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

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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.