Valomilk! Valomilk! Valomilk!

I've been looking for Sifer's Valomilks (a famous but regional candy) ever since I read Candy Freak two years ago. Today, finally, victory! While I was looking for Agar Agar at Wholefoods Columbus Circle, I ran into a whole display of Valomilks, piled six foot high. I set aside my plans to buy sea salt, grabbed four packages, and ran at a half waddle, half sprint back to my office to crunch into the dribbly, marshmallowy deliciousness. In the first picture, you can see the characteristic leakage of marshmallow filling from the hand filled valomilks, which never achieve the perfect, antiseptic seal of a Reese's peanut butter cup. And in the second, well, you can see why they say, When it runs down your chin, you know it’s a VALOMILK.” .

Ah, Pectin

So, I realize I'm being a smart-ass, but something tickled me about the quote below from an article today in the Wall Street Journal about famed baseball manager Joe Torre:


"There's something in jelly that makes it jelly", says Mr. James, senior baseball operations adviser with the Boston Red Sox. "Without that, it's runny grape juice with a lot of sugar in it".

Umm, well, there is something in jelly, he's right. Joe Torre as the pectin in the Dodgers jelly?

Petits Fours

It turns out that petits fours are extremely difficult to make, at least when you're a) incompetent and b) tired. Or, so I discovered when I made them as part of my fancy-pants valentine's day meal. Also, it is extremely difficult to pipe straight lines of chocolate icing onto a napoleon when your piping bag has ripped, and you're forced to use paper cones instead. Just for reference, since it's not obvious what I made, these are two kinds of truffles (Valrhona chocolate, covered in cocoa and in roasted almonds), and mini-napoleons, the making of which counts as one of the grand debacles of my cooking career to date.




To make up for these, I present some sweets I had on my last visit to Paris, a few weeks ago.

Olive Oil Madeleines

Cannelle & Vanille has made beautiful olive oil madeleines, which she proposes to give away. I don't have much more to say, other than to encourage any readers to compete for them.

Croissants made by Robots

The New York Times reports a croissant made by robots in New York, which supposedly helps make the croissants more tender. Color me unimpressed, but I'll go try them.

Amuses Bouches - Branzino Fumet, chanterelle, and Shrimp

I recently made this amuses bouches for my girlfriend on Valentine's Day. I'm working on a much longer post about the meal, but the idea was to attempt super fancy restaurant food as an experiment. This dish was based on a fumet made of branzino bones, flavored with chanterelle mushrooms (from Oregon) and garnished with a steamed jumbo shrimp.

Should you give your kids alcohol?

Eric Asimov, the New York Times wine columnist, asks whether parents should give their children alcohol at an early age to stave off potential abuse later on.

I don't have much to add to this, other than to say that wine, beer, etc, should obviously be introduced as early as possible just as a matter of common sense, because they're not big deals, and are part (for many people) of civilized life. Why we insist on fetishizing the whole issue is quite beyond me.

UPDATE: Read Michael Ruhlman's post on this, as he struggles with what to do with his 12 year old daughter.

How far would you go

My comment on going out of one's way for a special meal or food at Bitten had been posted as one of the "Comments of the Moment", so I'll just link here.


Being a city person, the question for me is “how far am I willing to walk?” for a particular food. I think there’s a certain charm in allowing oneself to eat anything, no matter how off diet, so long as one walks to get it. So far, my record is 3 miles for a particularly wonderful eclair made in the old way in Paris, but I’m always looking for excuses to beat that effort.

Bread with Chocolate

Michael Laiskonis, pastry chef at the wonderful Le Bernardin (where my girlfriend and I recently had a terrific meal, asks why we Americans don't have a native born combination of bread (and bread defined narrowly, as yeast, and flour and water, rather than a muffin or quickbread) and chocolate. France, he says, has the pain au chocolat, but what is our equivalent?

I would have thought that the obvious answer was the chocolate glazed donut. It is, of course, a bread. A somewhat sweet bread, though made properly no more sweet than a croissant. And, of course, it includes chocolate, and, as far as I know, is basically indigenous in this form to the United States. I realize it is fried, and the focus is on fat, in some sense, rather than bread, but on the other hand, I can think of nothing more primal than fried dough and chocolate.

UPDATE: Incidentally, Michael's recipe for chocolate ganache thickened with agar agar and served with bread looks astonishing. I will try it (and probably fail!).

The ivory tower

Ezra Klein says that meat ought to be more expensive. By which he means, presumably, that the country should move toward more humane husbandry. When pushed on the obvious problem (well, what are people who don't have a ton of money supposed to eat?), his answer is that they ought to eat more vegetables.

Obviously, everyone should eat more vegetables. But for one thing, the post entirely ignores the fact that the wide availability of (admittedly) inferior meat is one of the great advances of the last century. Meat used to all be organic, and free range, and humane, and so on. And it was available to a sliver of mankind, who were physically bigger, stronger, and better developed than the rest. Providing meat to the masses was actually a terrific equalizing accomplishment, and it is surprising that a self-described "progressive" would miss this point in an effort to be au courant with currently trendy food localism.

But let's say Klein and people who agree succeed, and somehow, humane husbandry is imposed across the board, and meat prices soar. Klein says that "other things would be cheaper". How does he know this? And how does he know that the newly deprived will make the choices he'd like them to make about food? While Klein may know that tofu is cheaper than chicken (depends on the tofu, and on the chicken, actually, as with most things, and in any case, is it really obvious that cheap genetically modified, pesticidey, tofu is better than cheap chicken?), chips are cheaper than both. As George Orwell observed in his wonderful "Road to Wigan Pier",

"Would it not be better if they [the poor] spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and whole-meal bread . . . ? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. . . .When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. You want something a little bit tasty. . . . White bread and margarine and sugared tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread and dripping and cold water."

And in any case, while humane beef is all well and good, that movement is all part and parcel with establishing proper agriculture. For someone posturing from Klein's position, all food is too cheap. So under a proper food regime, stripped of subsidies, not only would the grains the poor people are supposed to eat be more expensive (assuming they even knew how to cook them in a tasty way, which I understand from friends who work with food charities in poorer areas is actually a ludicrous supposition) but everything else would too. Milk, cheese, butter, all manner of leaves (Would Klein be cooking "asian asparagus" in February in DC if people ate properly? Umm, no) vegetables, cooking oil.

Now, it might be that the simpler world of less, expensive, food is a better one. We might well be healthier from a fat perspective. Our animals would be happier, and we'd all ingest less pesticides. But it is a much different world than the one we inhabit today, and I suspect it is one people like Klein would not like very much at all.