Eat All About It

Enjoying a dish cooked “sous vide” at one of the many Seattle restaurants that use the high-tech technique? Chances are the restaurant is unwittingly violating county health codes.

The King County Health Department recently notified restaurants that the sous vide process — cooking vacuum-sealed food in water baths at low, precisely-controlled temperatures — requires a variance from the health department, as well as an approved Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) plan, a detailed food safety plan more commonly seen in large-scale or industrial operations. 

The first (and only, to date) legal kid on the block? It looks to be four-star Crush on Madison, where chef-owner Jason Wilson is legendary for his aromatic, tender, sous-vide short ribs, and employs the technique for other ingredients from carrots to calamari. Crush has been working on its plan for weeks, and recently submitted it (along with $400 in new fees) and provided inspectors with a sous vide class and demonstration. Chef-owner Jason Wilson thought last night the plan had been approved; the health department said approval was “really close.” 

Don’t blame restaurants if they don’t have a plan on the books, though — chances are they had no idea they needed one. Restaurants statewide, not just in King County, have technically been required to get the variance since 2005, a health department spokeswoman said, following changes in the state food code. The department only recently realized, though, that sous vide cooking was increasingly common in Seattle restaurants. Many — if not most — high-end restaurants use the techniques, whether advertised on the menu or not. Chefs love sous vide cooking for its even precision, for the way it preserves and even intensifies flavors, allowing them to play with taste and texture. 

The regulations stem from food safety worries, chiefly fears that the low temperatures and oxygyn-free environment  could increase the risk of botulism. Sous vide cooking has been similarly regulated in New York, where, the New York Times reported, plans must “include step-by-step specifications that regulate how the food is packaged, what equipment is used to cook it, what internal temperature the food must reach, and how it is chilled. The rules require cooks to use expensive water immersion units or combination convection ovens and industrial vacuum-packaging machines.”

In King County, the health department recently alerted restaurants to the requirements, and are working with them to get on board. 

If they’re serving sous vide food now, it’s technically against the health code — but inspectors are not giving cease and desist orders, they’re letting the restaurants they work with know they’ll either have to start the permit process or cook up something different on the menu.

I have my share of benefit cookbooks on the shelf, but I often buy them more for the cause than the recipes. That’s why “40 Seasonal Soups” made an impact when I started browsing through it: The fund-raiser for Queen Anne’s Sacred Heart Shelter is a recipe collection from some of the best restaurants and most accomplished chefs around town. Canlis takes a bow with a parsnip veloute; Tilth offered up a broccoli-cheese soup made with aged Grafton cheddar; Ethan Stowell chips in his Mediterranean mussels and chickpeas; Le Pichet shares its famous onion soup; Tamara Murphy cooks up  sweet pepper soup, highlighting “the glamor girls of the garden.” The well-known stars are joined by neighborhood favorites such as The Continental and its avgolemono.

Volunteer Elizabeth Kruse, who spearheaded the project, began cooking dinners about two years ago at the shelter, which was founded in 1979 with the belief that everyone deserves a safe place to sleep. Volunteers bring their own food, cooking for 30 or so residents at a time. “I saw what a fabulous place it was, and the great things it was doing, really, on a shoestring,” she said. She started looking for more sustained ways to help. The shelter’s annual fundraiser was soup-related — a downtown luncheon with soup and bread donated by restaurants and bakeries — so she began asking chefs around town to contribute recipes for a book.

Some said no — too busy with other causes, just not interested, or just plain no. Most said yes. Dan Braun of Oliver’s Twist, whose son went to preschool with Kruse’s son, stepped up to make calls, encouraging colleagues to chip in as well as contributing himself. The only real prerequisite at first was that the recipes be user-friendly. (After a few came in at restaurant-quantity, serving 50, she began suggesting they be scaled to serve 4 to 12). As they kept pouring in, Kruse started adjusting — putting the brakes on tomato soups, for instance, or chowders.

Kruse tested the bulk of the recipes at home. ”They were all fantastic. Quite honestly, it was a pleasure. Not only I, but my family, my brothers, and my friends - a lot of people have had a lot of soup over the last couple of months.” Lisa Peterson, a friend with a graphic design company, volunteered hundreds of unpaid hours to design the book and see it through.

As I was talking about the delightful ins and outs of the food — how good it sounded to simmer ham hocks on a chilly day for Betty’s winter posole, or how fine it sounded to poach eggs in the broth of Taberna del Alabardero’s Castilian garlic soup — I realized that’s only one key part of the book. The recipes are great so they can help support the cause — the shelter, which serves families who often can’t be helped by other charitable organizations in town. Teenagers can stay with their families at Sacred Heart. Single dads with children are welcome. The organization serves up to six families and six single women at a time, giving them a place to stay for up to 90 days, along with trying to find them stable housing and help them get the skills and means to maintain it. Along with recipes, the cookbook includes first-hand stories from the adults and children who have been nourished there in all ways.

“The rug is being pulled out of places like this…” said Kruse. They do such beautiful work, she said, and so much work, under such tough circumstances. “I love the cookbook, and I loved so much working on it, but the best thing is really that all of the proceeds go back to the shelter, and really make a difference.”

The grand release party for “40 Seasonal Soups” will be Thursday, Oct. 1, at the Queen Anne Farmers Market. The party will include soup demos and samples, with soups by contributors Greg Atkinson, Becky Selengut, and Craig Serbousek. Sacred Heart’s annual Soupline Luncheon Oct. 9 will also feature the cookbook, or check out contact information for ordering here.

Seattle is one of three test markets in the U.S. for the SweeTango apple, a new cross between a Honeycrisp and a Zestar, hailed as the next big thing in the apple world. Like its parents, the SweeTango was developed at the University of Minnesota. Locally, it’s being grown by Wenatchee-based Stemilt, who also recently bought the rights to grow Pinata apples in the U.S. 

Stemilt offered to send me some apples to sample before they were available here, and I found them crisp and clean, attractive and crunchy and sweet. The skin was a bit thick, but I loved the texture, though Stemilt says in press materials that it expects an even better texture next season. As the Associated Press reported, the apple’s being seen as a successor to the Honeycrisp. But the way it’s being marketed is quite different: The university licensed the apple to a co-op of growers who control “who can grow SweeTango and where, and how the apple is marketed and shipped.” It’s the same sort of “managed variety” as Pink Lady and Jazz apples, more common overseas than in the U.S., the AP notes. SweeTangos are now on the shelves at QFC (the only place they’re available locally), and, at my neighborhood store, they priced out at $2.99/lb. It’s a dollar more than most other varieties there, though in line with what I usually see at the top end of apple prices.

Minnesota Public Radio noted that some growers find it unfair to restrict who can grow the apple, as the previous varieties developed by the university had been available to any grower who paid a one-time fee. The story continued: (more…)

Got a taste for lamb? We’ve got a pair of tickets to give away to the Oct. 25 American Lamb Jam, a gathering of 15 chefs and 15 wineries pairing “creative preparations of lusty lamb dishes” with award-winning wines. The roster includes Buty, DeLille Cellars, McCrea Cellars, ART, Flying Fish, Lola, and more. 

The restaurants didn’t simultaneously go nuts for lamb, of course. It’s part of the American Lamb Board’s Seattle blitz, a determined campaign to get people eating and talking about what’s been described as an underappreciated meat. I feel like I’ve appreciated it quite a bit around town, but it does strike me that while plenty of small Washington farms raise lamb, we don’t hear about them the way we know about, say, Billy’s tomatoes or Skagit River’s beef and pork.

So, want to win a pair of tickets to a night of lamb-centric wining and dining? Leave a comment here telling me what other foods grown or raised in Washington deserve more attention. We’ll close comments at midnight PST on Oct. 2, and use a random number generator to pick a winner.

I’ve been leaving it to the West Seattle Blog to chronicle the new incarnation of Gabriel Claycamp’s Swinery, but I checked out the website today when I saw the shop was scheduled to open. Check out the bottom of this page — an eye-opener for every restaurateur who’s kept a low profile on serving foie gras, hoping to avoid controversy. Here’s the gauntlet Claycamp throws down: (more…)

I wrote in this month’s Sunset magazine about visiting the Saanich Peninsula. (It’s the part of Vancouver Island people are talking about when they say Butchart Gardens is “near Victoria.”) It was that rare place where (with the exception of Butchart), locals and tourists seemed to be enjoying the same things. If I lived there, I’d be a regular at Sea Cider, where Kristen and Bruce Jordan built a grand and yet gloriously collegial cidery and tasting room, a cross between barn and castle. Sitting at long wooden tables milled from local trees, under soaring ceilings and enormous round iron chandeliers, I had the feeling I was at a Hogwarts feast. For taste, I most enjoyed the rough cider made from wild-caught yeasts; for inspiration I appreciated the community-driven Kings and Spies, where Sea Cider buys apples that a  local non-profit collects from the trees of willing homeowners, plowing the profits from the cider back to the organization. (more…)

Farmers markets have been rising in popularity for years, but they still mainly appeal to hardcore customers. A vast potential audience of “second-tier” shoppers claims in surveys to want locally-grown foods, but fears it will be too expensive, too inconvenient, or otherwise too complicated to shop at a farmers market. 

Now the non-profit Cascade Harvest Coalition is launching an interesting research project with the help of a state grant, working with Good Food Strategies to “address and overcome the triggers that are putting a ceiling on the kinds and numbers of consumers who look for and buy locally grown foods.” Three markets statewide - Phinney, Anacortes, and Shelton — are participating, and each one gets $4,500 for promotions to draw new customers in. At Phinney, you’ll see the results over the next two weeks in the form of $2 “Fresh Bucks” coupons available at various Phinney and Greenwood businesses. (more…)

A new take on the cookbook, Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking With What You’ve Got, is one of the first offerings from a new Oregon-based small press.

I wrote a bit about it in today’s Christian Science Monitor. If you’re intrigued, you can meet author Tod Davies at a celebration of Exterminating Angel Press at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 16, at the University Bookstore, or at a book signing at 5 p.m. Thursday at Pilot Books. (Bring a list of what ingredients are in your fridge for inspiration, a la Thierry).

One of the things that caught my eye was the take Davies, a screenwriter, had on photographing food for the book. She didn’t approve. (More here.) It’s as far as you can get from the world of food blogs, which I’ve come to view as modern-day cookbooks. Cornichon thought the book itself “reads rather like a series of posts by a wordy blogger; it’s like listening to a particularly chatty guest at a boring dinner party.” It struck me as a transcribed cooking show, or a podcast, meant for a relaxed perusal over the weeks. It’s making me think about what the word “cookbook” means — and making me think I’ll make her “eggplant caviar” with the contents of my crisper.

Just about anyone who read Shannon Borg and Lora Lea Misterly’s book, Chefs on the Farm, would have a craving to sign up for a week at the Quillisascut School for the Domestic Arts. It’s a hands-on immersion into cheesemaking, bread baking, and the other fundamentals of turning a farm’s products into food. And, for chefs, it’s a chance to experience every practical step from field to table.

On Sunday, we get a vicarious chance to visit, in the form of an “Urban Picnic” fundraiser featuring foods from a dozen top chefs and restaurants who share the farm’s ethos  – including Lark, Canlis, TASTE, and Top Chef Robin Leventhal, not to mention farm chef Misterly herself. Picnic tickets bankroll the farm scholarships that Seattle’s Chef Collaborative awards each year. Dining on sweet corn ragout and churro lamb and other goodies is an enjoyable way to contribute, and it does go both ways: When I talked to this year’s scholarship recipients, Zephyr Paquette of Elliott Bay Cafe and Zack Chamberlain of TASTE, I realized how much of their experiences at the school cycle back to us all. (more…)

Tom Douglas always has some new idea cooking, so it didn’t shock me to learn he was thinking of a new restaurant. What did surprise me was the location: Ballard?

Part of Douglas’s game plan until now has been keeping his entire empire in a small, walkable area downtown (see under: Danny Meyer). You’d barely work up an appetite making the full circuit from Etta’s to Palace Kitchen to Lola to Dahlia to Serious Pie. Ballard is hardly Peoria, but it would be a good five miles north, the first “neighborhood” outpost for Seattle’s best-known restaurateur. So I chatted on the phone with Douglas today to find out what’s making him break tradition now. (more…)