UDPATE: I had an opportunity to speak with Petaluma Poultry’s Steve Marht about the study. A third-generation chicken farmer, Marht was obviously pained by the conclusion. You can read his response to the study on the website. But I thought this quote kind of summed things up. “I was really saddened that these guys slammed me. It took five years to break even (financially) with organic. (Marht claims to be the first producer of organic eggs in California and has been in business locally for 27 years). My farm is kind of like my backyard. I don’t sleep at night because (this kind of thing) bugs me so bad. We are trying to do it right. Organics should be for the many, and not the few. And I want everyone to have our organic eggs to we keep them as affordable as we can.”
Marht spoke at length to BiteClub about his operation, which is considered medium-sized at about 250,000 birds. By comparison, NuCal Foods, in Ripon, Ca., which processes eggs for a number of major grocers and private labels, handles approximately 7.5 million eggs from 11 farms and 7 plants per day. Smaller producers may have up to 1,00 birds, but often less than a few hundred.
In the end, making a choice about eggs comes down to being an informed consumer and purchasing with your conscience. Check out this article for more details on labeling and processing.
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The Cornucopia Institute has released it’s “Organic Egg Scorecard” rating 70 egg producers around the country. With the recent salmonella outbreak, customers are increasingly wary of factory-farmed eggs, and many are looking for more sustainable, organic choices. But be wary of those labels, because funky cardboard packaging and promises of happy chickens don’t always mean well-bred eggs.
The Institute looked for small-to-medium sized family farms raising pastured chickens sold under the farm’s name or to natural grocery stores for it’s highest score of “Exemplary”. At the bottom were large-scale farms that don’t allow for outdoor access.
A few caveats which bear mentioning, however. This study is primarily focused on outdoor access and pasturing for hens, which in my mind isn’t the total picture. Having talked to many poultry producers in the area, I can tell you that raising poultry in pastures is a logistically and financially intensive enterprise, even for the most ethical of producers and near-impossible for large-scale operations. Poultry producers and organic standards boards themselves argue about outdoor access for the birds, as to what is meaningful and natural for the animals versus the economics of creating outdoor access, threats of disease and predators. Organic certification doesn’t necessarily mean that birds must have outdoor access, and often “access” simply means a door or two that the birds often don’t use. It’s hard to argue that chickens that live in small outdoor henhouses and peck and scratch at the dirt and eat bugs are probably more “natural”, but at what cost?
Boutique organic eggs can cost upwards of $5 to $7 a dozen (which is what I paid this week at the farmer’s market), whereas conventional eggs range froom $1.99 to $2.99 and “organic eggs” around $4-$5. I don’t know about you, but at $7 a dozen, I’m not making omelets for breakfast. I actually purchased “organic” grocery eggs to supplement our egg use.
The Takeaway: While small-scale family operations which allow for pasturing are obviously ideal, it’s not always possible to achieve that highest standard. Best bets are to buy eggs at local farm markets or eggs that are pasture raised, but a good bet is to find eggs from hens raised in humane conditions (cage-free) that are fed a vegetarian diet and not treated with hormones or antibiotics.
Here’s the Institute’s Scoreboard for NoCal Organic Eggs…
5-eggs (Beyond Exemplary)
Alexandre Kids, Cresent City
Elkhorn Organics, Prunedale
Vital Farms (from Austin, but available at Whole Foods Markets)
St. John Family Farm, Orland
4-eggs (Excellent)
no local producers
3-eggs (Very Good)
Clover Stornetta, Petaluma
Wilcox Farms (from Washington, but distributed on the West Coast)
2-eggs (Fair)
no local producers
1-egg (“Ethically Deficient”)
Judy’s Family Farm (Petaluma Farms), Petaluma
The study argues that this large-scale operation (which is family-owned) does not provide outdoor access. The farm’s organic certifying agent (Oregon Tilth) has granted them permanent exeption based on the threat of avian influenza. Petaluma Farms, a large‐scale egg producer in Petaluma, CA, produces both organic and conventional cage‐free eggs for sale under several brand names, which include Judy’s Family Farm, Rock Island, Uncle Eddie’s Wild Hen Farm and Gold Circle. They also produce eggs for the 365 label owned by Whole Foods and Organic Valley for Western US markets.
Petaluma Farms’ hens are, according to its owners, are “cage free, raised with no antibiotics, fed an all vegetarian diet (no animal by-products in their food), raised at the same location near the Pacific Ocean in Northern California, and raised with water, air and housing standards equal to OCIA organic standards.”
Also receiving 1 egg were national egg producers Horizon Organic, Land O’Lakes and Eggland’s Best.
Read the Cornucopia Institute’s full report (fascinating).
What’s your take? Is all the fuss a crack-up, or is there something to be said for outdoor access for chickens?
Fondo-licious: Edible Gran Fondo
The Fondo’s are about to descend. This weekend (October 8-9, 2010) thousands of bicyclists converge on Santa Rosa for Levi Leipheimer’s annual King Ridge Gran Fondo, a trio of challenging rides that invite everyone from families to hard-core enthusiasts to test their mettle against the big boys of the cyclo-circuit.
And while not everyone enjoys wearing perilously thin spandex over their trouble zones and pedaling their own body weight up 65 degree slopes, food is the common denominator here. Because where there are muscle-bound athletes, there’s bound to be some serious noshing. Not to mention the fact that quite a few local chefs are serious cyclists.
So whether you’re carbo-loading before getting in the saddle on Saturday, or merely snickering at those of us dim enough to think we can ride 32, 65 or 100 miles across Sonoma County, here’s where to get your eat on…
(And PS, yes…I’ll be doing the Piccolo Fondo on Saturday morning and I better not hear one snicker about my thighs in bike shorts. Seriously.)
Friday:
Gran La Fonda: This unofficial event on the Fondo lineup is for hardcore cycling nerds who drool and squeal over the very excellent craft of hand built bikes. A prestige group of 16 DIY frame builders (Sycip, Inglis/Retrotec, Rebolledo, Soulcraft, etc) will gathering in Railroad Square around 5pm. Bikes will be on display with builders eager to talk tig-welded custom forks, and head tubes until your eyeballs fall out.
Eats: Fork catering, Lagunitas beer, Noci gelato
Downtown Santa Rosa Pub Crawl: Fondo-riders get a pre-ride fete with a self-guided pub/grub crawl from 5 to 9pm. Street Food: In a surprise nod to mobile food trucks (more, please, more!), the street in front of Courthouse Square will be closed off and the gals from Street-Eatz and La Texanita will be serving up grab-n-go eats. We’re hoping this will become a regular tradition with more trucks joining the fray.
Restaurants: Participating with specials are Franco’s, Mary’s Pizza Shack, El Coqui, Nonni’s, Jack & Tony’s, La Vera PIzza, Bistro 29, Brasserie and Sushi to Dai for.
Saturday
Fondo Festival: Whether you’re in spandex shorts or not, everyone’s invited to the FondoFestival at the Finley Center where riders start and finish. There’s an entire food court with the likes of Fork Catering, Gerard’s Paella, Harvey’s Mini Donuts, Kashaya’s Brick Oven Pizza, Pica Pica, Lata’s Indian Cuisine, Salt Side Down Chocolates, Sift Cupcakery, and drinks from New Belgium Brewing, D’Argenzio and St. Francis wineries, Revive and Vibranz.
And on the downlow:
– It’s not secret that Riviera Ristorante is one of Levi’s favorite eateries. They’ll be hosting a special fundraising dinner on Thursday at St. Francis, but chances are the restaurant will be host to many a rider throughout the weekend.
– Occidental-bound:
Do you know a cool food/bike event happening in Sonoma County? Let me know!
Two new Wine Country Food trucks
Rolling up on the mobile food scene are two newcomers: Fork and Dim Sum Charlie’s, adding to Wine Country’s evolving food truck convoy.
Fork, run by caterer Sarah Piccolo out of Sebastopol, embraces the local farm-to-table vibe, serving up Stornetta beef burgers on whole wheat buns; a quinoa garbanzo bean burger, green chili mac and cheese, and salads bursting with veggies plucked from local patches.
The converted Mother’s cookie truck has been outfitted with a impressive kitchen and espresso set-up. You can find Sarah and her truck at a variety of public and private events (she recently was at the Handcar Regatta), including stints at the Occidental Farmer’s market and Dutton-Goldfield winery, though she prefers to stay within 90 miles of her home turf in Sebastopol.
For the latest updates, visit Fork’s Facebook page
(UPDATE: Dim Sum Charlies says Sonoma is “in the works”). In Napa, the buzz is about Dim Sum Charlie’s — a converted airstream serving up dumplings and dim sum near the Oxbow market. The truck’s still in it’s early stages, officially opening in early October, but already the lines are long. Dim Sum Charlie’s is open Wednesday and Thursday from 5:30pm until around midnight. On Friday and Saturday they’re open from 11:30am to 1:30am and Sunday from 11:30am to 10pm.
Buyer for Les Mars?
UPDATE: Douglas Keane, Chef and Co-Owner of Cyrus, Healdsburg’s two Michelin star restaurant, issued the following statement on the recent sale of Les Mars Hotel to winery owner Bill Foley.
“Cyrus has and continues to be a stand-alone restaurant, entirely independent of Les Mars Hotel. While the new ownership structure may be a positive change for the hotel, it will not affect our business, or the Cyrus experience, in any way.”
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BiteClub’s got word that the Healdsburg’s Les Mars Hotel — best known for being home to Michelin two-starred Cyrus Restaurant — may have a buyer. The hotel has quietly been for sale for several months, and is listed by Paramount Lodgings as “available well below development cost.”
Insiders say billionaire Bill Foley is the wallet behind the sale — the insurance magnate who’s been snapping up Sonoma wineries left and right. He’s already purchased Chalk Hill, Sebastiani Vineyards and has told reporters he’s continuing to seek high-profile Wine Country properties. And players close to the sale claim “it’s a done deal.”
Cyrus has a long-term lease on the space, however, and it is unlikely that the sale would have any impact on the restaurant.
Corn Salsa Even My Kids Will Eat
Coaching basketball at the professional level, commanding a United Nations peace-keeping mission, and getting kids to eat something for the first time – the latter a category generally construed to mean anything with so much as a splinter of family tree in Kingdom Vegetable, but often including everything not already vetted and approved via previous personal experience (a logical circularity seemingly lost on my own children) – all present management challenges worthy of the cheesy gurus atop airport book store best-seller racks. They also share a fundamental common thread, in that they all depend at least as much on the application of politics as they do of force: The ego out of all proportion to stature, the sheer and petty zealotry, the general perspective of world-as-sandbox… all demand a balance between the firm hand of leadership, the futility of negotiating with toddlers, and the imperative of coming out on top when the final score is tallied.
In seeking out such a balance, I really do try, insofar as there exists a common factor to our family’s 5 discrete sets of capricious preferences (actually, only 4 sets, because I’ll eat just about anything, and my tastes don’t count as capricious, because I’m the one doing the cooking), to engage the kids in the process of building a menu, and one of my favorite, if not uniformly successful, strategies for acquiring homestead rights in the ensuing debate is to shop together at our local farmer’s market: I point out what I like and why, they remind of their favorite stalls, and we eat the various samples as we talk to the farmers who produced them. And we try to let the market dictate the menu, rather than the other way around, because this, too, constitutes bedrock for the proximal cook, the respect for soil and season over cookbook and whim, and I sincerely hope that my kids will grow up with some appreciation for the many connections between fresh and good.
(This thread actually is going somewhere – hopefully to the recipe for the advertised salsa – despite all evidence to the contrary but, as our editor correctly reminds me, I have a tendency to try my readers’ patience. I also have to show up to my day job from time to time. So I’m going to put up the rest of this little missive, including our family assault on the farmer’s market and the ensuing recipe for a damn good corn sauce, in my next post. And, as ever, thanks for your patience.)
SoCo’s Pork Princess on the Next Iron Chef
UPDATE: Duskie made it through to next week. Stay tuned.
Despite the mega-watt grin, makeup and pigtails, Duskie Estes isn’t a chef to be messed with. Which is exactly what Alton Brown and her fellow contestants find out on the premiere of The Next Iron Chef (Food Network, Sunday @ 8pm). Oh, boy do they find out.
After screening the premiere (minus the elimination), let’s just say Duskie made a serious impression. There are some roller-coaster highs and lows for the SoCo chef, but I’m putting my money on Duskie making it through to the next round.
Her pigs will never forgive her if she doesn’t.
We can’t tell you everything, but we can say that a whole suckling pig, a large cleaver, homemade sausage and lots of sand were involved. There were also some tense moments with Mr. Brown and her fellow chefs.
“I’m very competitive” she said while cooking up a harvest luncheon yesterday at Michel-Schlumberger. Duskie’s keeping mum on the details (spilling anything has major legal ramifications) and Estes said that even her husband doesn’t know the outcome. The usually mellow Estes said she worried a bit about how she’d come off after having a pointed exchange with host Alton Brown, but hey, the camera adds few extra pounds of, uh, intensity to us all, right?
The real sourpuss of the show, however, is lemon-faced judge Donatella Arpaia. You just want to hate her for tirelessly kvetching about her “palate”, making all sorts of dramatic coughing and gagging, being “bored” with the food and generally having anything to do with the show. Can we vote her off?
Estes will be screening the show on Sunday at Zazu as a benefit for the Ceres project and no doubt telling a few pre-approved anecdotes about her time on-set for the show. Just don’t ask her about the pineapple.
Zazu restaurant + farm hosts dinner and a showing of the premiere of The Next Iron chef (featuring Duskie, natch) this Sunday at 5:30pm. All proceeds go to the Ceres Project. $97 for dinner, wine & viewing, $39 for wine, viewing and popcorn at 8pm. 3535 Guerneville Rd, Santa Rosa, 523-4814.
Rosso expanding to Petaluma?
Big news: Santa Rosa’s beloved Rosso Pizzeria and Wine Bar is hoping to expand to a second location in Petaluma. Co-owner and partner Kevin Cronin confirms that they’re eager to find a new audience and that he’s “talking to people” in Petaluma.
But that’s not all. Cronin said he’s also looking at spaces for a raw bar and grill in Santa Rosa that would be dedicated to sustainable seafood in Santa Rosa. “Think Swan Oyster Depot meets Sam’s,” he said. The concept would be casual and neighborhoody, he said, while serious about good seafood.
So far, nothing’s been inked, but Cronin’s optimistic about finding just the right space for Rosso’s expanding empire.
Sonoma chef needs your vote
Local chef Tiffany Friedman, who runs Butterroot Personal Chef Services, is one of 24 chefs competing in the Sears Chef Challenge — a nationwide talent search featuring some of the country’s best young culinary talents.
And she needs your help.
As part of the months-long contest, each chef raises money for food banks around the country, and Tiffany’s choice is Sonoma County’s Food For Thought. Depending on the number of rounds she wins (which depend on user votes), she could win up to $20,000 for the organization.
Friedman, a young mother who lives in Cotati, lost her father to AIDS several years ago and felt a connection to the Forestville-based food center that supports people with HIV and AIDS. Her introduction to cooking was at her father’s New York restaurant, and she has worked at Plumpjack in Lake Tahoe, The Village Pub and the Lark Creek Inn.
So far Friedman has participated in a number of video demonstrations for Sears and her continued success in the contest is dependent on the number of votes she gets from visitors to the site. That’s where we come in…
To vote for Tiffany and to follow her quest on the Sears Chef Challenge, cast your vote (there’s no fee involved, just a mouse click) at the Sears Chef Challenge site (searschefchallenge.com) and click on the VOTE NOW button. Tiffany’s in the LA crew. Voting for Round 2 ends October 9.
It’s a win-win for all of us. Said Tiffany: “It has been hard work, lots of burns, some harassment and tons of fun. It is a journey that never ends and always grows. When you keep the fire burning the flame will continue to blaze.”
Former Sonoma restaurateur killed
The town of Sonoma is mourning the loss of Zino Mezoui, a longtime presence in the town and operator of Zino’s on the Plaza. The 57-year-old moved his restaurant to Lake County in 2006.
Sonoma Town Hub blogger James Marshall Berry wrote this about the death:
Zino Mezoui, 57, owner of Zino’s Ristorante and Inn in Kelseyville, died from injuries sustained in a Friday morning collision with a vehicle at Highway 29 and Siegler Canyon Road. According to a report in the Lake County News online, The California Highway Patrol and the District Attorney’s Office were investigating the crash on Friday, with the driver of the vehicle fleeing the scene afterward, as Lake County News has reported. As of Sunday, no arrests in the case had been reported.
CHP Officer Dallas Richey said Friday that Mezoui had been flown to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, where he later died from his injuries.
How Not To Boil Water
You have to love getting a physics lesson from a simple kitchen task: Gravity, for example, seems particularly enamored of demonstrating to me her unwavering commitment, most often when I’m in a rush, by recasting my own kitchen floor as some vast cemetery plot for the night’s dead soldiers, the busted egg shells, the shattered crystal of a wine glass, the shards of a Pyrex prep bowl, the inevitable seasoning of too much floor-spice. But nowhere is your high school science teacher more elegantly remembered than in the humble pot of boiling water at the heart of this post: Thermodynamics, chemistry, and physics, all roiling away together, just so we can eat pasta for dinner.
Most of us, however, don’t boil our pasta water correctly, because adding salt to water in order to cause the water to boil more quickly remains one of the enduring urban legends of the home kitchen. In point of fact, salty water takes longer to boil than pure water, because salt in solution raises its boiling point; a higher boiling point means that the water must get hotter in order to boil, and to get hotter requires a larger transfer of energy from your burner to the water; and thus, if your burner is already maxed out on ‘high’, then there isn’t much you can do to get the water hotter, except to wait longer. (Unless you have a Spinal Tap burner that goes to eleven, but that’s more a question of technological metaphysics than it is of thermodynamics.)
Thus faced with a pot of water, a burner with fixed number of maximum BTUs and a package of uncooked pasta, what, then, is the home cook to do? As I understand it, it’s all about why water bubbles when it’s boiled, which is a story about lots of tiny water molecules careening into one another so rapidly that they literally knock each other out of the pot and into the surrounding atmosphere. (Somewhat off-thread, but this also explains why water boils at lower temperatures above sea level: With less atmospheric pressure leaning down on the surface of the water, it takes less energy to kick the little guys up and out into the thinner air.) The specific phenomenon about which home cooks everywhere have been misled for generations is called boiling-point elevation, and dictates that the point at which a liquid will turn into a gas – a fancy way of saying “it boils” – will rise if you incorporate something n0n-volatile (something itself not prone to boiling, such as salt – alcoho, with its lower equilibrium vapor pressure, would have the opposite effect) into it.
I have an entirely unconfirmed pet theory about the root of the confusion: At some point, in some kitchen, some cook who didn’t ditch chemistry in high school figured out that if adding salt to water makes the water boil at a higher temperature (which, as we’ve discussed, is true), then it should also make the food quick more quickly (which also happens to be true – hotter water, faster cooking). But then somewhere down the line, in a multi-generational game of kitchen telephone, some cook who skipped class a bit more frequently, erroneously conflated cooking quickly with boiling quickly – when, somewhat counterintuitively, the two are actually opposing concepts.
Armed with this knowledge, we can definitively settle the proper approach to boiling water: If you want the water to boil more rapidly, you should add the salt only after the water begins to boil, and then return it to the boil before cooking. The salty water will, upon boiling, be hotter, so you might think you’d have to worry about cooking times, but the practical reality is otherwise, because you’re unlikely ever to use enough salt to matter: The conventional advice for salting pasta water, for example, is to use about an ounce of salt per quart of cooking water. But such a quantity will only raise the boiling point by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, or less than 0.5%.
Class dismissed!