Substance over Style | Best of 2019 | Recipe: Infused Salt and Sugar
Issue No. 23
Welcome to the last Sunshine + Microbes of 2019! In this week’s edition, Jackie breaks bread over bread baking with a favorite baker, we highlight some of our favorite food and environment-related joys of the year, and send you off into the new decade with a holiday gift idea.
Note: This will be our final Sunshine + Microbes issue of 2019. We’ll be taking the next two weeks off to celebrate the holiday season. (P.S. All we want for Christmas/Hanukkah is for you to share this newsletter on your social media)
Last week I had a wonderful visit from Jennifer Lapidus, the woman behind Carolina Ground, the flour mill in Asheville that supplies the lion’s share of raw material for my baking habit. When I first started baking bread professionally, during the early days of Ground Floor Farm, I had attempted perhaps two dozen sourdough loaves in my life. I had no idea what I was doing, and often felt frustrated and alone trying to grapple with this mystical process.
Finding Jennifer and her mill was a godsend. Not just because her carefully sourced stone ground flours make such glorious bread, but because I finally had someone I could turn to with silly questions about baking. She made me feel like I was part of a larger community of artisans.
During her visit, Jennifer and I talked a lot about the importance of supporting female voices in the baking community. The folks getting the most airtime in the baking world are men hyping white bread - which is delicious and extremely photogenic -- but devoid of the many star qualities of the humble whole wheat loaf: nutrition, digestibility, flavor, and ability to support a fat hunk of cheese. Style over substance.
I thought about our conversation the other night when one of the artists told me my dinner reminded her of her mother’s cooking. This is the absolute greatest compliment I could receive. I strive to cook like a mom. At least the metaphorical mom -- I get that real moms are a diverse, imperfect lot. But when I think about mom food, I think about love and nourishment. Substance over style.
Mom food is the polar opposite of the sort of cuisine (cooked by predominantly male superstar chefs) we celebrate today - luxe ingredients, complicated technique, elaborate plating. This sort of cooking is self-indulgent at its core. It says “Hey! Look at me!” instead of “Here, I made this for you.”
If we took more cues from moms- real and mythical- and lifted up more female voices in the food world (voices like Samin Nosrat and Alison Roman, who are leading the charge on delicious, nourishing, unfussy food meant for sharing), I believe that would lead to more inclusive, bonded communities and many more satisfying suppers.
The mythic family supper is all about building lifelong, indelible bonds through the loving act of cooking and sharing food. While my millennial feminist brain forces me to instinctively roll my eyes at most of those Norman Rockwell ideas about family and gender, I really buy into the power of breaking bread together. I feel so privileged to lead the kitchen at the Rauschenberg Residency, where artists from all over the world arrive as strangers, and over the course of five weeks and many simple, nourishing, family-style meals, become a tight-knit community.
For me, cooking is about the people I’m feeding, the community of farmers and food artisans I’m supporting, and hopefully the people like you that I share knowledge and ideas with, and the many mentors like Jennifer that have guided me in turn along the way.
Have a healthy and happy new year!
Jackie
The Sunshine + Microbes Best of 2019 🏆
As 2019 comes to a close, it’s time to remember our favorite highs and lows from the year. Anyone can just google a list of this year’s best movies or best shows, so our list is a little different. Some of the stuff on the list might have happened in years past, but we experienced them for the first time in 2019, because you know, time is an illusion and all that.
So without further ado, here are Sunshine + Microbes’ best experiences, media and memes from the past year.
🍸👄Best Source for Cocktail Party Anecdotes
If Our Bodies Could Talk | James Hamblin
This is the fun, ambitious, heartwarming science writing of my dreams. Baby Boi (as Matt and I affectionately call him), who has built a career around public health literacy, structures the book like an FAQ about the human body. He uses real, often silly questions sent in from readers as gateways to big, fascinating explorations of science, industry, culture, and the shared human experience. Learn about how the sausage gets made when it comes to nutrition guidelines; what happens when we sleep, and when we don’t sleep enough; what’s the deal with dimples, gluten, and labioplasty; a brief history of how we handle dead bodies; and so many more uncanny facts and gripping histories.
🌎A Great Movie on Climate Change? Really!? Award
First Reformed | Available on Prime Video
Perhaps the first great movie to take climate change seriously (wait, does Mad Max: Fury Road count?) — instead of using it as a plot device for some schlocky disaster flick. For that effort, the 2018 film received an Oscar-nomination for best original screenplay. Ethan Hawke perhaps deserved his own nom for anchoring the film as a pastor in a small coastal town grappling with his faith in the aftermath of a death in the family and a divorce. When the pregnant wife of a young climate activist comes to him for counsel, a fateful sequence unfolds in this existential thriller.
🚜Best TV Dinner Binge for Degens
Letterkenny | Available on Hulu
When yer done choring and ready for a lunch break, go crush some puppers with the hicks, skids and jocks that populate the Letterkennyverse. Wayne, the small town’s resident tough guy, is the farmer of Jackie’s fantasies and leads a cast of the world’s most charming shit talkers. The quirky as hell Canadian comedy — with its unique vernacular about degens, chirping and sandos (sandwiches) — just wrapped up its seventh season, with the eight season dropping right after Christmas. Don’t fall any further behind. Or as they say in Letterkenny: Pitter, Patter. Let’s get at’er.
🐗🐗🐗Best Meme That Is Also Our Worst Environmental Nightmare
30-50 Feral Hogs | Reply All
Reply All — ostensibly a podcast about tech, albeit one that’s clever enough to weave strange online tales into human interest stories — turned a wacky meme into a gripping investigation on environmental degradation in rural U.S.A. Don’t worry if you don’t know the “30 to 50 feral hogs” meme. It’s explained in the episode and the background (an absurd off-the-cuff remark on Twitter about gun control that went viral) is only tangential to the story about how millions of hogs are terrorizing U.S. farmers and we have no idea how to stop them.
📗Best How-to Guide for Making Delicious, Uh, Mold
Miso, Tempeh, Natto, & Other Tasty Ferments | Kirsten and Christopher Shockey
If you only knew the amount of mold I’ve intentionally grown on rice and beans since this book came out in May. The latest work from my fermentation heroes Kirsten and Christopher Shockey demystifies this class of mold-based ferments. With their expert guidance, you’ll be making your own miso, amazake, tempeh, soy sauce, and sake in no time.
🍌Best Starch on The Dinner Plate
Kefir-Pickled Plantains
Over the summer when I had too many plantains and not enough time, these became a staple. First, you need to have some active water kefir, which is super easy. Just chop the plantains into chunks (at whatever stage of ripeness), throw them in a jar, cover in water kefir, weigh the plantains down so they are submerged in the brine, cover the jar, and let them sit on the counter and ferment for a few days. Once they’re bubbly, store in an airtight container in the fridge indefinitely. Then use them to make tostones, maduros, or slice them and throw them in your morning yogurt and granola.
🤖🍞Best Tale about the Existential Crisis of American Home Baking
How Tech Bros Fell in Love With Baking | Eater
The last few years have seen an explosion in home baking, and a driving force behind this kitchen awakening has been techies and engineers. Author Dayna Evans explores the motivations behind these (mostly) male bakers, and how they’ve shaped cultural definitions of good bread. It’s about labor, gender, social media, and the fight for the soul of bread.
👨👩Best Sibling Rivalry
The C.E.O. Who Called Trump a Racist (And Sold a Lot of Spice Mix) | New Yorker
Did you know that a spice company has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on impeachment ads for Trump? It’s true, and totally bizarre. Bill Penzey has bucked conventional wisdom about never getting political in business and has managed to sell a bunch of spice mix as a result for his Wisconsin-based Penzeys Spices — the U.S.’s largest independent spice retailer.
In the wake of Penzey’s capitalist activism, another Wisconsin-based spice seller called Spice House reached out to conservative blogs as a counterweight for liberal spice lovers. These are rival companies with palpable tension between the two owners: Bill Penzey and Spice House’s Patty Erd — who is Penzey’s sister.
☹️Worst Sandwich
Bread and cheese from Fyre Fest | Netflix and Hulu documentaries
In early 2019 two documentaries came out celebrating the world’s worst and most expensive sandwich at the schadenfreude event of the decade: Fyre Fest. Vice called this cheese sandwich “the iconic image of the influencer age.”
The horrorshow festival occurred (or better yet, was attempted) in 2017, where attendees spent hundreds and even thousands of dollars to visit the hottest new music festival on an island in the Bahamas. Unfortunately for them, despite the flashy Instagram ads, it all was a giant scam. While the documentaries are worth checking out, no image better defined the disaster than these two slices of processed cheese atop a puny piece of toast.
🔨Best Op/Ed for Understanding Sunshine + Microbes’ Mantra
Smash the Wellness Industry | New York Times
The Internet is filled with rail-thin Instagram stars hocking unrealistic diets and superjacked YouTube influencers bragging about sketchy supplements. Sunshine + Microbes strives to be the antidote to the “wellness industry.” In each issue we try to emphasize the relationship between food and our environment and society as a whole as opposed to just thinking about food as a tool to fix what we hate about our bodies. In this article, Jessica Knoll summarizes why the pseudoscientific claims of the wellness industry are so harmful, and cautions us to be wary of who’s shaping our ideas of health and nutrition.
🍵Cutest Little Sip
Baby Yoda
Mmm, yes. The tea, that is.
Infused Salt and Sugar
Infusing salt and sugar with different flavors is a simple technique that can class up any meal. I love finishing a salad with a sprinkle of citrus salt, or dusting the top of cookies with vanilla-cardamom sugar. A jar also makes for a lovely (easy! cheap!) holiday gift. I’ve included some potential inspiration below, but let your own culinary creativity guide you.
Ingredients
1 cup salt or sugar (I recommend a nice quality granulated sugar or a course or flaky salt like Maldon. Something with a textural crunch.)
2 tablespoons dry flavoring of choice
step-by-step
Prep flavoring. Fresh ingredients will need to be dried (spread on a baking sheet in an oven on the lowest temperature until dry to the touch). Large ingredients can be crumbled or blended (in a spice grinder or high-powered blender) so that they incorporate easily.
Powders and other smaller ingredients like crumbled dried herbs or fennel seeds do not need any additional prep.
Mix flavorings with salt or sugar. Can be stored in an airtight container in the cupboard indefinitely.
Flavor Combinations:
Citrus Salt: Use that fancy new microplane grater you got for Christmas to remove the zest or a variety of (preferably unwaxed) citrus
Chili Herb Salt. Mix in equal parts red pepper flakes and a variety of herbs like rosemary, oregano, and thyme
Mushroom Salt: Use dried porcini mushrooms (processed to a powder). Kick it up a notch with lime zest and black sesame seeds
Vanilla Salt: Perfect for topping chocolate chip cookies. Use a pairing knife to scrape out the black magic inside a vanilla bean.
Black Garlic Salt: Slice, dry, and powder black garlic, which can be found in specialty food shops (or made at home!)
Chai Sugar: Use a tablespoon each of cinnamon and ginger, teaspoon cardamom, pinch of clove, nutmeg, black pepper, and black tea leaves
Matcha Sugar: Use matcha powder. For additional nutrition and Florida foraging bonafides, blend in some dried and powdered moringa.
Rosemary Fennel Sugar: Use dried rosemary and fennel seeds. For the best shortbread cookies 😉
Mexican Chocolate Sugar: Use a tablespoon high quality cocoa powder, teaspoon cinnamon, teaspoon chili powder (ancho or chipotle would be nice)
Grapefruit Mint Sugar: Use grapefruit zest and dried mint
Thank you siblings Steven and Leah for making this sweet Louie Armstrong jam one of the sounds of Jackie’s childhood.
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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 other scraps to each issue.