Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

FOOD IS MY LIFE ! My wife has found me napping with my chin and shirt dripping wet with drool dreaming about FOOD.
FOOD is the one place that I don't try to save by using inferior products and having to live with severe dietary restrictions we make the most of the cards I've been dealt. I have found that incredible dishes can be created with a few quality ingredients and keep inside my diet restrictions also they can be served to company without them even aware, I've had very sophisticated paletes have seconds and even thirds.
I hunt and harvest our own venison [ elk, deer, moose, caribou ], antelope, wild desert sheep and goats, wild boar and wild turkey. We do buy bison and some free range organic poultry though. We catch our fish [king/coho salmon, halibut, snapper from Alaska and yellowfin tuna, albacore, bluefin, humbolt squid [whatever gets in the range of San Diego over-nite and multi-day tuna boats]
We buy whole grain artisan breads and farmers market produce whenever possible
The pantry is chauk full of various ethnic ingredients as well as the good old stand-bys. 7 types of salt so-far, 4 types of peppercorns, 6 sugars and so-on.
Various types of olives California artisan, Italian, Spainish, Greek Turkish etc. Cheeses wonderful cheeses homegrown natural artisan cheeses and various european varieties.
Asian food is my fav so we have a large selection of Thai, Indonesian, Chinese proper, Viet Namese, Korean, Japanese, some Indian, etc.
The pantry also holds contiental, mediterranian, latin and pacific fusion for lack of a better term.
I LOVE FOOD !

I know I’m suppose to keep kosher but I can’t give up hanging prime beef, even if the average cost is around $15 per pound and more importantly from a real butcher.

Farm fresh eggs, because I have no fear of making mayo

Damn good Olive oil, just because I deserve it

Free trade coffee – I refuse to live life without it and I seriously don’t care how much it costs

Good balsamic vinegar – just because

Imported Italian canned tomatoes, no tomato sauce should be without them

00 Flour – this is not me, my sour dough starter has expensive taste, Ok it also makes kicken pizza dough

Marco Polo tea from Mariage Freres – if you ever had any of these tea’s you would understand

Scharffen Berger and Callebaut organic Chocolate – come, on you would actually make a chocolate dessert without using one or both of these…what would be the point

Cheese goes without saying my current addition in is d’Affinois

Fish – gotta see the eyes and I live in an area where you buy the live fish in tanks

@ meravaleh – I bake between 150 to 225 doz cookies during the holidays and have for 20 years and I get the butter flavored Crisco thing, don’t know why but it just works with large batch cooking baking – try Nestle chocolate chips

Chocolate is a biggie for me, though I'm not saying that I don't enjoy a Hershey's bar now and then!

ed, i thought you might like to see what julie powell has to say: http://juliepowell.blogspot.com/

Trichinosis is a pain, literally. the worms live and form cysts in the muscle tissue of the host. And considering that to do that they burrow through your intestines and any other tissues in their way it is not great for your total health. I have worked with people who had gotten infested,and they assured me it is definitely not one of the things you want to put on your bucket list of to do's. If it were harmless, no one would be concerned.

To prevent infestation meat should be cooked to a minimum of 137 degrees farenheit, considereing most people can't or won't calibrate their thermometers, play it safe and go to 145, still rare, if that is what you desire.

Decades ago, when trichinosis was more common USDA gave us two other methods for destroying trichinae in meat.

Method 1 is freezing the meat at -20 degrees farenheit for 40 days, shorter times and higher temperatures may not work, this was known as certified Pork in the meat industry. this is also colder than most home freezers are run at.

The second method refers to dry cured meats. this required the meat to be treated with 3 1/2 percent salt for 40 days to destroy the encysted worms. The actual 40 days started when the product was fully salted, immediately with ground meat, think genoa salami or soppressata, but if it were a dry cured ham, it could take 60 days or longer for the salt to equilibrate to a minimum of 3.5% throughout the ham. That is why dry cured hams age for 4-6 months.

The reality here, is that people really know far less than they should about what they eat and how to prepare it. May people distrust real science for their gut feelings. Others are total cynics, maybe former hippies( oh the hate talk this will generate), who feel the system is out to get them and homogenize them. People, learn the real science, make sane decisions. Just because a Chef or Farmer tells you it won't hurt you to eat rare pork, or you read it on the internet (oh my god that is where I posted this!) doesn't make it 100% true.

Trust me, eating your pork a little dryer (Cooked to 145 to 150 degrees) is far better than trichinosis.

In the Philippines, I guess because they feed pigs with almost anything we've always cooked pork to well done. And that's the way i'm going to continue to make it. I think the problem with mass-produced pork here in the U.S. is that they have been bred to almost no taste (too lean) so cooking it well done taste like cardboard. I would love to try the pork from Flying pigs farm...it's on my list...chinese roast pig with their pork belly!

My husband and I have decided that given what we know now, we will continue to cook and eat Berkshire, Red Wattle, Duroc, etc. pork after it has been frozen for two weeks or longer. It will be cooked to about 137*. Thanks, Ed, for this post. It has provoked a lot of discussion, and we have decided that this is how our family will proceed. We also spoke this afternoon to our farmer. She reads everything she can on such subjects when she isn't reading Proust or tending to the farm. We consider the source of the food we bring into our kitchen to be very important, and we always try to be aware of the bias, agenda, ambitions of the people providing information.

@trialbyfood, yes, it was an op-ed piece, but it was published by the most powerful and influential paper in the country, and they should be more careful about what they print. i thought it was a ridiculous piece, myself, and i'm glad ed brought it up.

The Pork Board represents all commercial growers of pork, breed specific, free range and factory. They tell niche producers how to market, where to get certified, and try to keep them profitable and in business. To imply they have an agenda in this study, beyond proving pork is safe to eat, is beyond belief. Visit their web site and see what they do. If they have any agenda, it is to get people to eat as much pork as possible.

All federally inspected pork is lot tested for trichinae, and similar studies have been done by USDA, which have shown trichinae in free range pork. Why would anyone be suprised that an animal in uncontrolled outdoor conditions runs a greater risk of getting environmental infestations of parasites. The feral cats in major cities have toxoplamosis, why wouldn't free range pigs?

jmf605: I was actually referring to the link between indiscriminate antibiotic use in pork factory farms and the rise of drug-resistant staph.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/opinion/15kristof.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/magazine/16wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1

This is great news for the chain of Pork Sushi restaurants that I'm kicking off later this year.

I grew up eating the pigs my grandfather raised, he didn't use antibiotics on them and no one ever got sick. But then again, we would cook the pork for hours in a spit until it was falling off the bone. I think the temperature the meat reaches when cooking has more to do with how safe it is than the way it was raised.