The $100 Pound Cake
There was a big brouhaha in Albany yesterday about one of our local bakeries. The short version is that a local baker was competing on Cupcake Wars and lost in the first round. She made a mistake in the heat of a nationally televised competition, under especially intense and arduous conditions. It could happen to anyone.
My guess is that had she won, people wouldn’t have cared so much about this baker talking trash about the other local bakeries. Or maybe they would have cared, but they would have been forced to let it go, since she proved to have the skills.
But that’s not how it played out.
I’m not a fan of the local cupcake shop that lost. But I’m not really a fan of cupcake shops in general. If I were going to profess a favorite, it would be Bake Me a Cake Next Door, although I have yet to try Fluffalicious. And really, there are so many places to get cupcakes in the region, it could take me a year of weekends to try them all.
The point I wanted to discuss today is actually not about cupcakes, our losing hometown bakery, or even the outpouring of animosity that surrounded the airing of the show, but rather what it takes to bake something that is truly remarkable. You know, to achieve a sufficient level within the craft of baking to claim some well-deserved bragging rights. And for that I need to tell you the story of the $100 pound cake.
Bread Salad
Could it be I’ve never written a dedicated post about Marcella Hazan’s panzanella salad? It seems impossible, especially since what you are reading right now is my 709th post. But the problem of having so much content is that one looses track of what’s been written.
There is a lot I like about WordPress, but the search function on the platform is terrible. I use Google to find things I know that I wrote some time in the past, and it tells me I’ve only used the word panzanella in five posts. Two of them are in stories about restaurants. In another I simply remark on the dish’s magnificence. There was the one last August when I explained why this was such a great way to enjoy fresh tomatoes:
I made yet another jumbo panzanella salad with obscene quantities of juicy tomatoes and plenty of dried-out bread to ensure not a single drop of precious tomato juice was wasted.
However, just one week after that post comes the final mention of the dish, when I confide, “I still love that panzanella, although honestly it is no longer feeling much like a special treat.”
Well, yesterday we got our first tomatoes of the season from our CSA. We were traveling when the first ones really came in. So with gorgeous tomatoes, sweet red peppers, and a cucumber fresh from Roxbury Farm, I knew it was finally time to revisit that summertime tradition that I once loved so dearly.
Let me tell you how it’s done.
Big Belly
Always call ahead. This lesson somehow never manages to sink in. Just recently at the end of my two-week vacation in rural Pennsylvania I drove forty minutes for a mango lassi only to find the restaurant had recently gone out of business.
And really the lesson should have been fresh in my mind, because I made a special trip before leaving for vacation to Adventure In Food Trading. I had grass fed skirt steak on the mind, but they were fresh out.
The skirt steak is an incredibly reasonable cut of meat to buy wholesale because it comes in easy-to-use two-pound packages, much like the grass fed flank steaks. It’s not like buying a thirty-two pound beef shoulder. If I came home with something like that, I’d be sleeping on the couch.
As it turns out, bringing home an eight-pound Berkshire pork belly wasn’t seen as so reasonable either. But after treating the family to an Albany-Jane-inspired dish, I’ve changed a few minds.
Tour de Fish Fry
There are a lot of places to get a Fish Fry in the Capital Region. Originally, this tour was scheduled for summer because I wanted to sample the seasonal Fish Fry joints that are closed for most of the year.
As it turns out, there aren’t a lot of them. Gene’s in Rensselaer seems to be the only seasonal Fish Fry joint. Sure, there are a lot of soft serve places that might make a mean Fish Fry, but in these cases it’s a secondary offering. And while it may make sense to visit these places, doing so before evaluating the regional Fish Fry giants seems unwise.
So this Saturday, August 13, I’m going to visit the majors. Regrettably, I will not be able to make it to them all. But I’ll hit five restaurants in two counties in under five hours. The objective is to sample this regional food from some of the area’s favorite purveyors, back to back to back to back to back, in an effort to learn more about it and ultimately determine who makes it best.
You are cordially invited to come along and join me and other FLB readers in this effort.
Bruised, Crushed and Pulverized
Summertime drinks are always a bit of a challenge.
On one hand, it’s hot and you are thirsty. This isn’t the time to fool around with your cocktail and engage in some kind of fancy-pants mixology. Pour some booze in a tall glass of ice, squeeze in some citrus, consider adding something sweet, and fill the glass with seltzer. In no time at all you’ve made a Tom Collins or any variety of Rickey.
On the other hand, summer is when all of nature’s bounty comes out of its slumber and is bursting with brilliant colors and flavors to add to your drink. Anything that grows in your garden or comes from a tree is fair game: cucumbers, basil, cilantro, berries, melons, stone fruits, fennel fronds, and even lavender.
However to get these things into your drink, it’s going to take a bit of work. And for the most part, you’ll need to both muddle and shake. Muddling has come up a bunch here in the past few weeks, so it’s high time to take it head on.
State College is Getting What?
Here’s a little lesson about Nielsen and their DMAs. They don’t always make a lot of sense. Take State College, Pennsylvania for example. Officially, they are part of the Johnstown-Altoona DMA, but in reality, it’s a separate entity. And as we already know, the Johnstown-Altoona DMA is significantly smaller than the great and mighty Albany-Schenectady-Troy DMA.
We have the capital of the great state of New York, universities, colleges, hospitals, General Electric, and emerging nanotechnology. State College is the home to Penn State. On its own, it’s a very small town. But I’ve been told that when there’s a football game, Joe Paterno stadium turns into the third largest city in Pennsylvania.
Still, it’s a tiny market. In the 2000 census State College itself has a population of about 40,000 and Centre County in which it resides has just over 135,000. Despite their diminutive size for the vast majority of the year, State College has a Wegman’s, and that’s fine. It’s been there for a while. I’ve visited. It’s a very nice store. Good for them.
But I happened to stumble into a bit of news that I found quite upsetting.
Factory Foods
I’m sick. Not just sick about what is happening to food. But I’m actually sick. I’ve got a nasty head cold, which is really hindering my efforts at exploring some of the hidden gems of rural Pennsylvania. I’m told there is a place in Johnstown that puts French fries right on the salad.
Maybe that doesn’t get everyone hot and bothered, but it’s right up my alley.
However, I did discover something here on this trip that was quite unexpected. And it came from quite an unexpected place: my mother-in-law’s church. You see, this is farm country. There are dairies, and fields of corn and soybeans visible from the roads. And you can bet your bottom dollar these aren’t organic corn and soybean operations.
In fact, I’ve had a very difficult time up until recently even finding milk with a pledge against the use of rBST around these parts. So imagine my surprise when the church ladies were telling me all about their preferences for organic eggs and grass-fed beef.
I’m still trying to piece together what it all means. But it calls into stark contrast some of the other news from the past week, which is a good reminder about the shenanigans of big agriculture. At least now I know that it’s not just us urban dwellers who are concerned with such things. And I take no small amount of comfort in that.
So, that’s the good news. For the bad news you might want to sit down.
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