Energy from food waste

There seems to be a minitrend that I hope is as good as it sounds. Some food companies are exploring ways to take the waste that's produced in the course of their manufacturing and convert it to energy.

A recent such announcement comes from the Philadelphia Cream Cheese division of Kraft. Two of their plants in upstate New York plan to convert the whey (a byproduct of cheesemaking) into biogas, thus reducing their gas energy purchases by about one-third.

Another food company looking for similar solutions is Heinz. At their production facility in Oregon, there are plans to produce biofuels from potato peels.

If they joined forces, they might also have a fine potato chowder.

Flavor trends

Every year for nearly 10 years, the McCormick spice company has polled chefs, food technologists and trend watchers to come up with predictions for the top 10 flavor pairings for the upcoming year.

Here's their list for 2009:

· Toasted sesame + root beer
· Cayenne + tart cherry
· Tarragon + beet
· Peppercorn mélange + sake
· Chinese five-spice and artisan-cured pork
· Dill + avocado oil:
· Rosemary + fruit preserves
· Garam masala + pepitas (pumpkin seeds)
· Mint + quinoa:
· Smoked paprika + agave nectar

Wild and crazy apples

A couple of weeks ago I got a small box of apples in the mail from Melissa's Produce (great place). I thought that the person who had sent me the apples might possibly have lost his mind. Why would you send 5 apples in the mail??

Well, then I took a bite. Of course you already have the punchline to this story because you can see a picture of the apple at left. But imagine my surprise when I bit into a perfectly normal apple and found red flesh on the inside.

The apple is called Hidden Rose and it's an apple that is grown organically in Oregon. It's a hybrid of an heirloom and a common variety of apple and currently the orchard only produces about 800 apples a year. But keep an eye out for these apples, because they could potentially be hitting the market in a couple of years.

There are also a number of European efforts to make red-fleshed apples. Check out the Swiss apples at Next Fruit Generation.

Panko has gone mainstream

Panko (in case you don't know what it is) is the Japanese word for bread crumbs, borrowing from the romance-language word for bread (pain in French, pane in Italian, pan in Spanish). The Japanese use panko to make extra-crispy coatings on dishes like tonkatsu (pan-fried pork cutlets).

Several years ago panko was discovered by American chefs, who liked the extra-crispy nature of panko (which I will attempt to explain below). This eventually inspired home cooks to do the same.

Until quite recently it was a bit of a treasure hunt to find panko in stores, but now Progresso offers two different styles of panko, plain and (of course) Italian-style. Because of Progresso's national presence in supermarkets, it should now be easy to get this once esoteric ingredient.

The How of Panko
As I was musing about writing this blog entry, I thought it would be a good idea to explain why panko is so incredibly crispy. So I studied a Japanese website to see if I could figure out how they make it. As near as I could figure out (everything was in Japanese), panko is made by baking a crustless bread. The bread then has the moisture vacuumed out of it in a big chamber (I think it's similar to freeze-drying, but without the cold). Then huge rotating saw teeth cut the bread into what are essentially shards, not crumbs, which then get aerated. The end result is a crumb that will not absorb oil, which leaves a fried coating light and crisp instead of oily.

In my effort to understand the Japanese site, I took a portion of the text and put it into translation software. I thought I would share the result, because it's funny: "The many air bubbles (air) having entered in the bread crumbs, the fire sort, rises in order to perform the function of heat insulation slowly tastily. The bread crumbs are made shattering the pan." Get it?

Eat local

I'm so happy about the recent groundswell of interest in eating food that's been grown locally. It has a threefold impact on our lives: 1) the food you buy will be fresher because it's picked closer to actual ripeness and has to travel shorter distances to get to market, 2) because it travels a shorter distance there is less fuel expended to get the food to you, and 3) it helps support local farmers.

So here is a cool little tool to help you if you decide to jump on this bandwagon. A website called Local Harvest has an interactive map of the United States with local farms and farmer's markets (plus other food sources such as CSAs and online stores). There is a Search that lets you plug in an ingredient and then a zip code, city or state. When I plugged in Strawberries and Nevada, I got 14 matches.

Keep in mind that the map relies on the individual farmer's markets and other food vendors for the information in the map, so there may possibly be some inaccuracies. For example, it told me that I could buy artichokes at a farmer's market in New Jersey. My guess is that if they have them, they come from California, so not local. But who knows, maybe there is an enterprising farmer in New Jersey who has decided to grow artichokes. That would be cool.

Blender drinks are all the rage

In case you haven't heard, blender drinks are fashionable again. I'm sure this comes as a surprise to many of you out there who never gave up on blender drinks. But I'll bet you're still working with your old blender....the one you got as a wedding present.

Well, do I have a blender for you. Hamilton Beach recently introduced their Dual Wave™ blender, which has an amazing feature: It has two motors. What this means is that you can choose either to use it with two smaller, single-serving (16-ounce) blender jars, or with one giant 80-ounce pitcher, which sits over both motors. This gives you the option of using the small jars--which are also travel mugs, by the way--to make individual smoothies or the large jar to make big batches of frozen drinks for a party.

The large party-sized jar also has a spigot so it can double as a dispenser. (Just think of the horrible mess you make as you pour people's drinks straight out of a traditional blender jar.) What's more, if the drink you've made starts to separate, you can quickly reblend it because the jar is still in place over the motors.

The stainless steel version (shown here) has a 1000-watt motor and retails for about $70; it also comes in black. A nice bonus: The little single-serving jars store inside the large party pitcher.

Now, what to put in the blender? Hamilton Beach has kindly provided some ideas on their website. They have regulation frozen drinks (margaritas, et.al.) and smoothies, but they also have a number of ice cream-based drinks with intriguing names like Crash a Van with Cow Juice or Fuzzy Chicago Bottom.

uWink

What would you get if you crossed an Atari video game with a restaurant? Well, first you would get Chuck E. Cheese for kids, and then uWink for adults.

The former CEO of both Atari and Chuck E. Cheese now has a Los Angeles-based digital entertainment company that develops interactive software for restaurants (and bars). At a uWink restaurant, touch screens sit at every diner's place. The screens are used to order food (with the orders going straight to the kitchen) and also offer interactive games.

The two existing branches of uWink are both in L.A. The rest of us will have to wait and see if a video-game-oriented restaurant has mass appeal. My personal guess is that if the game features are that appealing, the customers may never go home.

Dining in the dark

I was reading the other day about a restaurant in Montreal called O.Noir where the wait staff are all legally blind. When you enter the restaurant there are no lights, and you order and eat in the dark (the name of the restaurant is a verbal play on the French words au noir, which mean in the dark).

The mission of the restaurant is to promote an understanding of what it is to live life as a blind person as well as provide employment for the blind. The side effect is that without the sense of sight, your senses of smell and taste are heightened.*

The idea of dining in the dark got me to thinking and I eventually found myself looking for cutlery that lights up. I found a number of sites--Who knew there was such a need?--including We Glow Ware at the Virginia Toy Company. The We Glow Ware is actually fork, knife and spoon tops that fit onto glow sticks, so the glow is temporary, but you can change it up for each party you throw. Like red and green for Christmas, or blue and white for Chanukah.

I also found flashing beer mugs, but I'll bet that's more interesting to a college kid who has had just enough beer that the flashing is amusing instead of intensely irritating.

*If you're a C.S.I. (Las Vegas) fan, you will have seen a recent episode all about the dining in the dark trend. (For any fanatics out there, it was Episode 2, Season 8 and was called "A La Cart.")