Old Skills & Sneak Previews

Cochon 555

Last month, Cochon555 brought its Midwest Regional championship to Des Moines for the second straight year. This Taste Network national tour puts our city in the select company of serious culinary destinations - New York, Napa, San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta, Portland, Seattle, Stillwater and Washington D.C. Cochon is an elite event hosted by several of America‘s most famous hotels and resorts. Chefs come from the country’s best restaurants (Boulud and Blue Hill in New York, The French Laundry in Napa). Time magazine and the New York Times cover the tour. In prestige, it’s the culinary equivalence of hosting an NCAA men’s basketball tournament. It might not return to Des Moines though. Ticket sales slipped and the event hasn’t interested any civic or state group that promotes this city’s image.

Five chefs competed by utilizing five heritage hogs, snout to tail. Guest-voters sampled pork while being treated to excellent wines from five boutique vineyards. Mike LaValle (Embassy Club) said that Chase Family Cellars’ Zinfandels were the best he’s ever seen in Iowa. This year’s competition included local chefs George Formaro and Hal Jasa, defending champion Matt Steigerwald from Mount Vernon, and two chefs from Kansas City - Cody Hogan and Howard Hanna.

Formaro and Jasa debuted some new applications for future restaurants. Using a Farmers Cross/Berkshire hog, Formaro premiered an all Mexican menu he’ll selling at the Downtown Farmer’s Market, and hopefully in a new East Village café soon.

His pozole was the best I ever tasted.

He fried carnitas in duck fat and coated Milanese style cutlets in pumpkin seeds. His huevos motuleños were a poached, Yucatan variation on bacon and eggs. His chiccarones were tender enough to pass for shoulder meat.

Jasa, who’s also hoping to open an East Village café this summer, presented ten dishes made from a Duroc. A deeply flavored consommé with pork cheeks and goat cheese tortellini stood out.

So did a fried ear salad of watercress with quail egg, and his corned tongue with pickled ramps. Jasa fried his rillletes, served his trotters with blinis, and presented a liver/heart pâté with a pistachio puree.

He served belly with poached grapes, cassoulet with orange gremolata, and sausage with parsnip puree and a pâté of roasted dates.

Recreating personal pan-served pasta from Lidia’s, Hogan kept things simpler with his Berkshire hog.

Ravioli were stuffed with braised whole hog and served with roast pork and headcheese. His ravioli were the most popular single item of the night with the public.

At Hanna’s River Club, members pay dues to support things that Cochon advocates - preserving heritage breeds, and utilizing whole hogs. Like Steigerwald, Hanna brought a staff familiar with butchering, brining, rendering, smoking and pickling. Using an endangered Glouscestershire Old Spots hog, they executed five familiar dishes exquisitely: headcheese; trotter garlic soup with fresh nettles pesto; a Cuban sandwich made with sous vide of shoulder, ham and organ pâté; pork & beans made with legs, heirloom beans, sausage and “KC salt” (crushed cracklings).

Hanna said he harvested the main ingredient for his stunning blood pudding “by squeezing every vein and artery.” It also included chocolate, hazelnuts, cinnamon and shortbread.

Steigerwald, whose Lincoln Café purchases whole hogs exclusively, won the competition again with a Red Wattle hog a breed that would become infamous three weeks later when it was again the pig of a winning Cochon chef, in Portland, Oregon. That so incensed another Oregon chef that he attacked both a winery representative and Cochon organizer Brady Lowe, sending the latter to the hospital with a broken leg and concussion.

His menu began with pork belly spring rolls with kimchii and an avocado/yuzu puree. It progressed to a “wattle head slick” with boiled peanuts and greens. He served a white sausage that included innards with fennel kraut. His hickory smoked shoulder was served on corn masa with turtle beans and pickled chilies. His ciccioli (compressed, dried fat) was treated to pickled ramps. He also served charcuterie that included ham and capicola. I have been dreaming of them ever since.

Andrew Zimmern

Believe It or Not - There Is Something He Won't Eat

“I am riveted, I am nauseated, I have anxiety attacks. I am obsessed with this show.” Kelly Ripa on Andrew Zimmern‘s ‘Bizarre Food’
　
Andrew Zimmern has staked a brand all his own within food and travel journalism. His popular show “Bizarre Foods” visit’s remote corners of the world where the host enthusiastically consumes things that most USA viewers would probably never dream of eating. Because of that, many consider him extreme, “the Quentin Tarantino of the food media.” Yet, the New York Times thinks that his restraint defines him, calling Zimmern “less dangerous than Anthony Bourdain, less annoying than Rachel Ray and less cloying than Paula Dean.”

Everyone agrees though that he’s no ordinary food journalist. One of the first male students to graduate from Vassar, the New Yorker pursued an art history career on the East Coast before moving to Minnesota in 1991.
Today, he says that he was more of a fish-out-of-water at Vassar than he is today, even as the only white rodent and bug hunter in Equatorial jungles.

“No question, Vassar was the stranger experience and it was good training for what I do now,” he said laughing.

Besides his busy TV schedule, today he’s the spokesman for Target, where his title is “Meal Adventure Guide,” Pepto Bismol and Carson Wagonlit Travel and writes a regular column for Minneapolis - St. Paul magazine. His move to the Twin Cities changed his life in many another way though.
“Like everyone else I came to Hazelden (addiction treatment center in Center City, Minnesota) for treatment. Life got good, so I stayed and I’ve been sober for 17 years now.,” he explained.

Now he applies his risk taking behavior toward the pursuit of strange things to eat. His taste buds and gag mechanisms are not ordinary either though. He wolfs down putrefied flesh, guts and sex organs regularly in his travels, but can’t stomach a couple things that many people find easy to swallow.

“The only thing I do not eat is walnuts. I just can’t stand that pungent, acrid after taste and (Asian fruit) durian is more of that same thing. I’ve tried it a dozen times and none were palatable to me. I can get it down now, but the texture is something else. I know there’s a nature vs. nurture issue here but I have spent a lot of time wondering what it is about durian that makes it a seeming waste of my time, while eating the next odd jungle rodent gets my juices flowing,” he explained.

Of all the worldly preparations for sex organs, Zimmern said that the Chileans are the hands down masters.

“Fresh really maters in testicles and those in Chile were harvested, peeled, sliced, laid on a plough share over a wood fire and pan fried with onions, garlic, chilies. They were extraordinary,” he recalled.
He’s also learned to discriminate amongst rotten forms of flesh.

“When it comes to putrefied protein, fish beats mammal meat hands down. But the best single putrefied dish I ever tasted was the “dama mein” I had in Taiwan. The pork was cut in noodle-like strips, rolled in cooked rice and stuffed in a jar for 30 days. What you get is something like pork sauerkraut. Then it’s sliced thin and served over ice. The worst was in Morocco, I think because the putrefied meat was a confit - it was cooked in its own putrefied fat, multiplying all that is unpleasant about such things.

After 17 years in the Midwest, Zimmern says one local dish is as confounding bizarre as anything he’s discovered in desperate jungles or deserts.

“No question, lutefisk is the weirdest Midwestern food. I have never been given a reasonable answer as to why the Scandinavians do this. Why not just re-hydrate the (dried) cod without using lye? My own personal theory is that they were so penurious that that used lye to increase shelf life even longer,” he mused.

Beyond the shock factor of dining, Zimmern studies food cultures with urban and suburban application in mind = particularly in economically troubled times.

“A ton can be learned from the Third World‘s food. We’re an extremely selfish, results-oriented, destination-oriented, convenience-driven society and we’ve been eating high on the proverbial hog for too long. We gave up snout-to-tail eating over 100 years ago. We gave up eating whole vegetables long ago too and gave up eating a number of other vegetables in any form. We stopped eating a grain-oriented diet and switched to a high protein diet. We are the only country in the world where a 15 ounce serving of protein-rich food is the centerpiece of the dinner plate. No where else.

“And all that was driven by cheap food and easy living, which might be over for awhile. Change is coming. I know Des Moines folks won’t start foraging in the woods for grubs and bugs to augment the protein supply on the dinner table, but there’s a ton to learn.

“In Singapore last week I ate fish head curry, a classic there and one of the greatest dishes in the world. Two of my cameramen had never seen anything like it - that’s typical here. Waste is typical. Singaporeans get three great meals out the same portion of fish from which Americans just cut out a 12 ounce filet and throw away all the rest - and in the case of fish heads, they throw away the best food, in all aspects of what is best - taste, texture, nutritional value,” Zimmern said.

He says that valuations in foods may turn upside down.

“The last ten years, the hottest restaurant trend has been, to state it broadly - snout to tail, natural organic, farm to table fine dining. People pay a premium in fine restaurants to eat like their more frugal ancestors ate 100 years ago. At Blue Hill in New York City, they pay $100 for a plate of trotters and roasted farm vegetables. People all over America now pay a premium for fresh, seasonal menus that were a matter of necessity to our immediate ancestors. Yet, farmers markets and CSA’s are offering this kind of food at relatively deep values. Those kinds of options have been relatively ignored in the recent past, but I think people will begin paying far more attention to them now.

“I recently returned from Russia where I saw the remnants of Stalin’s dacha system - one aspect of which was that everyone produced a percentage of the food he consumed. That’s not going to happen here, but people will start considering such options as they look to cut their budgets. The era of conspicuous food waste is over. Six to eight companies control something like 78% of all food production in the USA, that’s over as people look to options closer to home.

“We forgot, as we urbanized, about the displaced animals that propagated the foods Native Americans used to forage and eat. Economic security requires diversity of crops as of other assets. One crop solutions are no solutions -because the failure of one crop can become total failure. Crisis could force us to farm and eat healthier. There are opportunities in the woods. In Minnesota and Maine I found a lot more people eating native American vegetables, ferns besides fiddlehead ferns, marvelous little shoots that taste like cucumber and look like radishes, ramps in more southern climates,” he said.

In His Pantry

“I have 300 kinds of mustard. I love salt fish so I have lots of that, at least five natural fish sauces. Malaysian are the best. I am always buying chilies, both fresh and dried and ground.”

“My four year old son eats everything except worms. He had a book that made him adverse to worms. I got to him before the books did with other foods.”

“If I spit, it’s shown on the show. We reveal all. I live my brand. They have to drag me out of the places I go to eat bizarre foods. I love my food life and I don’t think most people do. How can they when the only eat three kinds of fish, only eat the center cuts of meats?”

photos courtesy of Andrew Zimmern