The Times of London reports that Italian Minister of Agriculture Luca Zaia has dissolved the mozzarella di bufala campana consortium after a series of inspections revealed that “25 per cent of the cheese sold as buffalo mozzarella was fake because it contained 30 per cent cow milk.” Mozzarella di bufala, with its wonderfully funky water-buffalo-milk notes, is one of the main ingredients in some versions of margherita DOP pizza (although it’s not, as Alan Richman has wrongly stated, a required ingredient). It’s also frequently served raw as an appetizer, either on its own or with ham.

The Italian Ministry of Agriculture has a recent history of operating at the curious intersection of neofascism and culinary purism. Zaia’s “zero-tolerance policy” on food fraud became famous with his 2008 bust-up of cheating Brunello di Monalcino producers, which was hailed as a victory for consumers. But in a less-reported crackdown the following year, Zaia, a member of the extreme-right-wing Lega Nord—the political party that has advocated the seccession of Northern Italy—also instituted, with Berlusconi’s backing, a policy banning new “ethnic” restaurants from opening in certain northern Italian cities, including Lucca and Milan. It was a move that the left-wing newspaper La Stampa called “culinary ethnic cleansing.” Reporting on the policy, the Times of London quoted Lucca city spokesman Massimo Di Grazia as saying that “French restaurants would be allowed”; he was “unsure, though, about Sicilian cuisine. It is influenced by Arab cooking.” Continued the Times: “Asked if he had ever eaten a kebab, Mr Zaia said: ‘No—and I defy anyone to prove the contrary. I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I even refuse to eat pineapple.’” This, from the country’s Minister of Agriculture.

Sometime in 2001 or 2002, I recall meeting, and discussing pure-ingredient fervence with, Giorgio Alemanno, who was Italy’s Minister of Agriculture at the time (this was two Ministers ago). The man talked about wine with great passion. And like Zaia, he was also an absolute right-wing zealot. (more…)

“You have got to brine it,” said Andrea Van Der Heyden of Van Der Heyden Vineyards as she hulked over my monstrous 28¼-pound Heritage turkey (a beautiful find, as it was feasting on Zinfandel vines the day before). Clearly, Andrea, like many across America during this time of year, was going out of her way to help me overcome the pitfalls of dry turkey.

As she should.

But with “brine turkey” at #12 on Google Trends today, it’s clear that the turkey-brining craze has hit new levels this year. Is the Food Network driving this bus? Alton Brown (who comes up in the first page of hits) preaches it. Sara Moulton swears by it. Just like roasting your turkey with a wine-soaked piece of cheesecloth was last year, or basting your turkey with orange juice was a few years earlier, it seems as if every Thanksgiving seems to come out with a new line of tools, gadgets, and fool-proof plans for housewives all across America to jump all over like the fall fashion line so they don’t serve the notorious dry piece of poultry to their in-laws. This year, there was an entire section of my local grocery store dedicated to brining needles, brining bags, and other brining accessories.

Don’t get me wrong: brining works. (On why it works, I’m sure the Food Network is running Good Eats Turkey episodes left and right, but Serious Eats really nails it here.) But brining can’t save an overcooked bird. It also takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of space, and there are more important things to be worrying about before Thanksgiving Day (like making sure your fantasy football team is set for the shortened week).

In my case, brining the 28¼-pound turkey that I acquired from Andrea would have required, at the least: (1) a bathtub; (2) a time machine (more…)

Over the course of a road trip across America, I was lucky enough to spend plenty of interstate time with my friend Andrea Armeni. One of the things we discussed at length was the question of in what circumstances the search for culinary authenticity turns farcical.

Florence Fabricant, in a recent article, embodies a common attitude amongst American food writers when she reveals the results of an exhaustive search for the true recipe for bucatini all’amatriciana, one of Italy’s most beloved pasta dishes: “After half a dozen plates of it during a recent trip to Italy, one detail became clear: for any pasta all’amatriciana to be authentic, it must be made with guanciale—cured, unsmoked pig jowl.”

Although it would be a difficult hypothesis to test empirically, Andrea and I had the same immediate reaction to this statement—his from growing up in Italy, mine from living there for a while: in Italy, almost nobody would care in the least bit whether pasta all’amatriciana were “authentic.” (more…)

We may disagree about our favorite artists and musicians, but it’s relatively easy to agree that a particular color is blue, or that a particular note is C-sharp. They’re described by wavelengths and frequencies along a clearly defined spectrum. That’s why the technologies of visual and auditory reproduction—photo, video, audio—work so well, relatively speaking.

Worth a thousand words?

With taste and smell—the so-called “chemical” senses, which are more complex (humans have about 400 different types of olfactory receptors) and less well understood than the others, we don’t have the luxury of those points of reference. That’s why we so often resort to loose analogies—“tastes like chicken”—and it’s also why reproducing tastes and smells is so difficult (grape soda doesn’t taste much like grapes, and nobody’s yet synthesized a bottle of 1945 Pétrus—an activity that would surely yield tremendous profit).

To challenge this barrier, we resort to analogy. Coffee tastes like nuts and chocolate; Sauvignon Blanc smells like grapefruit and cat pee. In a Sauternes, you might sense the brine of the first green olive you tasted in Italy; in a Pedro Ximénez sherry, the viscous maple syrup that your grandmother once drizzled on your pancakes.

But how carefully are we really choosing these adjectives and analogies? (more…)

It’s one thing for a food writer to opine about which pizza style is his or her favorite—everybody seems to do it, whether in New York, New Haven, or Naples.

But it’s a breathtaking mistake for a seasoned food writer like Alan Richman, in his widely read new GQ evaluation of the top 25 pizzerias in America, first to completely misstate the definition of Italian DOC pizza; then to imply, without evidence, that the whole Italian population supports that misstated definition; and, finally, to use that misstated definition as the basis for a condemnation of the entire pizza culture in Italy. He writes:

“ITALIANS ARE WRONG. Not about cars or suits. About pizza, and they’re not entirely mistaken about that, only about crusts and buffalo-milk mozzarella…the Italians are proudest when they can substitute fresh mozzarella from the milk of buffaloes and label their pies Margherita DOC…In my opinion, buffalo mozzarella is pizza’s second-worst topping, exceeded only by whole anchovies… All that excess liquid has to go somewhere, which is why the bottom crust turns to mush, not that it was ever particularly crispy…this is why Italians need a knife and fork. This is why our pizzas are better than theirs.”

“The Italians are proudest” when they can substitute in buffalo-milk mozzarella and “label their pies Margherita DOC”?

The Italians aren’t wrong—Mr. Richman is, about just about everything. First of all, Margherita DOC doesn’t require buffalo-milk mozzarella. (more…)

The wine cultures of Spain and Italy are idealized. But much of the time, in real-life situations, their populations—whether it’s old men guzzling at midday or twentysomethings at night—actually favor beer.

Wine is still the thing to accompany a family dinner or elaborate restaurant meal in southern Europe, which is why their per-capita wine consumption remains higher than ours. But because Americans increasingly tend to order wine at bars, and Europeans generally don’t, this gap is closing rapidly. The US now beats Italy in total wine consumption.

In Italy, amongst young professionals, a far more popular nighttime endeavor than going to the sort of upmarket (or so-called “gastronomic”) restaurant where you’d order wine is getting a big group together at a pizzeria. And contrary to US stereotypes, the Italians actually almost never drink wine with pizza—it’s strictly beer (or Coca-Cola).

In most of Spain, it’s the cervecería—not the wine bar—that defines the nighttime casual-eating-with-groups culture, and there, draft beer (“caña,” typically poured in tiny glasses) is beautifully paired with what’s often eaten: raciones of fatty jamón iberico and sweet pan con tomate; marinated fish, garlicky shellfish, and vinegary vegetables; boiled octopus drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with paprika; or pinxtos/canapés (bites of food served on slices of baguette), which often come free with each round of drinks.

When Spanish or Italian beer comes fresh from the tap, its elegant taste profile can yield extraordinary pleasure. Mahou, Nastro Azzurro, Estrella Damm, Forst, and Cruzcampo may not be dissimilar from each other, but they’re all models of balance, clean, bright, and refreshingly bitter. They’re usually poured properly—allowing the head to collect into something creamy and dense—and, like dry Basque sidra, they’re well suited to the occasion, which is precisely what seems to have been lost in translation in America’s rapid adoption of wine as a cocktail.

Even at Spain’s expensive restaurants, beer is often offered as an apéritif (more…)

On culinary televangelism and the Parkerization of cuisine

In the introduction to his book La Cocina al Desnudo (roughly “The Kitchen Laid Bare”), the chef Santi Santamaría writes: “one of the greatest challenges faced by today’s chefs is to avoid becoming the court jesters of the snobs and the posh.”

One of the highlights of FENAVIN, Spain’s national wine fair, was a spirited hour-long debate on the status of Spanish cuisine between Mr. Santamaría (Santceloni, Racò de Can Fabes, EVO, Tierra; on the right end in the photo), one of Spain’s great culinary traditionalists, and José Carlos Capel (on the left end), a well-regarded food critic for El País who, generally speaking, embraces the avant-garde.

It was a debate to which Ferran Adrià, one of the pioneers of molecular gastronomy (the culinary movement to which Santamaría alternately refers as “cocina de la vanguardia,” “tecnoemocional,” and “cocina del laboratorio”), was surely invited—and didn’t come.

Perhaps Mr. Adrià felt no need to defend himself. In late April 2009, his restaurant, elBulli, was named the best in the world for the fourth year in a row in the annual survey of the World’s Top 50 restaurants, by the British Restaurant Magazine, while Santamaría is absent from the list entirely. Fellow molecular gastronomy houses The Fat Duck (UK), Noma (Denmark), Mugaritz (Spain), and El Celler de Can Roca (Spain) round out the rest of the top five. (The chefs of Noma and Mugaritz studied with Adrià.)

Santamaría, without being so immodest as to suggest that (more…)

Apparently Stephen Colbert was amused by our paper investigating whether people could taste the difference between pâté and dog food.

His conclusion was pretty funny.

As reported by Jerry Hirsch in today’s LA Times, my latest research article, co-authored with John Bohannon (the “Gonzo Scientist”) of Harvard University and Alexis Herschkowitsch of Fearless Critic Media, discusses the results of a blind tasting that we conducted of five puréed meat-based products. Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste (Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, P<0.05), subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food.

The article has just been posted as a working paper (pdf) with the American Association of Wine Economists.

The Fearless Critic Washington DC Area Restaurant Guide (Fearless Critic Media, 608 pages, paperback, $15.95, distributed by Workman) is now on its way to stores. The book reviews 500 restaurants in the greater DC area, including the Maryland and Virginia suburbs out to the Beltway.

You can pre-order the book on amazon.com, which should receive stock within the week. The book will soon arrive at DC area stores, including Politics & Prose, Kramerbooks, B&N, Borders, and Books a Million.

In putting together the book, I worked with a team of critics and editors that included Alexis Herschkowitsch, Erin McReynolds, Rebecca Markovits, Justine Chiou, Coco Krumme, Sandra Di Capua, and Christina Dahlman.