people!

Anyways, maybe we should all just stick to wine and olives for a little while. For all we know, they could be next.

The BergHOFF can handle bread slices and pop tarts, but it’s particularly useful when dealing with really plump baked goods

Years ago, while visiting a friend at his sublet apartment in Paris, I encountered the most superbly French appliance: a toaster with openings so long you could brown a third of a baguette, sliced down the middle, for a perfect Parisian breakfast. Naturally we did this nearly every morning.

More recently, after this past year of cooking a lot and not doing much else, I decided it was time to invest in some good, sturdy appliances. When it came to a toaster, I knew I wanted something larger than the basic pullman-loaf-sized affair — I wanted something that would encourage that simple French breakfast of gently melted butter and tart strawberry jam. But real baguette toasters are hard to find state-side, as it turns out. So I took a chance on a model I thought would provide a similar experience: the BergHOFF Seren Side Loading Toaster. The baguette toaster of my Parisian stay had a standard top-down slot, just double the length of those on the toasters I was used to. This variety offers the same functionality, but with a long tray that slides out from the heating-element chamber.

Although it’s not what lured me in at first, it turns out the side-loading tray is where the real potential of this toaster lies. Pressing a button opens the tray’s clamp so you can slide in literally anything that will fit — and believe me, I’ve been testing its limits. It’s particularly useful when dealing with really plump baked goods, from extra-thick hand-rolled bagels to packed empanadas. Last week for lunch, I pulled out a chunk of leek focaccia from the freezer that was roughly the size of a day planner. Normally, I’d have to reheat something this thick in the oven, since it wouldn’t fit in a narrow toaster slot. But after two cycles in the long toaster, it was deliciously warmed through without getting burnt outside.

In my side-loading toaster, I’ve cooked frozen fish sticks and reheated leftover kimchi-jeon. When some homemade hawawshi got soggy in the fridge, an extra-long cook crisped them right up again. I’ve even heard rumors the toaster can cook a grilled cheese sandwich to perfection; although as a devout American cheese fan worried about it melting everywhere, I have yet to try this. I have, however, made good use of the toaster’s pastry-reheating abilities. In the past, I would wrap leftover pastries in a damp paper towel and attempt to microwave them just so: too much, they get hard at the edges, but too little and they’re still cold inside. While many baked goods can be refreshed with a little time in the oven, I can’t imagine a strategy I’m less likely to use during summer heat. And what am I supposed to do, eat a kolache cold when it could be hot and melty?

A long toaster is certainly more of a countertop space commitment than a standard model, but it’s worth the investment over fussier alternatives like toaster ovens, which rarely heat thicker foods all the way through. The completely removable tray also acts as a crumb collector, making it very easy to dump any leftover bits into a nearby sink. Given how much I use it, this toaster has more than justified its presence in my scant New York kitchen.

Jenna Stoeber is a writer, streamer, and academic.

Food Network making its own Christmas movie is frankly genius, as Pioneer Woman’s existing aesthetics and audience are already barely a step removed from Hallmark and Lifetime’s whole holiday vibe

Why is PepsiCo. choosing such violence?

Hey, c’mere. You like hot stuff, don’t you? I bet you do, tough guy. I bet you were the first one of your friends to crow about sriracha. You ever eat a ghost pepper whole and raw? You like Hot Ones? You think Sean Evans is a “badass”? Yeah, you freak, I bet you’d grind up the blue Takis and snort them if you could, just to feel again, because by this point the regular shit ain’t cutting it anymore. Well come over here, I got something to take the edge off: Mountain Dew Flamin’ Hot.

Yeah you read that right, spicy goddamn soda. You like that don’t you? It’s like drinking fizzy Cholula. Like you scooped habanero pulp into yellow Gatorade. “This is one of our most provocative beverages yet, and we’re excited for DEW Nation to taste the unique blend of spicy and classic sweet citrus flavor of MTN DEW,” Matt Nielsten, senior director of marketing at PepsiCo, said in a press release, but that’s just for the weak public who can’t fuckin’ handle what we’re dishing out. This is going to annihilate your body. You’re going to want to spit it out but you can’t. Look at that mascot. He’s laughing at you because he knows you’re a baby, so prove him wrong and drink it. You think you know pain? You can’t even imagine pain. You make me sick.

Hey, where are you going? Come back here! You have to come back!! The threat of violence is our only marketing strategy, honestly we just want whatever attention we can get!!!!!!!

At The Park’s Finest, meats used in traditional American barbecue meet Filipino spices and sauces

“The Park’s Finest is a representation of American cuts of barbecue with a Filipino flavor,” says Johneric Concordia, the pitmaster of the Park’s Finest barbecue restaurant in LA. “What that allows us to do is provide American cuts of barbecue with seasonings and sauces that are reminiscent of the Filipino experience present here in the United States.”

The Filipino-American experience is the common thread that weaves itself through most of the items on Concordia’s menu. In a dish called Mama Leah’s Coconut Beef, for example, he creates a soupy coconut adobo made with California chiles, fish sauce, garlic, smoked chuck, and of course, vinegar. Once it has had a chance to simmer together on the stove, it gets transferred to a large metal bowl and the cooking process continues in the smoker, which creates a rich texture, a smoky aroma, and tender meat.

It’s not about just recreating Filipino dishes, he explains, as he pulls a large slab of short rib onto the table. “We do not serve this in the Philippines,” he says as he coats the meat in the shop’s signature dry-rub — a mix of black, white, and cayenne pepper, chile flakes, garlic and onion powder, and pink Himalayan salt. “Accompanying it with our seasoning, accompanying it with our sauces, pairing it with rice, that’s what makes it Filipino.”

Check out the video to see what other barbecue dishes Concordia adds his Filipino flair to, like timuay tri-tip and cornbread bibingka.

Starbucks and Dunkin’ are introducing apple drinks alongside the usual glut of pumpkin spice everything

The pumpkin spice flavor wars have been raging for almost 20 years now. Does it suck? If you think it sucks, are you an elitist snob? Is it an identity? Does it have any business in things like salsa or deodorant? In 2019, Eater decided to accept the reality of pumpkin spice. There was no use having an opinion on something so omnipresent. It’s like having hard thoughts on whether or not socks should exist. But now, trying to create new trends, coffee chains want to make apple happen.

“Many feel that pumpkin spice ‘jumped the shark’ so to speak because there is a saturation of pumpkin spice everything,” Kim McLynn of the NPD Group, a market research company, told Insider. So this year Dunkin’ and Starbucks are introducing apple-flavored drinks. Starting today, Starbucks will be serving an apple crisp macchiato, “made with apple and brown sugar flavors and topped with a caramelized apple drizzle, made with apple puree.” The drink can be had either hot or iced. According to one Eater staffer who tried the hot version, it’s like “drinking a candied apple,” and the “apple juice concentrate is very prominent.”

Dunkin’, meanwhile, will make an apple cranberry refresher and an apple cranberry coconut refresher, the latter of which is too many things. They’ll also bring back the apple cider donut, but just so we’re on the same page, the new drinks are essentially apple juice, right? You’re drinking apple juice, which is fine, but you should just know that! Also, one of them is purple for some reason, despite neither apple, cranberry, nor coconut being in the slightest bit purple.

Starbucks and Dunkin’ have both experimented with other “fall” flavors before, like maple pecan, brown sugar, and vanilla spice, to make sure they have something for those who can’t stand pumpkin spice. But let’s be real — pumpkin spice is here to stay. Every year someone says pumpkin spice has “jumped the shark” and every year it returns earlier and earlier to much fanfare and obsession. Apple is nice too, but if you think this means the end of pumpkin spice, sorry! At least it’s not the worst thing to accept about reality now.

A guide to the most divisive and misunderstood denizen of the candy aisle 

What does licorice taste like? For me it’s sweet, earthy, herbal, sharp, wild, and dark, with a whole world opening up inside that flavor. But when I bite into some of the salty licorice that Scandinavians love, there’s a whole other dimension: the saltiness (which isn’t actually salt at all, but ammonium chloride) brings all the other flavors into balance, like an orchestra rising to a perfect hum.

Do people talk like this about any other candy? The licorice discourse is more like those around durian or Marmite, foods that have strong, pungent flavors that people either love or hate. With licorice there’s always another frontier to explore and discuss. So what’s the deal with this oddball of the candy aisle?

What is licorice, exactly?

“Licorice can be very different things. It’s a black confectionery, but licorice is really a root,” says Johan Bülow, who started the gourmet licorice company Lakrids by Bülow on the Danish island of Bornholm 14 years ago. “Licorice is a very sweet flavor. It has a little bit of tobacco, and there’s a metallic flavor. It’s very earthy,” Bülow adds, sounding like he’s describing a fine wine.

How is licorice candy made?

It all starts with the licorice root, which looks like a plain old twig in its dried form. “We make extracts from this root, and that’s the real taste of licorice,” says Bülow. While you want to get high-quality root that’s freshly dried and has a good flavor, other ingredients matter too: you need starch (rice flour, in Bülow’s case) and a sweetener (he uses molasses, which also differs significantly in flavor depending on where it’s from). “We mix the ingredients in a 100-kilo tank and heat it up,” Bülow explains. “We force it through a pump before extruding it into long ropes, and cutting them.” His company also makes licorice the traditional way by boiling it in an open vat for four hours, reducing it like a sauce before it’s hand-stretched. “That gives the licorice a unique flavor, but maybe even more importantly, a very unique texture,” says Bülow.

So where do you find these licorice roots?

The licorice plant — glycyrrhiza glabra — is a perennial herb in the legume family that grows wild pretty much anywhere warm enough. Typically sourced to the West from the Middle East, it’s 50 times sweeter than sugar. The word licorice comes from “glukos riza,” the Greek for sweet root. Bülow gushes over the memory of eating the fresh root in Georgia: “It was fresh and full of water, with a taste that was absolutely amazing. Straight from the earth. It just gave you something.”

When did people start eating licorice?

The use of licorice can be traced far back through human history. In ancient China, licorice was used in religious ceremonies, while the Egyptian king Tutankhamun was buried with it. Julius Caesar would give licorice to his troops to eat while they marched, as it alleviates thirst. In India, the god Brahma was purported to be a fan. Today, “in Indian and Middle Eastern markets, you’ll often see a container of dried licorice on the counter which people will chew on,” says Beth Kimmerle, a Chicago-based sensory consultant to candy companies.

I take it there’s more than one type of licorice?

Licorice candy comes not just in different flavors, but also in any shape and texture you can imagine: chewy, gummy, drops, ropes, powdered, crunchy, and runny. When I was a kid growing up in Scandinavia, licorice was a standard category in the candy aisle alongside chocolate and caramels. A sweet licorice fudge called Kick was my favorite, and I preferred my salty licorice as a lozenge with a powder heart — Tyrkisk Peber is a classic example of salmiakki, the Finnish salty licorice. If you were hard-core on the playground you’d go for Hockey Pulver, the powdered salmiakki that you pour into your palm and lick.

I still enjoy these candies, but when I tried Lakrids by Bülow I realized there might be another level to licorice: Lakrids is licorice for adults, ideal for people who also love olives, funky cheeses, and dark chocolate. With licorice, there are always new heights to conquer: while working on this story I discovered Italian pellets that are 100 percent pure licorice. I spat out the first one, but now I can’t stop eating them.

None of this sounds anything like American licorice!

“In the US, there’s no standard of definition for licorice, so you can call something licorice even though you’ve not used the root,” says Kimmerle. American licorice often has added anise, which sets it apart from the European varieties; red licorice like Twizzlers and Red Vines, which is prevalent in the States, doesn’t actually contain any licorice at all.

Sophia Pappas

How did licorice first travel from the East to the West?

It was returning crusaders who brought licorice from the Middle East to parts of Europe, where it became prized for its medicinal properties. “People would use licorice for basically any ailment,” says Kimmerle. When licorice first came England with Dominican monks who grew it in the gardens of their Yorkshire priory, it was used to treat stomach problems and coughs; it eventually became a popular remedy for chest congestion throughout England and Northern Europe.

It was George Dunhill, a pharmacist in the Yorkshire town of Pontefract, who first thought to add a little sugar to the medicinal licorice, and this is how people started eating it as candy. This first crossover into the treat category was the Pontefract Cake, and from there, England developed its own licorice style, the most famous example being Liquorice allsorts, a mixture of firmer licorice candies in a range of flavors and colors.

Carol Wilson, the author of Liquorice: A Cookbook, grew up in Yorkshire, where licorice was a childhood staple. “At the sweetshop you’d ask for a stick of Spanish,” says Wilson — in Yorkshire they called it “Spanish” for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, though Wilson claims it’s likely because the monks who brought it to town were Spanish.

Eating medicine as candy — that sounds like it could be dangerous?

Licorice isn’t harmless — too much glycyrrhizin disrupts the body’s sodium and potassium levels and may raise blood pressure. People with hypertension or who are pregnant should be careful not to overdo it. Licorice has even killed people, but it takes a lot, likely several packets a day for weeks or months, if not more.

Can you cook with licorice?

Licorice often appears in Indian and Chinese cooking, but is rarely found in Western recipes. Wilson’s cookbook details various types of pure licorice, from sticks and powders to syrups and pellets. She says it’s a great flavor to add with cinnamon and garlic to pork, or mix with orange and black molasses as a glaze for meat. “Licorice goes really well with fennel and aniseed, which have a very mild licorice flavor themselves, although the plants are not related,” Wilson explains. “It adds a subtle flavor that’s quite intriguing — a sweet herbal taste with a hint of bitterness that makes it unique.”

What’s the story with salmiakki, the super-strong licorice they have in Finland?

Salmiakki is the Finnish word for salty black licorice, which contains no actual salt, just a kick of ammonium chloride. Over the phone from Finland, Jukka Annala, the chairman of the Finnish Salty Liquorice Association, likens salmiakki to “a romantic relationship between salt and sweet in the form of a candy.”

No two people seem to describe licorice the same way, but no one speaks of the black stuff with more reverence than Annala. I quickly realize my question about how to pick a good salty licorice is far too simple for this connoisseur. “The choice depends on the mood. If the need is big, the easiest way to satisfaction is usually salmiakki powder,” Annala says. “This is a simple candy, just licorice and ammonium chloride.” The salmiakki field gets more complex from there, he continues. “They are all so different! There are strong ones and mild ones. If you’re in a certain mood and need a mild and lovely salmiakki, one which has a good texture so you can chew it, there’s molded candy or toffee.”

Wow. But why did the Finns go salty when the rest of the world went sweet?

While all the Nordic countries (plus the Netherlands and northern Germany) enjoy salty licorice, Annala doesn’t know why Finland emerged as the heart of this territory. It seems to be a quirk of culture, perhaps attributable to the Finnish “sisu,” one of those untranslatable words, which means something like “a special kind of strong will.” This might explain why you’d persevere past that first burn of the salmiakki, to find the sweet that hides underneath?

Would I enjoy salmiakki?

Finns enjoy feeding salmiakki to tourists and watching their faces squirm in disgust. “I think it’s because it’s salty, and people expect candy to be sweet — it’s strange. It’s very difficult to start late in life,” Annala says with a laugh. That said, there are Finns who don’t like it either. “It’s true,” he admits. “I know some!”

Is licorice likely to ever truly take off as a crowd favorite?

The mission to bring licorice to the world may need to put salmiakki on the back burner for now. While people increasingly appreciate more challenging flavors like kombucha or strong coffee, Kimmerle thinks we’d need a chef to champion it, or maybe discover some new kind of health benefit, to truly get licorice to take off. Lakrids by Bülow now draws 63 percent of its revenues from outside Denmark, but this progress is driven by its range of chocolate-covered sweet licorice. But whatever gets people in the door is fine with Johan Bülow. “We just want to try and make the world love licorice,” he says.

Assuming that more people do grow to love it, the Finns will be waiting to bring them into their hard-core heart of licorice darkness. “There’s salmiakki ice cream, chewing gum, and vodka too,” says Annala, who’s a fan of the new licorice-filled chocolates that have spread from Iceland into the other salmiakki-loving countries. Who wouldn’t enjoy a chocolate bar with a sweet licorice center, hiding a punch of powdered salmiakki? “There’s so many layers you can run to,” says Annala. “So much drama within one candy!”

Jessica Furseth is a London-based journalist who writes about culture and urbanism. Follow her on Twitter @jessicafurseth.
Sophia Pappas is a Pittsburgh-based illustrator.

Aglio e olio tteokbokki, anyone?

This post originally appeared in the August 23, 2021 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.

Tteokbokki — chewy, plump rice cakes, swimming in a pool of spicy, tangy sauce with fish cakes — is one of my favorite dishes, bringing me a sense of comfort and childhood memories. But, the more I eat tteokbokki, the more I realize its sauce — slightly thick yet glossy, coating all the rice cakes beautifully — is similar to pasta sauces like vodka sauce, or tomato sauce, or any cream-based pasta sauce (or anything that’s so saucy that you can eat it without the pasta, just with a spoon). That led to a lightbulb moment: Why don’t I treat rice cakes like pasta? As an experiment, I tossed rice cakes into some leftover ragu. The starch from the rice cakes naturally thickened the sauce, similar to how pasta water would bring noodles and sauce together. And the result was immaculate: The rice cakes kept their bouncy, chewy texture, and even absorbed extra flavors from the sauce.

Restaurant chefs have been doing this for a while, but ever since my own Italian-Korean mashup, incorporating rice cakes into pasta sauce has become my go-to move. There are two types of rice cakes: ones made with wheat flour, called mil-tteok, and ones made with rice flour, called ssal-tteok. (Mil-tteok will mostly be found in the freezer, and ssal-tteok will be in the fridge section). I recommend using mil-tteok for saucier pasta recipes, such as arrabiata, vodka, and ragu, since the texture of mil-tteok will remain chewy and not overdone no matter how long you cook them.

You can play with different shapes for a saucy rice cake “pasta,” too: Some are cylindrical, others pre-sliced and coin-shaped. Another popular shape is called joraengi tteok, which looks like a tiny snowman, with two spheres attached to each other. I personally prefer cylindrical shapes when tossing with pasta sauce, just because they are similar in length and design to penne and rigatoni.

Rice cakes also work great with oil-based pasta: Take spaghetti aglio e olio, in which cooked strands are tossed in flavorful, garlicky olive oil. This simple, classic pasta doesn’t take too long to put together with a few ingredients, but the rice cake version has an extra layer of texture: The rice cakes are lightly fried in the pan to golden-brown and crispy.

Since oil-based pasta already requires a copious amount of olive oil, aglio e olio tteokbokki is a fuss-free, one-pan recipe. Once the rice cakes are crispy on both sides, add your garlic and crushed red pepper flakes. Instead of starchy pasta water, just add tap water, and the starch from the rice cakes will help thicken. The rice-flour ssal-tteok is ideal for oil-based pasta since it creates a crispy texture when pan-fried. If using ssal-tteok with sauce, be sure not to overcook, since it can become mushy. Also, coin-shaped rice cakes have more surface area than cylindrical ones, making them more suitable for oil-based recipes.

One of my favorite rice cake and pasta combinations lately is crispy rice cakes with pesto. Quickly toast them in the pan, and toss with pesto and a generous amount of Parmesan. It’s so good that even an Italian nonna will approve — but really, the possibilities here are endless.

P.S.: For an inverse of this move — pasta served with a creamy, Korean-inspired sauce — check out Joy Cho’s recipe for creamy tomato gochujang pasta.

Just imagine the merch!!!

Renowned singer, rapper, and gay cowboy Lil Nas X has taken over the charts, taken over my heart, and has now taken the title of not-quite-CEO at Taco Bell. In anticipation of Montero, Mr. X’s forthcoming album, the chain restaurant announced on August 23 that the musician would be filling the role of Chief Impact Officer. It’s a full circle moment for the young artist, who five years ago was holding down a job at an Atlanta-area Taco Bell.

The role is honorary, and it’s not entirely clear what impact his involvement will have on the inner workings of Taco Bell — I, for one, can think of a few Lil Nas outfits that would make for pretty good uniform inspiration. But it doesn’t seem like updated work fits are in the cards. Lil Nas X will work with the Taco Bell Foundation, to support young creatives and, according to Billboard, the musician will team up with Taco Bell to craft an “exclusive experience” (which really, could mean anything). He’ll also work on some special menu updates.

In the meantime, fans of Lil Nas X, of Taco Bell, and of things stuffed with other things, have taken to twitter to get into the nitty gritty, with some requests. With a direct line to the gatekeepers of Big Taco, some fans are asking that Lil Nas ushers in a return of favorites including the Grilled Stuft Nacho, Nachos Supreme, and Mexican pizza. One Twitter user asked Lil Nas to push the chain to pay their staff a living wage, while the rest of the requests under the musician’s announcement were simply too horny to repeat while either of my parents live and breathe.

Recent collaborations between chains and pop superstars have paid off big time, paving the way for collaborations such as this one. A collab between McDonald’s and Travis Scott netted the rapper a whopping $20 million in 2020. McDonald’s, which had faced financial losses throughout the pandemic, saw a spike in sales after the collaboration went live. The burger chain followed the success of its Travis Scott partnership by going on to collaborate with other artists like BTS and J Balvin. It most recently debuted the Saweetie Meal in early August, with — you guessed it — rapper Saweetie.

If the Travis Scott collaboration is to act as a model for fast food chains collaborating with major artists, Taco Bell should let Lil Nas do… pretty much whatever he wants. Scott was reportedly quite involved in the process, naming the meal, drawing animation for the TV ad, and developing merchandise. Like Scott’s fans, lovers of Lil Nas X go extremely hard. But it’s up to Taco Bell not to water down the artist’s identity, and lose out on a major part of his fanbase in the process.

Part of what has catapulted Lil Nas X to stardom is the wonderfully loud, sometimes hilarious queerness he brings to his music, his music videos, and to pretty much everything else he does. It’s encouraging that Taco Bell signed a highly visible deal with a musician who has so openly expressed his queerness, and was recently seen in the “Montero” video giving the devil an extremely impressive lap dance, before licking his face and snapping his neck. I’m sure there are some Taco Bell fans who will be outraged that the chain is partnering with such an openly and proudly queer man. Personally, I just hope Lil Nas X keeps all that same unapologetic energy, no matter how big the corporate deals get.

The power the title implies has been a cover for bad behavior for far too long — and Reem Assil doesn’t want any part of it

Last month, I eagerly anticipated the finale of my guilty pleasure, Top Chef, to see if my girl Dawn Burrell, with whom I had the privilege of cooking back in 2019, would be the first Black woman to be crowned in the show’s 18 seasons. Choosing Burrell over Shota Nakajima or Gabe Erales — both with notable fine dining backgrounds — would have made a statement: Hers is an unconventional path, having made the leap from Olympic athlete to professional chef in Houston. She cut her teeth in establishments where she was likely a minority, and still managed to bring the cuisine of her West African and Southern heritage center stage. Instead, they gave the honor to Erales, despite his having been fired from his last high-profile executive chef position back in 2020 for “repeated violations of policies” which, shortly after his win being televised, were revealed to be related to harassment and discrimination against women. According to the Austin American-Statesman’s reporting, Top Chef knew about it.

The show made a point to frame Erales as the first Mexican-American chef to win the title, and it left me unsettled. Does this kind of representation matter? Erales, after all, is white-passing and English-speaking, and has had access to privileges that many on my team (a majority of whom are Latinx) may never get, including a culinary school education and the chance to work at some of the most prestigious restaurants in the world. He is, of course, an alum of Noma in Copenhagen, a launching pad for chefs like Blaine Wetzel, owner and chef partner of the Willows Inn on Lummi Island in Washington, which was also the subject of an expose about abuse and sexual misconduct earlier this year. Ever since 2017’s #MeToo movement empowered many to come forward about sexual misconduct and abuse in the restaurant industry, these revelations keep coming. Some recent reckonings have especially disappointed us, like the stories about Edouardo Jordan of JuneBaby and Salare, a proud Black chef with a significant platform for racial justice in the food industry, who was somehow unaware of the harm he’d caused until 15 women came forward to share their stories. It seems like there may be no immunity from the plagues of this industry.

There is a stubborn part of the American psyche trapped in the frameworks of white supremacy and patriarchy that believes it can transcend the idea of a chef as we know it. “Chef” has come to mean commander-in-chief, auteur, and career pinnacle — and the power that comes from the role has been a cover for abusive behavior for decades. Since #MeToo, it seems like the game plan is to punish the bad white male chef, and create a new narrative: one that shows someone like me, a Brown girl with an unconventional path to cooking, and says: Look at her, she can be a chef and get a James Beard nod, despite the odds. This industry is redeemable. In reality, calling me “chef” mostly serves to propagate the American dream myth that with hard work and a compelling vision, anyone can make it to the top. That narrative reinforces the very system my being hailed a “chef” is meant to disrupt.

I might have a platform now as a “chef,” but the power system around me in the culinary world is largely the same. It seems like the world equated my chefdom with my achievement and value, yet in reality, I was struggling. As an industry, we’re still aspiring to the same misconceived notions of success, and hierarchical titles and responsibilities continue to play too big a part in how we know if we’ve gotten there. What if we aspired to build our skills rather than our power? What unhealthy dynamics might we be able to dissolve when we center all people’s cultural and experiential wisdom in our restaurants rather than just our own?

Having been behind the curtains of fine dining establishments, I can say that there is no greater myth than that of the all-knowing chef bestowing magic and wisdom on the rest of the team. In reality, everything coming out of a restaurant kitchen — from the recipes to the plating — is a compilation of so many people, and often, it’s the cooks who are actually running the show. To continue to lean on the idea of a genius chef, as a leader to be followed, renders everyone else in the system invisible. It strips them of their contributions and gives a chef a false authority. It upholds a power imbalance that implies to be a chef is a solo act, which can lead some chefs to mistreat their team — yes, even the kindest chefs.

The mantle of chef is also a setup, particularly for those not traditionally in those positions of power like myself. When the media suddenly started to refer to me as a chef after I opened my first restaurant Reem’s California, I felt an incredible sense of pressure to know everything about the kitchen to prove my legitimacy, especially to my peers in the industry who never assumed I was a chef in the first place. When I partnered with Alta Group to create Dyafa, a fine dining Arab restaurant in Oakland, I thought I was changing the status quo. Instead, I was upholding the very same industry culture that I’d always tried to work against. As “chef,” I needed to play the role of visionary leader while also proving myself over and over again any time someone walked right past me looking for the chef or constantly negotiating with my business partners over how to run a healthy restaurant. The dissonance between the chef the media celebrated me as, and the real physical and emotional labor I was experiencing on the ground, turned me into both a token and a martyr.

What would happen if we were to lose the word “chef” altogether? Could we take away some of its power? A name change won’t solve the problems of our industry, but it could be a start to changing the conversation. What will it take to create a space where everyone can stand in their dignity? What if we were all leaders and decision-makers instead of hoisting one flawed human onto a pedestal as a chef? I believe that kind of change could help create some checks and balances against the wildly uneven power dynamics that routinely harm women and people of color in all kinds of kitchens, even where you’d least expect it.

On the Top Chef season finale, as I watched Erales execute his final dish — a candied pumpkin — using a fancy technique in the sous vide machine, I thought about my head baker Luis Vasquez and prep cook Armando Bibiano. They had introduced me to dulce de calabaza, a similar dish, when we were brainstorming ideas to include in one of our Reem’s Meal Kits during the pandemic. It’s a dish that’s treasured during Día de los Muertos, a day to honor the dead, sweetened with cinnamon and caramelized syrup. Luis, a fourth-generation baker from the Yucatán, who has years of training in intricate laminated doughs, suggested we do a rendition of this dessert in a puff pastry tart shell and Armando shared the idea of using a variety of winter squash, abundant in Northern California around this time, to incorporate a few different textures in the tart mix. We ended up making beautifully delicate squash tartlets candied with pomegranate molasses for some Arab flair, in a meal kit that celebrated the rich exchange between Mexican and Arab cultures and became one of our most popular. This collaborative process resulted in something far more exquisite than what I would be able to come up with on my own.

In my life, the fluid exchange of knowledge and experience about food has been a source of healing. At Reem’s, we’ve started to get rid of the notion that I’m the only creator. We are all creators and collaborators. I don’t have to have the vision every day — we can take turns being visionaries and executors. The pandemic has pushed us on a path to worker ownership and more democratic governance, which helps us all be accountable to the collective success of the business. I no longer feel lonely and isolated in this challenging era for restaurants because I struggle with my team rather than on behalf of my team. By ridding myself of the burden of being “the chef,” I have built up my emotional reserves to be more patient, and to take a coaching role in building up leaders around me. A good day for me in the Reem’s kitchen is discovering our prep cook, who is a mole master, tweaked my shakshuka sauce recipe brilliantly; witnessing the line cooks collaborate on a seasonal man’oushe (the iconic flatbread that put Reem’s on the map); or watching the dishwasher master the oven and turn out beautifully consistent bread. The restaurant is more inventive and delicious because of the confidence they have built over time.

What might happen to our industry if kitchen creators like Armando and Luis — who, believe me, can be found in every restaurant kitchen — were to unleash their imagination and inspiration? What joy and creation might be possible then?

Unless the system goes through a complete overhaul, the word chef is not a sign of respect; it is a sign of status quo. So until then, don’t call me chef.

Reem Assil is a restaurateur and founder of Reem’s California in Oakland and San Francisco. Christina S. Zhu is an illustrator based in Berlin, Germany.