COCHON 555 - “5 Pigs, 5 Chefs, 5 Winemakers”

Yeah. That's right.

And I'm going, thanks to Foodbuzz.

Cochon 555 brings together a group of top San Francisco chefs, who will each prepare a heritage breed hog from head to toe for this competition. Cochon 555 is the only national chef competition promoting heritage pigs and breed diversity. Guests and professional judges will determine a winner based on utilization, presentation and overall best flavor. The winner will be crowned the “Prince of Porc”. Yeah, that's right. In addition, five family-owned wineries will showcase their wines. I think I will be leaving fat and happy.

Couchon 555 started in Atlanta and is now national in scope. Other cities that have participated are New York City, Seattle, and Chicago. This time, the chefs from SF are:

Ravi Kapur, Boulevard
Ryan Farr, 4505 Meats
Nate Appleman, A16/ SPQR
Staffan Terje, Perbacco
Peter McNee, Poggio Trattoria

Could you have a better round up? Anyways, I'm pretty excited about it. And you should be too! As I'll be writing about it, taking pictures of it, and sharing it with you!

Stay tuned!

Avedano's Meat Market; Local People, Local Food

I first read about Avedano's Meat Market in Meatpaper, issue one, I was not only excited about the local people, local food moto, but also, the feminist in me was incredibly proud that three women were hacking apart cows and bringing us Kobe beef steaks. For about a year, I had had the intention of visiting their meet shop in Bernal Heights and I finally did visit the small shop on Cortland Ave last week. At first, I saw many of the staples of local and humanly raised meets, such as Rosie's Chicken, as well as wild Alaskan salmon (the only type of salmon you want to eat), but then, looking closer in the smaller coolers, I was happy to find chicken and pig feet as well as some animal insides not consumed by the average Safeway shopper.

Also, and probably most importantly, the staff was friendly and knowledgeable. They engaged us in conversation about their store, about the meats they had, and enjoyed making jokes about the over sized, plush t-bone steak pillows/toys they had for sale as well. It was fun and tasty; you should visit.

The Slow Food Taste Pavilions: a Glutonous Display of Food

One of the other events I participated in during Slow Food Nation was the Taste Pavilions. My ticket for this event was a whopping $58 after getting a discount from the original $65 via the Whole Foods discount. When my friend Lora and I arrived at Fort Mason, where the Taste Pavilions were being held, however, we were taken aback by the abundant display of delicious foods and suddenly realized that our $58 was money well spent.

The organizers of Slow Food Nation convinced local architects to create designs to convert one of the Fort Mason warehouses into a series of food specific rooms or "pavilions" where visitors can taste and learn about artisan versions of their favorite foods. Taste wise, my favorite of all of the pavilions was, by far, the ice cream pavilion. There were two "flights" of ice cream scoops, and I chose the Dark Chocolate, Olive Oil, and Fresh Blueberry flight, which was most definitely the best of the flights. The chocolate was creaming and wonderfully flavorful, the olive oil subtlety sweet and extra creamy with the fat of the oil, and the blueberry actually tasted like blueberries--what a concept!

My other favorite pavilions were the Olive Oil, Chocolate, Fish, and Wine, each for different reasons. The Olive Oil pavilion was in my opinion the best designed of the pavilions: the designers used everyday construction materials such as orange netting, raw wood, and crates to create a beautifully lit space that truly transported you away from the rest of the pavilions. More specifically, the front of the pavilion was occupied by a tasting station while the back of the space was equipped with an educational space where trained olive oil experts told about how to properly taste olive oil, which is a process reasonably similar to wine tasting, just involving smaller tastes (I mean, would you really want to drink a glass of olive oil in one sitting?). This pairing of spaces made it nice to go back to the tasting part of the pavilion so that you could taste each olive oil, knowing which undertones to look for. The chocolate pavilion was great because of the variety of tasting they gave you; it was also interesting how the flavors of each chocolate changed as you ate the other pieces, your taste pallet changing with each bite of chocolate. The wine pavilion, while not a wonderfully designed space, was wonderfully fun to go to with my friend Lora who can look at an absurdly long wine list and pick out the most expensive bottles to try, and boy, were some of them amazing. The fish was also a delicious stop for the creativity of each dish and was especially tasty after the disappointing charcuterie pavilion.

And so yes, the charcuterie was very disappointing. While the prosciutto we had was tasty, but it's pretty hard to have prosciutto not be tasty. We were also given beef jerky (really?) and something that resembled pate, but wasn't. Each were fine, but none had any wow factor. Charcuterie truly was a pavilion with so much potential (just off the top of my head, why no lardo?) that was totally not taken advantage of, while also in the midst of other pavilions that were totally pushing the envelop of their respective food products.

One of the most fun parts of the night, however, was are mistaken crashing of the employee party. After the official ending of the Taste Pavilions at 9, people congregated outside the event in front of the beer pavilion, and Lora and I thought it appropriate to join them. Eventually, it went on past 10 and a lot of people had left, and those remaining started to ask us which pavilion we had worked in. After enough people asked us, we realized we were in fact crashing the staff party, which was more than fine with the good natured foodies. The great part about the party was that all the beer, bread, and opened bottles of wine not used during the event were now being given out for free for all to take, which we might have taken advantage of just a bit.

Relating this back to the Slow Food movement as a whole, Slow Food is often criticized for being an exclusive or bougie movement; due to the expensive price of the ticket for the pavilions, this point is valid. While it was a wonderful experience to taste such delicious food, the polished designs of the pavilions, the high end food products, and the well dressed visitors seemed a little removed from some of the movement's "roots". On the other hand, having such a celebration of food brings delicious food and the necessary steps to obtain this food (good, clean, fair being the moto of the slow food movement) to the attention of a greater public than it would have otherwise. In this manner, it is great that it is more prevelent to be a conscientious food consumer but I would agree with one of the speakers I saw in a panel during the weekend (which will be the subject of my next posting) who said that one of the greatest obstacles to the movement is fashion. As fashions change and flux, we do not want the slow food movement to be a fad that will simply pass with time.

Also, I should mention that Alice Waters was there. She signed my ticket. Swoon.

Pizza three tasty ways and one not so tasty block mildly resembling pizza

Last week, I had some friends over for a pizza dinner. One friend brought over two large balls of dough, which we split into four to make four pizzas. I had three strong ideas for toppings based on ingredients I had gotten at the Farmer's Market the previous Saturday and was hoping the fourth idea would come to me while cooking (as you might be able to guess from the title of this post, it didn't really succeed).I started off with the ingredient about which I was most excited: the squash blossoms. I wanted to experiment a little with the blooms before the following weekend where I was going to be frying them for a dish (to be written about in the next post). I have had the truffled squash blossom flatbread from COCO 500 twice now, and I really like the rich truffle taste coupled with the delicate squash blossoms, and wanted to play with that a little. I had some leftover white truffle oil, which I mixed with the four cheese cheese mix before spreading it on top of the pizza (a suggestion of my friend Rebecca whose father used to make pizzas every Sunday while she was growing up), which serves to moisten the cheese and blend the flavors together. I spread this cheese across the pizza the place the squash blossoms on the pizza, with petals facing in, and then added lines of ricotta in between. While the dough was sort of on odd shape, I really like the ingredient layout.I then went on to make a pizza with some prosciutto I had bought at Bocallone. I wanted to play off the idea of eggs and bacon, so my idea was to have a pizza with prosciutto and fry an egg on top of the pizza in the middle of its being in the oven. I really do love fried eggs on pizza as it is not only a totally interesting and unusual presentation, but the taste of warm egg yolk as it freshly bursts across the pizza is quite detectable.The third pizza idea I had was a basic marguerite, which I made with fresh basil with roots (a week and a half after buying the basil, it's still fresh!) and some heirloom tomatoes.By the time, I had finished these three pizzas I had hoped a flash of brilliance would have come to me, which unfortunately it didn't. The best I could think of was five cheese pizza. The basic cheese I had been using was already using was a three cheese mix to which I then added parm and a hard goat cheese. At this point, the dough had gotten quite warm, and the pizza had been hard to role out completely, so I knew it was going to be a little thick. The result, however, was a block like pizza that look horribly unappetizing to me and all but one of the people there.He took it home.

Summer Feast: A Gastronomically Gluttonous Meating

This past Sunday night, I had the gastronomic pleasure of attending the Summer Feast, co hosted by Meatpaper and Gastronomica. And what a bloody feast it was! Bloody in two senses: when I first arrived, around 6:30 pm, at Perbacco, the restaurant was packed and buzzing with food consuming activity; my instinct to compete for food against my fellow humans kicked in and the four of us that came together strategically divided in order to help the rest of the pack get the the most diverse food and drink samplings. And bloody in that some of the dishes incorporated blood in a way I had not tasted: pig's blood sausage and pig's blood chocolate pudding with pistachio mascarpone topping.

After much glutenous consumption, my three most favorite tastes were the bacon, pistachio marshmallows, the blood pudding--both prepared by Perbacco--and the chopped liver from Serpentine. The bacon/pistachio marshmallow had a sweet and fluffy initial bite that was quickly follow up by the crunch and salt of the bacon and the fatty sweetness of the nuts. The blood pudding was just cool to me because it had been made from, well, blood and it's nice to know that you are using the most of the animal as you can. And I also just love liver. It's the anemic in me, really.

Anyways, here are some photographs from the event; the first is an image of the marshmallows, the second and third are images of the chocolate blood pudding, and the final a picture of three bites from Perbacco, the upper right of which is the blood sausage:

Boccalone's $9 Sandwich, so worth every penny...

I had heard from a few friends about Boccalone's $9 sandwich, and how amazing it was. I had even come close to buying it a few times, but hesitated twice, not wanting to fork over the cash. On the third time, however, I obliged my desire to spend too much money on a gourmet sandwich. And boy, was it worth it. The sandwich consists of peach slices, delicious Boccolone prosciutto, salt, pepper, olive oil, and fresh mint leaves on top of some very fresh, tasty bread. The prosciutto was especially smooth and deliciously salty, which brought out the sweet acidity of the peaches. The final taste of the sandwich was the sweet mint, which added a great complexity to each bight in which mint made its way. I had this sandwich for dinner, and while it was probably one of the best sandwiches I've ever had, I was a little hungry at the end and probably would say was best as a hearty lunch sandwich.

Boccalone just opened a new stall in the Ferry Terminal Market, replacing Capay Bay I believe, and has a mission of combining sustainable raised, heritage-breed pork with the freshest of ingredients to make the tastiest of meat products. In 2005, Boccalone started producing salumi, fresh sausages, and cooked products such as pate out of an Oakland facility that was once home to Moniz, a Portuguese sausage factory originally founded in 1900. In any case, their new store in the Ferry Terminal sells a host of delicious products, so you should visit, if not for the prosciutto and peach sandwich, at least to see what Lardo, cured pig fat, looks like.