Jakob's Bowl

A New Sheep and A New Goat with A Hint of Cow

I stopped in Steve’s Cheese before heading back to Seattle, hoping against hope that he would finally have some Big Woods Blue from Shepherd’s Way Farms in Minnesota. He had been out since late spring, understandably so, since most domestic artisan and farmstead cheese makers can sell all they make at Farmers’ Markets from June through October and have no need to wholesale. Big Woods Blue has been my favorite sheep milk blue for over a year, and possibly the best in the country.

I asked Steve for a taste, and as he pulled the wheel out of the cheese case, he suggested that I also taste a new sheep milk blue he brought in from Wisconsin. Before I could say anything, his eyes widened as he repeated his suggestion. Since he was as big a fan of the Shepherd’s Way blue as I was, I knew something was wrong. He suggested that I taste the Bohemian Blue from Hidden Springs Farm in Westby Wisconsin. It was younger and a bit sharper than I remembered the Big Woods Blue, but it was delightful in its own right - made from a mix of the milk from East Friesian and Lacaune sheep. I picked up the sample of Big Woods Blue with some trepidation, and even before I tasted it the aroma seemed different. The flavor was ‘off’ compared to the cheeses from last year with an overpowering ‘green’ tang and non of the finishing creaminess that had endeared it to my palate. Something was wrong!!! Steve told me that he was going to order another wheel just to make sure, but if it was the same that would be it for Big Woods Blue.

Of Cabbages That Are Kings And More...

I dropped down to Portland early this morning to run some errands, and I decided to take a quick walk through of the Saturday Farmers’ Market, and there were a few late season surprises. The Savoy cabbage wasn’t a surprise, but the fact that so many farms were offering them and most of them were good looking – my sources in Seattle don’t seem to have recharged yet. For my palate, and for those in Northern Italy the Savoy cabbage - Cavolo Verza - is the King of cabbages and nothing else can touch its sweet flavor. It seems to have been named for the Duchy/Kingdom of Savoy, which prior to the 17th century included both what is now France’s Savoy region and Italy’s Piedmonte region. I prefer it when farmers leave the dark green outer leaves on the head, since they are loaded with flavor, and their color stays bright green when briefly sautéed. When buying, the head should be firm and have some weight.

Mutton: The Forgotten Red Meat

About a year ago, I was watching an old episode of Gordon Ramsay’s The f word, and in one of the sequences he was on a campaign to rehabilitate the reputation of mutton in the UK - mutton is the meat of sheep that are two years or older. I don’t even remember what part of the UK he got the mutton from, but it looked beautiful and from the smiles of those who tasted his simple preparation, it was also packed with texture. If you were born in the 40s, 50s, or 60s, you probably had it drummed into your head that tough and strongly flavored mutton was inferior to lamb. By the 80s, unless you lived in sheep country or had a Halal market in your town, you may not have been able to find fresh mutton anywhere.

When I saw Ramsay working with it, I was excited and assumed that only aging Scots and those living ‘down under’ ate mutton. and they did so out of necessity or habit rather than desire. I had totally bought into the propaganda that unless lamb was fall apart tender and virtually void of any ‘game’ flavors it wasn’t worth eating. I was excited at the thought of a ‘new’ red meat from an ‘old’ animal. Think as I might at the time I couldn’t ever remember seeing it in any butcher shop or supermarket in Seattle or Portland.

Back From The Brink: The Pecorino Grape

Thought to have already been extinct the Pecorino grape vine - not the cheese - was rediscovered in a nearly wild state in Italy’s Le Marche Region. A few clippings, a bit of diligent research and few conscientious and enterprising viticulturalists later and this delightful grape was brought back from the brink. This thin skin variety with only moderate yields seems to do well in the regions of le Marche and Abruzzo, and it is from the latter that the hails. In case you are wondering, it is the famous Farnese Family, or specifically the branch that married into the Hapsburg Family. The grapes are grown near Ortono in Abruzzo’s Terre di Chieti IGT (Indicazione Geographica Tipica) with an exposure that gives the grapes plenty of sunlight and makes this a very easy drinking wine.

An Insatiable Corporate Appetite For Organics

In case you aren’t aware the ‘organic’ sector has been under siege for a while now, and I don’t mean by those trying to water down or do away with the organic regulations. I am talking about the increasing corporatization of ‘organics’ both farmed products and processed products that is rapidly transforming the organic ‘sector’ into the organic ‘industry.’ With this corporatization, working to the rhythms of Nature is replaced by dancing to the quarterly tune of Wall Street. It’s concentration and acquisition by the big conventional food processors, and venture capitalists, - often stealth acquisitions - and in many cases they never publicly divulge the connection. (My post The Walrus and Carpenter Dilemma, outlined how the sources of much of the poultry and eggs that Whole Foods Market sells are controlled by the venture capitalist firm Booth Creek Management, but what I didn’t know at the time was that as of 2008 the CEO of Swift & Company, one of the world's largest meat processors, was a partner in Booth Creek Management.) It's amazing so much of this never gets reported by the mainstream press!

Their objective, of course, is to dominate the high-margin organic sector. And when this happens it becomes all about the numbers and all about industrialization of operations, and it is also when the ‘gaming’ begins - shifting from ‘real’ organic ingredients to ‘industrial’ organic ingredients to significantly increase margins, expanding a trusted ‘organic’ company’s line with ‘natural’ brands that use no organic ingredients, and more. Professor Phil Howard of Michigan State University has studied these trends in the organic sector, including many of those pioneering organic companies that have been snapped up by the likes of Nestle, Kraft, ConAgra and Kellogg, and he presents the transformation of the sector in some pretty interesting charts, especially the first three (click the above image to find out who owns your favorite 'organic' foods). Your natural first question might be "why would billion dollar companies be interested in buying organic companies that are miniscule by comparison, and in many cases dramatically overpaying for them"? …I’ll leave it to your common sense and imagination. I found his 2008 paper, Consolidation in the North American Organic Food Processing Sector, 1997 to 2007, even more eye opening than his charts.

Can You Say ‘Nose To Tail’ - The Swinery

When I moved to Seattle almost thirteen years ago from Chicago, “Hog Butcher to the World,” there were only a few butcher shops in the city; most people bought their meat in supermarkets either already wrapped in cello or from a meat cutter who pulled plastic wrapped chunks of meat from a case and cut them into smaller portions, steaks and roasts. I was never sure how much they knew about taking apart a whole animal or if they even knew where the meat they offered originated, or cared for that matter. Once I started buying exclusively from the real butcher shops, it was clear that even for these skilled tradesmen that butchering whole, half or even quarter animals was a thing of the past. I was saddened by this, especially after taking a serious butchering class in culinary school. I say ‘serious’ because it was taught by a gentleman who during his long career worked both as a butcher and a chef, and it seemed that the French Master Chef who headed the school was always hovering over us to check our progress. It also wasn’t that long ago that restaurants were taking ’sides’ of animals, and profit could be increased by a chef who was also a skilled butcher.

I find it very exciting that there has been a resurgence of real butchering and butcher shops in this country, at least in the major metropolitan areas anyway. Butchers are being lauded as the new rock stars in the pages of the New York Times and other periodicals, and places like , Laurelhurst Market in Portland, and The Butcher Shop in Boston are on every foodie tourist’s ‘must-see’ list. While I am behind this movement 1000%, it is not without its pitfalls and challenges as I hope to explore in a post later this week. While I have had the benefit of having two family run butcher shops in Seattle, for economic reasons they source from significant sized suppliers and that means they are still connected in part to the industrial food chain. For most of the last six months I’ve been buying my meat from the Laurelhurst Market in Portland, but as of the end of September, I’ve got a new source, 170 miles closer to home, The Swinery in West Seattle.