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RESTAURANTS: Bon Appétit Café Pops Up In NYC

Bon Appetit Supper Club & Cafe
Our goat cheese Caesar salad by Uber Chef Michel
Richard was memorable…but the room by David
Rockwell Associates made it even more so.
  Lunch fun, anyone? Through November 2nd, everyone in the Big Apple can take ephemeral joy in the pop-up restaurant concept from Bon Appétit magazine. Featuring fine casual cuisine from some of the nation’s top chefs, who also participate in daily demos and tastings, it’s a foodie vacation. Get to work early and break for a long lunch; watch the presentations as you enjoy your soup, salad and dessert. Or, just pop in for a quick sandwich or a cup of coffee and a brownie, and catch one 15-minute demo. Come back the next day for a completely different experience. If you can’t stay to watch, you can get your food to go.
The Café enables food enthusiasts to taste the casual fare of great chefs, see them give demos in an intimate arena, get up-close with Q&As and book signings. (The Supper Club portion is booked for private evening events). Each day, there’s a selection of noteworthy fare from chefs Govind Armstrong, Cat Cora, Emeril Lagasse, Giada De Laurentiis, Michael Mina, Michel Richard, and pastry chefs Claudia Fleming, Wil Goldfarb and Pichet Ong. There’s a free walk-around tasting on the balcony overlooking the room: Woodbridge Winery is pouring its current releases, Häagen-Dazs is sampling its excellent Reserve ice creams and Ghirardelli chocolate is offering Intense Dark chocolate line samples that go nicely with the Woodbridge reds. We had a great first day, and hope to get back as often as we can before the Café disappears into memory at the end of lunch on November 2nd. Pop in at 221 West 57th Street between Seventh Avenue and Broadway, weekdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Warning: the Daily Specials were sold out by 1 p.m., so earlier is better. For more information and a schedule of events, visit BASupperClubandCafe.com.

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PRODUCT WATCH: Périgord Truffles

Feeling rich or reckless? Hankering to buy a voluptuous gift for yourself or your BFF (best foodie friend)? The French truffle season opens the last week of November. In the Périgord, the world’s greatest black truffle region, pigs, dogs and trufflers (human truffle hunters) will beating the bushes (or more literally, the forests of great oak and chestnut trees) for the precious fungus. While most connoisseurs pledge their troth to the white Alba truffle of Italy, we have always loved cooking with the Périgord truffle (the white truffle can’t be cooked, just grated over food).   Truffle Pig
Two Périgord truffle hunters: man and pig.
QuelObjet.com flies fresh black truffles directly to the U.S. from the Périgord, and will overnight express them to your doorstep. But orders must be placed in advance: They only import what has been ordered. To learn more about truffles, read our overview article, complete with a Truffle Glossary, recipes and some beautiful truffle photos. Truffles are found four to five inches underground, growing on the roots of oaks and a few other trees. Since they can’t be seen, they need to be sniffed out. Pigs have great noses for locating truffles and will naturally root them out. But pigs love truffles as much as we do, and will swallow them on the spot if they are not restrained (and as you can see from the size, it takes a tough man to restrain a large pig). Dogs, which can be trained to find truffles, but have no interest in eating them, are the preferred scout of most trufflers. P.S. If you plan a truffle feast…please invite us.

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NEWS: Cocoa Butter Substitution

HersheyThis year: made with cocoa butter.
Next year: made with vegetable oil?
  Will this be the last Halloween with “real” chocolate? If many of the big commercial chocolate makers have their wish, it will be. They filed a petition with the FDA earlier this year, to amend the standards for chocolate production. The proposed change would give manufacturers the option to replace the cocoa butter in chocolate with cheaper vegetable oil, and still be able to call the product “chocolate.” The product exists today, but must be called chocolate-flavored or imitation chocolate. If changes are legislated, you, the consumer, will have to read labels to know what you’re buying; and in instances such as restaurant and bakery purchases, where there is no label to read, it will be caveat emptor. We wrote about this serious issue in April, and urged NIBBLE readers to comment on the FDA’s website (you can read the post in April’s Gourmet News & Views).
The comments period is closed now, and the petition is under review by legislators Dow Jones MarketWatch commented on the overall issue and updates, quoting NIBBLE founder Karen Hochman. Read the full story. We continue to speak for chocolate lovers everywhere when we ask that the government focus its attention on food safety issues, rather than revising chocolate standards.

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PRODUCT WATCH: Mercer’s Port Ice Cream

Mercer’s Ice CreamA year or so ago we tried Mercer’s Wine Ice Cream, made in New York State. The Port ice cream was a standout, but at the time there was no online distribution. Now, a NIBBLE reader from St. Louis writes that he tried the flavors locally, also likes the Port, and recommends a local distributor, FrostOnTheVine.com, that will ship them. There’s a four-pint minimum ($10.00 a pint plus shipping). For a special holiday dessert, that’s not bad, and the four pints will go fast. You can mix and match flavors (the others are Peach White Zinfandel, Red Raspberry Chardonnay and Royal White Riesling), but we’d stick with the Port—which is formally named Ala Port, by some person who does not understand that (a) Port is named after the Portuguese town of Porto (a.k.a. Oporto) from whence the wine was originally shipped, not after the French word for door (la port), (b) one should never make up fake French, but if one must, one should spell it correctly (À la Port, not Ala Port), and (c) if you have four flavors in a line, you should follow a nomenclature—not serve up three names in English and one in “French.”

 

You can’t make these at home: Freezing alcohol and ice cream (or sorbet) successfully is something even the professionals have to work at. For a great line of wine sorbets, read our review of Wine Cellar Sorbets, a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week. You can find more of our favorite ice creams and sorbets in the Desserts Section of THE NIBBLE online magazine. And for the answers to the differences between ice cream, French ice cream, sorbet, sherbet and other frozen delights, check out our Ice Cream & Frozen Desserts Glossary.

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BOOK: The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry

Sharper Knife

Many women will be at least a little jealous of Kathleen Flinn. At age 36, she leaves her high-powered corporate job to pursue her lifelong dream of attending Le Cordon Bleu Culinary School in Paris. She falls in love not only with the City of Light, but with a man she eventually marries. And, she gets a book deal to write about it all. It has all the makings of a Lifetime movie.

The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry is not just a story about all the feel-good moments in Flinn’s life. She also records the many trials and tribulations of attending culinary school—the backstabbing, the stress, the intimidating chefs and the grueling classes. But, her feelings of self-doubt are quelled by her motivation to receive her Superior Cuisine diploma—despite the fact that she never intends to be a professional chef but just an excellent home cook. Flinn shares many recipes as well as hilarious stories of her many house-guests, including one particularly repugnant self-dubbed “wine snob.”

We finished this book in just a matter of days and really wished there were a second volume. Is Flinn still cooking regularly? Where does she work now? Is her husband still a knight in shining armor? The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry reads like good, romantic fiction, except that it all actually happened.

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