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Poivrot Farci

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  1. Boar's Head's legacy in Jarret, VA is, not counting the loss of 200 jobs in a town of 600, is a wooden bench they donated. Dietz & Watson (and virtually every other industrial processed food manufacturer in the US) uses sodium phosphate in their emulsified products (hotdogs) because of its water retaining & emulsifying properties. Sodium phosphate allows the manufacturer to add more fat and water -which is cheaper than lean meat- without breaking the emulsion or making it too soft, undercutting the traditional producers who do not use phosphates; they'll use more expensive non-fat dry milk powder or starches. Before the EU, western European countries resented the eastern ones who used sodium phosphates to make cheaper emulsified products (mortadella, hotdogs). The EU permits sodium-phosphates at 40mg/1kg (daily intake). USDA limit is 5000mg/1kg per sausage (8 ounces/100bs) unless my math is off. There are carcinogenic concerns regarding sodium phosphates. Scallop fishermen notoriously use sodium tripolyphosphates to retain water weight in scallops -they eventually leech out a milky white substance. Dry packed ones don't have them, but cost more. Only 4 states are required to label sodium tripolyphosphates in ingredients (CA, MA, NJ, PA). It is very hard to find decent meat-based food in a supermarket beyond raw ingredients, and even those are invariably from CAFO. The food system here is just so fucked.
  2. I do not tolerate feeling like a puckered asshole, miserable tightwad, and whatever wad falls in between because I balk at the 15%, 20% & 25% tip screen after an unindentured counterperson very simply, if happily, hands me over a baked good as is likely required in their job description. Retail tipping is emotional extortion. Its the hospitality equivalent of the $8.50 JFK air-train.
  3. Or, government can provide basic work/life benefits (healthcare, higher education & childcare being the most onerous) so that employees don't need more cash in pocket at the end of the week. It appears to work in more developed European countries with faster internet and more efficient indoor plumbing which still have a robust hospitality industry where tipping is a welcome but curious bonus. Relying on a customer's charitable mood to fulfill an unwritten paycheck subsidy in the 21st century in the wealthiest country in the galaxy is the height of absurdity.
  4. Food fraud is pervasive to the point of banality. If there was stock in food integrity, producers and consumers in the US would demand AOC/DOP/PGI/ETC... equivalencies to protect the sanctity of what is being sold and eaten for human sustenance and gustatorial pleasure. We seem to value inedible consumer goods more than the necessity of food. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/27/santa-monica-purveyor-admits-mislabeling-meats
  5. Forgive me, but Joyce Farms has taken some liberties. For a while they claimed that "poulet rouge" was famed French breed of chicken, but as far as I couled tell, after much digging, none exists by that name and when the farm I work at called the red broilers (Freedom Ranger) "poulet rouge", we got a cease & desist letter. I wrote to Joyce Farms and told them that I was unable to find any record or resource naming "poulet rouge" as a bonafide French chicken breed. I got a perfunctory reply and when I went back to the website a few month later, they scraped the feel-good story and instead trademarked Poulet Rouge. As best I know, you can't trademark a breed from another country that has allegedly existed for decades. I got what was sold as grass-fed beef from Joyce Farms 6 years ago and wrote to the company, again, because I was surprised, startled even, by how big the top sirloins were from what was billed as a 100% grass-fed steer younger than 30 months. They just don't get that big on 100% grass in just over 2 years. One of their nutritionists was alerted and replied that they have an intense grazing program, and that they feed their steers corn, but only really young corn, when it is still a grass. I am not a bovine nutritionist, but the email reeked of bullshit. As for Gloucesterchire Old Spot (GOS), those are the wrong breed for the wrong time. There is a dearth of integrity in large scale food operations. It depends on how intensely they are raised and what they are fed. There are many variables to lamb, beef, tomatoes, broccoli...anything and everything that is grown/raised.
  6. Probably a $200 turnip with gold leaf and dairy-free cole slaw for New Year's Eve. Apple sauce for dessert. Maybe they will have their barely paid interns bicycle citrus up from Florida.
  7. As if shipping lemons, asparagus and grains from the other side of planet has few environmental consequences for the planet. Not all meat is raised equally and Epicurious would better serve their readership by advocating consumption of less beef and promoting beef that is not raised in CAFO's. If the top brass at Epicurious can not see the daylight between feedlot and pastured beef, they are just as worthless as a fashion editor who lauds the comfort of shoes made by slave labor. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/27/991247520/epicurious-ditches-beef-in-a-move-it-calls-pro-planet
  8. At the supple, puberty tickled age of 13, I had a glorious lunch with my father in Paris and the server was wearing an open-cup bra that exquisitely propped her perky crimson nipples and lambskin-soft breasts against a sinister veil of white polyester. As I matured, I hoped it was linen. It was one of the greatest dining experiences of my life. I had peach Melba for dessert and a priapism that lasted for days.
  9. News and Media link does not work and does not appear on the main page unless one is logged in..
  10. Unfortunately most small markets and retail shops are prepared for this type of business model where the clientele is being asked to avoid public spaces and items are not ordered in person. Butcher shops and farmer’s market stands for example don’t have an endless inventory and what appears on the white board in the morning might very well be depleted by afternoon. Restaurants or stores that make prepared food can’t reliably advertise how many orders they have of something until they are made and farmers generally don’t know exact quantities of what they have until it is harvested a few days before sale. Constant updating is not a great use of time and often leads to confusion if someone sees items in the morning but they aren’t there later or vice versa. Large retailers have the advantage of technology and programs dedicated to tracking inventory in real time and their products have much longer shelf lives. There aren’t many easy solutions that can replicate the ease of Amazon Prime for small retail. Anecdotally, our farm store was overwhelmed with online orders this past weekend and the process/time spent corresponding to confirm orders, items that we didn’t have enough of or were out of, coordinating pick-up times then calling to process credit card payments was impractical and excessive. This system for providing goods & services is new for everyone and customers need be patient given the unusual circumstances.
  11. The US makes it somewhat easy for Mom & Pop places to hang out their town-code permissible shingles but is not designed to take care of mom & pop places when the boom goes bust. Beyond Denmark being tiny and having a population that entirely supports a generous social safety net, the US is a tethered to a “survival of the richest” economic theory where "it could happen to me" reverence for the ultra-rich prevails. This should be the catalyst for mandating paid sick leave and other work/life benefits, but it won’t so long as the Senate represents a minority of the population, contempt for and misunderstanding of the role of government is rampant, tax revenue has fallen, greed is pervasive and too many Americans & their legislators are unwilling to accept or even consider that there is a more efficient and effective way to take care of the population. Those in the food service industry and agriculture have been exploited for decades. In 2002 I had to work 3 months in a restaurant with a hernia until I was covered by health insurance (health coverage should be the gov’t responsibility, not the employer’s, but that’s another thread) and the idea of paid sick days in a restaurant and most is a fantasy that would only outrage the colleagues who have to make up for the absence, like taking a vacation. I found it curious that Danny Meyer & Friends penned a compassionate opinion pleading the government the throw a life-saver to their industry which is content to otherwise offer the most spartan benefits allowed by law in fair weather. Marcus Samuelson was in the byline too and surely he could convince his immediate colleagues and nationwide contemporaries that demanding work/life benefits which are standard elsewhere would benefit the 20 million restaurant workers & agriculture workers they rely on, just as they do for everyone else in his native Sweden regardless of job title. Plenty of Mom & Pop’s are tragically and inevitably going to wither. If there is still a demand to eat out in 6 months, those who survived might recoil at the thought of expanding. In the interim, I hope the millions of people who feed themselves in isolation have (re)considered the merits of retail food stores and where that supply comes from. There is an infinite market for ingredients and my hope is that there is a modest shift towards smaller, independent specialty food and ingredient stores while keeping consolidation at bay. And the only way for smaller businesses to retain staff, survive and prosper is for the collective tax revenue to relieve them of the burden of providing fundamental benefits for the next hurricane, disease or whatever calamity.
  12. We had fried sugar toads at Eat the Rich. The sugar toads and sea robins (gurnard family) are similar to monkfish in that they don't have much in the way of pin-bones or ribs, just a cartilage spine, but the sugar toads taste more like monkfish than the sea robins do. Sugar toads have endearing eyes and the sea robins make croaking/barking noises so I am content to let them go, but the latter is a delicious bouillabaisse staple.
  13. I'm inclined to believe that they are not using real tamarins for "Tamarin glazed Angus short ribs" so they may take some liberties with ingredient authenticity. That menu (and many others) lets up dip our toes into the deep end of the "diver scallop" pool. I'll wager a bonafide Amish chicken that virtually of the scallops listed as "diver" were brought to the surface with a diesel powered dredge since less than 1% of commercial US scallops are actually caught by hand by underwater divers.
  14. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/nyregion/foie-gras-ban-nyc.html Under the self-righteous auspices of condemning animal cruelty, the NYC council voted to ban the sale of foie gras, an esoteric ingredient that is as unavailable to the majority of consumers as it is affordable or appealing. These same champions of animal rights however have no objection to CAFO beef (steers get sick from eating grain), CAFO pork (pigs raised on concrete and have their tails docked) or the benign CAFO broilers/egg layers (who have their beaks cut and never see the light of day) which make up the rest of the land meats available for consumption once the foie gras gluttons have been gorged.
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  15. Maybe you were getting birds raised in Lancaster by Amish (I can't guarantee otherwise). It is a long drive to Brooklyn for slaughter and then back to DC/VA to sell. An unlikely scenario since there are slaughterhouses in PA, but not impossible. You could always contact Bobo directly and satisfy (y)our curiosity.
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