Posts Tagged → taste
seeing is…tasting?
I like to cook. In fact, about 42 years ago I was trained by Andy Zangrilli as a cook and chef, at his Highway Pizza and The Deli restaurants in State College. I am proud of this experience, because Andy took a doofus 18 year old kid and gave him (me) a valuable skill. To this very day, you can put me in a kitchen heretofore unknown to me, with a wide variety of ingredients, spices, herbs, whatever, and, assuming the kitchen has the necessary pots, pans, utensils, gas stove, etc, I will make you a meal that you will at the very least greatly enjoy, if not go crazy for. Spices are a big part of being able to impart certain flavors and nuances to anything we cook, boil, broil, simmer, etc., and thus an essential part of my cooking.
Thank you, Andy.
So as I still greatly enjoy cooking, spices are still my thing, and I use them liberally in almost every dish I make, sweet or savory. Several days ago I made an applesauce from our backyard’s sweet crabapples and granny smith apples. With very little sugar added, it needed something to keep its tartness from making people cry. And so some nutmeg and cinnamon were added, which made it “perfect” according to one shnarfling admirer. She could not stop eating it. Dad added a dollop of real maple syrup. Mom ate it straight.
Somehow over the past year or so, our home’s spice drawer has become ever more populated by bottles with odd, capricious, whimsical names. These names contrast like the Himalayas to the Appalachians, with the staid old “Paprika,” “Garlic Powder,” “Thyme,” “Rosemary,” “Basil” and so on. I do not recognize these things. Other than ketchup and pickle flavored spices, few of these newcomer spice bottle labels describe or even hint at what taste or flavor is expected from their contents.
Green Goddess? Is this a new superheroine? Everything but the Elote stumped me, because despite an A+ English vocabulary, I have no idea what an elote is. Which pisses me off and makes me think I don’t want to know. It must be useless. Aglio Olio? A spiced dry oil in a bottle…not OK, but rather weird and trying too hard to be different.
Multipurpose Umami sounds like a versatile American Indian tribe. And in my friend’s spice drawer in Denver last month, I encountered a huge number of similarly named mystery spices and flavorings that all emoted colors and activities, which in my 100% male brain do not connect to anything related to flavor or aroma. And in fact, it is his wife who has amassed this enormous collection of verbal creativity in a bottle.
I don’t think my friend uses anything but salt and pepper in his foods.
Most or even all of these appear to come from Trader Joe’s, that famous venue for posing, posturing, preening shoppers in tight yoga pants. And I think that is the ticket to understanding what is going on here with these weirdly mis-named bottles of flavorings: Girls/ women/ ladies/ female humans apparently are willing to have a fling with flavor. They are willing to just try something new and unexpected in their food experiences, because apparently the lack of rote routine meeting known expectations is stimulating.
Men, think about this.
Think hard.
If women are sprinkling a bottle called “Green Goddess” on their food, then what does that tell us about these women’s food experience? About how it makes them feel, like a goddess…
I am going to sign off here, stumped as I am. I confess, I am just a man; I can change, I suppose; if I have to (thank you to the Red Green Show).
Gotta go add some more of my home grown basil to the home grown tomato sauce I have simmering away on the stove right now. I know it will end up tasting delicious, because there is a nice linear straight-ass line from the basil to the flavor outcome. No mystery involved here, and I like it that way.
Mystery flavors in a bottle appeal to someone I am not, but I remain intrigued
I love the smell of brown sludge in the morning
When I get a snoot full of that brown sludge in the morning, it brings back warm memories. Doesn’t happen all the time. Not as often as I would like. The period for brown sludge is often almost over as soon as it begins, though when I was a kid at Stone Valley Lake, the period lasted for a good eight weeks.
Memories of cold mornings, even cold nights, sometimes lugging a sloshing bucket by headlamp, stumbling through the brush, tripping over vines and branches, picking bugs out of the buckets. Sometimes the bugs concentrate in the buckets, drawn by the smell, and the taste. Trying not to spill it, good God don’t spill it! And then the long nights. Yes, you might start in the daylight, but at six the next morning you were up all night, running for the bucket every ten minutes, tired out, cramping, sleepy.
You see, modern maple syrup is nothing like it was. It is now a victim of technology. Where maybe just five years ago maple syrup producers used fire to boil maple sap down, now they have reverse osmosis machines, and spectrometers and spectrographs that tell the syrup maker how concentrated the sap sugars are, and thus when to start and when to wait longer. When to keep adding to the huge coolers, and freezers, and when to begin condensing.
In the big maple syrup production outfits today, the sap collection is mechanized, run through a spider web of tubing across the sugar bush. The sap is pumped, and gathered in big tanks, then stilled, separated, distilled, purified, filtered over and over, sterilized and then jugged. This is maple syrup today. How it is created looks nothing like how it was made for the past 15,000 years until very recently.
And frankly, as a result of this industrial processing, it no longer tastes like maple syrup. It tastes bland.
Sure, you can try to buy the old Grade B dark brown maple syrup. You remember, surely, the maple syrup that puts the phrase “maple flavor” in maple syrup? You can try to buy it, and some sellers will try to sell it to you. And it will indeed look amber-ish, with a hint of brown. Now they will disclaim it, or add some caveats, or sheepishly try to explain that it is dark for maple syrup “these days,” but it is not quite like what you remember from just a half dozen years ago, let alone your childhood.
And you will taste it, this modern creation, and you will not taste maple syrup. Instead you will taste Maple Product.
Maple Product is the result of the industrialization of even hand-crafted specialties like maple syrup. It is mechanized, industrialized, and heavily filtered, and it has very little real taste. No rich taste, for sure, not the unique and authentic maple taste you came for in the first place.
That is why we have been making our own maple syrup. It started out really small, like when I was a kid using plastic milk jugs hung on string from hand- cut wood spiles. Maybe a couple cups of syrup, and it lasted one day. A treat from Mother Nature, the whole family enjoying it, gathered round like families have over nature’s bounty since time immemorial. A natural and innately healthy moment.
Then I ordered a bunch of old maple buckets with metal spiles, and boiled lots of sap on the stove top. That was a bad idea because the whole house steamed up and smelled vaguely of damp earth. The small amounts of sugar in the steam hardened to a clear armor on everything in the kitchen, and cleaning with water just made it sticky. Getting closer!
Then I ordered a stainless steel evaporator pan from a young guy in the Midwest. Couple hundred bucks and worth every penny. With a threaded spigot and a valve on the end, it can release as much boiled down sap as I want to take to the next stage of boiling. The only filtering we do is from the big sap collection tank in the back of the pickup, through an old cotton tee shirt, and some skimming in the evaporator. Bits of bark, the occasional rogue ant, “stuff” from inside the maple trees is all skimmed off. But what we do not do is filter out the taste.
We gently and carefully finish off the concentrated brown sap inside on the stove top, and then pour the finished syrup into old whisky bottles with cork stoppers. This is real maple syrup, and it is so rich tasting it knocks your socks off. This is what maple syrup used to taste like, and it is what maple syrup is supposed to taste like.
So when I hit the bottom of one of those old whisky bottles because the syrup was mostly poured out over pancakes or hot cereal, then all that remains is the thick brown sludge. This is the stuff you could make maple candy from. My son and I pour cold milk into the bottle, swill it around until the brown sludge has turned the milk brown and slightly viscous, and we heartily quaff it down.
You just can’t beat it.
p.s. sorry we make just enough for our own family use, and we do not sell it. But you can make your own, and because you worked so hard to make it, you will truly enjoy every drop, every molecule, every rich taste you take.