On Heated with Bittman: Why Salt and Pepper Should Break Up
1.Salt and pepper are not always perfect together, our writer, Edward Schneider, attests. We need salt for flavor. But pepper?
Pepper is a spice, like cloves and cinnamon, which raises the question of whether you would use cloves or cinnamon in just about every dish you cooked.
2. Simple Cake cookbook author Odette Williams, whose book is an homage to her late father’s style of cooking, explores his greatest hits on Father’s Day.
As you know, a good grilled cheese can bring you to your knees — and Dad’s was killer. It was all in the quality of the ingredients and his attention to detail. He came from a family of bread bakers, so good bread was a non-negotiable. Occasionally he’d make his own damper, a traditional Australian soda bread baked over the coals of a campfire. He’d select the ripest tomato from the window sill and slice it thinly. And he’d never shy away from giving us kids a sharp, nutty cheese. He wasn’t fooled by the ’80s fad for margarine and opted for cold salty butter — always.
3. Mark talks to José Andrés about his new cookbook, Vegetables Unleashed, and naturally, the conversation turns to politics. From José:
We need presidents who are watching and listening and learning. But political discourse is so broken that instead of fighting for good food, we are almost fighting for democracy. That makes it harder to bring up important issues like how we are feeding America. It’s amazing how healthy we could be with farming that is more environmentally friendly and producing better food, too. It’s crazy, really crazy, to think that we don’t care about how we live or eat. And it’s not us, but our children who will pay the price. There’s a huge opportunity to talk about these things now.
4. Writer Andrea Strong looks at the uptick in student hunger on campus and explores what schools are doing about it.
“Many people make assumptions about whether or not food insecurity exists in their community, but we want to say directly — this exists here,” says Liz Vaughan, associate dean in the Division of Student Affairs at CMU. “And it should not exist here or anywhere. We need to be forthcoming about it and bring down any level of stigma or shame, and we feel like being open and aware of this issue is a first really important step in that.”
5. As national pride is on the rise in countries around the world, a Tokyo museum and a few restaurants have been exploring the Edo period, linking dishes from the past to modern Japanese cuisine and sustainability.
To develop his recipes at Nanko, Abe turned to Tokyo Kasei Gakuin University’s Ayako Ehara, a professor emeritus who has spent much of her career translating Edo period cookbooks, recipes and food-related diaries and other texts from classical to contemporary Japanese — most recently as part of a government-led initiative to digitize 300,000 pre-modern Japanese works.
6. Mark talks about how to grill the perfect steak in one of two ways.
The first is about as simple as it gets. The other is a bit more adventurous, but so damn fun — and entails cooking the steaks directly on blazing hot hardwood charcoal embers. But before we get to the recipes, here’s a bit more on grilling steaks.
That’s all for now and thanks for reading. See you here next week and drop us a line of what you’d like to see more of from us at heatedbybittman@gmail.com.
