Tag: food

Speed Breeding

Combining speed breeding with gene editing and other technologies is the best way to improve crops. We already have test fields with 3x yield. Getting another 2x would feed more than 20B people. They trick the crops into flowering early by using blue and red LED lights for 22 hours a day and keeping temperatures between 16 and 22 degrees Celsius. They can grow up to 6 generations of wheat, barley, chickpeas and canola in a year instead of only 1-2 crops each year using old farming methods.

Serious Eats

In 2006, when the biggest names on the internet still included MySpace and Geocities, a new site burst onto the scene that promised to be bookmarked by food nerds across cyberspace: Ed Levine — perhaps the ultimate food nerd — and his team of happy-go-lucky writers unleashed Serious Eats, and it was, in many ways, the “food blogger” trope made manifest. It didn’t take long before the site became a one-stop destination for the original deep-dive into In-n-Out’s secret menu; an exhaustive guide to Sri Lankan food on Staten Island; a column in which Levine grappled with dieting for 182 weeks; and 5000 words on perfecting chocolate chip cookies. (I interned, for free, and then freelanced for the website, though I try not to think about how little I was paid.) Now, Levine has released a new memoir and, to celebrate the site’s 12 (frequently cash-strapped) years in business, Grub Street talked to the culinary obsessives who toiled away in the site’s dumpling-strewn content mines during its earliest years.

Fermentation Lab

While playing around with MIT’s as-high-tech-as-possible controlled environment mini labs and other prototypes, she also created more stable, robust and practical models with parts anyone can find on Amazon. They’re meant more for restaurant kitchens like at the Standard East Village where she’s already making 2 that fit the needs of their food-and-beverage outlets. “There’s something fun and punk rock about building these things, not out of garbage but out of discarded things”. She also put in a commercial dough proofer that holds koji ferments—i.e., ingredients transformed by a bacteria typically used to make miso, soy sauce and sake—at just the right temperature and humidity level.

Sarashina Horii

Centuries-old Japanese buckwheat noodle restaurant Sarashina Horii — helmed by 9th-generation soba maker and owner Yoshinori Horii — will open at 45 East 20th St., near Park Avenue South in Flatiron this July. The menu will include more than 12 noodle dishes, both hot and cold, as well as appetizers and other entrees.

Barrow’s Tasting Room

I love ginger. I love fresh ginger, pickled ginger, ginger candy chews, ginger ale, and ginger tea. So it stands to reason that I will love something called Intense Ginger Liqueur. This intimate bar has over 150 spirits, where you can taste your way through flights, craft cocktails, or sweets made in collaboration with Blue Marble Ice Cream and Li-Lac Chocolates. I’m looking forward to trying ginger-spiked cocktails.

Breadless Sandwich?

But what about sandwiches which contain no bread-like thing at all? I stumbled on one the other day that tests our idea of what constitutes a sandwich. 969 NYC Coffee is a pleasant little Japanese café that specializes in coffee, matcha whipped as you watch, and onigiri (rice balls). Located on a side street, it has a yellow awning, a pleasant outdoor seating area with tables, and tight interior that looks like any other coffee bar, only instead of doughnuts and bagels, it serves rice balls. One particular form of rice balls caught my eye. In the glass case were 3 different ones labeled “sandwich”: pork, beef, and fish. The fish version ($6) had a standard slice of fried fish as its focus, with additional layers of scrambled egg, shredded and pickled carrots, creamy avocado, and mayonnaise. Above and below was a layer of sushi rice, and the whole thing was wrapped in laver, the dried seaweed known in Japanese as nori. The thing tasted agreeably mellow and squishy, and one thing about using rice instead of bread in a prepackaged sandwich: no stale bread!

Kong Sihk Tong

My greatest connections with memories with cha chaan tengs in Hong Kong is sitting down to plates of condensed milk “French” toast in the morning, preferably those with peanut butter. Those would be filled with a thick layer of the nutty condiment and drowned in condensed milk, a morning heart attack. As if that was not enough, many times a slice of butter would be placed on top and start melting as the toast was served.


The version of condensed milk & peanut butter toast ($1.95, above) here was comparably super healthy, with very small amounts of both between slightly toasted pieces of white bread. Light as a feather, and to be honest not nearly as satisfying.

Teranga

Everything on the menu—from black-eyed-pea salad to fonio, an ancient grain that Thiam imports from West Africa, to chicken marinated in lime, garlic, and thyme—is designed to pair with everything else. Drinks include ginger juice, bissap (a sweetened mint-hibiscus tea), and bouye, a traditional Senegalese shake made with a fruit called baobab.