THE NIBBLE BLOG: Products, Recipes & Trends In Specialty Foods
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October 8, 2007 at 9:45 am
· Filed under Food Holidays & More, NutriNibbles-Organic-Health
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| When Native Americans and European immigrants hit the trail and needed energy, they carried the original energy bar, pemmican—a mixture of meat, fat and dried fruit. |
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| Now, The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation Company has gone back to its ancestral roots for a healthy, natural alternative to the energy bars now on the market: the Tanka Bar, made with South Dakota bison and Wisconsin cranberries. (If you remember “Dances With Wolves,” tanka means bison in the Lakota language.) The bar is a spinoff of a centuries-old Lakota food called wasna that sustained Great Plains Indians during long trips. Based on traditional wasna and pemmican, it combines high-protein, prairie-fed buffalo and tart-sweet cranberries that is slow-smoked to a jerky-like texture. If you’re a nomad on the go, try it next time you hit the trail. At TankaBar.com. |
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October 5, 2007 at 4:37 pm
· Filed under Food Holidays & More, Fruits, Nuts & Seeds
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Not a harmonica—it’s a Banana Guard, to protect your fresh fruit. |
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Love to bring a banana for a workday snack (or send the kids to school with one), but hate to find it brown and beaten up when you remove it from your bag? Have no fear—Banana Guard is here! The banana protectors are designed to fit most banana sizes and have ventilation holes to allow the banana to ripen at its natural rate. Banana Guard comes in several different colors including a glow-in-the-dark variety—perhaps for spelunkers and theater ushers. It’s $6.99 for a single Banana Guard, $12.99 for a 2-pack and $29.99 for a 5-pack at BananaGuard.com. Let’s hear it for healthier snacks, and the folks who invent ways to carry them. |
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October 5, 2007 at 4:34 pm
· Filed under Food Holidays & More, Salts-Seasonings-Herbs-Spices
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| Just in time for Halloween, McCormick’s has introduced black food coloring. While it’s been easy to make orange from the standard yellow and red food colors, black has always represented a challenge. Now, thanks to spooky food technology, cakes, cupcakes and cookies can be decorated in true Halloween spirit. Check out McCormick.com for a recipe for a black cat cake, purrfect for kids or adults! The food coloring is available nationwide for a suggested retail price of $2.80 for a one ounce bottle. Also new are Italian Tabletop Spices and Traditional Tabletop Spices, single shakers with four sections of different spices. |
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McCormick’s new Tabletop Spices: at left, Italian spices, at right, Traditional. |
| The Traditional shaker offers sea salt, black pepper, garlic salt and an Italian seasoning blend. We’re not keen on pre-ground black pepper (piperines, the fiery compounds we love in pepper, start to fade within 20 minutes after grinding). But the Italian shaker, with oregano, sweet basil, garlic powder and crushed red pepper, seems perfect for Pizza Night. If you also like salt and pepper on your pizza, get both and shake away! Each has a suggested retail price of $3.99, at grocery stores nationwide. |
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October 5, 2007 at 4:25 pm
· Filed under Beer & Hard Cider, Food Holidays & More
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 Photo of Czechoslovakian hops vines by Dušan Gavenda | IST. |
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What revelers at next week’s Great American Beer Festival won’t be discussing is the higher prices forthcoming on their brews of choice. While the segment grew 11% the first half of this year, the cost of materials is growing as well. As reported today in the Wall Street Journal, poor harvests, the week dollar and farmers’ shifts to more profitable crops have caused the price of hops and barley to rise—the largest ever faced by the industry. Malting barley, which gives beer its color and sweetness, is less a profitable crop than corn, in demand for biofuels like ethanol. Hops, which provide aroma and bitterness, are commanding higher prices because of poor crops in Europe (hops are also grown in America’s Pacific Northwest). At the same time, the acreage devoted to hops has decreased by half over the past dozen years because of a previous glut of hops. |
| According to the Wall Street Journal, the cost pressures could slow the expansion of American craft brewers and even put some smaller ones, who have not locked in contracts for hops and malt, out of business. Big brewers face the same cost increases, but they use far fewer hops and barley in most of their beers, which is why they are lighter in taste (and calories). A barrel of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, for example, has about twice the malt and up to five times the hops of a mass-market brew like Budweiser or Miller. As in any industry, large manufacturers have the finances to to secure long-term contracts that protect against rising costs of materials. Now, smaller brewers are trying to do the same, and some are tweaking their recipes to see what they can do without the European hops they’ve always relied on. |
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October 4, 2007 at 2:10 pm
· Filed under Beer & Hard Cider, Food Holidays & More, Travel
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| The doors open on Thursday, October 11, 5:30 p.m., and until Saturday at 10 p.m. (not nonstop, of course); attendees at the 2007 Great American Beer Festival will have 1,884 beers available to sample. A total of 2,832 beers will be judged over three days by more than 100 judges. There are some new styles among this year’s 75 beer categories, including Pumpkin Beer, Other Low Strength Ale or Lager, Gluten Free Beer, American-Style Sour Ale, Wood and Barrel-Aged Sour Beer and American-Style Imperial Stout. |
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| Attendees can sample beer by state, visit educational booth areas, attend food and beer seminars from an A-list of chefs and food experts and listen to live interviews with the rock stars of the brewing industry. New this year, the festival has gone green with the goal of recycling all possible packaging and festival programs. Craft beer has never been hotter. According to data from Information Resources Inc., supermarket sales increased a whopping 17.8% increase in 2006—more growth than any other alcohol beverage category in the supermarket channel. In the past three years, craft beer sales have grown by an astounding 31.5%. Visit GreatAmericanBeerFestival.com for tickets and event information. |
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