Chunks Have Returned!

Sam and I work for the same large corporation — albeit in different divisions — and we are both on the Foodies list. In a recent email thread about tempering chocolate and the chips one can buy for the purpose, she casually suggested the new Scharffen Berger chocolate chunks she was snacking on.

My breath caught, and I clicked the link. Could it be? It could.

Because these are not a new product. Scharffen Berger made these chunks a few years ago, but the process was too expensive given the demand. As I remember it, they had to stop their normal chocolate production, switch the factory over to a new mode, and then make chunks for a while before undoing all the effort to make normal chocolate again. I guess all that Hershey money has empowered them to start up again.

You can snack on these, as Sam was doing, or melt them down for tempering, as she suggested. But the baking chunks are perfect in the thick, chewy chocolate chip cookies I prefer. They become gooey pockets in the cakey mass, bigger (and better) than chocolate chips. They are also, it turns out, ideal for the “chocolate things” recipe in The Cheese Board Collective Works (a buttery yeast dough filled with chocolate bits). The recipe even calls for six ounces, which is the exact weight of one package of chocolate chunks.

So far, I've only seen them at the Scharffen Berger stores (at the factory and at the Ferry Building), but you can order them online. Here’s hoping they stay around this time so that I don’t have to go on another hoarding run when I hear they’re being discontinued.

A Diminutive Dinner Party

We have begun to entertain again.

Not, I should add, in earnest. We are rusty at the dinner party game, and so we are swinging our foot along the surface of the water, pushing wavelets about before we jump in.

But nonetheless, some people other than us have sat at our dining room table. Some people other than us have eaten more than a course or two at that table. Some people other than us have sipped our wine.

The other night, we had some friends over. One was celebrating a birthday — like me, she is on some repeat of her 29th birthday — and the others were there to wish her well and catch up. I greeted everyone with a platter of salt-roasted chestnuts, radishes, and balsamic-roasted figs to nibble on while we poured glasses of Champagne.

Regular readers may be about to call me out. I recently claimed that I only peel chestnuts once a year. That’s true, but I have no problem letting my guests peel some, which is the presentation suggested in the original recipe. As it happens, these chestnuts peeled more easily than my tear-wrenching batch, but they still engaged our guests. I like a tactile appetizer platter. There is something immediately leveling and companionable about eating from a common plate, even when the guests are already good friends.

While our guests snacked, I plated a cauliflower panna cotta (mostly the recipe from The French Laundry Cookbook) with a spoonful of gremolata on top and a green salad on the side. I paired it with a 2002 Sherwood House Chardonnay from Long Island because I wanted a wine that was somewhat creamy and weighty with age for the panna cotta but also acidic enough for the salad dressing and gremolata.

Our main course — already we have arrived at the entrée, so you can tell this was casual — was a roast leg of lamb on a rosemary risotto garnished with small dice of root vegetables that had been blanched, shocked, and reheated in duck fat. I pulled a 2002 Ceja Cabernet Sauvignon, a rich, robust wine capable of standing up to the red-rare lamb, from our downstairs rack.

The course I fretted over the most, however, was dessert. Yes, you’re shocked: There was no cheese course. As I said, we are still regaining our stride. I called my dessert “Taste of December.” Eggnog ice cream garnished with nutmeg, pomegranate sorbet topped with ruby-red pomegranate seeds, and spiced cider sorbet, garnished with an apple slice. All served in tuile cups. I was eager to try the freeform sorbet recipes suggested by Harold McGee's The Curious Cook, a recent discovery at a local used book store. He offers proportions for scoopable sorbets of many kinds in tables that promise the ability to create wildly and still score. My first attempt was not exactly what I wanted: Scoopable, yes, but unevenly so, so I couldn’t make perfect little balls. Perhaps some alcohol would have done the trick. I didn’t serve a dessert wine because I feel that frozen desserts blunt the palate and remove the pleasure that a dessert wine can afford.

Real-World Wine Pairing

I’m going to use you all as guinea pigs. I want to start posting more about the connections between food and wine. It occurred to me that I have a perfect bag of material: dinner. I don’t cook every night, but even when we get take-out, we almost always have wine or beer to drink.

And since I invest a tiny amount of effort in thinking about that beverage, I thought I’d post occasional glimpses at my thought process.

First, some caveats. I believe that most wine goes with most food. I’ve had a few stellar matches; I’ve had some clunkers. But for the most part, it’s hard to go too far astray. I steer by a few guidelines, but mostly I follow my mood and work with what I have available at the house. Don’t look at these posts as absolute guides; look at them as a glimpse at my thought process. Also, I probably won’t write up every meal. You may have noticed that I’m not so much with the daily posts. But I’ll try to do these with some regularity.

The Dish: Pasta with Roasted Chestnuts and Bitter Greens
Once a year, some recipe inspires me to peel my own chestnuts. Once a year, the chestnuts reduce me to tears with their clinging flesh. This year, the agent of my despair was the recipe for salt-roasted chestnuts in Paula Wolfert’s Slow Mediterranean Cooking (a book I heartily recommend, by the way, despite some editorial lapses). I decided to put her chestnuts onto pasta and mix in wilted arugula and mache.

The Drink: 1997 Stéphane Tissot Vin Jaune, Arbois
I like oxidized wines when I have a strong nut component in a dish. Actually, as my students could tell you, I like oxidized wines with just about anything, and vin jaune is an unusual member of the species. A winery makes it by filling a barrel partway with wine and letting a native population of yeast form a mat on top of the wine. The Arbois region of France, in the Alpine foothills on the east side of the country, is one of the few places where you’ll find a yeast population that can do this: Jerez is another — fino sherries are made this way — and Tokaji is one more, though I’ve never seen a Tokaji Szamorodni here in the United States. Ed describes the flavor of vin jaune as “rancid walnuts,” which is as good a description as any for this funky wine. They age forever: Jack of Fork & Bottle recently let me taste a 1967 Chateau Chalon vin jaune, and it was still fresh and vibrant.

How’d It Work?
Because I so seldom suffer the agony of chestnuts, I forget that they’re more sweet than nutty. I expected the rich flavor of slow-roasted almonds, but I got a delicately sweet nut. The bitter greens mellowed quite a bit, and so the wine ended up overpowering the dish. A gentle, lightly sweet Riesling or Scheurebe might have been a better choice.

Go To Jojo

Over the years, I have urged my Bay Area readers to go to Jojo in Oakland. Sometimes I’ve done so overtly, but I have always kept a link to it on the right side of this blog. Melissa and I have many happy memories tied to the restaurant and its owners — among others, it’s where we chose to have our rehearsal dinner — and it is simply some of the best food in the East Bay. Curt’s duck confit trumps all the other versions I’ve tried, and I’ve tried many, many versions. And I have always held up their wine list as a paradigm: Not because it’s big, but in fact because it is small, incredibly focused, and closely tied to the restaurant’s food.

We just got word that they’re closing, and it breaks our hearts. They’ve had a good run for a restaurant — nine years — but we still feel like we’ve lost a family member.

So let me urge you, one last time, to go to Jojo before the end of 2008. Don’t miss the chance to experience this rare gem of a restaurant. Don’t be left out when all your foodie friends reminisce about it in years to come.

Wine Writing Cliches

John McIntyre, whose copyediting blog You Don’t Say is one of the few sites I read every day, has recently been covering cliches. First he discussed crime story cliches, then the seasonal cliches of the winter holidays.

I thought that the wine writing community should join in the fun and point out the clunkers in our field. This isn’t about outright errors, such as using varietal when you mean variety, but phrases we’ve grown tired of reading. Though not ones we’ve grown tired of writing, it would seem. (Just to be clear, I’ve been guilty of these in the past.)

Here are some I thought of. Post your favorites in the comments, and I’ll incorporate some into this post (with attribution, of course).

We believe great wine is made in the vineyard
“At least until we get it to the cellar, where we use a cultivated yeast designed to bring out different flavors; stuff the juice into new, heavily toasted barriques to add a lot of oak; and then use reverse osmosis on it to get the alcohol in balance.” This phrase is practically guaranteed to be on the label of the next midlevel wine you buy. Or on the website. Or in an interview. No one means it: They just want to pander to wine as a lifestyle choice.

pairs perfectly with (or variants)
Really stunning pairings do happen, but far less often than most recipe/wine writers would have you believe. Most wine goes with most food reasonably well. (And as an aside, if you’re going to suggest a wine pairing for a dish, the wine educator in me implores you to explain your choice.)

hedonistic
This Parkerism has spread to much of the wine press, and we have overused it.

rosés aren’t just White Zinfandel
This well-trodden theme about dry rosés crops up every May in what seems like every wine publication. Is there anyone with a passing interest in wine who has not heard this by now? (I assume that those with no interest in wine other than drinking it are not reading the publications that have these articles.)

rascally or rogueish as adjectives for Terry Theise
It’s not that these are incorrect descriptions of Terry, but they seem to always crop up. Reading articles about him begins to feel like reading Homer: “Prudent Penelope” and “clever Odysseus” skitter through The Iliad and The Odyssey. Find new adjectives, or give a richer portrait.

eccentric or maverick as adjectives for Randall Grahm
Ditto for Bonny Doon’s winemaker.

“pop the cork” or “uncork” when referring to anything other than opening a bottle
I often see this as a catchy bon mot — or so the author thinks — in press releases announcing some new product. Too bad that many other PR people used it first.

Katie seconds "we believe great wine is made in the vineyard and adds …

"Fruit bomb" drives me nuts (we can thank the grand poo-bah of wine, Parker, for that one). "Sideways Effect" is another...some of us want to go back to being quiet pinot-obsessed junkies w/o the hoopla!

Tete de Cuvee Rose Tasting

As a wine writer, I get invited to a lot of tastings. As a person with a full-time job, I don’t go to all of them. I disregard some, hope to make some — and then can’t — and occasionally find myself at one. Then there are the tastings that get me to take time off so I can attend.

When I got a note from Schramsberg, America’s prestigious sparkling wine maker, inviting me to a tasting between Schramsberg’s wines and comparable wines from around the world, I jumped at the chance. And that was when I expected it to be a small but standard press tasting: Too many people in too small a space, industry friends chattering away while blocking the spit bucket, and a line-up of interesting wines.

When I showed up on Monday morning, after an hour and a half of hungover driving, I was one of nine people in the room, most of whom were in the winemaking business. A line of 12 glasses — it was a blind tasting — had been arrayed in front of each seat. We even had individual spit buckets.

As Hugh Davies, the company’s president, explained, we were there to taste wines from a similar class and see how they fared against each other. He and his staff do this periodically. I had signed up for the Tête de Cuvée Rosé tasting, which meant we were tasting some very nice brands indeed: Bollinger, Cristal, Taittinger, Dom Perignon, and of course the J. Schram sparkling rosés. Most were vintage bottles.

Pencils scratched out notes and glasses went up and down — and sometimes up and down again — as we quietly evaluated these prestigious pink wines. Then we gave our rankings and discussed them.

I consider myself knowledgeable about wine. I have that obsessive geek thing, and I put a lot of research into my articles, which I generally consider to be worthwhile contributions to the wine press. (Indeed, one of those pieces, about efforts to combat urban sprawl in wine regions, had made enough of an impression to get me to this tasting.) But seated among winemaking veterans, I felt like a wine novice. Adjectives poured out, fine points of balance and herbaceousness and bitterness were bandied about, and winemaking techniques were guessed at.

It was fantastic. I love this industry because I’m always learning. I jumped in as best as I could (I will say that I introduced some of them to the term petrichor) and listened to Hugh talk about the sparkling wine industry, his winery’s changes over the years, and more.

As an aside, I always urge students in my wine class to be honest about their opinions, because I can’t tell them what to think. People disagree, and it’s okay. Indeed, wines that I loved came in last place for other tasters. Wines with low marks from me came in first for others, and not always the same ones. And all those tasters disagreed with each other as well. Everyone has a unique palate and sensibility.

Except that there was one clear winner, a complex, well-balanced wine with a rich, fragrant nose and a great taste. As I said to the group, I could have waffled on 2 and 3, and 4,5, and 6 overlapped, and so forth, but number 1 was an easy choice. Most of us put it in the first or second spot. When they pulled off its bag, it was the 2000 J. Schram Rosé.

The Problem With Cabernet Sauvignon

If you were to gauge our wine tastes by our wine rack, you might think we have an inordinate fondness for Cabernet Sauvignon. When I went downstairs to get a bottle last night, a cursory glance took in a Ceja Cab, a Mondavi, a Silverado, and a Judd’s Hill. And I can only get wines onto the top half of our big wine rack. And one of the shelves is half full of class wines. There were no Rieslings. There were no Sauvignon Blancs. There were no Southern Rhônes. There were no Piemontese wines. And yet these wines are among my favorites.

Why don’t I have any on my rack? Because we drink them all. (We do have a bunch in off-site storage.) But Cabernets sit for a few years before they get pulled out. My abundance of Cabernet doesn’t come from liking it: It comes from never drinking it.

The tannin-heavy, weighty grape has its place, but that place is next to heavy meats, and I just don’t have the budget for steak or rack of lamb every night. Even if I did, I like more variety in my food. To my mind, Cabernet Sauvignon does not.

On the other hand, this means that my Cabs end up sitting on the rack for a while, accruing a few of the years they need to mellow out and develop. Last night, when I made steak for dinner, we drank a 2003 Judd’s Hill Napa Cab, and its fine-grained tannins had settled down to allow the fruit — red raspberry jam and strawberries — to gush out. And there were the first hints of older Cabernet in our glasses: a thin rim of red that was more orange than purple, a whiff of tobacco and earth.

It will probably be a while before I drink another Cab, and so they will continue to pile up. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing, after all.

Manresa

We may be among the very last Bay Area foodies to eat at Manresa, David Kinch’s well-sung Los Gatos restaurant.

We’ve known about it for a long time: Food bloggers everywhere raved about it even before one of our own started dating the chef. But the last time we thought about going, we bought a new house with a repair list that made Santa Claus’ naughty-and-nice list look like a quick read. We had to wait another year, and our eagerness grew as we read each new glowing report.

We worried that we had heard too much hype. Could the restaurant live up to the gushing praise we had read? Yes, in fact, it could.

In our 15-dish tasting menu, virtually every dish was a little gem: Intense flavors, flawless technique, and elegant presentation. It’s the kind of meal that inspires me, a good cook by most accounts, to improve and stretch my abilities. It wasn’t just good: It was revelatory.

From the starting amuse of red pepper gelée with black olive madeleines (cleverly mirrored with a mignardise of strawberry gelée and chocolate madeleines) to the “Autumn Tidal Pool” (uni and foie gras in a rich broth) to the pork belly with soubise (an onion bechamel) to the banana crème with chocolate fondant and meringue kisses, we had little transcendent moments with each dish. A waiter would describe each course as it appeared at the table, and our anticipation rose to such a pitch that we stopped talking entirely when, after the amuses, a waiter arrived with a basket, which he boldly presented to our adoring eyes as “unsalted butter with sea salt and house made bread.”

One can opt for a wine pairing with the tasting menu, but we decided to pluck bottles from the restaurant’s extensive list. We started with a 2005 Stéphane Tissot Chardonnay from the Arbois, moved to a 2005 Tablas Creek Esprit de Beaucastel Blanc from Paso Robles, and finished with a 2004 Dönnhoff Schlossbockelheimer Kupfergrube Riesling Spätlese from the Nahe (as someone with a high regard for Terry Theise, though, I was sad to see that the wine buyer had opted for a grey market import of this bottle instead of Terry’s). A dinner of white wines might seem odd, but in fact only one course in the menu, the slow-roasted lamb, might have preferred a red wine.

We walked back to our hotel that night, warmed by the company of friends — meriko joined us; I had two dates for the evening — and the memory of the meal we had just eaten. Every so often on that walk home and at breakfast the next morning, one of us would speak the name of a dish from the menu, and we would all take a moment to remember and sigh.

So let us add our voices to the chorus: If by any chance you haven’t already eaten at Manresa, make your reservation as soon as you can.

Pork Scratchings, A Version Of

What do you do with leftover pig skin?

I recently decided to make my own lardo, salt-cured fatback, using a large piece of pig that my friend Bonnie got for me. Misremembering the details of lardo, I asked for a piece of fat with the skin on.

Bad idea. You want only the fat for lardo, and so I spent hours cutting the creamy white fat away from the pink, leathery skin: I understand now why they used to make footballs from this stuff. With the fat tucked away under weights in the refrigerator, I turned my attention to the square foot or so of skin I had left.

By chance, I had been flipping through Fergus Henderson’s Beyond Nose to Tail. (Also by chance, shuna had been, too.) If you have not yet discovered Henderson, run to the nearest independent bookstore to fix this gap. It’s not just that he writes recipes for offal, the “off cuts” of an animal: He writes those recipes in a warm, humorous, thoughtful voice that is as charming as it is knowledgeable. Of the snails you need for a nettle and snail soup, he writes, “24 fresh English snails, picked by your fair hands (you will need to put them in a bucket and let them poo all their poo out for a few days before cooking …); or there is Tony the Snail Man, who breeds snails.”

One of the first recipes in Beyond Nose to Tail is “Pork Scratchings, A Version Of,” which Henderson describes as “A most steadying nibble.” I describe it as pig skin confit. Pluck stray hairs from the skin; salt it; let it sit for five days; soak overnight in cold water; cook, covered, in duck fat for 2½ hours; and store in duck fat until you need it.

No one considers me shy about serving odd food to guests, but even I might hesitate before serving pig skin confit on toast to most diners. Fortunately, David Lebovitz was in town, and a few food bloggers gathered in San Francisco to pay homage to the master of chocolate and ice cream.

Most food bloggers will put anything edible into their mouths. And sure enough, the guests reached out without hesitation for my crostini, which held reheated, crisped, and chopped pig skin — a gummy, gluey texture — along with an apple-onion marmalade. I watched tentatively as the bloggers’ teeth sank in: I was prepared for disaster. Instead, I heard mmmms and saw eyes rolling back. The pig skin confit was a hit.

I still had some left a week later when I decided to make a variant of the classic French salad of frisée, lardons, and poached egg. Instead of lardons, I reheated the pig skin and chopped it into bits. Instead of frisée, I used Little Gems lettuce tossed in a bacon grease/red wine vinegar vinaigrette. The pig skin bits ranged in texture from teeth-shattering crunchy to teeth-gluing chewy. But they were still delicious. My one regret was that the chunks, even when chopped, glommed together: I wanted them to spread through the salad more.

Peanut Butter Truffles

I have been on a peanut-butter-and-chocolate kick.

Sitting near our office vending machine hasn’t helped. It is always stocked with at least one Reese’s product: Sticks, Cups, or — for one heavenly week — Pieces. I know these are crap foods, except for Reese’s Pieces, which are wonderful, but they’re close and cheap when I need a snack at work.

But as I chewed my way through these unsatisfying bites, I remembered a peanut-butter-and-chocolate recipe in my cookbook collection: the Peanut Butter Truffles in the back of The French Laundry Cookbook.

As French Laundry recipes go, this one is fairly easy: Make a ganache by puréeing peanut butter, butter, sugar, and melted chocolate; chill; coat in melted chocolate; chill; dust in cocoa powder. It’s also astonishingly delicious. I brought them into work for a “pollinated pairing, ” our team’s occasional Friday celebration of food and drink, and my coworkers slurped them down. Our community manager asked, with hand poised over the plate, if she could take some home and then asked, on Monday, if any were left in the refrigerator. Our group’s designer left early, but I slipped her a truffle before she headed out: She said on the Monday after that it didn’t even make it to the car.

So consider us fans.

I’m not, however, a fan of the truffle dipping fork. I decided to give one of these delicate little forks a try, and I am far from a natural with it. I put the ganache ball into the room temperature chocolate, and then plucked it out with the fork. But the chocolate formed an uneven coat, and if I missed or the fork turned while buried in the chocolate, I ended up plunging the fork into the ganache and turning it into a malformed mess. Only at the end, when I switched to using my fingers, did I get the coating I wanted. I’ve made lots of truffles, but the dipping fork added nothing to the process except frustration.