Hasta La Ideas

Paul Virant goes through a year of pickles, preserves and aigre-doux

From Paul Virant, chef-owner of the Chicago area’s Vie and Perennial Virant, comes a collection of recipes and techniques geared towards foods with a long shelf life. “The Preservation Kitchen” traces the Michelin-starred chef’s mission to dish out local and seasonal meals, offering instructions on proper canning techniques, full meal recipes and seasonal advice for pickled vegetables and fruit jams.

The vibrantly photographed kitchen companion is rife with stories surrounding Virant’s forays into preservation and his Midwestern heritage: “I grew up eating pickles,” he writes. “My grandmothers, both from Missouri, were avid canners, their summer meals often punctuated with a plate of tart dill-marinated tomatoes served straight from the refrigerator.” While the anglo-American influence is heavy in his recipes for pickles and preserves, his classical French training shines through in his exhaustive treatment of aigre-doux and mostarda.

Virant offers a practical set of guidelines for safe canning, breaking down the science and proper measurements for beginners, before launching into pickles, the foundation of his canning program. Going beyond strawberry preserves, the variety of recipes brings creativity to canning, from peach saffron jam and ramp sauerkraut to Virant’s Beer Jam Manhattan, which sweetens bourbon with a stout syrup and gets a brandied sour cherry as a garnish.

Recipes for preserves from the early parts of the book—which each come prefaced with a thoughtful introduction and chart outlining volumes and percentages—are later incorporated into seasonal meals in which Virant combines fresh ingredients with pantry-ready canned items, like grilled and pickled summer squash salad; chicken liver mousse with arugula, currant mostarda and grilled bread; and buttermilk ice cream with brandied peaches.

Shipping 3 April 2012, “The Preservation Kitchen” is available from Random House and on Amazon.

The designer’s latest footwear collection with the Workshop Residence uses reclaimed materials from the Bay Area

A long career in industrial design informs Martha Davis‘ footwear collection, which was first launched back in 2009. The multifaceted designer spent the last few months at San Francisco’s Workshop Residence, creating shoes by hand from custom steel shanks, vegetable-tanned leather and reclaimed wood from the Bay Area. Debuting today, the three new styles represent Davis’ embrace of natural materials and minimal fashion.

Davis found her work straying away from objects for a time, as she moved into designing user interfaces for digital products. “That’s when I decided to go to Italy,” she says, feeling a need to make things once again. While she appreciates the traditional craftsmanship she learned abroad, the need to experiment eventually won out. “The Workshop Residence was an opportunity for me to really play around with stuff, and I’ve always been interested in natural materials and how to use things without disguising them.”

Davis is the third participant of the Workshop Residence, an organization that provides makers from all walks with the space, funds and access necessary to realize their creations. “I think of the Workshop as being an incubator for makers and designers with Bay Area local manufacturers,” says Davis. Much of Davis’s work relies on the Workshop’s relationship with local manufacturers. For the steel shanks of her shoes, no local manufacturers could be found, so a local metalworker was called upon to custom build the pieces.

All materials used in the collection were sourced locally. The uppers are made from thick, vegetable-tanned leather, and the wooden heels upcycled from a variety of sources. Davis used the remnants of forests burned by local wildfires, their charred character pairing nicely with the designer’s unfinished aesthetic. She also reached out to a San Francisco trolley repair shop for discarded wooden brakes, which are made from Douglas fir and disposed of after only a few days of use.

The shoes strike a balance between chic and utilitarian. “My approach is always fairly architectural,” explains Davis. “I don’t do a lot of decorating.” One of Davis’s more progressive creations has an elliptical heel that can be turned on its side to bring the height down by an inch.

Martha Davis’s collection launches with an event tonight, 24 February, 2012 from 6-9pm at the Workshop Residence and is now available through their shop.

The Workshop Residence

833 22nd Street

San Francisco, CA 94107

Locally made jams and apple butter now available through partnership with New York Mouth

Since 2004 Blue Hill Farm at Stone Barns in the Pocantico Hills has been on a mission to raise awareness about the effect of food choices on our everyday lives. Now the gastronomic purveyors behind New York Mouth are helping make some of the natural flavors of the gorgeous food prepared in Dan Barber’s award-winning kitchen available at home.

Jars of apple butter, Hudson Valley honey and plum elderberry, quince and cherry jam make the flavors of Blue Hill ripe for the picking. The intensely rich apple butter comprises just apples, apple cider and brown sugar. The jams are made with the best seasonal ingredients carefully chosen by the Blue Hill chefs, and the Hudson Valley honey is a raw, unpasteurized wild flower variety with a deep color. All of these jars would beautifully compliment a brunch spread or cheese plate set on one of J.K. Adams‘ North American Maple cow-shaped cutting boards.

Shoppers can also get their hands on Blue Hill pickles, made with Kirby cucumbers and grown by Cherry Lane Farms in Bridgeton, NJ. The New York Mouth team describes the brine as an “incredibly complex” flavor that will “change on your tongue”.

New York Mouth is careful to select hand-crafted healthful food products made with local ingredients by independent companies in and around New York. The new partnership with Blue Hills fits in perfectly with their philosophy on food and sustainability initiatives. “We are sort of like an indie music store for food—indie food,” says New York Mouth’s Craig Kanarick.

With a deep respect for Blue Hill’s love of locally sourced ingredients and high-quality foods, New York Mouth is proud to be the only place for people to buy the new jam flavors and apple butter outside the Blue Hill at Stone Barns on-site store.

Two apps seek out sustainable food and responsible diet options

We know plenty, perhaps even too much about how we ought to eat, but the fact remains we put a lot of faith in restauranteurs and grocery stockists to have our best interests in mind. Lately, we have noticed a few apps that aim to put power in the hands of the purchaser. Vegan, gluten-free, raw, green, sustainable, ethical and flexitarian eaters can all appreciate the awesome power of knowing the best foods to eat and where to find them.

The newest app for selective eaters is inBloom, founded by OK Go guitarist Andy Ross and Eytan Oren of Eytan and the Embassy. The personalized interface saves the users’ dietary preferences and employs the information to filter search results. Not limited to food, inBloom also offers the ability to search for eco-friendly lodging and electric charging stations. Each restaurant description includes yelp ratings, hours of operation, map location and other useful tidbits. The location-based app is currently only available for NYC with plans to spread to other cities.

Clean Plates is less user-specific, with browsing based on the type of fare you happen to be feeling at the moment. Search by cuisine, location, price or diet to find healthy, sustainable and delicious food. Essentially a restaurant searcher, Clean Plates sets itself apart with well-researched summaries that are a result of investigation into the background of individual restaurants. The app also includes Yelp ratings, links to Menupages, hours, price ranges and locations. Rather than ignoring middle-of-the road options, restaurants are rated as either “great,” “good” or “okay” to allow for more dining flexibility.

Some old favorites in the sustainable food app selection are Seafood Watch and Locavore. The former comes from Monterey Bay Aquarium and rates different types of seafood based on sustainability and ecological ratings. Once users decide on a fish, they can search restaurants and stores to find it nearby. Locavore features a seasonal food list so that you can stay informed of locally grown produce any time of year. The app also lets you search for nearby markets, browse recipes and see what others are eating in your area.

North Carolina’s oldest microbrewery churns out tasty beers and more from their eco-farm

After leaving his home in Germany to study large-scale farming in England, Uli Bennewitz moved to the U.S. to work in agribusiness. His beer-brewing hobby soon became an obsession, and 25 years ago he started Weeping Radish, now North Carolina’s oldest microbrewery. The craft beer project has since grown into a fully-developed brewery and nitrate-free farm, serving up award-winning charcuterie (handcrafted by their master German butcher, Frank), alongside an assortment of German-style beers.

Weeping Radish brews their beer according to the Reinheitsgebot Purity Law of 1516, a regulation made by Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria stating beer could only be made using malt, hops and water to maintain quality. Later amended to include yeast, Bennewitz and his team include the fourth ingredient in their recipe.

Bennewitz, passionate about utilizing local North Carolina ingredients, is a working example of value-added agriculture. Not only does the brewery’s pub menu follow a “Farmer to Fork” ethos, they also add the beer to ‘brats and use watered-down distilled beer to fertilize crops. They also work with the small farms that supply them beef to create sausages and charcuterie products at Weeping Radish that are then sent back to the farms to be sold.

For their 25th anniversary this year, the “hobby out of control” incorporated cascade hops grown on a farm in the mountainous region of Ashville, NC into their India Pale Ale. Bennewitz says eventually they will, “go to the next level, grow our own barley, have it malted and bring it back.” While we found the that the IPA could have been hoppier, the mild flavor was still palate-pleasing. Their current lineup of regionally-inspired flavors includes OBX Kölsch, Radler, Corolla Gold, Fest and Black Radish. The creative chefs behind nearby Boot Local Kitchen & Wine Bar told us they made regular trips to Weeping Radish for their Altbier brew, a “top notch” top-fermented beer with a slightly crisper taste.

Weeping Radish brews sell from their online beer store for $39 per case of 12 swing-top bottles.

Images courtesy of Boot