Curious Cook

Cilantro haters, it's not your fault

FOOD partisanship doesn’t usually reach the same heights of animosity as the political variety, except in the case of the anti-cilantro party. The green parts of the plant that gives us coriander seeds seem to inspire a primal revulsion among an outspoken minority of eaters.

Culinary sophistication is no guarantee of immunity from cilantrophobia. In a television interview in 2002, Larry King asked Julia Child which foods she hated. She responded: “Cilantro and arugula I don’t like at all. They’re both green herbs, they have kind of a dead taste to me.”

“So you would never order it?” Mr. King asked.

“Never,” she responded. “I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.”

If you can wring out the dough, it's too wet

WHEN I started making bread back in the 1970s, whether an establishment loaf from James Beard's ''Beard on Bread'' or a countercultural one from ''The Tassajara Bread Book,'' it was a hands-on workout, kneading a stiff, elastic dough for what felt like a very long 10 to 15 minutes.

In the 1990s, I kneaded many hours away getting the hang of the tangy, crusty breads from the Acme Bread Company in the Bay Area, starting with the recipe that Steve Sullivan, Acme's founder, had supplied for ''Chez Panisse Cooking.''

Today I wonder what else I might have done with all those hours. Labor-saving bread books are nothing new, but the current crop includes several by respected professional bakers, and a consensus that kneading just isn't necessary for good homemade bread. Most proclaim the virtues of doughs that are too wet and sticky to knead, nothing like the resilient doughs of the past. What happened to the idea that prolonged kneading works a dough's gluten proteins into alignment, making it more elastic and capable of rising higher into a lighter loaf? Is it really true that less work can make better bread?

A Camembert That Pasteur Could Love

IT’S not everywhere that you can get raw milk from a vending machine, or see how cheese tastes when it’s made without any added salt (pretty bad) or when it’s aged after being sewn up in a sheepskin, wool side in (like a wet sweater). 

I sampled many lactic curiosities this October in Bra, a small city near Turin in northwest Italy and the home of Slow Food, which organizes a gathering of cheesemakers, merchants and fans from all over the world every two years. But the cheese most on my mind was one I’d found over the summer in a San Francisco supermarket. 

It was a French Camembert that seemed like the real, summertime, raw-milk deal, its thin edible rind touched with orange highlights, its interior golden and softly clotted, its flavor intense, persistent, mouthfillingly fruity, mushroomy, earthy, buttery and meaty.

A Chill at the Still to Keep Flavors Fresh

COLD has been a hot subject in the drinks world for some time now, mainly in its incarnation as ice. Recently it’s become crystal clear how cold can put fresher flavors in the bottle, before ice cubes even get into the act.

By distilling without applying heat, gin makers are creating livelier spirits, and bartenders and chefs are extracting flavor essences with great purity.

The control over flavor offered by this method — vacuum distillation — is also tempting Americans to go outlaw. The same creative bartending that wins awards in London could land a New Yorker in court on a charge of moonshining.

Prolonging the Life of Berries

ONE of summer’s great pleasures is eating berries of all kinds by the basketful. One of summer’s great frustrations is having baskets of berries go moldy overnight, or even by nightfall. Over the years I’ve come up with various strategies for limiting my losses, but this summer I came across a surprising one, the most effective I’ve ever tried. Thermotherapy, it’s been called. A very hot fruit bath.

Accused, Yes, but Probably Not a Killer

AFTER 20 years of cultivating my garden in sunny inland Palo Alto, last year I moved 40 miles to San Francisco, where the cold, foggy summers are less hospitable to heat-loving tomatoes. Here at the end of July, my tomato plants are bearing just a few green fruits. But they have lots of healthy foliage. The leaves may not taste like ripe tomatoes, but they do have tomato flavor. Which made me think, why not cook more with tomato leaves? Because they’re poisonous! That’s what most people have said when I mention the idea. But it turns out that there’s little good evidence for that common belief. So I’ve branched out from Paul Bertolli’s leaf-flavored pasta sauce, an old favorite. I think tomato leaves are worth adding to our roster of kitchen herbs.

Bringing Flavor Back to the Ham

HAVE you ever placed a vanishingly thin morsel of rosy meat on your tongue and had it fill your mouth with deepest porkiness, or the aroma of tropical fruits, or caramel, or chocolate? Or all of the above? A really good dry-cured ham can do just that. Not a standard pink, cooked ham, juicy with injected brine, but a raw ham preserved by the application of dry salt, hung up to age for months or years, then sliced paper-thin and eaten as is, uncooked, yet transformed into the intense, silken essence of meat. Spain and Italy are renowned for the quality of their dry-cured hams, their jamons and prosciuttos, which can sell for $30 to $100 a pound. America is not so renowned, even though dry-cured hams have been made in the South since Colonial times. These country hams evolved into an inexpensive regional product whose usual fate is to be soaked in water, then poached and baked with a sweet fruit glaze. Happily, the home ham picture began to brighten a few years ago. I recently tasted dry-cured hams from Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Iowa, and some rival Europe’s best.

Asparagus’ Breaking Point

IT’S spring at last: prime time for a vegetable that does not go gently into our food chain, that keeps binding up its harvest wounds even as it’s shipped and stored, growing and bending upward to find the sun. A vegetable whose texture horticultural engineers test by tapping it with a tiny hammer and listening to it vibrate. Asparagus is the hardest-living stalk in the produce business, a challenge to farmers and grocers and cooks alike. The stalks quickly toughen from the bottom up, and it’s no snap to tell the tough portion from the tender.

They Do the Work, You Reap the Yogurt

RIGHT now my kitchen is teeming with bacteria, and I’m doing everything I can to make them feel at home. They’re lactic acid bacteria, the ones that ferment milk into yogurt and buttermilk, cream into crème fraîche. I’ve been making all of these, as well as milk thickened with reputedly beneficial “probiotic” lactic acid bacteria. And getting to know viili, a Finnish fermented milk that reminds me of the Japanese soy product natto. It’s slithery.

How Much Water Does Pasta Really Need?

SOME time ago, as I emptied a big pot of pasta water into the sink and waited for the fog to lift from my glasses, a simple question occurred to me. Why boil so much more water than pasta actually absorbs, only to pour it down the drain? Couldn’t we cook pasta just as well with much less water and energy? Another question quickly followed: if we could, what would the defenders of Italian tradition say?