Filed under: Trends, Stores & Shopping, America, Artisan Foods, Food News

As of now, it’s Pomegranate located in the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. The 20,000 square feet of shopping space includes aisles full kosher gourmet foods. An article from New York magazine calls Pomegranate a “kosher gourmet megastore.” The supermarket seems to be a cross between Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s.

Unlike other specialty markets, Pomegranate caters to the thousands of Orthodox Jewish families living in New York City. The store has three kitchens: dairy, meat, and parve (fish, vegetables, fruit and grains). Each has its own on-duty full-time rabbi. Customers can choose from a rich selection of freshly baked challah and homemade cheeses to aged prime beef-rib steaks to an olive bar and sushi bar. The gourmet food market is an obvious business trend. Is the kosher version of Whole Foods the new trend?

I live in Brooklyn, not far from Pomegranate, and I see several smaller gourmet kosher markets on Kings Highway. The prices are not cheap. So, I do not think that Pomegranate will have a hard time competing with existing stores. You can now visit the supermarket that’s located on Coney Island Avenue at the corner of Avenue L.

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Filed under: On the Blogs, Eggs

For a period of time, long before I was born, my dad was a short-order cook. He worked the breakfast grill, cooking up mountains of pancakes, rivers of bacon strips and more eggs than is possible to count. Because of this experience, he is a master at the art of cooking eggs, be it soft boiled, hard boiled, poached, sunny side up or even over easy, hold the wiggle (a term that describes that perfect point at which the whites are just cooked and the yolks are still beautifully runny).

I credit his egg mastery to my own egg-cooking ease. It never occurred to me to feel anxiety around the preparation of poached eggs, I’ve been making them on my own since I was 9 years old. I didn’t realize that some people held to strict hard boiled egg routines, I just put them in the pot and go. They always turn out perfectly fine.

For those of you who need a bit more guidance than, “just boil until it feels right,” Cooking for Engineers has put together a thorough soft boiled egg chart and tutorial for you. Michael Chu cooked up a whole bunch of eggs, removing them from the pan at 1 minute intervals, so you can see how a two minute egg looks different from a seven minute egg. Pick your egg preference, set your timers and enjoy!

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Filed under: Business, Newspapers, America, in sixty seconds, Meat, Local Eating, Food News

Underground supper clubs - half dinner party, half restaurant - are in.

Low alcohol beers gain popularity.

Thinking of opening a restaurant? Think twice. Then think again.

Memories of teenage boy food.

The Minimalist shows us how to cook with lavender without making the dish smell like your grandmother’s powder room.

Artisanal cocktails are here. Of course.

Fortune cookies are not Chinese.

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Filed under: Feast Your Eyes

Last spring, I took a class about the theory of the narrative in short stories and writing. One of the books we read in pursuit of learning about different styles of narrative flow was Marcel Prout’s Swann’s Way. That’s the book in which the narrator describes in great detail the way in which the taste of a madeleine takes him back to a particular experience from his childhood. The night we discussed that section of the book, my professor brought madeleines and tea to class and now I can’t see madeleines without thinking of that moment.

These are a particularly lovely version of the madeleine. Big thanks to Angie for adding this pic to the Slashfood Flickr pool.

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Filed under: Beef, Retro cookery

From Dainty Desserts for Dainty People (1915), Knox Gelatine

I’m interrupting the semi-regularly scheduled Midnight Sausage series to share molded food images and recipes from my personal collection of early-to-mid 20th century cookbooks. There will be aspic. There will be mousse. There will be various gelatins. All will be semi-solid and of debatable degrees of edibility.

Please feel free to shimmy and shake your way to the comments section to share your very own magical, masticable molds of yore.

Previously - Ham Mousse

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Filed under: Grains

The short answer is that durum flour is flour which is ground from Durum wheat. Durum wheat is a type of wheat that has an especially high protein content, and in fact its name derives from the Latin word for “hard”.

Durum flour, with its high protein content, makes dough with unusually strong gluten. It’s generally used in pizza dough and pasta, and its more coarsely ground cousin semolina is used to make cous cous. Though you can make bread with durum flour, recipes usually mix durum and regular wheat flour.

Durum wheat can be ground into semolina (sometimes called semolina flour if it’s ground more finely) and durum flour, which can be referred to as extra fancy durum flour or extra fancy pasta flour. However, you can’t really substitute one for the other. Semolina is a coarse grind and it looks a lot like corn meal. In fact a lot of bakers and pizza makers use semolina to dust baking sheets and peels so the dough doesn’t stick (check the bottom of your pizza next time). Durum flour is ground as fine as regular flour and that’s why it can be used in bread and pasta doughs.

I haven’t ever been able to find real durum flour in a brick and mortar store, so I have to order it online. Semolina, on the other hand, is generally available in grocery stores, at least upscale ones. For more on the subject, here’s a good page to check out.

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Filed under: Television/Film

Wanting to get in on the unscripted programming action, Reuters reports that the Lifetime network is cooking up 3 new shows — one on weight loss (yawn), one on clairvoyance, and one on cooking.

The latter, called Mom’s Cooking, will be a half-hour weekday series that focuses on moms teaching their daughters how to cook their favorite childhood recipes. So far, the channel has ordered 20 episodes with half of them to be shot in New York, and half in Atlanta. I have to give them props for the idea — it’ll be nice to get some classic home cooking on TV that’s not from Paula Deen. And getting kids to cook makes it even better.

However … I wish it wasn’t only catered to women, because believe it or not, guys have beloved homemade recipes too. Yes, I know it’s “television for women,” but at the very least — mom could teach son sometimes, or Dad could teach daughter. There’s no reason for television shows in 2008 to stick so rigidly to old stereotypes.

So, this question is for you guys out there — What beloved recipes did you learn from mom or dad?

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Filed under: Vegetables, On the Blogs

Lasagna isn’t really my thing. I will happily eat it when others prepare it, but I’ve always found it to be sort of fussy and unappealing to make on my own (all that pasta pre-boiling and careful layering just left me cold). Besides, I always felt like you could get comparable flavors with a pasta bake - noodles tumbled together with garlicky red sauce, sauteed spinach and a carton of ricotta cheese and topped with a generous layer of mozzarella cheese has always been my favorite.

However, having seen the grilled veggie lasagna that Julie posted yesterday, I’m starting to rethink my previous anti-lasagna position. For one thing, the step-by-step pictures she took are really lovely and show off the rustic beauty of the grilled veggies. Her recipe also reminded me that you can use no-bake noodles, rendering one of my lasagna complaints moot. And lastly, seeing it done, it just doesn’t look that difficult or fiddly. I may be a convert sooner, rather than later.

How about the rest of you? Are you a lasagna maker or more of a pasta bake person?

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Filed under: Cookbook of the Day

We all struggle with finding healthy foods to eat these days, especially since nutrition scientists often waffle back and forth as to whether certain items are good or bad (over recent years the humble egg has been both vilified and placed on a honorific pedestal). This dietary challenge is even harder for parents who know they want to put nutritionally sound meals on the table for their kids but don’t know how to go about it.

Lucky for those parents (as well as the rest of us), there’s a new cookbook on the shelves that can help simplify the mealtime confusion. Real Food for Healthy Kids was written by Tracey Seaman (test kitchen director of Everyday with Rachael Ray) and Tanya Wenman Steel (editor in chief of Epicurious.com) and it contains 350 pages of parent and kid-tested recipes.

They offer great variations on standard breakfast meals like Carrot Cake Oatmeal (page 33) and Kiss-of-Honey Wheat Biscuits, good stuff for the lunch box like Turkey Pinwheels and kid-friendly dinners that will have even the pickiest eaters taking a few bits. There’s also a section devoted to foods appropriate for babies and toddlers (ages six months to three years), which I’m certain many a new mom or dad will welcome.

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Filed under: Breakfast, Television/Film

When you were a kid, did you get lectures about a healthy breakfast? Did you suffer under specific weekday breakfast rules to keep your mind alert for all your classes? I remember growing up with a huge urge for the weekend — not for cartoons but to have sugar cereals.

Spoofing that idea, America for the Arts created a faux commercial for Raisin Brahms, which you can see above. As part of their campaign that stresses the importance of arts being taught at school, the faux ad shows a family that gets super-smart after eating arts-enriched Raisin Brahms, and being visited by late German composer Johannes Brahms.

Forget cereal boxes with sports heroes — where are the classic composers, artists, thinkers, writers … ?!

[via Serious Eats]

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