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Foodways Texas: 2nd Annual Symposium

robbwalsh — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 16:33:32 +0000

From Foodways Texas: Over the course of 2 1/2 days during Texas Preserved , our second Foodways Texas symposium, we will explore the ways we preserve Texas (as a region, as an idea) in our food and the ways we preserve food in Texas. We’ll talk about preservation in our pastures, on our farms, in our kitchens, and in the stories we tell around the dinner table. We’ll discuss what we literally preserve in the mason jars in our cupboards and witness some of those preservation techniques. The weekend’s sessions will include a broad range of topics faithful to our theme, including a canning demo by Confituras owner Stephanie McClenny along with a little history regarding fruits and vegetables unique to Texas. We’ll hear from the folks behind the Shrimp Boat Projects out of Houston, and a group of intrepid Austin historians out to collect stories from iconic restaurants around the state. Experts from around the state will update us on this historic drought and its effect on different segments of our food economy, while an expert panel of craft brewers will discuss the world of Texas breweries and help us launch our Craft Brewery oral history archive. Along the way we’ll sample artisanal wares from all across the state of Texas.

Registration includes lunch and dinner on Friday and Saturday as well as a Sunday Chuck Wagon Brunch from Tom Perini of Perini Ranch Steakhouse. In addition to Perini, our chefs for the weekend include Justin Yu of Oxheart Restaurant in Houston cooking up the week’s catch from Louisiana Food’s Total Catch Market, Matt McCallister of Campo Modern Country Bistro in Dallas who will teach us a bit about charcuterie, and Sonya Cote of East Side Showroom in Austin who will treat us to an 1840s farm dinner onsite at Boggy Creek Farm in east Austin. Plan to be well-fed and satisfied when you trek back home on Sunday.

$225 Members
$250 General Public
$85 Panels Only (no meals) limited availability

About ZenBBQ

robbwalsh — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:47:16 +0000

Texas Eats has a new sister website named ZenBBQ. It got started after photographer O. Rufus Lovett and I started working on an upcoming book about Southern barbecue. Friends and associates pointed out that while the Arkansas, Alabama, Carolina and Tennessee stories I was posting were interesting, they didn’t make a lot of sense on a website dedicated to Texas food.

Whole hogs cooking at Skylight Inn in Ayden North Carolina

So we decided to keep Texas Eats focused on the Lone Star state and expand our barbecue horizons on another site. Texas barbecue posts will appear both places, but stories and photos about barbecue in the rest of the country will henceforward be found at ZenBBQ along with posts about the methodology of building pits, where to buy special pork cuts, and tips about cooking whole hogs and Southern barbecue. Hope you enjoy it!

Texas Oyster Season Open

robbwalsh — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:03:33 +0000

Good news for oyster lovers! Texas Parks & Wildlife has announced the opening of most oystering areas in Texas. The red tide has subsided and oysters from Texas bays are passing FDA testing to ensure no trace of the bacteria remain.
Texas oyster fisherman in the southern San Antonio bay system began oystering in late January. Levi Goode reported that Goode Company Seafood was already serving Texas oysters last weekend.

The reef specific oyster program started by Jerri’s Seafood last season is expected to return once all the oyster reefs are opened and fisherman have a chance to check the status of each reef. Last summer’s drought broke the record for salinity in Galveston Bay. The high saline level allowed many oyster predators including whelks and the bacteria called dermo to invade the reefs. Oyster mortality levels will be reported as the reefs open.

Don’t Mess with Texas Cottage Food

robbwalsh — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:16:33 +0000

Local food lovers, Democratic and Republican state reps, the Houston Press and the Dallas Observer, and home bakers groups all pulled together to pass The Texas Cottage Food Bill, a change in the law that allowed Texas home bakers, canners and artisans to sell their homemade foods directly to the public without having to buy a million dollar insurance policy and lease a certified kitchen. (Read the Houston Press story.)

After the bill passed, new rules were drafted behind closed doors by the Department of State Health Services. These rules impose labeling requirements on homemade products like cakes and cookies that commercial bakeries don’t have to follow. Sounds like the Big Food lobbyists are working behind the scenes to kill cottage food businesses before they get started.

These new rules are now open for public comment. We need your help.

Please email
cheryl.wilson@dshs.state.tx.us
right away and tell her to “Stop Messing with the Texas Cottage Food Bill.”

Here’s a statement from one of the bills sponsors, Eddie Rodriguez of Austin:

It is clear to me that these proposed rules subvert the intent of the legislation we worked so hard to pass. We were pretty clear in trying to make it easier for small business to thrive and some of these rules proposed by the state will do just the opposite. I have spoken with the Department of State Health Services and let them know I take issue with their rules and will keep an eye on the process moving forward. I also encourage all cottage industries to weigh in immediately by sending an email to cheryl.wilson@dshs.state.tx.us. and letting them know how you feel. All comments submitted between now and February 26, 2012 will be considered as public comments for DSHS to consider as they redraft the proposed rules.

Eating Roses

robbwalsh — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:40:50 +0000

My daughter Katie Walsh writes for a food blog called Whisked Foodie She called me the other day to ask where to get edible roses. (If you have a source, please share it under “comments.”) This question seems to come up once a year around this time. I used to grow organic roses so I could cook with them, but growing roses without chemicals proved too be to big a challenge for my modest gardening skills.

Still, the question brought back fond memories of Valentine’s Day cooking projects.

This article and the recipe for Quail in Rose Petal Sauce ran in column I used to write for Natural History Magazine “A Matter of Taste.” The story was published in May of 1999. (story and recipe after the jump)

A Rosy Repast
Ever so gently, the young woman gasped as I set the platter down on the table. It was a few days before Valentine’s Day and for dinner I had made quail in rose petal sauce. The dish was made famous in the Mexican novel Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. Tita, the cook whose dishes literally express her emotions, makes the sauce from roses given to her by Pedro, her forbidden lover. Putting this recipe together, I felt a little like I was preparing a witch’s potion. And the most magical of the ingredients were the red roses.

Flowers aren’t really unusual in cooking, in fact they are often essential. Bouillabaisse wouldn’t be bouillabaisse without the intoxicating aroma of saffron threads, which are the orange-yellow stigmas of the purple crocus. Hot-and-sour soup wouldn’t taste right without dried day lilies, known in China as “golden needles.” And in New Orleans, no self-respecting bartender would dare serve a Ramos Gin Fizz without a splash of orange-flower water. But in none of these flower-flavored dishes can you actually recognize any blossoms. As the book title, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies suggests, actually putting whole blossoms in your mouth seems a little strange.

Roses in particular, with all of their romantic connotations, look odd on an ingredient list. After all, when a man sends a woman a dozen roses, he doesn’t expect that she’s going to be making salad out of them. But, in fact, roses have been eaten since ancient Roman times. At some flower-strewn Roman feasts, rose petals were sprinkled on the food, the table, and all over the banquet hall. Rose petals, fresh, dried and crystallized, as well as rose water and rose syrup are still widely used in the cuisines of the Middle East. Greek baklava, for instance, is authentically served with a drizzle of rose syrup.

While roses are one of the most common flowers in our florist shops, we Americans hardly ever eat them. Which is a good thing, because modern systemic pesticides have made them highly toxic. And according to Cathy Wilkinson Barash, author of Edible Flowers: From Garden to Palate, (Fulcrum), even if you could eat modern hybrid roses, you’d probably be disappointed. “Queen Elizabeth has very little flavor, Tropicana has none at all,” she reports. Barash grows flowers organically so that she can use them in cooking. And she has eaten dozens of roses in her quest for good tasting varieties. “My favorite eating rose is the beach rose (Rosa rugosa alba) which grows wild along much of the Atlantic coast,” she says. “It has great aroma and it tastes as good as it smells.”

If you’re looking for a cooking rose to grow organically in your garden, Barash recommends David Austin varieties, which are throwbacks to old garden roses. “‘Gertrude Jekyll’ is my pick of his cultivars,” she says. Among the modern hybrids, ‘Mr. Lincoln,’ a deep velvety-red rose and Tiffany, a light pink hybrid are tastiest. Carrot slaw on a bed of pink Tiffany rose petals is one of Barash’s favorite salad recipes.

We can thank the organic farming movement for the return of edible flowers to our cuisine. The pesticide-free cooking roses used by most American chefs come from organic gardeners in California who air freight them to specialty food suppliers around the country. So what does a good eating rose taste like? “I don’t think roses really taste like much of anything on the palate,” Chef Danielle Custer told me, “but there is an aroma and a texture and an association with their eye appeal that makes them very sensual–almost– what’s the word–aphrodisical.”

The quail in rose petal sauce that Tita made in Like Water for Chocolate certainly was an aphrodisiac. After eating it, her sister Gertrudis “began to feel an intense heat pulsing through her limbs.” Dripping with rose-scented sweat, Gertrudis went to the wooden shower stall in the backyard to wash. “Her body was giving off so much heat that the wooden walls began to split and burst into flame.” Having set the shower stall on fire, Gertudis stood in her backyard, burning hot and smelling of roses, until she was suddenly swooped up by one of Pancho Villa’s men who charged into the backyard on horseback. “Without slowing his gallop, so as not to waste a moment, he leaned over, put his arm around her waist, and lifted her onto the horse in front of him, face to face, and carried her away.” The naked Gertrudis and the crazed soldier made love at a full gallop. The moral: Cook and eat flowers at your own risk.

I followed Tita’s recipe pretty closely, except I added more roses. Not only did I use rose petals and rose water as called for in the recipe, I also garnished the dish with an extra dozen tiny red buds. The young lady who ate the quail with me did not set my house on fire. (I kept a pitcher of water nearby just in case.) But the striking beauty and the deep perfume of all those roses certainly made her cheeks flush.

Quail in Rose Petal Sauce
(from Like Water for Chocolate)
My local Middle Eastern store had plenty of rose water on hand. I ordered the edible roses in advance from a specialty food company, but if you grow organic roses, you are in luck. You can also find edible flowers at farmers’ markets sometimes. Tita’s recipe also calls for pitaya, a delicious type of cactus fruit. But pitaya was out of season, so I substituted a dark red prickly pear fruit puree. You can also use frozen raspberries.

Serves 2

6 quail
3 tablespoons butter
Salt and pepper to taste
1 cup dry sherry
Petals of 6 fresh, organic red roses
6 peeled chestnuts (boiled, roasted or canned)
1 clove garlic
1/2 cup pitaya or red prickly pear fruit puree (or substitute raspberries)
1 tablespoon honey
1/2 teaspoon ground anise seed
1/4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
14 teaspoons rosewater

Rinse the quail and pat dry. In a large frying pan over
medium-high heat, melt the butter and lightly brown the birds on all
sides. Add sherry and salt and pepper the quail. Lower the heat, cover and simmer 15 minutes. Turn the quail, cover and cook another 10 minutes. Remove the quail, reserving the pan juices.
Rinse the rose petals in cold water. Place half the petals in the
blender, with remaining ingredients and the pan juices. Puree until smooth. Transfer to a sauce pan and simmer 5 minutes. Adjust seasoning with more salt, pepper and/or honey. Pour some sauce on the plates and arrange three quail on each. Pour the rest of the sauce over the quail and sprinkle with the remaining rose petals. Serve with crusty bread, tossed salad and a chilled Rosé champagne.

Irene Wong Shoots El Real

robbwalsh — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:02:57 +0000

Food TV would be a cool thing to do. Mess around in the kitchen–take a few videos. Eat good. What could be better?

Meet food TV mega-producer Irene Wong. After Irene Wong produced half a dozen hits for the Food Network, she went independent and started her own production company, IW Productions. These days, she spends nine months a year on the road shooting 6 days a week for a grueling 12 hours a day.

Irene and her crew came to El Real Tex-Mex on Saturday to shoot a segment for Unique Eats on the Cooking Channel. Irene and company got there at 4 AM! That’s one hour after we close on Friday night. Chef Bryan Caswell and I were asked to arrive at the leisurely hour of 6 AM. Irene’s gang had already lit the entire kitchen and were testing equipment when we got there. They had Caswell wired up with a microphone before he got a cup of coffee in his mouth.

I was flattered when Irene told me she had all my cookbooks. To make myself useful, I ran out and got everyone some hot glazed and boudin kolaches from the North Main Shipley’s. The crew scarfed the doughnuts and kolaches without ever taking a break. One camera crew did crowd shots when the restaurant opened at 11, while another crew set up food close-ups upstairs on the balcony. By the time the 9 hour shoot was over, I was exhausted.

I won’t ruin the movie by telling you the ending or what dishes the show wanted to feature. I am not sure when, or even if, the footage shot at El Real footage will make it on TV. Irene Wong and crew didn’t hang around to socialize. They had several more shoots scheduled for Houston restaurants and stores.

Dang, that food TV thing looks like a blast–right?

Publishers’ Weekly Review

robbwalsh — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:39:11 +0000

Release date March 6, 2012 Preorder from Amazon

“Food writer Walsh (The Tex-Mex Cookbook ; Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook) is a three-time James Beard Award winner and an authority on Texas culinary history. His latest is primarily organized by region, with chapters that focus on either a popular dish (e.g., Chili con Carne and Chicken-Fried Steak) or style of cuisine (e.g., Czech Texan, Vietnamese Texan, Indian Cowboys). Culinary explorers who like variety will find ten ways to serve oysters, seven kinds of hamburger, and plenty of interesting seasonings, sauces, and spice blends. Packed with history and stories, this is a great choice for homesick Texans and armchair travelers.” -Publishers’ Weekly

Dublin Dr Pepper Is Gone, But Not Forgotten

robbwalsh — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:00:51 +0000

Lori Dodd at the Dublin Dr Pepper plant

Yesterday was the last day to buy Dublin Dr Pepper at the plant. Anyone who tells you this was amicable resolution to the lawsuit filed by Dr Pepper/Snapple against the Dublin plant needs to watch the TV interview with the tearful owners as they shut the place down.

If you are wondering what all the fuss is about, check out this story in the Houston Press about the Dublin Dr Pepper tradition, here’s an excerpt:

The flavored syrup that all Dr Pepper bottlers use is manufactured in St. Louis. Local bottlers just add the carbonated water and the sweetener, which is why it was so easy for the Dublin plant to continue to use cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. The franchise agreement that bottlers have with Dr Pepper doesn’t require them to use any particular sweetener—but it does limit the area where they can deliver products.

And the product that the bootleggers want is a retro-looking eight-ounce bottle full of cane sugar-sweetened Dublin Dr Pepper. Though the bottles look old, they are actually new disposable bottles. I drank one while we walked around the factory. There was a wonderful mouth-filling quality about the sugar sweetness that had me smacking my lips.

The disposable eight-ounce bottles are popular, but true connoisseurs have their own bottles. Although Dr Pepper discontinued reusable bottles in 1990, the Dublin Dr Pepper plant still refills old Dr Pepper bottles for loyal customers.

I looked at cases upon cases of bottles going back to the 1960s and 1970s that were waiting to be washed. It’s amazing that so many people keep these old bottles in circulation. Manager Lori Dodd told me that there are collectors with bottles dating all the way back to the 1930s — those have to be hand-filled. The factory itself maintains an inventory of over 100,000 old reusable Dr Pepper bottles.

The Dr Pepper plant is so revered in Dublin that on Monday, June 9, in an annual rite of summer, a crew of workers will drive around the city limits taking down the signs that read “Dublin” and replacing them with signs that read “Dr Pepper, Texas.”

Well so much for that 120 year-old Texas tradition. Why the corporate headquarters of Dr Pepper/Snapple found it necessary to close down the oldest Dr Pepper bottler in Texas and a living museum of their own history is baffling to anyone who respects our food culture.

Advance Review of TEXAS EATS

robbwalsh — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:13:40 +0000

From Ten Speed Press, release date March 6, 2012 Preorder from Amazon

Many thanks to Eater.com’s Spring Cookbook Preview for the kind words about the new cookbook!

The Eater Spring 2012 Cookbook and Food Book Preview
Monday, January 9, 2012, by Paula Forbes

American Regional:

Texas Eats: The New Lone Star Heritage Cookbook, with More Than 200 Recipes by Robb Walsh

Robb Walsh has long been the go-to cookbook author for Texan cuisine, but this book has the potential to be his masterwork. Gone are stuffy preconceptions of what Texas food is (cheese enchiladas!), and in their place find what Texans really eat (Czech-Tex! Viet-Tex! And, okay, some vintage Tex-Mex.) Bonus? Aaron Franklin’s nationally recognized recipe for barbecued brisket from Austin’s Franklin Barbecue.

The Acorn and the Tree

robbwalsh — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:57:16 +0000

Despite my advice to the contrary, my daughter Katie has been pursuing food writing as a career track lately. As much as I wish she would find something better to do for a living, I am very proud of her efforts. Here’s a recent blog post from her regular gig at Whisked Foodie: http://whiskedfoodie.com/chefs-rant/a-happy-birthday-pig-pickin-party/

A Happy Birthday Pig Pickin’ Party
by Katie Walsh | Jan 6, 2012
Pig Pickin

I was at my dad’s house in Houston last weekend to celebrate his birthday when he told me to come outside and bring my camera. I was intrigued.

He lifted the lid of his smoker to reveal two big ol’ hunks of beautifully barbecued meat, a whole pork shoulder, and a ham, which he’d had cooking low and slow for 26 hours.

It came off the heat and onto the cutting board, where he pulled back the skin and separated the fat from the crispy edges from the tender, fatty midlands, all of which got pulled apart and thrown into a big bowl. We all gathered round and pitched in for a regular pig pickin’ party.

My sister Julia and Joey, her chef-in-training boyfriend, took a little video reel as Dad demonstrated the process and chatted a little about his strategy. He explained that he’d picked those two cuts of pork to bring in the flavors and textures of meat from all over the animal, giving his pulled pork a whole hog taste without having to actually fuss with one.

The result was so delicious I couldn’t resist eating some myself. The family piled generous mounds of it on thick slices of fresh-baked bread with pickles, onions, and a little vinegar-based hot sauce like a little Texas spin on South Carolina pulled pork sandwiches.

We also sampled two kinds of coleslaw, very similar but subtly different—one made with a little sour cream and the other with a little mustard. Obviously the sour cream version was nice and creamy, but I kind of liked the crispness of the mustard version.

My step-mom valiantly attempted to bake my dad’s favorite cake—German chocolate—from scratch, which she quickly discovered is a rather laborious process. The cake pans we had weren’t quite the right size, so the middle of the cake sort of ended up sinking into itself. While not the prettiest, it tasted incredible—super moist, with big pieces of unsweetened, flaked coconut that she’d soaked in coconut milk before mixing into the icing.

Not-whole pig pickin’, irresistibly slow smoked pulled pork, coleslaw taste test, and German chocolate by hand—sounds like another weekend at dad’s. Happy birthday, Pops!