Kitchen Commandments | What ‘Cage-Free’ Eggs Really Means | Recipe: Homemade Yogurt
Issue No. 2
Welcome to the second edition of Sunshine + Microbes! Thank you to the dozens of new readers we had sign up between last week and this Friday. If you missed our first edition, check it out here.
Food production always has mellowed me out in the most pleasant of ways. My brain is a fairly chaotic place to live, and not much quiets the mind for me like stirring a pot of milk for cheese or mixing a bowl of dough for pizza or carefully slicing an onion to caramelize. I find the repetitive actions of the kitchen grounding and meditative. The kitchen has become a crucial refuge for me as the dissonance of the outside world becomes as chaotic as my brain. My personal coping mechanism for chaos calls for taking a breath and cooking myself (and routinely someone I love) a nice meal.
So with that in mind, here are my own five kitchen commandments for a sated belly and happy brain:
1. Don’t under-salt your food.
The point of salt is not to make food taste salty – but to enhance the flavor of whatever you’re cooking. Try this simple experiment: Take a couple tomato slices. Salt one but not the other. Taste each one. See which one tastes more tomato-y. It’ll probably be the salted one. Ideally, every bite of food you eat should make your tongue light up with excitement. The right amount of salt does that.
Not sure how to figure out if your food is properly salted? Read Samin Nosrat’s accessible yet epically exhaustive Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.
2. Use quality ingredients.
If you’re using rancid olive oil, unripe vegetables, and ancient spices, your food will not taste good.
Ensure your produce is fresh by trying to buy directly from the grower. The stuff on supermarket shelves might have been harvested weeks ago, and may not last long in your fridge. But your local farmer generally harvests as close as possible to market day, which should guarantee a longer shelf life. As for the items gathering dust in the pantry, remember that nothing is truly nonperishable. Oils go rancid, grains get weevils and spices lose their flavor.
3. Have at least three back pocket go-to meals.
Pick out a holy trinity of simple recipes to whip out in a pinch. These can be for friends and family or just to be good to yourself after a long day. The dishes don’t need to be showstoppers that require hours of work and costly, hard-to-find ingredients. They should just be something satisfying and unfussy. Mine are: 1) White bean puttanesca with garlic, tomatoes, olives, capers, and fresh basil, served with crusty bread and olive oil. 2) Pasta with lemon cream sauce and peas and lots of parmesan. 3) A hearty panzanella salad with fresh greens, slice tomatoes, fruit, or cukes, hunks of mozzarella, torn croutons, and a basic balsamic vinaigrette.
4. Master the art of a homemade dressing
Forking salad into your mouth shouldn’t be a chore. A delicious dressing makes all the difference. Start with minced garlic and honey. I like to add something savory like mustard but miso is great too. Then about 1 part vinegar or lemon juice to three or four parts nice olive oil (if you don’t like the way it tastes on its own, don’t cook with it). Add pepper, enough salt, and shake shake shake. Now taste it! It should be acidic but not overwhelmingly so, with base hints of sweetness and umami. Finally, it should make your tongue zing (which means you added the perfect amount of salt). Not quite right? Add a blob more honey, another pinch of salt, or a glug or two of oil. Follow your senses.
Make sure your greens are thoroughly dressed. Every leaf should be covered, but this is achieved by an efficient hand tossing, not excessive amounts of dressing. And serve immediately. Dressing the salad should be the very last thing you do before you sit down to eat.
5. Treat yourself to a nice meal.
As a single and super busy 30-something, I completely get that cooking yourself dinner when you’re eating solo can feel like another slog. But as much as your schedule allows, you should try to do it. I am not into wellness maxims, but here is one I can get behind: Cooking yourself a delicious, nourishing meal and sitting down to the table to eat is vital self-care. We show our love for others through cooking. You deserve the same treatment on days when you’re eating on your own.
love,
Jackie
Edible Jargon: Egg Labels 🥚🥚🥚
Egg producers love to cover their cartons in lavish claims. But does a brown egg produced by cage-free, vegetarian hens mean anything? No. Not really. Here’s how to understand all those fancy labels:
Brown Eggs: Some hens lay brown eggs. That’s all that means. There’s nothing special about them.
Cage-free: USDA-regulated term for hens that aren’t caged, but don’t have access to go outside either. That’s not necessarily humane, especially since hen-on-hen violence happens when chickens are cage-less and trapped indoors.
Farm Fresh: Like its brethren “all-natural”, this buzzword means absolutely nothing in the legal sense.
Free-range: USDA-regulated term for hens that have access to go outside. But the size of that outdoors space might be tiny.
Hormone-free: The FDA bans hormones and steroids, so this is redundant and doesn’t really mean anything.
No Added Antibiotics (or Antibiotic-Free): Another redundant term. Egg-laying chickens shouldn’t be receiving antibiotics in the first place.
Omega-3: Eggs with high amounts of omega-3, due to the hen receiving a supplement like flaxseed in their diet.
Organic: Hens that are fed an organic diet and live a free-range life. The Obama administration tried to toughen the regulations for organic egg farms, but the USDA withdrew that proposal last year.
Pasture-raised: Not regulated by USDA, but this is more ideal for hens. They allegedly get indoor barn space and a large area to roam outdoors. You can trust Humane Farm Animal Care’s Certified Pasture-Raised label.
Vegetarian-Fed: Chickens are omnivores so this makes for a strange diet. But as “What’s the Diff” notes, meat-eating factory farmed hens usually are fed crude “animal byproducts, like feather meal or chicken litter.”
Sources:
Lifehacker, Cooking Light, What’s The Diff
What’s Stewing in the Food World?
💸Tip Skimming, or Why You Should Always Tip in Cash
The gig economy creates all kinds of tech-assisted odd jobs and all kinds of nefarious ways to take advantage of laborers working those jobs. NYTimes writer Andy Newman spent 27 hours as a food app delivery driver, and experienced some unseemly realities about a business where riders risk limb and livelihood to bring a meal to a customer’s doorstep. One particular tidbit, about the tipping policy for the nation’s largest food app company DoorDash, stuck out as particularly exploitative:
Restaurant workers deal with a similar tipping structure depending on the state. However, employees in the restaurant industry have much stronger labor protections than those in the fledgling world of delivery apps delivery (what makes this new is these drivers don’t work directly for the restaurant). As the tech site Gizmodo noted, unless you give quite the generous tip — your money is going to a company that received a valuation of $7.1 billion in February 2019. Meanwhile, Newman reported that food couriers will sometimes make below minimum wage if they don’t get enough pings to deliver an order each hour.
The backlash prompted DoorDash CEO Tony Xu to promise to make changes to the tip-skimming policy that the company had previously defended (other food delivery apps recently have reversed similar policies; Amazon Flex hasn’t backed down). He said that the reason for the policy was to make sure delivery drivers received a fixed additional payment on orders where customers left no tip.
That is a common issue for delivery drivers. App users sometimes don’t feel the need to tip on what might be a surprisingly expensive bagel run or fast food order. The measly wages that delivery drivers earn means everyone should offer a tip. USA Today put together a guide for how much to give. An etiquette expert suggested $4 to $5 or 20 percent on the total should be the minimum. To avoid a multi-billion dollar company taking a piece of that tip, please give in cash. Or if you have no cash, ask to tip the driver personally through digital wallets like Venmo or Cash App.
Fresh Links
👩🔬One of America’s top climate scientists is an evangelical Christian. She’s on a mission to persuade skeptics. | Washington Post
A large portion of scientists have religious beliefs despite what one might assume about the field. Meet one evangelical scientist who sees herself as a prophet in the fight against climate change:
Katharine Hayhoe’s faith motivates people. After her keynote at the Citizens’ Climate Lobby conference, attendees approached her, hugged her, showered her with praise, asked for selfies, sought advice on how to talk to nonbelievers in nonthreatening ways. At lunch, the people kept coming. That night, hours before her testimony in front of Congress, she was the marquee guest at a dinner organized by Climate Caretakers, a coalition of Christian environmentalists. There, a man named Shannon Caraway told Hayhoe that he was moved — by her videos and writings online — from denial to belief. He calls it “my conversion.”
😷Have you talked to your doctor about how climate change is affecting your health? | NPR
Unlike smoking or wearing a seat belt, an individual can’t stop climate change by making lifestyle changes. Doctors are starting to talk with patients about how to cope with the consequences of an increasingly warming world. From worsening asthma and allergies to heat waves, climate change threatens patients (especially the elderly) in alarming ways.
🍎 After two decades of research and development, a new apple(!) might change the agricultural industry forever | California Sunday Mag
The Red Delicious is obsolete. The Cosmic Crisp, a crossbreeding of two apple varieties, will be “the largest launch of a single produce item in American history.” How might it disrupt an entire industry?
RECIPE: Homemade Yogurt
This is Sunshine & Microbe’s first fermentation recipe. We get that collaborating with microbes in your kitchen can feel scary, and we want to be a resource and guide to help you through the process. If you’re feeling intimidated, just remember humans have been making yogurt since the Stone Age, and that was long before we had recipes and food thermometers. You don’t have to follow the recipe perfectly for the yogurt to turn out right. Feel free to reply to this email with any questions.
You should be making yogurt: It’s easy, versatile, and great for your gut. Also, you’ll be communing with the ancestors by participating in one of the most ancient forms of food processing.
Yogurt is a fermented food – meaning a food that has been transformed through the hard work of beneficial bacteria. Here’s the basic science: Add a little bit of lactic acid bacteria to milk. The bacteria eat up the sugar (lactose) and convert it into more lactic acid. The bacteria reproduce and take over the milk this way. When the milk becomes acidic enough, the proteins (casein) coagulate into a jelly-like consistency, otherwise known as yogurt.
The role the gut microbiome plays in keeping us healthy is a fascinating area of research. However, don’t let the unregulated supplement industry take your money by selling probiotic pills that probably aren’t doing anything. Instead take your microbes the old fashioned way, in a spoonful of homemade yogurt.
Making yogurt is simple, but because I’m a geek I dove into all of the details about preparing one of humanity’s favorite kinds of nourishment for several millennia.
Ingredients:
½ gallon of nice milk (Remember the No. 2 kitchen commandment? Quality ingredients will produce a better final product. Probably skip the gallon at the gas station)
1 tablespoon of homemade or commercially made yogurt***
food thermometer (ideal but not mandatory)
incubator (more on that below)
***Yes, you need yogurt to make yogurt! The live bacteria in the yogurt will inoculate (definition 1B) a new batch. For your first attempts, save a bit of yogurt from the grocery store and use it for this recipe. Just be sure it’s plain yogurt. Anything with sugar will inhibit proper fermentation. Plus, you should probably avoid that stuff, as it’s just candy in sheep’s clothing. The strains of bacteria from commercially produced yogurts usually weaken after a few homemade batches and eventually stop thriving. Once you get the hang of it, buy yourself a yogurt starter culture, at a website like this, or this (or even Etsy). These starter yogurt cultures will last as long as you keep on using them.
Step-by-step
Gradually bring the milk to just shy of boil – at 180 °F or higher – over medium-low heat. Look for the surface of the milk to steam. Heating the milk to a high temperature denatures the whey protein known as lactoglobulin, joining it with the casein proteins to strengthen their structure and increase the yield. Doing it slowly keeps the final yogurt texture silky smooth.
Remove milk from heat and cool to 110 °F on the counter, or if in a rush, nestled in an ice bath. This is the temperature that makes yogurt bacteria happiest. Add your starter culture (a tablespoon of yogurt from a previous batch or from a grocery store) and mix thoroughly. If you do not have a food thermometer, keep checking the temperature of the yogurt by placing a finger in the mixture and trying to hold it there for 5 to 10 seconds. Once you can do so, you’re ready for the next step.
Place the cultured milk in a container, such as a wide-mouth quart jar. Loosely cover and incubate at 110 °F for 12 or so hours (this step is super easy and there’s a how-to below). When the yogurt has set, it will appear solid, perhaps with a bit of yellow whey pooling at the top. When you tilt the container, the yogurt will pull cleanly away from the side in a solid mass.
Refrigerate the yogurt for a minimum of two to three hours to firm it up further. Save a bit of the final product in order to culture your next batch.
How the heck do I incubate something?
Incubating requires keeping the yogurt at a warm, steady temperature. As we said earlier, yogurt bacteria thrive at around 110 °F. While some varieties of yogurt can culture at room temperature (Finnish “Villi” is a popular one), most require you to incubate for several hours around 110 °F. There are several ways to do this. Here are a few:
Option 1: In a slow cooker or an Instant Pot. Program the slow cooker to around 110 °F. Place the container of yogurt inside.
Option 2: In a gas oven with the pilot light lit. A gas oven turned off but with the pilot light lit maintains a temperature of about 110 °F. A fancy electric oven with the temperature set to 110 °F or “low” will work too.
Option 3: In an insulated cooler. Place the container of yogurt in the cooler. Pour 110 °F water about 3/4 of the way up the jars. Close lid tightly and wrap the cooler in a blanket.
Now that you have homemade yogurt, try this.
Live your weekend like an emu playing in a sprinkler
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Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is the current Chef-in-Residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. and co-founder of the Florida Ferment Fest. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a freelance reporter based in Colombia. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes others scraps to each issue.