The Mass Market Rejects Farmed Atlantic Salmon
I love food but I hate what’s been done to it. There are so many issues regarding food that I would like to help move forward. But in my mind, the low-hanging fruit has always been moving people away from farmed Atlantic salmon to wild Alaskan salmon.
The inhumanity of factory-farmed meat, the widespread and unlabeled use of GMOs in our food supply, and the persistent creep of chemicals into what we eat all seem too big and overwhelming to tackle.
But last week there was a significant development in the move away from farmed Atlantic salmon. Thank you, Albany Jane for bringing it to my attention. Target, the mass market retailer with over 1,700 stores in 49 states and over $60 billion in annual revenue, made a startling announcement.
Target Eliminates Farmed Salmon From All Target Stores.
Ask the Profussor – Für Elyse
It’s not so much that I abandoned writing the semi-regular Ask the Profussor posts, but there has been a lot going on, and I’ve had plenty of other things to talk about.
Luckily sometimes, someone asks such a good question, I need to stop and write an equally good answer. This time it was a new reader named Elyse. And while I’m doing that, I will also try and catch up on all the unanswered questions since the last installment of AskTP.
If for some reason after today your question remains unanswered, I assure you it was a terrible oversight. Please feel free to contact me directly or publicly chide me in the comments. Either way. I just want to make sure everyone’s questions get answered.
Without further ado, here is what Elyse had to say:
I am puzzled and disturbed by your love for Chipotle. Their sustainability model is excellent, but it doesn’t make up for the way their food tastes, or rather, doesn’t taste. It is totally bland. I’d expect higher standards of Mexican food from someone who spent some time in California! Did you forget what it’s supposed to taste like?
Good Wine Gone Bad
The restaurant wine ordering ritual is terribly misunderstood. And I think it causes a lot of needless anxiety for those unfamiliar with the custom. There are only two things the diner needs to do in this little dance. The first is to confirm that the bottle brought to the table is the bottle that was ordered. The second is to assess if the wine has gone bad.
You do not need to make a pronouncement on the vintage. You do not need to smell the cork. You do not need to expound on the bouquet and flavor profile of the wine.
There are some early telltale signs of a brewing problem inside the bottle. Wine streaks on the label, a brittle or moldy cork, or a brownish tinge to the color of the wine may indicate the wine was improperly stored. But ultimately it comes down to how the wine smells and how it tastes.
And here’s the problem. Too many people do not know corked wine when they taste it.
Rye, NY
New York is known for a lot of things. Rye whiskey probably is somewhere around page six, if it makes the list at all. Hopefully this will soon change.
While at the craft-distilled spirits tasting and seminar this past week, I got to try two fantastic rye whiskeys. One is made by Tuthilltown Spirits (a little to the south outside of Poughkeepsie), and the other is made by Finger Lakes Distilling (on the southeastern side of Seneca Lake).
While they are both blazing the trail of bringing craft distilling back to New York State, these two operations couldn’t be more different. I got to speak with each of the distillers, and they approach their whiskey from two opposing perspectives. Ralph Erenzo at Tuthilltown embraces the inconsistency of the batch system. Thomas Earl McKenzie at FLD believes in the importance of maintaining consistency from batch to batch.
And I have to say, when you reach the price point of Tuthilltown, inconsistency might be a bit hard to swallow. Their 375ml bottles, close to the size of a soda can, retail for about $45. That is the equivalent of a $90 bottle of booze. People buy them, and I understand why. But the FLD rye is magnificent and a steal at half the price.
Mr. McKenzie sent me home with a bottle of his rye, which has given me a lot more time and focus to evaluate it.
BurFREEtos
Today is free burrito day at Chipotle’s newest Capital Region location in Clifton Park. So you should pack your car full of family and friends and pick up some burFREEtos.
Officially you can get tacos, burrito bowls, fajita burritos, salads, chips, and sodas for free too. If you have never been, and perhaps thought it was just a tad too expensive for a fast-food chain, this is your chance to see what all the fuss is about.
It is no secret that I get very excited about Chipotle. When the store opened in Latham I was invited to a special tasting for the [cough] media. Who would ever have thunk that what I do is even remotely considered journalism. But afterwards I ran down the menu ingredient by ingredient and weighed in on their promise of “food with integrity”.
Incidentally, that post on the restaurant’s ingredients turned out to be my second-most-read post in 2009.
New York Distilled
The Profussor is a creature of habit. Cocktail posts are for Fridays. But today is special, because yesterday I attended a killer seminar and tasting that I’d like to talk about.
But first a legal disclaimer as may or may not be required by an act of federal legislation:
The event that follows was not open to the public. I was an invited, based on my past posts on cocktails and spirits. At the event I received fifteen (15) free samples of alcoholic libations, which were followed by light appetizers. I paid nothing to attend. In addition I was graciously given a one-liter bottle of LiV Potato Vodka, one 750 ml bottle of Finger Lakes Distilling McKenzie Rye Whiskey, and one 375 ml bottle of Long Island Spirits Sorbetta Lemon by their respective distillers.
I’m glad that that is out of the way. Now let’s begin.
My love of craft spirits is no secret. I have written extensively about my closest distillery, Harvest Spirits. And for me it has been one of the bright spots of living in this area.
Well, it turns out that New York is rife with micro distilleries.
Tossing 1,240,000 Pounds of Meat
Weekend news has a tendency to get overlooked. So here, in the calm clear air of a Monday morning, allow me to recap something that went down late Friday night and made the newspapers on Saturday.
An estimated one million two hundred forty thousand pounds of meat was recalled (or six hundred twenty tons, if you prefer). For those who may be following overseas, that translates to 562,000 kilograms.
We live in a world of big numbers. And sometimes those numbers are so overwhelmingly large that we do not stop and take stock of them. Here is a stab at trying to wrap some context around this volume of wasted animal life.
You ever go to a pig roast? Where they get a full size 200-pound hog? Do you remember how many people that fed, and how much was left over? Well, this amount of meat would be the equivalent of having a pig roast every day for over 17 years. By my rough calculations it is well over 6,000 hogs. It’s a travesty.
But even if you were carefully reading the papers, and think you are up to speed on the salmonella outbreak, you may have missed a few key pieces of information.
The Best Cheap Wine Store Ever
It has been over a month since I have written a Best Ever post. I checked.
For a moment I was a little concerned that I had been going to that well just a bit too often. Maybe that’s because yesterday I was at the Albany Soup Swap, for which I made The Most Delicious Split Pea Soup in the Known Universe. And while I suppose that’s not a “best ever” claim, the level of puffery is sufficiently similar.
So I am feeling OK about my title. Except in fact the best cheap wine store ever was a grocery store.
Maybe soon New Yorkers will be able to buy wine in grocery stores too. I wrote about that earlier this week on the Guilderland blog. It’s a local issue, so I’m not going to get into it here.
What I am going to do is talk all about the joys and challenges of cheap wine hunting.
The Manly Manhattan
Cocktails are emasculating. Just go and look at any cocktail menu at any bar that has such a thing. They are largely sweet and sticky things whose primary purpose is to cover up the taste of alcohol and make it more palatable to those with a more delicate constitution.
Sometimes they are pink, or bright green, or could be confused with a milkshake.
But not all cocktails are emasculating. James Bond for better or for worse drank the martini. Ernest Hemingway drank maybe one too many daiquiris. But the Manhattan is the only one known as the “drinking man’s cocktail.”
And it’s brown.
There is no sugared rim. No cloying liqueurs. There is no dusting with cocoa. No syrup swirls. It’s only whiskey, aromatized wine, bitters and perhaps a wee bit of garnish. It is a cocktail after all.
If you will be kind enough to indulge my sentimentality, I will share the memory of my first Manhattan. After yesterday’s heavy topic, it’s refreshing to think about college drinking.
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