PETA’s Euthanasia Rates Have Critics Fuming

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After recieving 50 applicants from all over the US and Canada I have made my final decisions on the 2 stages for this years head to tail dinner at Incanto. This was not an easy decision since there were so many great applicants with great essays and resumes. But there can only be 2 people there is only so much room in our kitchen. Thank you all for your interest in being a part of this annual event just because you didnt get it this time dosent mean you wont get it next year.

Below are the winners names and essays:

Michael Hudman chef/partner of Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen in Memphis Tennessee

Hello Chef, my name is Michael Hudman, chef and  co-owner of Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen in Memphis, TN.  I could tell you all about me and where I have worked in the past, but the main thing is I am very passionate about food and especially about nose to tail.  Two years ago I opened my  restaurant with my long time friend and business partner.  We concentrate on bringing the best product we can to our customers.  We are constantly trying to learn more and more everyday.  When I first came across the offal good web site, it blew me away.  There are not many restaurants or books that work offal ingredients or techniques.  We have done a lot of trial and ERROR with offal, your web site has helped us improve. Last year we closed the restaurant down for a week and made a trip out to San Francisco and Napa.  We ate at Incanto twice, the second time we did the Il Quinto Quarto menu and the dinner just stuck with me. (You even waited on a taxi cab for an hour with us, Thanks) It reminded me of the food my grandmother told me about as a kid and the food that we experienced in Italy while in school. At my restaurant we do a Nose to Tail dinner all with Newman Farm pork .  We love pork and  use it as much as we can, we are working on our charcuterie every day. Speaking of, I saw that y’all are making nduja, we  have not had that since we were in Calabria. We are excited about tasting it next time we are in California.  You have definitely inspired me to use more offal and push myself as a cook. It would be an honor to learn from you, thank you for your time and I hope to be able to help you and your staff on this year Nose to Tail dinner.

Jonah Resnick  a line cook from Blackbird in Chicago

Cooking and working in a kitchen is a non-stop opportunity to learn and improve techniques on a daily basis. To have the chance to work in your kitchen for a week prepping and cooking the Head to Tail dinner would be one of those times where learning new techniques from you and your crew would be an honor. Eating and cooking offal and whole animal butchery is a passion of mine that I look to improve and get inspired by new ideas whenever the opportunity presents itself through other chefs, books, recipes, and blogs. I have worked in well-respected kitchens in both New York and Chicago so working long hours in the kitchen is nothing new for me. You would not have to be concerned with “baby sitting” me during the week. I would love the opportunity to do whatever was needed of me just keeping my eyes open learning the way you execute the Head to Tail dinner from start to finish. I currently work at Blackbird in Chicago where we focus on locally sourced produce and meats and turning them into upscale dishes. I have been there for a year and a half and have worked my way through all of the stations and continue to improve, learn, and help with menu development. Working for Paul Kahan and Chef de Cuisine Mike Sheerin has had a profound impact on me as a cook, as well as a chef, and I will carry the techniques, ideas, and philosophies on food with me for the duration of my career. However, I believe that traveling, eating, and experiencing other parts of the country and world is an invaluable part of becoming a well-rounded chef and cook. I was lucky enough to travel to San Francisco over the summer and experience the local food culture all over the Bay Area. I was blown away by places like the Ferry Building and the farmers market there, the produce, meat, and seafood available in one place blew my mind. While I was visiting the Bay Area I was lucky enough to eat dinner at Incanto and actually speak to you while eating at the bar. I had a wonderful meal there and really loved what you and your cooks were doing with food. Once I read that there was a chance to come there and cook the Head to Tail dinner I immediately jumped at the opportunity. That being said, please consider me for one of the two available positions to stage during the Head to Tail dinner. You will not be disappointed by my dedication and ability in the kitchen.

To have a shot of aquavit at 11am in the morning is not how I like to start my day,  but when David Arnold called and asked me to do this shoot I jumped at the chance.His thought is you can learn a lot about a person from their skoal. Read below to learn about Skoal. Or go to Cooking Issues Website to see more Skoal photos and get the full treatment.

Skål: a Scandinavian toast.

Aquavit (Akvavit): A Scandinavian distilled liquor usually flavored with caraway.

Skål/Skoal project: Discovering something of people’s nature by how they handle the ritual of the Skål. It all started with a 1967 photo of Swedish actor Max von Sydow. Now we aim to collect hundreds of skoals. We’ll post more weekly.

For more info, including the history and purpose of the project, tips on skåling, and Nils’ recommendations on how to be an authentic Swede, see here.

The original: Max Von Sydow, 1967:

You can find a list of celebrities that we are dying to skål on our WANTED! page.

Here is OUR library of skåls:

Flying across the country to skoal Merle Haggard gave us a good excuse to have some San Francisco chefs, writers, and culinary friends pose for a skoal shot. Dave, Nastassia, Harold McGee, Flo McGee (Harold’s daughter) and the official Road Skoal Photographer, Travis Huggett, gassed up, fed parking meters, and drove circles around San Francisco with a cooler of cold Aquavit in pursuit of one thing: spreading the skoal to the Bay Area.

Straw man

A barnyard staple takes a surprising turn in the kitchen.

By Daniel Patterson, Photograph by Amy Herold

It’s difficult to think of a product more symbolic of agrarian life than hay. As someone who has spent a fair amount of time tromping around farms, I’ve seen quite a bit of it—in barns, bundled in fields, used in displays—but I’d never thought of hay as a culinary ingre dient. Until now.

Hay is one of the most exciting and unexpected additions to my pantry in recent memory. It’s not a new idea, though: Hay has been used for centuries in French and Italian cooking, where large cuts of meat are buried in it and roasted either in the oven or in the dying embers of a fire.

In this country, hay has traditionally played a supporting role. The hay-box cooker has been used for more than 100 years, particularly during World War II as a way to conserve energy. The technology is simple: Bring a covered pot—preferably heavy metal or ceramic—full of food and liquid to a hard boil, then transfer it to a box packed with hay and cover it. The hay keeps the heat in the pot, so in four to eight hours, the stew will be cooked, sans fossil fuels.

From a practical standpoint, hay makes a great cooking medium, keeping heat in and diffusing temperature changes. But it’s the flavor that makes hay an extraordinary ingredient to work with. The taste is sweet and herbaceous, and the aroma is incredible, evocative of farms, pastures, and spaces vast and green and far removed from the city.

The idea came from a conversation with my sous-chef. We were trying to find a new way to cook carrots, and he recalled working in a restaurant in France where the chef cooked pork with consommé and hay for hours at a low temperature, until the meat was tender and the broth an elixir. It seemed like roasting carrots in hay would yield similarly delicious results, so the next weekend at the farmers’ market, I found myself shoving a gigantic bale of hay into the backseat of my car.

Back at the restaurant, we used the hay to made a stock. We burned some of the ends first, to give the stock deeper flavor, then covered the hay with water and let it simmer for about an hour. We tossed in young carrots with olive oil and salt, then combined them with hay and a little hay stock in a heavy enameled-iron pot and cooked them for about 30 minutes at 300°F, until they emerged tender and aromatic. It’s a simple process that can be done with any root vegetable.

Hay has made occasional appearances on American menus over the years. Chris Cosentino, the chef at Incanto, recalls a dish offered years ago at Red Sage, in Washington, D.C., where leg of goat was covered with a mixture of hay and clay, then baked—another traditional European technique. Cosentino, who was inspired to buy his own hay, first used it to cook a whole leg of pork. His menu currently features rabbit braised in hay that he serves with nettles and carrots. “People love the flavor,” Cosentino says, “and the aroma is amazing. Every time we pull one out of the oven, you can smell it across the dining room. It’s intoxicating.”

There’s not much to know about cooking with hay. The easiest way to use it is to throw a little into a stew as it simmers, then remove it before serving. If you roast with it, you should first soak the hay in water, then lay it down as a thick bed for the meat or vege­tables. Burning the ends of the hay will give the dish subtle smokiness and depth. You can cover your main ingredient with the hay or not; adding a bit of liquid to the pot will ensure that it doesn’t burn. And if you’re considering eating the hay itself, I wouldn’t. The flavor is great, but unless you’re a farm animal, the texture leaves much to be desired.

Most farms and farm-supply stores carry hay, but because you’ll use it in direct contact with food, make sure it hasn’t been treated with chemical pesticides. And beware: Before you place your order, stake out some serious storage space. A bale of hay is enormous.

At Coi, we haven’t made much of a dent in our stash, which means that there will be hay on the menu for quite a while. So far, we’ve infused oil with hay and used it to confit suckling pig, reserving some of the oil to drizzle into the sauce. We’ve ground salt and hay together to make a crust for beets. We’ve infused it into onion soup, its presence magically transforming a standard flavor into something fascinating and delicious. Hay might not be the same workhorse in the kitchen that it is on the farm, but in my pantry, hay has found a comfortable second home.

CHRIS COSENTINO’S
Rabbit braised with hay
The chef at Incanto likes to poach baby carrots in the braising liquid to serve alongside the rabbit.

INGREDIENTS
2 2½- to 3-lb. rabbits, each divided into six pieces
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
½ cup flour
3 Tbsp. olive oil
1 onion, peeled and cut in half
1 carrot, peeled and cut in half
1 head fennel, cut in half
1 head garlic, cut in half
½ cup white wine
1 fresh bay leaf
1 handful of hay
2 qt. chicken stock

DIRECTIONS
1. Heat the oven to 250°F. Season rabbit pieces with salt and pepper, then dust lightly with flour.
2. In a Dutch oven, heat the oil over medium heat. Sear the rabbit pieces one or two at a time, taking care not to crowd the pan. When the pieces are golden brown, remove and set aside.
3. Add the vegetables and cook until they just begin to brown.
4. Add the wine, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and let cook until it’s reduced to about 2 tablespoons, occasionally scraping the bottom of the pan to loosen any browned bits.
5. Add the bay leaf and hay. Set the rabbit pieces on top of the hay, add the chicken stock, cover the pan, and braise in the oven until the rabbit is tender, about 1½ hours.
6. Transfer the rabbit pieces to a platter and serve warm.

Makes 6 servings

]]> http://www.offalgood.com/press/straw-man/feed 0 http://www.offalgood.com/photos/fermin-factory-tour http://www.offalgood.com/photos/fermin-factory-tour#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:04:12 +0000 Chris http://www.offalgood.com/?p=1144 Here is a slide show of my recent tour of the Fermin processing facility in Spain. This factory is like watching a ballet its so beautiful how everything is handled with such care.

F&W’s editor in chief  Dana Cowin challenges some of her favorite chefs, all masters of indulgent food, to create healthy recipes that even a sausage fetishist would lust after.

By Dana Cowin
Burgers. Fried chicken. French fries. Steak. On menus worthy of dozens of passionate reviews by bloggers and Yelpers, these are the dishes that generate the buzz. I love these foods. Love.

Some people will travel to France to eat at a Michelin three-star restaurant—and I’m not saying that I wouldn’t—but I’ve always been just as happy to travel anyplace I’m promised great fried chicken. In Manhattan, I’ve cracked the crust on the spicy Korean-style wings at Mad for Chicken on 32nd Street, and I’ve rhapsodized about the delicate version at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Perry St., where his son, Cedric, is chef; I’ve also gorged on splendid fried chicken all around Nashville. So it’s with tremendous respect for these marvelous dishes that, as editor-in-chief of F&W, I pose this challenge: Chefs, can you please lighten your food?
While dishes like fried chicken and their buttery or carb-loaded counterparts are super-popular and well-priced, I actually don’t want to eat three days’ worth of calories in one sitting. I’ve gradually lost a taste for too much of that kind of food, and I believe other people eventually will, too. Yes, most restaurants offer a green salad (which, depending on the dressing or mix-ins, still might not make Dr. Oz happy) or a simple vegetable side dish (which often comes with liberal amounts of cheese or pancetta, or both). And yes, there’s usually some kind of fish, but eating it generally feels like a compromise when everyone else at the table is poking their hand-cut, twice-fried chips into house-made ketchup and figuring out how to get their mouths around an unusually large lamb slider. Why can’t foods that are good for you be as cravable as the deep-fried, bacon-wrapped hot dog at Manhattan’s PDT?

One common reply to that question is that fat equals flavor. But what about Thai food? That’s got a lot of flavor—bitter, salty, sweet, sour—and, in general, relatively little fat (just look at Su-Mei Yu’s recipes). Or Japanese food: It’s clean, and its flavors are bright. But, of course, those aren’t iconic American cuisines, which brings us to the second-most-common answer: People yearn for the foods of their childhood, and for many Americans, that means the hot dogs and hamburgers their parents grilled on the Weber in the backyard. Still, I don’t buy it. My favorite fried chicken is the kind I ate at home growing up, but I’m not thinking about that when I reach for the fourth wing at Mad for Chicken. I want it because it tastes fantastic.

Can’t something taste sublime without a burdensome amount of fat and calories? To find out, I went to some of my favorite chefs, the ones who have a cult following for their super-indulgent dishes, and asked them to create recipes that even a sausage fetishist would lust after. What I discovered at first isn’t exactly breaking news, but I’ll share it here anyway: Chefs don’t have a particularly good sense of fat grams or calorie counts. One chef suggested a recipe for a ravioli stuffed with parsnip and bone marrow (bone marrow is mainly fat). But one lovable quality of chefs is that they’re creative and solution-oriented. After some back-and-forth, F&W senior editor Kate Heddings had gathered a collection of six healthy recipes with that wow factor.

“I think chowder is the way to go,” said chef Linton Hopkins of Restaurant Eugene and Holeman and Finch Public House in Atlanta. “The very word chowder makes your mouth water.” This from a guy who adorned the entry of Holeman and Finch with a custom-made glass curing case full of pig legs. He came up with two ways to get a chowder’s creamy consistency without fat: adding cubed potatoes and using buttermilk. In Chicago, the Publican’s Paul Kahan chose spelt flour as his secret weapon (spelt is a grain that’s high in protein and fiber) after watching Chris Bianco of Phoenix’s Pizzeria Bianco—”a yeast-and-flour genius,” says Kahan—make spelt bread. Kahan’s spelt focaccia topped with squash, kale and just a few shavings of nutty pecorino is so good, I’d eat it like a pizza or as an appetizer/side dish combination.

At Gautreau’s in New Orleans, Sue Zemanick cooks indulgent dishes, but in her off-hours, she has a distinctly lighter approach. And in fact, when I spoke to her, she was just coming off a 13-day cleanse, vowing to do it four times a year. That disparity was so extreme that I was particularly impressed she was able to retain the essence of the food at Gautreau’s when coming up with a lightened recipe for grilled pork tenderloin with vegetable curry. In place of coconut milk (one cup of which has 552 calories, 479 of them from fat), she chose coconut water (more often thought of as a drink than a cooking ingredient) and combined it with two tablespoons of full-fat sour cream to get that luscious feeling. It’s a trick the F&W Test Kitchen is sure to remember and use in the future.

What I discovered from this group of recipes, perhaps not surprisingly, was that these talented chefs could make amazing healthy food. And some of them even had healthy dishes on their menus. For a while, Laurent Tourondel, who serves incredible beef and addictive onion rings and popovers at 11 BLT Steak restaurants around the world, offered a Thai green mango–crab salad. Did customers like it? I asked him. “It didn’t move,” he replied. “When people go to a steak house, they want steak. I love the crab salad, but they want steak.” Chris Cosentino of San Francisco’s offal-centric Incanto, though, had a different experience: His sardines are hugely popular. But perhaps that’s because bony, whole-fishy, charred sardines fit into the offal-lover ethos.

And this is the crux of the dilemma. When a healthy recipe matches the mood of the restaurant, it works. But right now, at most of the popular foodie establishments in America, light foods don’t make sense. What we need is a new paradigm: hip, affordable restaurants with a great vibe that reinvent healthy food and make it as cravable as a cheeseburger. I believe that change will come eventually, but until then, I’m going to be picking out the stealthily healthy dishes at restaurants—and making these phenomenal recipes at home.

Roasted Sardines with Olives, Capers and Parsley
Recipe by Chris Cosentino

Chris Cosentino of San Francisco’s Incanto is known for his offal dishes but a hearty fish like sardine, served whole, can also appeal to the nose-to-tail crowd. Cosentino pan-fries the omega-3-rich fish with an exhilarating mix of olives, capers, lemon zest, parsley and chiles. To make this more of a main course, he prepares a crunchy salad of artichokes and sunchokes to eat alongside.

Pairing SuggestionFish rich in omega-3s go best with unoaked wines with few tannins. For Cosentino’s tangy roasted sardines, try pouring a bright New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, like the citrusy 2009 Brancott Marlborough, or a very light red, like the cherry-scented 2008 Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais-Villages.

Roasted Sardines with Olives, Capers and Parsley
TOTAL TIME: 45 MIN SERVINGS: 6
FAST HEALTHY STAFF FAVORITE
INGREDIENTS
1 lemon, halved, plus 1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest and 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
6 baby artichokes
3/4 pound sunchokes, scrubbed but not peeled
3 tablespoons canola oil
18 fresh sardines (about 2 ounces each), cleaned and scaled
Salt and freshly ground pepper
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
3/4 cup green olives, such as Cerignola, pitted and chopped
3 cups loosely packed flat-leaf parsley leaves
2 tablespoons chopped oregano
2 tablespoons capers, drained
2 serrano chiles, seeded and minced
4 cups baby arugula (4 ounces)
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
DIRECTIONS
Preheat the oven to 400°. Fill a large bowl with water and squeeze the lemon into it. Snap off the green outer leaves of the artichokes until you reach the yellow leaves. Cut off the top third of each artichoke. Using a mandoline or a food processor fitted with the slicing blade, thinly shave the artichokes. Add them to the lemon water. Shave the sunchokes into the lemon water.
In a very large ovenproof skillet, heat the canola oil until nearly smoking. Season the sardines lightly with salt and pepper and add them to the skillet. Cook for 3 minutes, then flip the sardines and add the garlic, olives, parsley, oregano, capers, chiles and lemon zest. Transfer the skillet to the oven and roast the sardines for about 5 minutes, or until cooked through.
Drain the artichokes and sunchokes and pat dry. Return them to the bowl and add the arugula, olive oil and lemon juice. Season lightly with salt and pepper. Transfer the sardines and salad to plates and serve.
NOTES
One Serving 330 cal, 22 gm fat, 3 gm sat fat, 17 gm carb, 3 gm fiber, 19 gm protein, 810 mg sodium.

After the break there is a “Letter from Incanto” explaining a little bit more about the changes from my buisness partner Mark Pastore.

A leg up A new decade at Incanto

By mark Pastore

About an hour ago we opened the doors for dinner service.  Just as we have for virtually every other non-Tuesday night for the past eight years.  But tonight is different. I’m especially excited about opening our doors tonight.  I thought you might like to know why.

We’ve entered a new year; a new decade.  With the passage of time, we’ve learned a great deal about ourselves: our perfections and imperfections, what inspires us, and what we want to be when we grow up. Now seemed as good a time as any to refresh Incanto’s physical space, refocus our energies on what we love most, and – hopefully – to refine our craft.

I’ve been meaning to write to you every day for the past week to share this exciting news. But for the past week has been chock-full of contractors, hard work, and very early days, as we were laboring to bring to you the new Incanto 2010. Every night, by the time I sat down to draft something, it was midnight or 1:00 a.m. and I hadn’t yet eaten dinner. Somehow, I kept falling asleep at the page.

So without further ado, here’s what’s new:

The Dining Room

You’ll notice some significant changes to the main dining room when you next visit, which we made with the generous assistance of our friends Jack Verdon and Peter Jenny atVerdon Jenny Architects. Our carpet had worn out (again) and so we have put down a new floor. It’s sleek and new and very hip. Made by craftsmen from right here in Noe Valley. Brown is the new black.

The brocaded drapes have come down. In their place are some fantastic photos, very large, very colorful (see above for one) taken by our good friend Lisa Hamilton.  As a bonus, the new photos hide heavy-duty acoustic panels to further dampen the noise of a busy dining room.  We’ve also hidden a few more panels around the dining room to help take the din out of dinner. If you’re curious, ask us and we’ll be happy to point them out. They’re pretty well hidden.

Our beautiful American cherry tabletops were starting to show some signs of wear, tear, and occasional knife-sawing along the edge.  We’ve refinished them with a matte finish and they look gorgeous.

Last, we’ve slightly reconfigured the layout of the dining room, including a modern walnut-and-leather banquette along the north wall of the dining room.  You’ll have to drop in to see exactly how it all comes together.

Shared Dining

One of the things we love to do is to provide you with a shared dining experience. Incanto 2010 nudges you more in this direction in several ways:  In addition to our ever-popular Whole Pig Dining and Leg of Beast Dining, we’ve added a new shared entrée: Ham in Hay. This is a whole ham, roasted in a crust of salt and fresh alfalfa hay, meant to be shared among eight to ten people. Please visit Information for more details about booking one of these dinners.

You’ll find more opportunities for sharing on our regular menu as well: the Boccalone antipasto platter is now offered in three sizes for any occasion: Piglet (for one), Sow (for two), and Boar (for three or four persons).  All of our pastas and risotti are now available in small and entrée sizes, also perfect for sharing in a multi-course dinner.

We’ve added two new tables in our front dining room that are perfect for a party of 8-10 persons to share one of our Legs (beef or pork). On those occasions when we don’t have these tables reserved for a large group, they will serve as a communal table, at which you will break bread shoulder-to-shoulder with your neighbors. Many of my fondest Italian dining memories took place at just such a table. We wanted to offer you the opportunity to create your own memories, in which dining can bring some unexpected and wonderful surprises.

Odds and Ends

New in the wine bar is a reclaimed slate chalkboard for “Odds & Ends”. For those of you who like to sit at the counter, you’ll have a front-row access to those dishes that, typically for availability reasons, don’t make it onto Incanto’s printed menu. We might only have three orders of something, so up it goes on the chalkboard.  Order it while it’s still there.  Tonight, for example we have “Head & Shoulders” and “Chilli & Bones”.

While we’re in the wine bar, we should also mention that we have also refined and extended Incanto’s beverage program.  In keeping with Incanto’s mission of showcasing the best in high-quality Italian wines across Italy, we have introduced a new featured bottle program that will enable us to delve more deeply into some of the hidden corners of Italy’s expansive wine-producing regions.  Our bound bottle list will continue to present the classics from Rome to points North.  The “Featured Bottle” list will be accessible – printed alongside the wines by the glass, not in the leather-bound list – and will showcase a group of wines centered around a particular region or related theme.  This abbreviated list will change every four to six weeks, while the bound list will change less frequently.

We are also pleased to open a window upon another current trend in Italy: artisan beermaking.  In the past few years, the quality of beermaking in Italy has risen to a world-class level. Like Italian wines, these beers go great with food.  Definitely worth a try.

The most important refinements may actually reside in the smallest details, which I haven’t mentioned here.  It’s time for me to head down to the dining room – and perhaps it’s best that you discover them for yourselves. Suffice to say that for the past few years, we’ve been listening to you, saving up ideas, and preparing for this moment. We hope you like the new Incanto and we hope to see you soon. Wishing you a healthy and prosperous 2010, from all of us at Incanto.

As you all know i have a long standing relationship with upper playground, and this is the final segment of our cooking art collaboration videos. Its perfect timing for the release, with valentines day being this weekend. I had the opportunity to work with n8vandyke, a great bay area artist with an honest interest in food. Take a look at the video below it was fun as always these guys have passion for their art like chefs do for their food.