December 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Weekend Foodblogging: Non-Toxic Waffles

If you do a bunch of Googling, something as simple as waffles makes you scratch your head. Remember Eggo waffles, the brand behind the ad slogan “Leggo my eggo!”? Dig into the ingredients list:

Ingredients: Enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, vitamin B1 [thiamin mononitrate], vitamin B2 [riboflavin], folic acid), water, vegetable oil (soybean, palm, and/or canola oil), eggs, leavening (baking soda, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate), contains 2% or less of sugar, salt, whey, soy lecithin, yellow 5, yellow 6.
Source: Kellogg’s website

Looks pretty reasonable, doesn’t it, except for the aluminum? I was curious about the last two, yellow 5 and yellow 6. One is a food coloring banned in some countries in the EU (tartrazine, yellow 5) and the other is derived from petroleum (disodium 6-hydroxy-5-[(4-sulfophenyl)azo]-2-naphthalenesulfonate, yellow 6). On June 30, 2010, the Center for Science in the Public Interest called for the FDA to ban Yellow 5. Executive Director Michael Jacobson said, “These synthetic chemicals do absolutely nothing to improve the nutritional quality or safety of foods, but trigger behavior problems in children and, possibly, cancer in anybody.”

Yummy. Who wants some petroleum distillates and aluminum in their waffles? I’ve leggo the Eggo.

So with that in mind, I asked myself, how hard could frozen waffles be? Make a bunch all at once, stick ‘em in the freezer, right? Turns out it was ridiculously simple. Anyone with a bowl and a spoon can make waffles that are significantly healthier than prepackaged food.

DSC_0030

Here’s the recipe, in case you want to make your own and stop spending big bucks getting a load of crap in your waffles.

Non-Toxic Waffles

Makes 3 large waffles, or 12 small ones.

  • 2 eggs
  • 2 cups of milk
  • 2 cups of flour
  • 1/2 cup vegetable oil
  • 2 teaspoons of sugar, maple syrup, or honey
  • 4 teaspoons aluminum-free baking POWDER (not baking soda)
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla or almond extract

Directions:

  • Mix everything in a bowl until smooth. To make life easier and less painful, use a mixer of some kind.
  • Pour into waffle iron.
  • Cook until done. (golden brown and delicious, no artificial coloring required)
  • Bonus: put them in zip-top bags and stuff them in your freezer.

Here’s what I’m finding, the more I Google my food (and the ingredients of prepackaged versions): a fair number of foods are actually stupid easy to make. Not only that, they’re also less costly, you control the ingredients that go into them, and they taste better.

Take some of your favorite prepared foods and Google for how to make them at home. I think you’ll be surprised at the number of them that require little to no cooking skill and can save your money and your health.

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Filed Under: Foodblogging
July 27, 2012 8 Comments

Why I use a manual coffee grinder

photo

Justin Levy asked me a while back why I use a manual coffee grinder when there are far better options available. The answer is: because it takes a long time to grind coffee this way.

That seems like a strange answer, doesn’t it? After all, why would you willingly choose the least efficient way to grind coffee? Believe it or not, that’s a good thing.

If you’ve never used a manual coffee grinder, it’s nothing more than a set of grindstones with a hand-turned crank. Making enough coffee for a pot typically requires about 10 minutes of steady turning. When you’re done, you have coffee that looks like every other coffee you’ve ever prepared in advance of sticking it in the pot.

Here’s why this is important, at least to me. It’s an enforced creative break. It’s 10 minutes of mandatory downtime where there’s no convenient way to check messages (your hands are busy holding and turning the grinder) or take calls (too noisy). It’s required boredom, and that’s a healthy thing, because in those 10 minutes, you can give your mind time to process problems and step back from work.

The very real problem we face today – part of the reason we feel stressed and burned out so often – is that everything is too convenient and too fast. When you can plop a plastic cup in your insta-brew coffee machine and have coffee 15 seconds later, you don’t get a real mental break from work. When everything is available right now, right now gets really crowded and overwhelming. One look around at the rest of the animal kingdom indicates that “right now all the time” isn’t a sustainable way to live. The lion that requires incredible speed to catch its dinner doesn’t sustain that speed for very long.

Power question: how can you introduce more mandatory breaks in your day?

The other thing that using a manual grinder does very well is it gives you time to consider what it is you’re about to consume. If you’re not a coffee fanatic, coffee is actually an exceptionally storied, labor intensive process. Farmers in distant lands, from Hawaii to Ethiopia to Indonesia, manage farms made of coffee trees. These trees grow coffee cherries (yes, the coffee bean is the pit of a cherry-like fruit) which are then harvested by hand, then dried or pulped to extract the pits. The pits are bagged up and sold on various commodity exchanges or to stores that either sell them raw or roast them, which is a polite way of saying burn them. Once they’re lightly burned, they’re sealed up and sold, either as is or processed further. Those insta-cup coffee machines are at the very tail end of a very long chain.

By hand-grinding your coffee, you’re participating in a very small way in the tremendous chain of human effort to create a cup of coffee. It gives you time to mentally honor the many people who have put effort into creating your morning coffee. All of that tends to fall by the wayside when coffee is no less or more effort than clicking a mouse or starting a smartphone app.

Enjoy the coffee.

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Filed Under: Awakening, Foodblogging
June 18, 2012 1 Comment

Method matters as much as ingredients

I was making grilled chicken yesterday and realized that my chicken was reasonably good. It’s kind of a funny method, but one I discovered after years of eating other people’s bad chicken. Here’s the thing about chicken: as a meat, it tends to dry out really fast, especially on the grill. Having thoroughly cooked chicken also tends to mean having dry, tough chicken unless you specifically focus on chicken that isn’t dry or tough.

So, to prepare chicken well, here’s how I handle it. First, I use chicken thighs rather than other parts. Thighs are inherently higher fat, about 6% fat rather than breast meat, which is about 1% fat. The higher fat content means that it takes longer to dry out and is more forgiving of mistakes with heat. It also, at least to me, has a better texture.

Typically I mix some barbecue sauce with an equal volume of water and let it marinate for a minimum of 4 hours. After that, it goes in a baking pan and on the grill over low heat for 12 minutes, 6 minutes per side. The goal here is to get the sauce and chicken to a simmer, about 170 degrees with a thermometer. This is essentially poaching the chicken to achieve sterilization and cook it thoroughly without denaturing the meat proteins (which causes toughness).

Grilled chicken

Once I’ve gotten the chicken simmered for about 12 minutes, I move it out of the pan and crank the burners to OMGHOT, 3 minutes per side, while dumping the contents of the pan in the flowerbed. This puts a nice sear on the chicken, giving it that “barbecue” look and taste, but 3 minutes a side isn’t long enough to toughen it up.

Grilled chicken

After it’s done, it goes in the now-empty pan and rests for 5 minutes to normalize the heat and let the meat re-absorb moisture that it would lose if you cut it open right away. After a rest, it’s ready to eat and is a wonderful flavor and texture while still being safe from food-borne bacteria.

What does any of this have to do with marketing, besides possibly making lunch for your team? Simple: if you looked at the final product, there’s a very good chance that you would be unable to reverse-engineer the process. You could definitely copy the ingredients, but the method is largely invisible. That’s what makes a successful marketing secret recipe.

Everyone has the same marketing ingredients. We all have websites. We all have social media. We all have SEO. We all have email marketing. Some marketing ingredients are slightly better than others, but it’s not the ingredients that matter as much as it is the proficiency of the chef and the methods that you use to cook with. Great ingredients in the hands of an incompetent chef are just wasted. Great tools in the hands of an incompetent marketer are wasted or worse, are abused and cause damage to your company.

Conversely, mediocre ingredients in the hands of a great chef sing to as much potential as they can offer, and will often make a memorable meal even if they’re not top quality. Even on a relative shoestring, a terrific marketer will be able to generate some results, enough to pay for additional investment (better ingredients) in a virtuous circle.

If you want to be a successful marketer or a successful chef, get what you can afford for ingredients, but spend the majority of your time and efforts focusing on improving your methods, how you use those ingredients, for maximum results.

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Filed Under: Advertising, Foodblogging, Marketing
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