Category: Food science

Toss out your Teflon pans!

In a recent NY Times article, Chef Andrew Zimmern points out the chefs never use Teflon pans, because they don’t need them. These non-stick pans are safe and work fine UNTIL the coating starts to disintegrate or is overheated. In both of those cases, you are then exposed to the poly-fluoro alkyls (PFAS) that have been found to be quite toxic “forever chemicals,” meaning that they don’t break down in the environment, but remain there more or less forever. And of course, the manufacture of Teflon spreads this problem quite broadly.

When my last Teflon pan started to crumble a few years ago, I tossed it and bought a ridged sort of Henkels pan from Costco that claimed to be nonstick. It wasn’t.

But here’s the thing. As Zimmern points out, your cast iron skillet really is pretty much non-stick and utterly durable. I have two such cast iron pans, about 10” and 12” diameters. They were my mother’s and she took good care of them. In fact, those pans are nearly centenarians!

Last weekend, I made my usual bacon and eggs using my 10-inch pan (probably an inside diameter of 9 ½ inches. The results were outstanding! These pictures show the 10-inch pan. We could cook 4 eggs in te 12-incher.

I cooked the bacon as usual, using medium to medium/high heat, and let to pan cool down a bit to medium/low. I like my eggs basted rather than over-easy, so I spooned the bacon fat to cook the tops.

And now, the important test. Did the eggs stick? Not at all. They slipped easily onto my spatula and onto my plate. Another time, I make an egg sandwich with a single egg using just a dab of butter, and it too cooked without sticking.

So forget your 1950s Teflon pan and just use your mom’s cast iron pan, or buy one yourself.

Cleanup? Swirl the pan in hot water, perhaps with a dish brush, and dry it with a paper towel.

Do you have to be careful of using soap? Not at all. These pans wear “like iron.” In fact, we once absent-mindedly ran one through the dishwasher, and with just a swish of oil to re-season it, it was good as new (or old).

Rich blueberry scones

This delicious scone variation produces a softer textured scone, almost like a little cake. They are more delicate, and you can eat them with a fork while hot, or by hand when cool. I got this recipe from my daughter-in-law, and I assure you these are a great hit with company!

2 ½ cups flour
¼ cup granulated sugar
¼ cup light brown sugar
1 Tb baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
6 Tb butter, cut up
1 cup cold, heavy cream plus 2 Tablespoons
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
Turbinado or brown sugar for sprinkling
½ cup blueberries or other fruit

Preheat the oven to 400˚ F. Line a baking sheet with parchment.
Mix together the flour, sugars, baking powder and baking soda.

Cut in the cold butter with a pastry blender.
Mix the heavy cream, egg and vanilla and add to the flour. Mix until uniform.
Add the blueberries, cut up if very large. You can also press blueberries into each scone after you cut them up, and even vary which kind of berry you use. Or even chocolate chips!

Either pat the dough into a circle and cut into wedges as we described earlier, or scoop out dough using a large cookie scoop or ice cream scoop.

Brush each scone with cream and sprinkle with brown sugar.
Bake for 16-18 minutes until browned and a toothpick comes out clean.

Let cool a bit before serving. Serve with lots of butter.

Makes about 15 or 16. They keep well in an air-tight bag or container. Heat them in the microwave for 30 sec before serving the next day.

Golden Diner Pancakes revisited

A week or two ago, the New York Times published a recipe for Sam Yoo’s Golden Diner Pancakes, fabulous, tall pancakes served with a fruit compote and honey-butter syrup and topping. The recipe was quite a hit, based on how often it appeared on social media. You can stand in line for hours at the Golden Diner near the Manhattan Bridge to sample these pancakes, or you can make them yourself.

There are several unique things about Mr Yoo’s recipe (as scaled down for the Times by Genvieve Ko): the most important one is that you “pre-ferment” the flour, yeast and buttermilk for an hour or so, before mixing up the batter. The other thing is that in the Golden Diner kitchen, they cook each pancake in a 7-8 inch non-stick pan, so the pancakes are wider and taller than conventional pancakes.

When we first made them, we used a couple of skillets about the size Ko recommends, and since we were making for a couple of us, we had to make two, and keep them warm while we made two more. This worked pretty well, and they were delicious, but we had a lot of difficulty controlling the heat to keep the pancakes from browning too much.

But we noted that that pre-fermented batter also had developed a lot of gluten stretchiness and the batter was very cohesive. So, we wondered if you could make them on a griddle and cut out a couple of steps (the pans and the warming). This was a great success, and we report on the slightly revised recipe here.

Pancake batter

Pre-ferment ingredients

2 ¼ tsp active dry yeast
1 cup of all purpose flour
1 ¼ cups buttermilk
¼ cup water

Batter ingredients

1 cup all purpose flour
2 Tb sugar
¾ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
2 large eggs
¼ cup canola oil or other neutral oil

Maple-Honey Butter

¼ cup (1/2 stick) Kerrygold butter, softened
3 Tb honey
2 Tb pure maple syrup
¾ tsp fine salt

Maple-Honey Syrup

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/3 cup honey
1 ½ Tb maple syrup
1 tsp soy sauce
½ tsp fine salt

Berry Compote

16 oz mixed berries, such as blueberries and strawberries cut up
½ cup sugar
2 tsp cornstarch
1 lemon

First thing in the morning, combine 1 cup of flour and the yeast in a modest sized bowl. Put the buttermilk and water in a pitcher and warm it in the microwave until luke-warm. (This takes 4-50 seconds. We suggest trying 15 second steps until the milk mixture seems lukewarm. Don’t let it get over 100˚F (37˚ C) or you could kill the yeast. Mix the warm milk mixture with the flour and yeast until smooth and cover with plastic wrap and let it ferment for at least an hour. You can make the honey-butter, the syrup and the fruit compote while you are waiting.

Make the maple-honey butter, by mixing the honey, maple syrup and salt into the softened Kerrygold butter with a wooden spoon. We chose KerryGold over the original unsalted butter because it has a lot more flavor. Let butter mixture sit out until you need it, unless you are doing this long in advance. Then, chill it and warm it back up when serving.

To make the maple-honey syrup, combine the butter, honey, syrup, soy sauce and salt in a small saucepan, and heat with whisking until the butter melts completely. Add 1 ½ tsp water and keep whisking until emulsified. Leave the pan on the stove so you can rewarm it before serving.

To make the berry compote, mix all the ingredients in a large cast-iron skilled, and stir and mix while heating. Heat until some of the blueberries pop. Keep the berries in the pan and rewarm before serving.
Heat a griddle to 375˚F. Mix the remaining 1 cup of flour with the sugar, baking soda and salt in a small bowl. In a large bowl, mix the canola oil and the two eggs. Add the pre-ferment batter and mix. Mix in the flour/sugar mixture until no flour is unmixed. The batter may be lumpy and this is OK.
Heat the butter-honey syrup and the fruit compote.

Scoop the batter onto the hot griddle using a rounded half-cup measure. You can make them bigger if you want, but these will be about 6-7 inches each. You can make 4 at once, or 6 at once if you have a bigger griddle. Cook on each side for around 2 minutes.
To assemble, put one pancake on each of two (or three) plates, and pour the maple-honey syrup over them. Spread fruit compote on top of that, and then place the second pancake on top. Again, add the maple-honey syrup and the fruit compote, and top with a rounded spoon of the hone-butter. Serve at once.

These pancakes are a fabulous special breakfast. They may seem to take some time, but you can make the syrup, butter and fruit compote while the batter is fermenting.

So, while this is Yoo’s (and Ko’s) recipe, we make the following simplifications.

We warmed the buttermilk and water in a microwave instead of on the stove.
We used Kerrygold butter in the honey-butter and decreased the butter by half: you don’t need that much for 2 or 3 diners.
We increased the fruit compote to 16 oz. 14 didn’t seem like quite enough.
We cooked the pancakes on a griddle instead of pans.
Ko suggested using two spoons to make little oblong pats of butter to go on top, but this didn’t work as well with the Kerrygold, so we skipped it.

If you have batter left for another day, Kat Lieu says it will keep, refrigerated for a week. She also tried making the large pancakes in a big rice cooker with some success, but only one at a time.

And, if you have any of that honey-butter left, it is great on English muffins!

Chicken saute with garlic and hollandaise

This delicious, but fairly simple, recipe is derived from one by Julia Child in MTAOFC vol1. We make it as a “company dish” all the time, and the results are really impressive, considering you can make it in half an hour or so. In our latest variation, we decided to use only dark meat, since it is considerably juicier. If you use a whole chicken, you add the white meat later in the cooking process so it doesn’t dry out.

A heavy duty 10” or 11” skillet with a lid.
¼ lb butter (one stick)
2-3 lb of chicken legs and thighs, skin removed.
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp basil
¼ tsp fennel (ground or seeds)
Salt and pepper
3 cloves unpeeled garlic
2/3 cup dry white wine
2 egg yolks
1 Tb lemon juice
1 Tb white wine
2 Tb fresh basil or parsley (or both), chopped finely

Combine the basil, thyme and fennel and mix together. If you are using fennel seeds (which are ore common), you can crush them with the other two spices using a mortar and pestle or in a good blender or food processer.
Remove the skins from the chicken, dry them off and sprinkle the spice mixture over the tops. Add salt and pepper
Heat the butter in the skillet over medium heat until it’s foaming.
Add the chicken piece and the unpeeled garlic cloves. Cover, and cook over low to medium heat for about 8 minutes.

Turn the chicken pieces, baste them with the butter, sprinkle with spices and salt and pepper, and cook covered a few more minutes until the chicken has reached 165˚ F.
Remove the chicken from the pan to a warm plate, and cover it to keep warm.
Mash the garlic cloves with a wooden spoon and remove the peels.
Add the white wine, and boil it down over high heat until it has been reduced by half.
Meanwhile, put the egg yolks in a small saucepan, and beat until sticky. Add the 1 Tb of wine and lemon juice, and mix together.

Then, beat in the butter and wine mixture from the cooking pan a Tb at a time, to make a thick, creamy sauce. Be sure to include the garlic.
Whisk the sauce over low heat to thicken it.
Then mix in the chopped basil and parsley.

In theory, you should be able to serve the chicken at this point, perhaps with rice, and this creamy sauce.

But hollandaises can be persnickety and there is a non-trivial chance that the sauce will separate or curdle while it sits there. Fortunately, this has a quick fix.

Put 1-2 Tb if dry white wine in a small mixing bowl and slowly beat in the curdled sauce, a tablespoon at a time. This will result in a smooth, stable sauce you can serve with pride.

Serve the chicken on a platter and pass the sauce in a dish or gravy boat.

Enjoy this fabulous meal!

Cacio e pepe made simpler

As we explained in our previous article, cacio e pepe is a beloved Roman dish made of pasta, pecorino romano cheese, some pasta water and pepper. We explained the research of Giacomo Bertolucci et. el., who determined that most recipes don’t have enough starch in their pasta water to prevent the cheese from clumping. Instead, they proposed added some cornstarch or potato starch solution to the cheese before adding it to the hot pasta.

This approach worked very well. However, food scientist Nathan Myrhvold, the author of the food scientists’ bible, Modernist Cuisine proposed another solution. He suggested adding some sodium citrate to the cheese mixture, which serves to emulsify and stabilize the cheese and also prevents the dreaded clumping.

Well, sodium citrate is easily available online and in cooking stores, and is well known for it uses in making smooth cheese sauces. Just to reassure you, citric acid is the sour taste in citrus fruits such as lemons, limes and all the related fruits, and you can get sodium citrate by mixing lemon juice and baking soda. But since you can get a pound of it (probably a lifetime supply) for around $10 and have it delivered the next day, why bother?

Our recipe

• 240 g pasta (about half a pound, 8.4 oz)
• Water to cover the pasta in a wide, shallow pan.
• 160 g pecorino cheese (5.6 oz)
• 2 tsp sodium citrate (11 g).
• Freshly ground pepper

1. Grate a little more than the 160g of pecorino cheese in a food processor. Save the excess for sprinkling on top. You can use a cheese grater if you don’t have a food processor.
2. Bring the water for cooking the pasta to boil in an open, flat pan wider than the length of the pasta, and cook until al dente. Be sure to test the pasta’s doneness, as it will take longer than the suggested 10 minutes, since the small amount of water will reduce the heat of the boiling water.

3. Scoop out around half a cup of pasta water about a minute before the pasta is done. Add the sodium citrate to this water and stir to dissolve.

4. Mix the citrate pasta water with the grated cheese.

5. Lift the pasta out of the cooking water into a serving bowl.
6. Stir in the cheese mixture a little at a time. Add more pasta water if it is too thick. We ended up adding almost another half cup. The cheese shouldn’t clump at all.
7. Grate pepper into the cheese and pasta and stir it in.
8. Serve right away. This makes enough for two hungry people.
9. Serve with a side salad with homemade blue cheese dressing.

How to make sodium citrate at home

We know that lemon juice contains 1.44g of citric acid per ounce.

1. Weigh out 7.6 grams of lemon juice and 14.3 grams of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate). This will give you about 11 g of sodium citrate (2 tsp).

2. Slowly pour the lemon juice into the baking soda and stir. The mixture will foam up as it expels carbon dioxide.

3. When the foaming subsides, your paste containing your sodium citrate is read to use. Stir it into the pasta water and add to the cheese just as above.

The chemistry behind these measurements

Citric acid has the structure

You can also write it as

HOOC-CH2-C(OH)(COOH)-CH2-COOH

Or compactly but confusingly as C6H8O7.

Each of those COOH groups represents a carboxylic acid. Note that there are three of them and we have to neutralize all three.

The molecular weight of citric acid is 192.12 g/mole. Since our 2 tsp of citric acid weighs 11g, we need 11/192 or 0.057 moles of citric acid. Sodium bicarbonate, NaHCO3 has a molecular weight of 84 g/mole, and .057 x 84 is 4.8 grams to make .057 moles. However, since there are three COOH groups, we need three times that much, or 14.4 g of baking soda.

When you mix the lemon juice with the baking soda it foams as carbon dioxide gas is released:

C6H8O7 (aq)+ 3 NaHCO3(s) = 3 CO2(g) + Na3C6H5O7(aq)

The resulting mixture still contains some lemon oil that you may taste slightly in the resulting pasta dish.

Cacio e pepe—cheese and pepper pasta

The classic Italian dish cacio e pepe is just grated cheese on hot pasta served with pepper. The cheese is usually Pecorino Romano (sometimes, misnamed “Romano”) and the pasta can be tonnarelli or spaghetti. Tonnarelli differs only in that it has a square cross section rather than round. And while Pecorino is the preferred cheese, some chefs add up to 30% Parmesan to the Pecorino.

The story behind this seemingly simple dish is that shepherds could carry the dry pecorino (aged sheep’s milk cheese), pasta and pepper and make themselves a hearty meal. Maybe. But despite the fact that this dish has only four ingredients (including water), it is hard to get right in the home kitchen.

In restaurant kitchens, they keep a pot of pasta water boiling, and cook all their pasta in it. Over time, this becomes quite a starchy solution that chefs often use to enhance the mouth feel of sauces. In this dish, that starch content is critical to its success.

When you stir together the pasta, cheese and pasta water, you want the result to be pasta with a creamy sauce. But this depends on there being enough starch in the mixture. If there is too little starch, the cheese is likely to form lumps rather than melting into the sauce.

And, if the temperature is too high, the cheese can go into a gooey “mozzarella phase” instead of dissolving into the sauce.

We read through six or seven different recipes that weren’t a lot different and made it seem easier than it is. Interestingly enough, Lidia Bastianich suggested crushing whole peppercorns under a heavy flat pan rather then grinding the peppercorns, to give big pieces of pepper in the sauce. This is a matter of taste and how much pepper you really want. Babish solved the sauce problem by pouring the hot pasta water over the cheese in a blender. He also adds a bit of butter to the pan where you put the drained spaghetti and after tossing the spaghetti in the butter, he just pours the blended sauce over that pasta. This isn’t quite the same as melting the cheese on the pasta, but it is foolproof.

Research on the phases of cheese

However, the ultimate research on cacio e pepe (Phase behavior of cacio e pepe) was posted on ArXiv by eight physicists who study phases of such liquids. G. Bartolucci, D. M. Busiello, M. Ciarchi, A. Corticelli, I. Di Terlizzi, F. Olmeda, D. Revignas, and V. M. Schimmenti, working at the University of Barcellona, Max Planck Institute in Dresden, University of Padova and the Institute of Science and Technology, Klosterneuberg, Austria participated in studying the phases of the cheese and starch solution. Despite their labs being spread all through Europe, they emphasized that they were all originally Italian, and thus were not messing with someone else’s national dish.

In a nutshell, they determined that if there is not enough starch in the pasta water, the cheese is likely to clump rather than dissolving. They also noted that you should let the pasta cool for about a minute before mixing with the cheese to avoid the dreaded “mozzarella phase.”
So, rather than just using starchy pasta water, they propose making up a warm starch solution to mix with the cheese. We tried this and it works exactly as they described. They recommend potato or cornstarch.

• 240 g pasta (about half a pound, 8.4 oz)
• Water to cover the pasta in a wide, shallow pan.
• 160 g pecorino cheese (5.6 oz)
• 4 g cornstarch in 40 g water
• Freshly ground pepper

Mix the cornstarch and water and heat it gently until the mixture becomes nearly clear. The mixture will become quite thick and gelatin-like. (This is known as “starch gelation.”)
Grate the pecorino until you have a bit more than 160 g. Save the excess for sprinkling on top. You can use a cheese grater or a food processor.

Mix the starch gel with the grated cheese in a bowl, adding room temperature water as needed to make it moist enough to make a smooth mixture. Add ground pepper to the mixture.
Bring the water for cooking the pasta to boil in an open, flat pan wider than the length of the pasta, and cook until al dente. Be sure to test the pasta’s doneness, as it will take longer than the suggested 10 minutes, since the small amount of water will reduce the heat of the boiling water.
Scoop out around half a cup of pasta water about a minute before the pasta is done.
Lift the pasta out of the cooking water into a serving bowl.

Let the pasta cool about one minute and then begin to mix in the cheese mixture, adding the slightly cooled pasta water as needed. You want to add enough water so that the cheese mixture mostly dissolves in the water.
Add more ground pepper.
Divide the pasta into two serving bowls and top with ground cheese (here you could add Parmesan if you wanted) and more pepper. Serve immediately.

If you have some left over, you can refrigerate it and reheat it in a microwave without the sauce coming apart, as the starch stabilizes it.

Nathan Myrhvold, the author of Modernist Cuisine, has suggested that you might also be able to prevent the cheese from clumping by adding some sodium citrate, suggesting that this anticoagulant might be more more effective than the starch which could blunt the flavor of the the cheese.

What happened? A Nation panel analyzes the election.

One of the early sessions on this The Nation cruise was called “Dissecting Democratic Malaise: WTF happened.” The panelists were Nation publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, Jeet Heer, Christina Greer, Elie Mystal and John Nichols, moderated by Sam Seder.

These comments are transcribed from my notes and might seem a bit choppy, but brings out the progressive view of how the election was lost.

John Nichols was the first speaker, and described our situation as “whipsaw politics,” where we go back and forth from one dangerous extreme to the other: rather than holding power for any longer period. He blamed the media for not knowing how to cover politics, but instead reduces it to simplistic gossip. He also noted that the GOP does NOT have a mandate: they had a very narrow victory.

Elie Mystal began by explaining that all the issues we discuss are shared except the issue of whiteness. All of the minorities knew that Trump was wrong, but he was essentially elected by white people. On our cruise ship, he assumed that we could easily find people who voted for Trump, but that if you asked them why, they would give you a “socially acceptable answer,” but the real issue was white racism.
Seder noted that we will have to devote significant efforts to reaching these white people.

Christina Greer said that we are watching a kleptocracy forming itself in real time. And while you might expect that poor white women (who voted for Trump) they didn’t, because they had never “experienced the boot.” Instead, voters latched onto some essentially irrelevant issue like transgender teenagers (who are a very small number of people) as an excuse to swing their vote to Trump.

Jeet Heer noted that it was amazing that we elected a con man and criminal toe the presidency. Trump’s appeal seemed to be “I will protect you,” which is unlikely to be true unless you were some of the super-rich. He also noted that Kamala ran as part of the establishment rather than as a refreshing change.
Katrina vanden Heuvel noted that Kamala spending three days with Liz Cheney was 3 days wasted when she could have been reaching the voters she needed. There is a significant need to reorganize the Democratic party, because they are heading to being the party of Rahm Emmanuel.

In general discussion that followed, the point was raised that Harris was never able to take her own position on Gaza, which probably hurt her with younger voters. She was more or less captive to Biden’s unpopular policies.

The DNC (Democratic National Committee) came under significant attack. Speakers felt that it “served no useful purpose,” and gave Harris no useful help. It didn’t have any strategy to reach the working class. Harris didn’t exploit her multi-racial, multi-ethnic characteristics in her campaign, and this, they blamed on the DNC. Their strategy was too cautious.

Christina Greer felt that had there been a primary, Kamala would not have been the nominee. Democrats chase speakers where there are problems, showing that “I can build coalitions with horrendous people.”
California needs to revise how they count votes. Democrats need to maximize their turnout. Only 63% of eligible voters voted this year, and a lot of Democrats stayed home. In California this was a significant problem for Democrats.

The media did not do an adequate job of covering the election: they are more interested in who has the power. As far as encouraging young voters, young people don’t see themselves in politics.

Great politicians may arrive in non-traditional ways. Seder sees possible candidates among Ro Kahana, Chris Murphy, and AOC, and those already active include Gavin Newsom and Christie Whitmer. Sometimes a transformational figure arrives from outside traditional politics: one such candidate might be LeBron James. And don’t count out Jamie Raskin. What we do have to do is move from party-centered politics to candidate-centered politics. And resist Clintons and Obamas getting involved!

In an afternoon session, Joan Walsh joined a discussion with Christina Greer and John Nichols.
Walsh said that Kamala’ reputation was being torpedoed quietly by Biden staffers, and said should cold cite names. Biden was more popular among black women. She said that Kamal’s campaign was inititially a sh*t-show when she took over. She tried to introduce a working class agenda for women, not men.
Kamala did better than Biden among seniors. Lower middle class women should have gotten a lot of help from the Kamala campaign, but “Nancy said no.”

The media doesn’t know how to report on black issues.

John Nichols finished off this session. He noted that her campaign defined her in terms of Trump rather than in terms of her own plans and ambitions. While commentators were saying that they didn’t really know Harris, it was Kamala who moved Biden closer to unions and arranged all of his union appearances. The fact that she was in charge of that labor movement was never communicated.

Her campaign as too much about Trump and Liz Cheney contributed nothing useful. The DNC is not a useful organization: it is solely concerned with raising money, rather than promoting candidates and policies.

Nichols said that he had a chance to interview Kamala early in the campaign, and one on one she was very impressive. She could easily have been a good President and might have been a great President.

The Nation magazine is a 160-year old publication, originally organized to combat slavery, but moved into other progressive causes after the passage of the 15th Amendment.

On board the Holland America Nieuw Amsterdam

I arrived in Miami Saturday around 12:30 pm and took an Uber up to my hotel (Embassy Suites) in Fort Lauderdale. Then many of us boarded a shuttle bus at about 10:15 am. It was towing a baggage trailer to the pier where our ship waited. Our baggage boarded separately. We had to go through scanning of our boarding pass, and of our passports and then go to a huge room full of chairs where I was given a card saying Group 17. That sounded ominous, but in fact the wait was barely 15-20 minutes and we were on the ship. Overall, the whole process from the hotel to the ship was barely an hour.

The Nieuw Amsterdam, to me seems a pretty big ship. Walking from one end to the other takes a good ten minutes or more. It has a capacity of 2100 passengers and 910 staff, giving you a passenger to staff ratio of about 2.4. This puts it in the Moderate Luxury class. Previously, we had sailed on Celebrity once and Seabourn twice. This seemed to be a step up from our experience on Celebrity, but of course with Seaborn’s ships being smaller and with more staff, you get a lot more attention (and pay more).

We were put in elevators to the 9th deck, where there is the Lido Market informal restaurant and bar. Here you can get drinks and a plethora of food from a buffet. They will also grill your hamburgers and hot dogs to order. On Holland America ships, you can get a drinks package that gets you up to 15 hard and soft drinks a day, or an all-in-one package which includes Wi-Fi in your cabin and a contribution towards one or more excursions and one premium dining restaurant. This latter cost about $350 a week (per person).

After lunch with a beer, I went down to the 5th deck to my “stateroom” just as my baggage was arriving. I also met our cabin steward, Anton, who made it a point to greet me by name and ask if I needed anything. This is a very nice touch. It had a nice veranda and chairs, but the room was pretty cramped.

I think if I had a partner with me, we would have been running into each other. I could have upgraded from Veranda Suite to Signature Veranda suite for about $2000, but since there was only one of me, it seemed extravagant. A friend of mine suggested I ought to upgrade to Neptune Suite with Veranda for about $4000 more. It comes with some privileges like free laundry and priority boarding and access to a private restaurant and lounge area. Might be fun, but for one, I didn’t think so.

About 125 of us were on this cruise sponsored by The Nation magazine, and there are talks morning and afternoon on sea days and in the afternoon on port days. The speakers included Sam Seder, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, John Nichols, Sasha Abramsky, Jeet Heer, Elie Mystal, Kristina Greer, Eddie Soufrant, Joan Walsh and Bhaskar Sunkara.

There was a welcome party at the Lido Market Bar and pool area at 4pm, with a DJ and a lot of menacing looking drinks for sale. One was a rum punch in a souvenir glass for only $18.75. I stuck to diet Coke.

Then there was a welcoming Nation reception with free drinks and snacks in the Crows Nest bar on the 11th deck at 6:15.

After a few sips of my innocuous punch, I felt rather dizzy, but it turned out it was the ship rocking, with the 11th floor amplifying the rocking motion. You could see the liquid in the liquor bottles sloshing back and forth. In these receptions, you really have to insist to get a soda or non-alcoholic drinks. They never have any right there for the asking.

Then we all went to dinner in the main dining room at 7:30, each with assigned seating so we could all get to know each other. Most of the diners at my table ordered the Mahi-Mahi, served with shellfish as shown. They all devoured it. I ordered the nightly special: pork belly served with mashed sweet potatoes and spinach. It was not the best example of pork belly I’ve had.

Among the desserts, we had a strawberry sundae, bread pudding and a chocolate tart. Only the sundae received much praise.

For breakfast this morning, I had a delicious room service American breakfast with perfectly done eggs and sausage, with orange juice and toast. They sent two by mistake, so I photographed one on the veranda.

Lunch on these ships is limited to the Lido Market, which is, in essence, a great big buffet. I have never liked waiting in line for food from a steam table, but I was able to pick up a delicious little premade sub sandwich, and went back for some ice cream for dessert. Very nice. There are always free tables, already set and helpful staff everywhere.

So far, I am having a great time. Tonight I’ll visit one of the fancy restaurants (Tamarind) and tomorrow, I’ll summarize the fascinating talks I heard from The Nation’s writers.

Make your own buttermilk (and biscuits)

We described the characteristics of buttermilk in our previous article. Most important is that it is more acidic than ordinary milk and that helps things like pancakes and biscuits rise nicely when they interact with baking powder and baking soda.

You can make your own buttermilk substitute by simply adding a tablespoon of white vinegar to milk to acidify it. It really works very well as you can see in the video below.

To summarize:

Buttermilk

1 cup milk (whole or 2% or skim all work)
1 Tb white vinegar

Biscuits

2 cups flour
1 Tb baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
6 tb unsalted butter
1 cup buttermilk (about)

Bake at 450˚F for 10 minutes.

The battle of the buttermilks

I first tasted buttermilk at my grandmother’s house in Lincoln, Nebraska. My mother and I had taken the train from Columbus out to Lincoln to visit her family there. I was probably 10 or 12 years old. I came in from playing with my cousin Steve, climbing trees and the like, to find that they were going to make pancakes with buttermilk. I tasted the buttermilk and didn’t like it much. “But,” they said, “wait till you taste the pancakes. They will be like you poured a lot of butter into them!”

And, yes, the pancakes were very good indeed.

Some years later, when I started collecting recipes, I got that buttermilk pancake recipe from my mother’s sister, Elsie, and have saved it ever since. Since it was originally my grandmother’s it is probably over a hundred years old, and was probably made from real buttermilk. Here it is:

2 cups flour
2 eggs
2 tsp baking powder
1 Tb sugar
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt

As a memory guide, Elsie pointed out that you can summarize the recipe as 2-2-2-1-1-1/2.

Mix dry ingredients and add buttermilk until you get a “thickish batter.” Cook in a large cast-iron pan or a griddle. Turn the pancakes when they start to show bubbles.

Buttermilk was originally formed by allowing the milk to stand to separate the cream allowing it to ferment a bit. Then, after churning, they let the buttermilk ferment and thicken. But once centrifugal cream separators were developed, you didn’t have to let the cream set and begin to ferment before churning the butter. So, another way to make buttermilk was developed, where they took part skim milk and added the same bacteria that were found in fermenting the original buttermilk. These were usually Lactococcus lactis and Leuconostoc citrovorum. This was called “cultured buttermilk” and is commonly found in the US, where there is little original buttermilk available.

I have been making excellent pancakes using Friendship Buttermilk for over 20 years. But recently, our local market dropping the Friendship buttermilk, offering only Kate’s Buttermilk. You can still buy it at ShopRite and at some Stop and Shops.

So, it seemed like a good idea to compare the two. We made up two identical batches of dry ingredients and eggs, and added buttermilk to each until we reached a “thickish batter” stage. We initially cooked 4 pancakes on each time on our Presto griddle. But recognizing that the griddle’s heating was uneven and measurement of each pancake aliquot was difficult we then simply put one carefully measured ¼ cup of batter on the griddle from each recipe, and placed them close together so they would have the same cooking temperature.

The result:

The pancake on the right, made with Friendship cultured buttermilk, clearly rose higher than the one made with Kate’s buttermilk. We would assume then that the Friendship buttermilk is slightly more acidic and reacts with the leavening more that the Kate’s recipe did.

How did they taste? We tasted a slice of each pancake without any added butter or syrup. The Friendship pancake had a rich buttery-milky flavor, but the Kate’s pancake was quite bland, with no distinct flavor at all.

So, how do the two buttermilks themselves taste? Not surprisingly, the Friendship buttermilk tasted more like buttermilk. The Kate’s just tasted sour. No real butter-milky flavor at all. So, we are sticking with the Friendship for our pancakes. An experiment with biscuits showed similar differences in rising as well.

Sorry to say, despite all the positive press Kate’s has gotten, we found it quite disappointing.