Recipes for Health

Recipes for Health

Chickpeas and Pita Casserole

By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

Published: November 4, 2009

There are a number of Middle Eastern preparations made with stale pita or flat bread, also known as fatta. They are comforting dishes, especially this layered casserole made with pita, chickpeas and broth, and garlicky thickened yogurt.

1 1/2 cups dried chickpeas, washed, picked over and soaked overnight or for six hours

Salt to taste

3 pita breads, white or whole wheat

4 garlic cloves, split in half, green shoots removed

1 teaspoon cumin seeds, lightly toasted and ground

5 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice (more to taste)

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1 1/2 cups drained yogurt

2 tablespoons sesame tahini

1 to 2 teaspoons dried mint, or 1 to 2 tablespoons chopped fresh mint

1. Drain the beans, and combine in a large pot with 6 cups of water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, cover and simmer one hour. Add salt to taste, and continue to simmer for another hour, until the beans are very tender. Drain through a colander set over a bowl. Add 2 tablespoons lemon juice to the broth, taste and adjust salt.

2. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Open the pita breads, and toast in the oven until crisp, about 10 minutes. Oil a 3-quart baking dish. Break the pitas into pieces, and line the dish with the bread.

3. Combine the garlic with 1/4 teaspoon of salt in a mortar and pestle, and mash to a paste.

4. Puree half the chickpeas with half the garlic and the cumin in a food processor fitted with the steel blade. With the machine running, add 3 tablespoons of the lemon juice, the olive oil and 3/4 cup of the cooking liquid from the beans. Add salt to taste.

5. Douse the pita bread with 1 cup of the chickpea broth. Scrape the pureed chickpeas over the pita bread in an even layer. Top with the remaining chickpeas. Stir the remaining garlic, the tahini and the remaining lemon juice into the yogurt. Add salt to taste. Spread in an even layer over the chickpeas.

6. Warm for 15 minutes in the preheated oven, sprinkle on the mint and serve.

Yield: Serves six.

Advance preparation: This can be assembled several hours before you heat and serve it. It can also be served at room temperature. Leftovers will be good for about three days. Refrigerate leftover bean broth for moistening the leftovers.

Martha Rose Shulman can be reached at martha-rose-shulman.com.

Theobroma, this cocoa-based brew was hatched from a chemical analysis of 3,200-year-old pottery fragments from the Cradle of Chocolate, the Ulua Valle

scientific american
Jun 5, 2009 02:00 PM in Archaeology & Paleontology | 28 comments | Post a comment

9,000-year-old brew hitting the shelves this summer

By Brendan Borrell in 60-Second Science Blog

This summer, how would you like to lean back in your lawn chair and toss back a brew made from what may be the world’s oldest recipe for beer? Called Chateau Jiahu, this blend of rice, honey and fruit was intoxicating Chinese villagers 9,000 years ago—long before grape wine had its start in Mesopotamia.

University of Pennsylvania molecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern first described the beverage in 2005 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences based on chemical traces from pottery in the Neolithic village of Jiahu in Northern China. Soon after, McGovern called on Sam Calagione at the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Milton, Del., to do the ancient recipe justice. Later this month, you can give it a try when a new batch hits shelves across the country. The Beer Babe blog was impressed, writing that it is “very smooth,” and “not overly sweet.”

But that’s not the only strange brew Dogfish is shipping out this summer. Next week, the brewery will be bottling up the first large batch of Sah’tea for the general public—a modern update on a ninth-century Finnish beverage. In the fall, The New Yorker documented the intricate research and preparation that went into making the beer, which was first offered on tap at the brewery in May. In short, brewmasters carmelize wort on white hot river rocks, ferment it with German Weizen yeast, then toss on Finnish berries and a blend of spices to jazz up this rye-based beverage. Reviewers at the BeerAdvocate universally praised Sah'tea, comparing it to a fruity hefeweizen. One user munched on calamari as he downed a pint and described the combo as “a near euphoric experience."

And Dogfish is also bringing back one of their more unusual forays into alcohol-infused time travel. Called Theobroma, this cocoa-based brew was hatched from a chemical analysis of 3,200-year-old pottery fragments from the Cradle of Chocolate, the Ulua Valley in Honduras. Archaeologist John Henderson at Cornell University first described the beverage in 2007 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pushing the first use of the chocolate plant back by 600 years. Dogfish first sold Theobroma in May 2008, and the next batch—made from a blend of cocoa, honey, chilies, and annatto—will be on shelves and in taps in July. The chocolate beer was apparently too sweet for Evan at The Full Pint, who writes that it contained “a ton and a half of sugary sweetness” with “an insane amount of gooeyness left behind on the roof of your mouth."

Image of woman drinking beer courtesy a4gpa on Flick

Farmers, who gently coax food from the earth, are more like folk singers, less flashy and more introspective.

Young Idols With Cleavers Rule the Stage

OLD SCHOOL Adam Tiberio at work in Massachusetts.

By KIM SEVERSON Published: July 7, 2009
IF chefs were rock stars, they would be arena bands, playing hard and loud with thousands cheering.
Farmers, who gently coax food from the earth, are more like folk singers, less flashy and more introspective.

Now there is a new kind of star on the food scene: young butchers. With their swinging scabbards, muscled forearms and constant proximity to flesh, butchers have the raw, emotional appeal of an indie band. They turn death into life, in the form of a really good skirt steak.

And it doesn’t hurt that some people find them exceptionally hot.

“Think about it. What’s sexy?” said Tia Keenan, the fromager at Casellula Cheese and Wine Café and an unabashed butcher fan. “Dangerous is sometimes sexy, and they are generally big guys with knives who are covered in blood.”

Of course, there is more to butcher love than that. “Obviously everyone is the middle of a total meat obsession,” Ms. Keenan said. “That’s definitely part of it.” In the last few years, quality meat from small producers has started to make a comeback. These farmers do not send their animals to the large processors that dominate the meat industry, creating a demand for people who know how to extract short ribs from a side of beef or pork belly from a hog.

So young men and women, many with culinary backgrounds, begged their way into apprenticeships with the few old-school butchers and small slaughterhouses that survived. Or they simply taught themselves.

Now they’re working in boutique butcher shops that are opening in cities like New York, New Orleans and San Francisco. The ones who are famous enough to have a following use Twitter and blogs to organize cutting demonstrations that sometimes feature cocktails and sausages.

In San Francisco, Ryan Farr calls himself a “producer of porcine pleasure.” Mr. Farr, 30, is a former restaurant chef who is working on opening his butcher shop, 4505 Meats. In the meantime, people pay him $75 to learn how to break down a young 90-pound pig. They get to take home about 12 pounds of pork and nibble on roasted pork head and Mr. Farr’s signature chicharrones.

Max Heilbron, 31, bought slots in a late spring class as a birthday present for his girlfriend, Jade Le, 28. She hacked away at a leg while he documented the event on his iPhone and Mr. Farr tried to give away some of the grimmer tasks.

“Who wants to start taking the face off the head?” he asked.

For $30, Farr fans can be part of meat and liquor mash-ups at a local bar where he butchers a pig (and soon, a lamb and a quarter of a steer) while people drink cocktails and eat his handmade corn dogs and pulled pork sliders.

Mr. Farr visited New York last week, and one thing on his list was to meet another rock star butcher, Tom Mylan of Marlow & Daughters in Brooklyn. The broody, moody Mr. Mylan, 32, has become such a cult figure that his classes sell out quickly and he sometimes dodges fans, who approach him at parties, and calls from the news media.

Mr. Farr had a dream. “I want to throw a 300-pound pig in the middle of a room full of people and just tag-team it with him,” he said. So far, Mr. Mylan hasn’t set a date.

Butchery skills began to recede in the 1960s, when beef and pork, already cut and boxed, started arriving at supermarkets. Neighborhood butchers, who once handed a child a slice of bologna and saved the hanger steaks for special customers, began to evaporate. Modern butchers became more like slicers.

But the trend began to reverse with the rise of locally raised meat, and the popularity of so-called off-cuts. Some restaurants brought butchery into their kitchens, even though it’s a skill barely taught in culinary school.

“For chefs, you’re not really in the game if you can’t cut up a pig anymore,” said Tamar Adler, a chef who learned butchery at Farm 255, a restaurant in Athens, Ga. She teaches butchery and also coordinates a Web site for people in the Bay Area who want to share in the purchase of whole animals.

The roots of the butcher as an icon of cool might be found in the writings of Bill Buford, who fashioned an operatic meat hero out of Dario Cecchini, a towering, Dante-spouting butcher from the Chianti countryside. Mr. Buford immortalized him in an article for The New Yorker and in his book “Heat.”

“Dario might be in some ways the first rock star butcher, but he did a lot of things others hadn’t done,” said Mr. Buford, who is working in a restaurant kitchen in Lyon. “He was the first polemicist. He is the first unapologetic meat eater.”

In New York, the butcher’s emergence as a haute player snapped into focus in 2004 when Danny Meyer asked Pat LaFrieda, a third-generation Manhattan meat purveyor, to craft a custom blend of hamburger for his Shake Shack restaurant. The butcher’s name gained so much currency that Keith McNally commissioned a special LaFrieda Black Label made from prime dry-aged cuts that is fashioned into $26 hamburger at his new Minetta Tavern.

As a result, Mr. LaFrieda, 35, has been inundated with young would-be butchers who want internships.

Does he think the new breed of rock star butchers are any good? “No. This is a business that takes a lot of training, and where are you going to find good meat to practice on? It’s hard.”

More drive than training among beginners can lead to garage-band butchery.

Part of what some people call the hipster hottie butchering phenomenon is that sometimes the meat isn’t up to par, said Josh Ozersky, editor of The Feedbag Web site and author of two books on meat-related subjects. “It’s like some kind of tattooed lothario is now going to give you the horrible shins raised by some other hipster who doesn’t know anything about meat.”

Joshua and Jessica Applestone, owners of Fleisher’s Grass-fed and Organic Meats, are trying to prevent that. Since they opened their butcher shop in Kingston, N.Y, four years ago, they have released a load of young butchers into the world, Mr. Mylan among them. He spent a year sleeping at their house, learning the craft from Mr. Applestone, 39, a pony-tailed butcher with a porn-star mustache whose grandfather was a kosher butcher in Brooklyn.

They, too, are inundated with requests from people who want to work for free at their shop. So they formalized the program and charge $10,000 for six to eight weeks of instruction. Students can sleep in an Airstream trailer.

Julie Powell — the Julie who inspired the upcoming film “Julie & Julia” — sought them out before they started charging. Her affair with a good friend had left her marriage in shambles, and she was looking for a way to repair her broken heart.

“Standing at the table all day breaking down chuck shoulder just focuses your mind,” she said. “For eight hours a day I am not thinking about any of the mess in life.”

The resulting book, “Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession,” is set to come out in December.

The difference between male and female butchers also came into focus during her time there. She would watch a parade of young people, mostly men, come into the butcher shop for weekend lessons, and the testosterone level was “poisonous,” she said. Once, someone put ice down her shirt. She figured bra snapping wasn’t far behind.

Jessica Applestone, 42, understands. Gender, she said, makes a difference. Men approach breaking down a carcass the way they might approach rock climbing, muscling their way through it. Women, who often lack the upper body strength to pull a 100-pound piece of pig from the hook to the table, take a more strategic and delicate approach.

“Their cutting is a little more sensitive and precise because of it,” she said. But even among the women who butcher, Ms. Adler said, there is that swagger.

“There’s a macho performal nature that some of these people crave,” she said. “And what better a performance than the blood and guts of butchery?”

Melanie Eisemann, 34, said that when she and two other women bought a butcher shop in San Francisco called Avedano’s Holly Park Market, they weren’t interested in performance or machismo.

The vintage shop they took over two years ago has features that would be prohibited by health codes today, like the wood-lined walk-in, with its track for carcasses snaking along the ceiling.

An old white enameled meat case sells cuts by name and provider, all broken down by hand. In the back, a little door reveals a secret room where Tia Harrison, an owner, cooks meaty dinners of tri-tip, black cod and cowboy steak. Competition for a seat is stiff.

“We never did it to be rock stars,” Ms. Eisemann said. “For me, it was a way to promote small farms and certain fish. That’s it.”

Of course, as in music, there are always new styles and new challengers coming up. In June, two Japanese butchers in trousers and ties landed at Japanese Premium Beef, a pristine downtown Manhattan storefront that looks more like a Prada boutique than a butcher shop. Using knives beveled on only one side, they slice blocks of wagyu into sashimi-like slices of beef, some of which sell for $49.99 a pound.

And in August, Adam Tiberio will roll into town from Massachusetts and take up the knives at Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in the Chelsea Market.

He is one of the few young butchers who has worked in a slaughterhouse and cut beef for a supermarket chain. His idols are South American butchers, whose YouTube videos he studies to learn how to break down hanging beef with their poetic elegance. And Mr. Tiberio, 26, writes about the old-school Northeast meat cutters who taught him how to work with speed and precision, withstanding the bone-chilling temperatures of the cooler by stashing a brandy flask in the belly cavity of a lamb.

When he’s in New York, the butchering game might become more competitive, he says. But he means no disrespect to other young butchers in town.

“There is always going to be some guy in some meat room in some part of the world who is going to be faster than you,” he said. “I just leave that alone and cut.”

“I had a boss who wanted me to make the dish in a photo he showed me,” Mr. DeLucie said. “Behind the dish was a girl in a bikini. He always wanted to

Forget the fries and coke, think of her!

Cata la Grande!

“I had a boss who wanted me to make the dish in a photo he showed me,” Mr. DeLucie said. “Behind the dish was a girl in a bikini. He always wanted to know why the dish never tasted as good when I made it.”

The Perfect Burger and All Its Parts

By JANE SIGAL

Published: June 30, 2009

THE simple hamburger isn’t so simple any more.

Over the last decade or so, there has hardly been a serious chef in America who hasn’t taken a shot at reinventing or improving it. They have trained their skills on every element, from the precise grind of beef to the ketchup and pickles. Some have turned their bakers loose on reformulating the bun.

By most accounts, the burger’s upward journey began eight years ago, when Daniel Boulud stuffed ground sirloin with truffles, braised short ribs and foie gras at his DB Bistro Moderne in Manhattan. A few weeks ago, Mr. Boulud brought things full circle, opening a burger bar on the Bowery called DBGB Kitchen and Bar.

While some chefs have groused quietly about the insatiable demand for burgers, most are philosophical. “All chefs can be frustrated by the buying public sometimes,” said Clark Frasier, a chef with restaurants in Massachusetts and Maine. “In this economy I’m happy to sell anything they want to eat.”

All this high-powered attention has produced some new ways of thinking about and cooking burgers. Interviews with 30 chefs provided dozens of lessons for the home cook that aren’t terribly difficult and don’t cost much money. And it all yielded the ideal burger.

A PERFECT BURGER RECIPE There’s a lot you can learn from a man who’s griddled thousands of burgers. Michael David, executive chef at Comme Ça brasserie in Los Angeles, had already earned his burger stripes on the team that developed Mr. Boulud’s French-American DB Burger.

At Comme Ça, Mr. David finally nailed the consummate burger on the 11th try.

The genius of his Comme Ça burger is that it is consistently juicy, perfectly seasoned and precisely medium-rare. The patty is charred on the outside and rosy pink from edge to edge.

It is a radical improvement on what most people already do, but it’s not much more complicated. His trick is to treat the burger the way many chefs do a steak.

He puts a good hard sear on both sides using his plancha, the freight train of flat tops, then transfers it to a 375-degree oven to finish cooking. After it comes out, there’s a built-in resting period while he toasts the buns and makes a last-minute lettuce salad.

His method translates to an amazing amount of flexibility. Home cooks who don’t have a plancha can sear the meat either on a grill or on the stovetop in a cast-iron skillet. It works equally well for one or two people, or for a crowd, because you can sear in batches.

The final cooking works beautifully in a toaster oven as well as a regular oven. Or, if you have an outdoor grill that is as large as some people’s kitchens, you can simply move the burgers to a cooler spot once they’ve been charred.

Mr. David melts Cheddar cheese over the patty and dollops iceberg lettuce salad dressed with spicy mayonnaise on top and, voilà, a reformed burger.

THE RIGHT CHOICE OF MEAT But before you get to cook the burger, you have to choose the right meat.

In “Burger Bar” (Wiley, 2009), Hubert Keller writes that what you do not want is preshaped burgers or meat that is stuffed and compacted into plastic packaging. Once beef is compressed, a light texture cannot be regained.

Douglas Keane, the executive chef and an owner of Cyrus and the Healdsburg Bar & Grill in Healdsburg, Calif., advises people to lose their fear of fat. He started with 80 percent lean beef, then moved to a 70-to-30 ratio.

“The day I did it,” he said, “the servers started coming in and asking, ‘What did you do to the burger? The guests are going crazy.’ ”

Mark Bucher, the executive chef at the Burger Joint in Washington, said that to make a great burger at home, have your butcher grind a piece of brisket. “It’s got a 25- to 30-percent fat-to-meat ratio,” he said. “It’s gorgeous. It’s my favorite.”

Pat LaFrieda, president of LaFrieda Wholesale Meat Purveyors, which delivers custom blends to many of the top burger restaurants in New York City, recommends grinding the meat yourself with a food processor or a mixer’s grinding attachment. He prefers chuck and brisket, and said to put them in the freezer first and chill them to 30 degrees.

“It’s like grating cheese at home,” he said. “Or coffee beans. It’s better, isn’t it?” He explained that preground beef is often made from the trimmings left over from steaks, roasts and stew meat.

It is important, he said, to choose select, choice or prime grade meat.

“When dairy cows come of age, they give a very lean, low-grade beef,” he said. “That’s often what’s used for preground meat. That’s something the consumer wants to stay away from.”

A NICE ROUND SHAPE Next, you form the patty.

“If you do nothing else, you should handle it less,” said Suvir Saran, an owner of Dévi, an Indian restaurant in Union Square. Mr. Saran, who calls himself a vegetarian who cheats, offers burgers at his restaurant, American Masala in Jersey City. Handling the raw meat too much means you’re going to end up with a brick of meat.

Mr. David of Comme Ça thinks a lightly shaped patty holds together better if it’s refrigerated for an hour or two before cooking.

Michael Mina, founder of the Mina Group, which includes the recently opened XIV in Los Angeles, rolls each patty into a ball, then presses it flat to get a nice round shape.

Alternatively, jar lids are popular with chefs. Mark Richardson, the executive chef at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco, swears the lid of a Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar makes the best possible burger mold.

Laurent Tourondel is completely against those chefs who use a whopping 12 ounces of meat.

“It’s not too appealing to have such a thick piece of meat to bite into,” said Mr. Tourondel, the executive chef and partner at the many BLT restaurants. He thinks the patty needs to be in proportion with the tomato, the bread and whatever else you have.

No matter how big the patty is, one small shaping trick will help it cook better. “The first thing you do is take your thumb and make a well in the burger,” said Bobby Flay, the owner of eight restaurants, including Bobby’s Burger Palace, and the author, most recently, of “Bobby Flay’s Burgers, Fries & Shakes” (Clarkson Potter, 2009).

Tamara Murphy, the executive chef and an owner of Brasa, in Seattle, said the air and water in burgers make them puff up when they’re cooked. “Nobody wants a ball of a burger,” she said. “Then people take their spatula and go, smash, squishing out all the liquid.”

Dimpling the patty, she said, helps it cook evenly, and you won’t be tempted to smack it down and lose all the juice.

All the chefs agree that salt is crucial. Whether you’re using kosher, table or sea salt, you should be pretty liberal with it. Beef can take more salt than you think. Most chefs recommended seasoning the burger just before cooking it.

HOW HOT DO YOU GO? The beauty of a burger is its seared crust, and the only way to get it is to make sure the grill, skillet or flat top is hot, hot, hot. “You have to be willing to cook over high heat,” said Andy D’Amico, the chef and a partner at Five Napkin Burger, in the theater district, and Nice Matin, on the Upper West Side.

Testing for doneness is always a challenge for the home cook. Seamus Mullen, the chef and an owner of the Boqueria restaurants in the Flatiron district and SoHo, uses a wire cake tester. (Any thin, straight piece of metal will work as well.)

“We stick it in the middle through the side,” he said. “If it’s barely warm to the lips, it’s rare. If it’s like bath water, it’s medium rare. The temperature will never lie. It takes the guesswork out of everything.”

AND THE PERFECT BUN These chefs are focusing their laserlike attention on the bread around the meat, too.

The buzzer went off for Hidefumi Kubota, the baker at Comme Ça, after Version 14 of the hamburger bun.

The bun was too soft and fell apart. Or it was too hard and crushed the burger. It had to be big enough to hold the patty but not so big that you couldn’t get the burger into your mouth. He ended up with a light brioche bun.

Mike Plitt, the pastry chef at Arrows restaurant in Ogunquit, Me., needed about a dozen attempts before he settled on a cross between challah and a buttery dinner roll.

But Ryan Skeen, who developed a following for his burgers at Resto and Irving Mill, both in Manhattan, likes Martin’s brand potato rolls, sold at supermarkets up and down the East Coast.

Every chef believes that the buns should be warm and crispy.

SWEET, SOUR BUT FRESH FIXINGS Nothing is taken for granted, not even pickles. Some chefs have adopted the buy fresh, buy local ethic. Kyle Bailey, the chef at Allen & Delancey on the Lower East Side, for instance, found his pickles around the corner at Guss’ Pickles.

He especially likes the sour ones because their acidity plays off the sweetness of the ketchup, mayonnaise and bun. “You want something to cut against the richness,” he said.

Other chefs are applying the principle that everything is better if you make it yourself. At MC Perkins Cove in Ogunquit, Me., and Summer Winter in Burlington, Mass., Mr. Frasier pickles serrano chilies. Josh Eden, the chef and an owner at Shorty’s.32 in SoHo, serves quick, house-made cucumber pickles, which get their tang from rice wine vinegar. They’re extremely easy, crunchy and spiked with sweet, anise-flavored tarragon, instead of the usual dill.

Cheese receives the same attention. Joey Campanaro, the chef and owner at the Little Owl in the West Village, uses American cheese.

”You have the eye appeal,” he said. “It looks like what a burger should look like. We’re not elevating it to something it isn’t.”

Jim Leiken, the executive chef of DBGB, said the beauty of American cheese is the texture, but rejected it in favor of Cheddar because he prefers its flavor. He also tried blue cheese for a while, but decided it overwhelmed the beef.

Matt Jennings, a cheesemonger as well as a chef at Farmstead Cheese Shop, La Laiterie Bistro and Farmstead Lunch in Providence, R.I., is in an unusual position to pair cheeses and burgers. What matters most to him when selecting cheese?

“Meltability,” he said. So if a cheese like Gruyère doesn’t melt easily, he grates it, then presses it into a disk the same size as the burger.

The chefs had some final tips for creating a memorable burger. Choose lettuce that’s crisp and serve it cold. Use only really good, ripe tomatoes; a bad tomato waters down the burger without adding any taste. At DBGB, Mr. Leiken replaces the tomato on his Frenchie burger with an intensely flavored house-made tomato-onion compote.

Ultimately, though, it’s not just the ingredients that make a burger great, said John DeLucie, the chef and a partner at the Waverly Inn in Greenwich Village.

“I had a boss who wanted me to make the dish in a photo he showed me,” Mr. DeLucie said. “Behind the dish was a girl in a bikini. He always wanted to know why the dish never tasted as good when I made it.”

CortesíadelNYT

Ubicada dentro de los predios del Club Cariari, frente a la espectacular vista que ofrece la naturaleza que rodea el mayor campo de golf de Centroamér

En Costa Rica

Bienvenidos al Centro Gastronómico La Casona

La Casona abre de nuevo sus puertas

Ubicada dentro de los predios del Club Cariari, frente a la espectacular vista que ofrece la naturaleza que rodea el mayor campo de golf de Centroamérica, ahora completamente remodelada en su aspecto físico, con esmerada atención y gran variedad de comidas.

Aunque su aspecto externo se conserva acorde con el medio que la rodea, su interior ha sido completamente remodelado para ofrecer a los visitantes comodidad, tranquilidad y diversidad de ambientes.

Es así como ahora cuenta con una terraza cubierta que le permite disfrutar de la brisa del campo y hermosos atardeceres degustando un rico café acompañado de variados postres, pizzas o pastas al mejor estilo italiano o nuestros almuerzos ejecutivos gourmet de lunes a viernes.

Si desea un ambiente un poco más íntimo, la nueva Casona le ofrece “Las Tapas Bar”, lugar diseñado para compartir variadas y auténticas tapas españolas y mediterráneas, acompañadas de todo tipo de bebidas. Podrá disfrutar también de pantalla gigante de TV y música ambiental.

Si el deseo es disfrutar de comida formal, La Nueva Casona le ofrece dos ambientes extraordinarios:

¨Picahna Churrascaria & Rodizio ¨, donde puede disfrutar de una amplia barra de ensaladas frías, guarniciones calientes y de 12 cortes de carnes servidos en su mesa al mejor estilo brasileño. Le recomendamos venir con suficiente tiempo para poder así relajarse y disfrutar de estos manjares, sin límite, hasta satisfacer por completo su apetito, por un único precio.

“Très Bistro” restaurante de comida francesa gourmet, donde podrá elegir a la carta su comida predilecta o saciar el deseo de descubrir nuevos platillos. Podrá degustar cordero, pollo, pato, cerdo, carne de res, pescados y mariscos, acompañado de una amplia cava con diferentes vinos y de un pianista que le deleitará los oídos.

Próximamente música y/o espectáculos en vivo jueves, viernes y sábados

No sólo en nuestras instalaciones se puede disfrutar del servicio y comidas que ofrece El Centro Gastronómico La Casona¨, tambien contamos con servicio express y Catering Service a cualquier lugar del país.

AGAVE NECTAR In a Venn diagram of vegans and bartenders, this might be the only overlap.

Refreshing by Definition

By PETE WELLS

Published: June 23, 2009

AGAVE NECTAR In a Venn diagram of vegans and bartenders, this might be the only overlap. While the former group likes it as a honey substitute with no taint of animal exploitation, the latter appreciates its easy ability to blend into cold drinks. Professionals prefer mixing it with tequila and mezcal, but lazy home bartenders might use light agave nectar just like SIMPLE SYRUP, without the bother of boiling, cooling and bottling an extremely sticky substance.

Justin Maxon / The New York Times

Related

Recipe: Watermelon Sugar (June 24, 2009)

Recipe: Blueberry Maple Caiprissimo (June 24, 2009)

Recipe: Pimm’s Saigon (June 24, 2009)

Recipe: Gin Julep (June 24, 2009)

Recipe: Thai Basil Bliss (June 24, 2009)

Rye Rickey (June 24, 2009)

iStock

Josh Habiger

Heidi Schumann for The New York Times

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

iStock

Gabriele Stabile for The New York Times

BASIL Unless you sell your own line of pesto, there’s only so much basil you can use. So why not drink it? A distant cousin of MINT, basil can be put to some of the same uses in cocktails, but with predictably different results. MUDDLE it or just toss it in the shaker and let the ICE do the work (but use a strainer). Basil plays well with fruit, even pineapple.

BLENDER DRINKS See FROZEN DRINKS.

CHILIES Sometimes the best way to cool down is by adding heat. Sparing amounts of hot peppers can lower body temperature, and will cut against the grain of a sweet cocktail, too. Bits of fresh chilies can be tossed into a blender for FROZEN DRINKS or smashed with a MUDDLER. Whole fresh chilies may be left in a bottle of liquor, like vodka. Ground dried chilies — typically cayenne, but smoky pimentón is also worth a try — can be included in a salt rim, as in: Watermelon Sugar.

COLA Rum and Coca-Cola, the Andrews Sisters sang. America sang along. And drank along. And it was good. What happened? Maybe our tastes changed. Coca-Cola certainly did — around 1900, when the drink was invented, Coke contained cane sugar (and cocaine, but that’s another story). Now it has high-fructose corn syrup, a viscous, unwelcome intruder in a Cuba Libre. But some new colas on the market contain restrained amounts of cane sugar, and a mildly bitter presence of kola nut. This sets the stage for an overdue revival of the Cuba Libre. To make one, mix two ounces of un-aged rum and the juice of half a small lime in a tall glass, build a tower of ice cubes, and top it off with the driest cola you can buy. The rind of the half lime is optional. A straw is not.

COLLINS Commercial sour mix drove this drink to the edge of extinction. If you must take a shortcut — if, say, you have heatstroke and the act of squeezing a lemon might send you to the hospital — then pour very good sparkling lemonade over your favorite liquor (gin, if it’s a Tom Collins; with vodka, the name changes to John). But try to gather strength to make it the right way, with the juice of a lemon, a tablespoon of SIMPLE SYRUP, a slug of liquor and loads of SELTZER. As a way to pass a hot afternoon, it is difficult to beat.

CUBA In most Polynesian-themed bars, not one cocktail comes from Polynesia, but plenty come from Cuba. The island is a prodigious source of classic summer drinks, including the Cuba Libre, the mojito and many variants on the DAIQUIRI.

DAIQUIRI If it’s purple and looks like it came from Mr. Softee, it’s not a daiquiri, no matter what the bartender says. This noble drink from CUBA, often ignobly degraded, should be the color of sea glass and taste somewhere on the sweet side of sour, or the sour side of sweet.

FREEZER The freezer is the home bartender’s most important ally. Set it very cold and always keep a bag of ICE in it for reinforcements, although the ice trays that come with most freezers yield superior cubes. Thick and substantial, they melt slowly. Stashing liquor bottles in the freezer is an affectation that may lend your kitchen a slightly desperate appearance and doesn’t do much to cool individual drinks. But it is a help when making punch. If you are, freeze a large plastic bowl of water (or a ring mold, to be fancy about it) the day before. Once solid, the ice will chill a punch for an hour or two before melting.

FROZEN DRINKS This degraded class of cocktail is now clawing its way back to respectability with the aid of bartenders like Adam Seger of Chicago and Martin Cate of Forbidden Island and the forthcoming Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco. Traditionally, most blender drinks are tropical and rum-based (leaving aside, with a violent shudder, the ones that contain ice cream). But the idiom can stretch to fit other flavors as well, as in this drink of Mr. Seger’s: Blueberry Maple Caiprissimo.

GINGER Ginger ale never went away as a mixer — a spigot with a button marked “G” is standard equipment in most bars — but it lost its fizz, not to mention its zing. Bartenders are restoring both. At the easiest level, this means buying high-quality ginger ale or ginger beer, the kind that burns a little as it goes down. Poured into a tall glass over ice and vodka, with a teaspoon of lime, it makes a Moscow Mule. With dark rum and lime, you have a Dark and Stormy. But there are other ways to drink your ginger. You can throw in thin slices of ginger root when making SIMPLE SYRUP for a ginger syrup that combines sugar and spice. Or get your hands on ginger juice. You can make it if you own a juicer, or you can buy it at juice bars, health food stores and Whole Foods, among other places. Dissolve an equal amount of sugar into it and you have a much more energetic ginger syrup. One last tip: in a pinch, you can grate ginger and squeeze it. You won’t open a ginger ale factory this way, but you can extract enough juice for drinks like: Pimm's Saigon.

ICE Modern bartenders will brag about keeping 10 different kinds of ice on hand. For home use, though, only three are worth worrying about. First, regular ice cubes, for the cocktail shaker and for most drinks served on the rocks. Second, big chunks of ice for punches; see FREEZER. Last, finely cracked ice for JULEPS. Some ice crushers on their finest setting will yield something close to this. But for sticklers, only ice wrapped in linen or canvas and whacked to a fine powder with a wooden mallet will do. If the prospect of that makes you want to take a wooden mallet to this reporter, then forget it, and just find the nearest bar that stocks 10 different forms of ice.

JULEP For all the chest-thumping this class of drinks has caused, it’s a simple affair: sweetened liquor stirred in a mound of finely crushed or shaved ice. But until you’ve had one made without shortcuts, one that truly frosts the outside of its cup, it’s impossible to imagine how refreshing a julep can be. These days it is almost always seen in the form of the bourbon-based mint julep, but in the 19th century Americans drank a julep made with genever, an aged gin that eventually vanished from stores. Now it’s come back and with it, if we’re lucky, this recipe from the drinks historian David Wondrich: Gin Julep.

LEMONS AND LIMES Citrus may be a winter crop, but even the most devoutly seasonal bartenders would not make it past the solstice without lemons and limes. Beyond standard uses, keep in mind that a big dose of lime cuts the sugar in a gin and tonic, especially those made with oversweetened mass-produced TONIC WATER. In fact, it can uplift almost any drink made with a carbonated mixer; see RICKEY.

MELON Honeydew, watermelon and even cucumber (all members of the cucurbitaceae family) can be pounded with a Muddler to flavor a cocktail. But for a tall drink where the juice is the main ingredient, you can peel and pulse them lightly in a blender (seeds and all), then push the pulp through a sieve or a cheesecloth. The juice can taste flat without LEMON or LIME juice and SALT. Try, for instance, loading a shaker with ice, then adding 2 ounces of gin, an ounce of cucumber juice, a teaspoon of lime juice and a pinch of salt. Shake, pour over ice in a tall glass and top with cold TONIC WATER.

MINT Essential ingredient in mojitos and some juleps and a fine garnish for almost every other summer drink.

MUDDLER If you don’t own one, you can make do with the handle end of a sharpening steel, or even a wooden spoon. But a muddler, essentially a miniature bat with a blunt end, is a worthwhile investment for crushing fresh herbs and fruit: Thai Basil Bliss.

PEACHES When they’re in season, drink them. Puréed, sweetened white peaches topped with Prosecco make a Bellini. Three or four ripe peach wedges, Muddled with MINT leaves, a tablespoon of sugar, two tablespoons of water and two LEMON slices, then shaken with bourbon and ice, strained into a glass and served on the rocks, gives you Dale DeGroff’s classic Whiskey Peach Smash.

PIMENTO DRAM Crafting sweet drinks that don’t cloy is the trickiest part of summer mixology: you don’t want your rum punch to taste like Hawaiian Punch. Bitters and CHILIES can help. So can Jamaican pimento dram (or pimento liqueur), now back on some liquor store shelves in the United States. As an undercurrent in fruit-based cocktails, it adds a dash of what-is-that-flavor intrigue. (It’s allspice.)

RASPBERRY SYRUP On summer’s first really hot day (and that day will come, unlikely as it seems), when fresh berries turn to pulp before you can eat them, do this: Boil 3/4 cup of sugar in 3/4 cup of water until dissolved, and let cool slightly. Purée a cup of raspberries with the warm sugar syrup in a blender, then strain and let cool completely. Keep in a clean jar and use the raspberry syrup in place of sugar or SIMPLE SYRUP in any cocktail recipe, particularly those with LEMON. Or stir 2 ounces of syrup into 6 ounces of seltzer for a lovely, if expensive, soft drink.

RICKEY So simple it’s almost embarrassing, a rickey is nothing more than a shot of any liquor with a healthy dose of LIME juice and lots of seltzer. That’s it. A little sweet liqueur can make it even better, as in: Rye Rickey.

SALT Once seen on margaritas and nowhere else, salt has come in for a second look at bars. A pinch in the shaker can sharpen the taste of juices like MELON or cucumber. More often it’s used on glass rims, mixed with sugar, perhaps, and with ground spices like fennel seed, black pepper, CHILIES or dried citrus zest. (Bacon dust has also been spotted, but the less said about that, the better.)

SELTZER Keep a few small bottles in the refrigerator, and more in storage, and you will always have the simplest summer drink within reach: a highball, made with liquor and soda.

SIMPLE SYRUP Nobody in their right mind makes simple syrup for just one cocktail. But it’s worth the bother in summer, when a big batch comes in handy for sweetening iced tea, coffee and lemonade. Boil a cup of sugar in a cup of water and stir until dissolved. Let cool, decant into a glass container and keep refrigerated. (For a change, especially in rum and pisco drinks, try simple syrup made with Demerara sugar instead.)

SPICED SYRUPS Follow the method for simple syrup, but throw in some cinnamon sticks or a tablespoon of whole cloves, allspice or black pepper. Let cool, strain out the spices, and store. Use instead of, or with, SIMPLE SYRUP in fruity drinks. Your guests will be pleasantly mystified.

TONIC WATER Like COLAS, many commercial tonics are now made with high-fructose corn syrup. They have a way of sticking to the roof of your mouth that might be fine in peanut butter, but not in a gin and tonic. New boutique tonics, like Q and Fever-Tree, are less sweet and sticky. A sour blast of Lime juice is no longer a necessity, just a nice complement.

WINE When it’s hot, we’re thirsty. But you don’t want to knock back straight whiskey like water, just to quench your thirst. That’s why tall drinks diluted with COLA, SELTZER or TONIC make sense, and why wine cocktails deserve a try. On the other hand, you could just forget the cocktail and drink a cold rosé.

the Obamas themselves, who used Date Night to dine at his Greenwich Village restaurant, Blue Hill

A Locavore Before the Word Existed

Christopher Smith for The New York Times

SINCE 1990 Savoy, in SoHo, was a pioneer in cooking with local and seasonal ingredients.

By FRANK BRUNI

Published: June 10, 2009
BY all accounts, the two of them are collegial, even friendly. But still you have to think that Peter Hoffman sometimes wants to bean Dan Barber with an extra-juicy heirloom tomato — at the peak of its season, of course — or scatter some Jolly Green Giant into Mr. Barber’s freshly harvested sugar snaps.

Mr. Hoffman must marvel: How did this whippet-thin whippersnapper, some 14 years his junior, become downtown Manhattan’s farm-to-table guru, enshrined by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people and affirmed by the Obamas themselves, who used Date Night to dine at his Greenwich Village restaurant, Blue Hill?

Mr. Hoffman, after all, was foraging in the Greenmarket (to which he has always traveled by bicycle, mindful of his carbon footprint) when Mr. Barber was still in high school. And Mr. Hoffman, and his wife, Susan Rosenfeld, began exalting all things organic, sustainable and humanely raised at Savoy, in SoHo, a full decade before Mr. Barber did likewise at Blue Hill.

It’s easy to overlook that, given all the loud and proud locavores upon the land today. It’s easy to forget about Mr. Hoffman and about Savoy, whose leafy, principled menu now seems less a breath of fresh cooking than the default setting of the urban bistro, where a chef contemplates ramps in May, butternut squash in November.

But if Savoy is no longer a trailblazer or paragon — and if, indeed, it makes a more modest impression than a latter-day temple of ethical eating like Blue Hill — it remains an attention-worthy restaurant, on account of how deeply pleasant an afternoon or evening here can be. Its low-key charms haven’t faded since its opening in 1990, and its adjustments over time have been wise ones.

Physically, for example, it’s more attractive than when it was last reviewed in The Times, in 1995, getting two stars from Ruth Reichl. That was around the time it expanded from one level to two. But it was configured differently, and it didn’t have the long bar just inside its entrance, one of the most inviting bars in the city, a band of dark stone shaped like a horseshoe, so that when you sit at it, you face the people around you. It’s a bar as a drinking and dining community, a circle (almost) of enlightened epicures.

Early in the evening there’s a cutting board at the base of the horseshoe. On it are olives, pickles, meats cured in house, farmstead cheeses and the like. They’re seductive bar snacks, though the one you shouldn’t miss isn’t in view. It’s a plate of crunchy battered duck livers, which make an important statement about Savoy. They say that for all its virtue and vegetables, it’s not playing waistline watchdog. It will give you something rich, even something fried.

The breaded egg that’s part of an appetizer of asparagus, for example. Egg and asparagus: scores of restaurants do that. But lightly breading the egg after poaching it and dunking it briefly in hot oil? That’s not as prevalent, and it gives the dish an extra texture, an added heft.

Over the years Savoy has served as a classroom for Greenmarket chefs who graduated to other restaurants just as beloved, if not more so. It has also, apparently, served as something of a gastronomic dating service.

Charles Kiely and Sharon Pachter, the couple who own the Grocery in Brooklyn, met at Savoy. So did Andrew Feinberg and Francine Stephens, who own Franny’s, also in Brooklyn.

In fact there’s a tie between the style of cooking and restaurant that define the current Brooklyn scene and what’s been going on at Savoy for two decades. There’s a shared concern not just with the provenance of ingredients and the straightforwardness of their presentation but with a dining experience more folksy than glitzy, more bluntly nourishing than madly exhilarating.

At Savoy, whose front windows open onto an intersection with actual cobblestones, that sensibility translated into a wild dandelion salad with toasted hazelnuts whose faint and distinctive sweetness was the perfect counterpoint to the bitter greens. It translated into a clear-flavored, resonant spring onion broth with ramp-and-Gruyère dumplings that lifted it above the kind of soup you’d find in a lesser restaurant or could make at home.

The Savoy kitchen, in which Ryan Tate is chef de cuisine, doesn’t operate in a showy manner. But it definitely operates in a skilled and diligent one, manifest in the dependable juiciness of the roasted Belle Rouge chicken, served on a broad plate that, when I had it, brimmed with mashed new potatoes and braised leeks. Almost all of the entrees I had — including an excellent salt-crusted duck (with caramelized sunchokes) and a pork shoulder (with cornbread pudding) that was gorgeous one visit, dry the next — were generously portioned.

The desserts, under the direction of the pastry chef Lisa Fernandez, reflected as much of a premium on pure indulgence as on Greenmarket correctness, the standout being a vanilla cheesecake that was more like a mousse — like a cloud, really — flecked by early-season strawberries.

Mr. Hoffman’s menus are confidently edited, with no more than eight appetizers and eight entrees on most nights, so the duds stand out. A cornmeal-crusted soft-shell crab tasted mainly of salty batter, and bacon-wrapped rabbit sausage had a generically fatty, unfocused flavor.

The grass-fed beef that he uses at Savoy and at Back Forty, a more casual sister restaurant that he opened in the East Village a year and a half ago, doesn’t have the richness of the best grain-fed beef. So Savoy’s steaks, by far the most expensive entrees, don’t seem worth the price.

Instead get the halibut, poached in olive oil and served with sugar snap peas and a radish salad. Ask to sit downstairs. While both dining rooms have working fireplaces, the street-level one feels at once more intimate and livelier.

And raise a glass of wine (from an appealing, varied list) to Mr. Hoffman, an evangelist outpaced by younger adherents but not out of the picture. Not even close.

Savoy

★★

70 Prince Street (Crosby Street), SoHo; (212) 219-8570, savoynyc.com.

ATMOSPHERE Two homey floors of a 19th-century town house in SoHo with fireplaces upstairs and at street level, where there’s also an inviting horseshoe-shaped bar.

SOUND LEVEL Moderate.

RECOMMENDED DISHES Fried duck livers; asparagus with poached egg; dandelion salad; roasted chicken; salt-crusted duck; confit pork shoulder; vanilla cheesecake; rhubarb upside-down cake with beet sorbet.

WINE LIST Well organized, diverse and appealing, with many bottles under $50.

PRICE RANGE Dinner appetizers, $9 to $18; entrees, $26 to $45; desserts, $7 to $9.

HOURS Lunch from noon to 3 p.m. Monday to Saturday. Dinner from 6 to 10:30 p.m. Monday to Thursday, to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday and to 10 p.m. Sunday. Limited bar menu from 3 to 7 p.m. Monday to Saturday.

RESERVATIONS For prime times call at least a week ahead.

But in any pizzeria in Rome or Naples, you’ll find a dizzying array of offerings that really are healthy.

Recipes for Health

Healthier Pizzas

By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

Published: May 25, 2009

Pizza is many things to many people, but one thing it usually is not: healthy. I blame chain-store pizza and their thick, doughy crusts, usually loaded with cheese even before the extras like pepperoni and sausage are added.

But in any pizzeria in Rome or Naples, you’ll find a dizzying array of offerings that really are healthy. The crusts are thin, often topped with seasonal vegetables, and the slices are reasonably sized. There may be cheese on top, but not more than a few ounces.

It’s not tomato season yet, but that doesn’t stop me from making a range of pizzas. They’re white pizzas — instead of tomato sauce, they’re topped with caramelized onions and fennel, or roasted peppers, or mushrooms, goat cheese, walnuts and arugula. My crust, made with half whole wheat flour, is wholesome but light, full of flavor.

This week’s pizza recipes also make for a handy way to sabotage the picky habits of vegetable-averse kids. Just tell them they’re having pizza for dinner.

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

Enlarge This Image

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Whole wheat pizza crust has a nutty flavor and real nutritional value. Since the crust is what pizza is primarily about, this is a good thing. But a crust made with too much whole wheat flour can be heavy, dry and tough. I’ve found that this formula, which combines whole wheat and all-purpose flour, makes a crust that is both delightful to eat and full of whole grain nutrients, especially fiber.

2 teaspoons active dry yeast

1 cup warm water

1/2 teaspoon sugar

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil, plus additional for brushing the pizza crusts

1 1/4 cups stone ground whole wheat flour

1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, plus additional if necessary for kneading

1 1/4 teaspoons salt

1. Combine the yeast and water in a 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup. Add the sugar, and stir together. Let sit two or three minutes, until the water is cloudy. Stir in the olive oil.

2. Combine the whole wheat flour, all-purpose flour and salt in a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Pulse once or twice. Then, with the machine running, pour in the yeast mixture. Process until the dough forms a ball on the blades. Remove from the processor (the dough will be a little tacky; flour or moisten your hands so it won’t stick), and knead on a lightly floured surface for a couple of minutes, adding flour as necessary for a smooth dough.

3. Shape the dough into a ball, pinched at bottom and rounded at top. Transfer the dough to a clean, lightly oiled bowl, rounded side down first, then rounded side up. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap, and leave it in a warm spot to rise for 1 to 1 1/2 hours. When it is ready, the dough will stretch when it is gently pulled.

4. Divide the dough into two equal balls. Put the balls on a lightly oiled tray or platter, cover with lightly oiled plastic wrap or a damp towel, and leave them to rest for 15 to 20 minutes. Afterward, the dough balls can be placed in a wide bowl, covered with plastic wrap and refrigerated for up to three days. Alternatively, you can wrap them loosely in lightly oiled plastic wrap and refrigerate them in a resealable plastic bag. When you are ready to roll out the pizzas, you will need to bring the balls to room temperature and punch them down again.

5. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Place a pizza stone on the middle rack of the oven. Roll or press out the dough to a 12- to 14-inch circle. Lightly oil pizza pans, and dust with semolina or cornmeal. Place the dough on the pizza pan. With your fingers, form a slightly thicker raised rim around edge of the circle. Brush everything but the rim with a little olive oil, then top the pizza with the toppings of your choice.

6. Place the pizza pan on the stone. Bake as directed.

Yield: Two 12- to 14-inch crusts.

Advance preparation: The pizza dough can be refrigerated after the first rise for up to three days (see step 4). The rolled out dough can be frozen. Transfer directly from the freezer to the oven.

Pizza With Green Garlic, Potatoes and Herbs

A pizza topped with potatoes may sound strange, but this is much loved in Italy. Make it now, while you can still get luscious, juicy green garlic.

1 bulb green garlic, sliced; or if the bulb has formed cloves, 4 cloves, sliced thin

1/2 pound new potatoes or other waxy potatoes, scrubbed

Salt

3 tablespoons olive oil

1/2 recipe whole wheat pizza dough

Freshly ground pepper

1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary, or 1 teaspoon crumbled dried rosemary, or 2 teaspoons dried oregano

1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1. Bring a medium pot of salted water to a boil, and drop in the garlic. Blanch for 30 seconds, and transfer to a bowl of cold water using a slotted spoon. Drain and dry on paper towels.

2. Add the potatoes to the pot, and bring to a gentle boil. Cover partially, and simmer the potatoes until just tender when pierced with a knife — 10 to 15 minutes, depending on the size of the potatoes. Drain and rinse with cold water. When cool enough to handle, slice about 1/4 inch thick.

3. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees with a baking stone inside. Roll or press out the pizza dough, and line a 12- to 14-inch pan. Brush all but the rim of the crust with 1 tablespoon of olive oil, and sprinkle on the Parmesan. Top with the sliced potatoes and sliced garlic. Season generously with salt and pepper, and sprinkle withthe rosemary or oregano. Drizzle on the remaining olive oil. Bake until the crust is browned and crisp, about 15 minutes. Serve hot or at room temperature.

Yield: One 12- or 14-inch pizza.

Advance preparation: The cooked potatoes and blanched garlic will keep for a day or two in the refrigerator. The dough can be made up to three days ahead and kept in the refrigerator.

Martha Rose Shulman can be reached at martha-rose-shulman.com.

goat is the most widely consumed meat in the world

How I Learned to Love Goat Meat

Foto:Jennifer May for The New York Times
NOT LAMB, NOT BEEF... Goat meat is a staple in many cuisines around the world but only recently has become a novelty at restaurants in Manhattan and elsewhere.

By HENRY ALFORD

Published: March 31, 2009

Gabriele Stabile for The New York Times

NEW TASTE IN TOWN Barbecued goat at Cabrito.


YOU never know where goat will take you. When I asked the smiley butcher at Jefferson Market, the grocery store near my apartment in the West Village, whethe r he had any goat meat, he told me: “No. I got a leg of lamb, though — I could trim it nice and thin to make it look like goat.” I politely declined. We fell into conversation.

I found myself telling him: “Koreans think eating goat soup increases virility. It can lead to better sexytime.” My new friend responded: “My lamb does that a littl

e. You won’t want to every night, but maybe every other night.” Reaching toward his counter to pick up a mound of hamburger, he paused to ask, “It’s for you, the goat?”

Mine is the tale of the recent convert. Admittedly, I’m late to the party: goat is the most widely consumed meat in the world, a staple of, among others, Mexican, Indian, Greek and southern Italian cuisines. Moreover, it’s been edging its way into yu

ppier climes for a year or so now, click-clacking its cloven hooves up and down the coasts and to places like Houston and Des Moines. (When New York magazine proclaimed eating goat a “trendlet” last summer, one reader wrote on the magazine’s Web site, “Here are white people again!!!! Acting like they invented goat meat.”) A famed beef and po

rk rancher, Bill Niman, returned from retirement to raise goats in Bolinas, Calif.; New York City has a chef (Scott Conant) who’s made kid his signature dish.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Capretto at Scarpetta.

Novelty and great flavor aren’t the only draws here — the meat is lower in fat than chicken but higher in protein than beef. There’s even an adorable neologism (“chevon”) for those who want their meat to sound like a miniature Chevrolet or a member of a 1960’s girl group.

I’d partaken of the bearded ruminant before, most memorably in a Jamaican curry in Brooklyn. I’d liked the flavor of the meat, equidistant as it was from lamb and beef. But when my teeth wrangled a particularly tough piece of meat that was shield-shaped and curved and slightly rubbery, I had the distinct impression that I had bitten into the cup of a tiny bra.

Indeed, goats have long held a lowly reputation. Scavengers, they are falsely accused of eating tin cans. Their unappetizing visage is simultaneously dopey and satanic, like a Disney character with a terrible secret. Their chin hair is sometimes prodigious enough to carpet Montana. Chaucer said they “stinken.”

My conversion moment came this February when I went to the West Village restaurant Cabrito and had the goat tacos. This hip taquería-style restaurant — which is named after the baby goat that is pit-barbecued in Texas and Mexico — marinates its meat for 24 hours before wet-roasting it over pineapple, chilies, onion and garlic. The resultant delicious pulled meat is tender throughout and slightly crisp and caramelized around the edges. Think lamb, but with a tang of earthy darkness. Think lamb, but with a rustle in the bushes. Think ... jungle lamb.

Suddenly I was go go goat. I wanted to order goat in as many restaurants as possible. Shortly into this process, a friend asked me, “Is it gay meat?” Confused, I said, “There’s nothing gay about it at all.” She explained, “No, I said is it gamey?”

Oh, that. Only very slightly, and depending on how it’s prepared. Two of my favorite goat dishes in New York are the least gamey. At Scarpetta, Mr. Conant’s signature dish, capretto, consists of slices of moist-roasted kid floating on top of a column of peas and cubed fingerlings. Convivio serves baked cavatelli in a tomato-braised goat ragù. In both dishes, the meat is as tender as a Jennifer Aniston movie.

Once I’d tasted a wide variety of goat — from a spicy curry at Dera in Jackson Heights, to a goat paratha at the Indian takeout place Lassi, two blocks from my apartment — it was time to make some of my own. Three butchers in my neighborhood told me that, with three days’ or a week’s notice, they could get me frozen goat meat.

“You have elk and wild boar, but not goat?” I harangued a butcher at Citarella, invoking Norma Rae; he countered, “That’s how life is,” suddenly Montaigne. I had better luck at the Union Square greenmarket, where two farms, Patches of Stars and Lynnhaven, sell frozen meat for about $13 to $18 a pound on Saturdays (and Lynnhaven on Wednesdays, too), as well as at Esposito Meats at 900 Ninth Avenue, which has it daily ($4.98 a pound). I found fresh goat meat available daily at $4.50 a pound at Atlantic Halal on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.

Two things quickly became clear once I started cooking. First, because it’s so lean, goat is particularly good when braised or cooked with moist heat so it won’t dry out. While my mantis, or mini Turkish ravioli, filled with goat and parsley and onion, were pretty good and my goat and pork polpettine, or tiny meatballs, slightly better, the two winners so far have been goat ragù and chèvre à cinq heures.

The former, an adaptation of the chef Andrew Carmellini’s lamb ragù, adds cumin and lots of fresh herbs (thyme, rosemary and mint) to a tomato ragù, yielding a dish that evokes the saturated greenness of a meadow in springtime. In the latter, an Anthony Bourdain recipe, you cook a garlic-clove-studded leg of lamb — or, in this case, goat — in a Dutch oven so it can have all the benefit of sitting for five hours in a pool of white wine and 20 more cloves of garlic.

My second realization was that goat, like lamb, has a lot of the fatty membrane known as caul. Though a sharp knife is your friend here, I have, on two occasions, resorted to using scissors, and, while doing so, been reminded of how the chef Fergus Henderson uses a Bic razor to depilate pig. This is the only part of cooking goat that I don’t love — however, I will confess that I think the single most terrifying passage in all of literature is from a lamb recipe in Madame Guinaudeau’s 1958 book “Traditional Moroccan Cooking”: “Make a hole with the point of the knife just above the knee joint of one of the legs between flesh and skin. Blow through the opening until the air gets to the fore legs and makes them stick up.”

It is the hallmark of the true enthusiast that he is wont to proselytize. Indeed, I recently threw a dinner party at which I served goat at every course — the polpettine among the appetizers, the ragù as our entrée, and a cheesecake interlarded with nearly a pound of Coach Farm’s chèvre for dessert. At evening’s end, as my wine-fueled guests prepared to scramble down the stairs of my four-flight walk-up, it was all I could do not to tie tiny bells around their necks.

More recently, in an effort at romantic overture, I mail-ordered some of Mr. Niman’s wonderfully flavorsome loin chops ($45 for 3 pounds from www.preferredmeats.com); marinated them in red wine, garlic and rosemary before broiling them; and ate them with my boyfriend amid candlelight and fresh flowers. Did the goat yield the desired end? Let a veil of decorous restraint fall over the proceedings forthwith, the better to mask a small storm of bleats and four cloven hooves, gently twitching.


Source:

you could see the chefs’ eyes getting big

An Old Breed of Hungarian Pig Is Back in Favor

By MICHAEL S. SANDERS

Published: March 26, 2009
Emod Istvánmajor, Hungary

LIKE style on the runway, style for pigs is changeable. With their abundant fat, the curly-haired Mangalitsa pigs of Hungary were all the rage a century ago. But as time went on, they became has-beens.

Tamas Dezso for The New York Times

Mangalitsa pigs.

Now that succulent pork is back in fashion, the Mangalitsa — saved from near extinction on a farm here at the edge of Hungary’s bleak and barren Great Plain — are making a comeback.

Most of those raised here become ham and other cured meats in Spain. But Mangalitsas are also being raised at farms in the United States for chefs who pay as much as 40 percent more for them than for Berkshires, another elite breed.

Last Wednesday April Bloomfield at the Spotted Pig in Greenwich Village served the belly and trotters of a Mangalitsa/Berkshire crossbreed with Agen prunes for $32. (She hopes to have more in two to three weeks.)

“When I tasted this pig,” Ms. Bloomfield said of the Mangalitsa, “it took me back to my grandmother’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, windows steaming from the roasting pork in the oven. Back then pork tasted as it should: like a pig. This pork has that same authentic taste.”

Devin Knell, executive sous-chef at the French Laundry, confits the belly of the Mangalitsa (pronounced MAHN-ga-leet-za); roasts the liver, kidneys, and chops, and poaches the saddle sous vide with a garlic mousse.

“Unlike workaday pork,” Mr. Knell said, “Mangalitsa is marbled, and the fat dissolves on your tongue — it’s softer and creamier, akin to Wagyu beef.”

George Faison, an owner of the New York City specialty meats company DeBragga and Spitler, will start selling chefs pork from Mangalitsas fattened on the West Coast this summer. He said the fat was luscious, more like that of duck than pork. Recalling a tasting for chefs last fall, he said, “The belly meat was unctuous, but it was the loin meat that really impressed me.”

Mosefund Farm in Branchville, N.J., sells Mangalitsa pork to restaurants, including the Spotted Pig, for $10 to $11 a pound, about $3 a pound more than what Berkshire pork costs. Ms. Bloomfield said Mosefund sells the Berkshire crossbreed for $7.99 pound.

Mangalitsas were bred for their lard on the Hungarian farms of Archduke Joseph in the 1830s. Herds shrank with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I and declined further with the introduction of fast-growing white pigs and cheaper, higher quality vegetable oils after World War II.

But Peter Toth, a Hungarian animal geneticist, did not want this Hapsburg legacy to be lost. He has worked to save the pigs here on a farm with buildings of whitewashed stone, with roofs of thick thatch. Dimly lighted wooden pens filled with straw shelter piglets and nursing sows. Breeding boars and sows live in pens open at one end. On a tour of the farm, 100 miles east of Budapest, a bitter wind blew out of the Carpathian foothills just visible to the east.

Their feed is a mix of barley, wheat, wheat bran, alfalfa, and sunflower seeds, but unlike the feed on factory farms, little corn and nothing with soy.

“When Communism collapsed,” Mr. Toth said, “the state farms that served as the last gene banks also collapsed. It was a total anarchy in the country. When I started to save Mangalitsas, to search for them in 1991, I found only 198 purebred pigs in the country. Sometimes, I would rescue the pigs right from the slaughterhouse.”

Today his company, Olmos and Toth, in addition to maintaining breeding stock, fattens some 8,000 pigs and oversees the production of 12,000 more on farms in the surrounding regions.

Because these pigs can cost 40 percent more to raise, Hungarians, who earn less than most Europeans, use them mostly to make lard and sausages.

“The Mangalitsa — many problems!” Mr. Toth said. “We must kill them at 140 kilos” — about 300 pounds — “to make sure that the marbling is maximized and the meat the best quality. If you kill it at 80 kilos” — 176 pounds, when industrially produced pigs are slaughtered — “you won’t have marbled meat. You need time, more than one year, when a normal pig takes five months to raise.”

“The second big problem,” he said, “is at the slaughterhouse: the carcass has only half of the quantity of meat and double the fat. So the Mangalitsa product we will have to sell, cured dried ham or fresh loin, always at two to three times more in price.”

Also, Mangalitsas give birth to only 5 to 8 piglets instead of the 12 to 14 of more commonly raised breeds.

Mr. Toth’s partner, Juan Vicente Olmos Llorente, who runs Monte Nevado in Spain, takes every Mangalitsa ham, loin and shoulder produced on the farms. In Spain, the hams are finished and sold as jamón Mangalica, the most expensive going for $70 a pound, rivaling pata negra hams. Monte Nevado hopes to begin Internet sales in the United States in June at latienda.com.

There is one American breeder of Mangalitsas, on the West Coast: Heath Putnam. His company, Wooly Pigs, based in Auburn, Wash., fattens the swine for sale but also sells neutered piglets for others to raise. Mr. Putnam started three years ago with 25 pigs he brought from Europe, before imports were restricted. He now produces about 1,200 piglets a year and has begun selling pork to chefs, wholesaling larger cuts for between $12 and $15 a pound.

Mr. Putnam had Christoph Wiesner, an Austrian breeder who selected the Putnam herd, give chefs a workshop on European butchering and curing.

“When I opened the belly of the first pig,” Mr. Wiesner said, “you could see the chefs’ eyes getting big. ‘Oh, wow!’ they were saying. ‘Look at that fat!’ You could see they were already thinking what I can do with this part and that.”

The workshop took place on the farm of Keith Luce, the executive chef at the Herbfarm Restaurant outside Seattle.

“Because it’s so great for curing,” Mr. Luce said, “we’re laying it down and curing the legs predominantly, making lardo, all the traditional things. It’s a true nose-to-tail experience with the Mangalitsa, and there’s not any part we’re not using.”

The restaurant has also featured the meat on its tasting menu in a different form almost every night recently.

“We were laughing when we tasted it,” Mr. Luce continued. “We couldn’t control ourselves. The taste, the texture was so unbelievable.”

Mangalitsas may be too expensive for most local bistros, but Mr. Faison, the specialty meat wholesaler, said there should be a place for them. “We tell the chefs, you got to keep some magic on the menu, some fun,” he said, “because the people are coming in to escape whatever hell they’re facing out there.”
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