Sabbatical Flashback 1: Lidia Bastianich's Tomato Sauce

Again, I feel quite honored that the City Paper named TBS to its Best of Baltimore list for 2010. You just don't expect to hear that too often.

But alas, I am still on a sabbatical from the blog. And yet, it seems like now is a better time than ever to show readers some of what I do here. So over dinner last night (the Carlyle Club has gotten surprisingly inexpensive, especially their dosas, none of which reaches $10), I shot around some ideas with my friends Eric & Alan over what to do. It made sense, a la Minx Eats, to do some flashback posts.

So over the next few weeks (about once or twice a week), as I focus on family and work issues and recover from burnout, I will be bringing some of my favorite posts back for you to read. New readers: this is some insight into how the mind of this blogger works.

The first flashback post dovetails nicely with Baltimore's Book Festival, as it was the inspiration for the post. The recipe in this post is still scrawled on a piece of note paper hanging in my kitchen. Two things to note: as you recall, BBF '08 was subject to an absurdly hard downpour, and it was apparently more difficult to find San Marzano tomatoes in the supermarket than it is now. Hell, I can go to Giant and get them now. I think.

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Lidia Bastianich's Tomato Sauce

(originally posted Thursday, October 2, 2008)

Inspired by Adam Roberts' cooking demo at the first-ever underwater Baltimore Book Festival on Saturday, I went ahead and made pasta sauce. It was the first time I had ever done this, though I have made other tomato-based sauces before. These were usually of the vindaloo and murgh makhani varieties. One would think the ancestors would get me to make an ancestral tomato sauce at some point, but nooooo. Then again, food-wise I best remember my Italian-American grandmother for her Thanksgiving stuffing, and the little pot of coffee she cooked every morning. It wasn't even a tea pot - just a little aluminum saucepan. Perhaps she did make napoletana food (her parents were from a little mountain village outside of Salerno, near Naples), but I never had the fortune to eat it.

Where was I? Oh yes, pasta sauce. I hunted down the Lidia Bastianich oeuvre at the Towson Library and found the recipe that Adam had made for Saturday's demo. I finally found said recipe in her book Lidia's Family Table. For this recipe, the words "SAN MARZANO TOMATOES" jumped out at me. I had heard the Amateur Gourmet utter these same words the other day, so I went a-searchin' for some San Marzano maters. I found none. Not in Trader Joe's. Not in Super Fresh. I almost got to Whole Foods but it was late and I couldn't be bothered.

I finally did find two cans of organic San Marzano tomatoes, canned by Racconto. Their Bella Terra brand of peeled organic tomatoes have little in the way of preservatives. And what they lack in preservatives they more than make up for in two areas: taste and price. They are some tasty tomatoes. And they are some expensive tomatoes. One 28-oz can cost me $3.30! That's over 1 1/2 times the price of the super-expensive 28-oz can of "organic" tomatoes sitting right next to them. I was deterred enough to buy only one can, since I already had two cans of the local Sun of Italy brand peeled "Italian-Style Whole Tomatoes" waiting for me at home (about $1.75 each). I grew up with Sun of Italy, so I figured they had to be the best the area could muster.

Always the bridesmaids, never the bride...

I wasn't sure how each would fare against the other, since I had no idea where the Sun of Italy tomatoes came from. So I opened each and tried them.

One of these cans tastes better than the other...

I tried the San Marzanos first, and they were a little sweet and not salty at all, very robust and (forgive the word) "tomato-ey". Then I went for the Sun of Italy brand.

***WINCE***

I had never realized just how salty those tomatoes were! They were a bit more acidic than the others, I will say that. Not a bad tomato, and I love most of Sun of Italy's products, but I now know why those San Marzanos cost so damn much.

On to the pasta sauce, which La Lidia and Adam both recommend you should mush up with your fingers.

I did make the mistake of waiting a little too long to mush up those tomatoes. This was a problem because, after starting the pasta water (for my fusilli), I put about eight garlic cloves into a pan of olive oil, then started mushing up the tomatoes - I ended up combining the San Marzanos with one of the Sun of Italy cans. By the time I was done, my garlic was just starting to burn. I salvaged most of it, but had to spoon out a few black slices which floated to the top of my not-too-crushed tomatoes.

It was starting to look less like tomato sauce and more like tomato stew. Don't believe me? Look for yourself:

Trust me: it's tomato stew.

This was, again, because my tomato chunks were just too damn big. Even after adding a cup of pasta water and a big bunch of basil, letting it cook, covered, for 10 minutes, and then uncovered for 5, I eventually just cheated and threw the whole batch of tomato sauce into the blender. And yes, I did take out the basil before doing that.



This was only after I first ate some of it, mind you.

I must have done something right in the end, even with the sprinkles of sugar and cayenne pepper. It did taste good - not as good, I imagine, as if I had only used San Marzano tomatoes and had not burned any of my garlic. But in a mildly salty kind of way, it was a robust and smooth sauce. Especially since I had blended it up. In a big blender.

Besides fusilli, I have been eating it on meatloaf and mashed potatoes. It was alright on the pasta but OH MY GOD it was just wonderful (or as my buddy Jim out in Yucaipa, CA, would say, mostly to irritate me, "exquisite" and "to DIE for"). Yeah, Jim, that one's for you.

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(Still on Hiatus, but...) The City Paper likes me, it really likes me!

Yes, I'm still on a very necessary sabbatical. But I just found out today (thanks, Brett) that the City Paper really seems to like this blog. From their website:

Most food blogs just annoy us—we already know how awesome bacon is, thanks. The Baltimore Snacker appears to have concocted a good recipe for not only not annoying us, but for keeping us clicking back. It goes something like this: one part personable, never-precious reviews of local restaurants and other places that have food; one part links to interesting food news and think pieces from all over, usually with his own even-handed yet drily witty two cents folded in; the occasional recipe that seems designed to share a (hopefully tasty) experiment, not to audition for Top Chef or Man vs. Food; and random personal (but not too personal) posts and funny bits that don’t test our patience. We are entertained, we learn stuff, and we don’t want to smack him. Winner.

It's difficult to be witty here. I'm welling up. Thank you, City Paper. I am unbelievably flattered :)

What a time to go on sabbatical, huh?

And now for a brief snack...

Ladies and gentlemen, I have decided to take a hiatus from the blog. Posting has been extremely light as of late, and to be honest my heart just isn't in it right now. There are lots of things going on with the family and with work - both what I have and what I'm trying to get - that just have to be my first priority.

I will still be checking comments for the time being. I'm not sure how long this is going to last, but I want to be able to come back to The Baltimore Snacker with the same excitement and enthusiasm that I did four years ago today. I still anticipate the blog being around for its fifth blogiversary, but for now both it and I need a break. In the meantime, thanks to all y'all for reading (especially keeping the sorghum thread alive and, ahem, popping). When I'm ready to fire up the blog again, I'll let you know on Twitter and Facebook. But for now, the pots and pans are being put to rest.

It's TBS' Fourth Blogiversary

Yes, this blog started four years ago today. The blog has had its ups and downs as of late. Life has happened, and I've been having less time to devote to it, as my readership can see.

I went out last night with friends. I wasn't doing it to celebrate the blog's birthday, but I guess it counts anyway. Eric, Alan, Jim, Ralph and I to Rub in South Baltimore. There we enjoyed various meat plates. Mine was the delicious combination of smoked turkey (seriously, turkey usually bores me but not this juicy and beautifully-flavored bird) and ribs (which are still beckoning to me in my fridge). The sweet potato fries are among the best of its kind in the area, and the Texas corn pudding is among the only of its kind in the area. For drinks, Ralph and I each got one of the Rub beers on tap. I can't place the name, but it was one of the darker beers (not the stout), and it was not good. But the waiter generously replaced them with a Blue Moon and a Rub IPA respectively. Everybody else got wine. We all also shared some fried okra that was tasty and tender yet still a wee bit slimy, as okra tends to be.

We had hoped to take ourselves to the Rowan Tree afterwards, but with no parking anywhere near the bar, that wasn't an option. Looks like they're not hurting for our business.

Because it's Eid Ul-Fitr

It's the end of Ramadan, Indian-style, as ShebasRecipes.com's Sfehmi shows us a fave sweet Eid breakfast... sheer korma!? Yes, something sweet and desserty to break a month-long daytime fast. As she points out, "It's yummy."

Freezer science: in case you were wondering...

Home-made Thanksgiving stuffing / dressing is still good after sitting double-bagged in a freezer bag in the freezer, after 9 1/2 months. Just thought y'all should know.

Because it's Rosh Hashanah

From Kosher Tube: Doin' up the New Year, Sephardi-style:

James and the Giant-Priced Peach

James McWilliams discusses the notion of expensive farmers' market, organic food and whether junk food is actually cheaper than non-junk food - in a sense, "fair-price" (for the growers, anyway) in the food section today's Atlantic Magazine website. Michael Pollan and Alice Waters have spoken passionately about expensive food that you just don't buy as much of, like a $3.90 peach or an $8 dozen of eggs. Famous and not-so-famous food writers (Can I still call them foodies? Ooooh please let me call them foodies!) have taken them to the woodshed. I mean, really called for their heads. From McWilliams' article:

Anthony Bourdain, who dedicates a full chapter of his latest book, Medium Raw, to attacking Waters's airy idealism, scoffs at the idea that people should be willing to spend more on food: "She annoys the living shit out of me. We're all in the middle of a recession, like we're all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market." Jason Sheehan, author of Cooking Dirty, is even less restrained in his assessment of Pollan. Admitting that Pollan is "damnably right about a lot of things," he can't quite stomach that pricy peach. "When you've been too broke to buy soup," he writes, "some iconoclastic dickhead trying to tell you that paying $4 for a peach is a good idea because it is a really good peach can be the kind of thing that makes you want to buy a rifle and a map to the homes of famous food writers." (Dude, it's just a peach ...)

So, yeah, folks are angry.

That rifle thing is just disturbing.

Granted, a Bourdain rant is a lot more common than that $4 peach, just as juicy, and a bit more tiring. But McWilliams actually speaks up for Pollan and Waters. Mind you, he disagrees with much of what they say. But here he suggests they have a point: namely that cheap crap food is lamentable and yet seen all too often. But McWilliams points out something even more surprising: it isn't just crap food that has gotten cheaper over the past 30 years - it's also the healthy stuff. But people are still choosing the Tastykakes over the apples. Hmmm...

Check out the comments. Those are particularly interesting.

Haute Dog Carte

I have to hand it to the folks running the Haute Dog Carte, conveniently located near the corner of Lake and Falls next to Bonjour Bakery. They have a good business going. How so? Let me note the ways:

• Their onion and tomato jam (it's better than ketchup) may make you swear off eating mustard on your hot dogs ever again - unless you taste their Dijon mustard.
• Their different-each-week Binkert's Dog ($4), and their different-each-week Chef's Dog ($5) - today was a Filipino frank called the Maharlika. I got their Dijon in my bun but they were right: I didn't need it.
  
• Oh, these buns are soft and hollowed out, not open-faced at all like a typical hot dog bun.
• And the way they warm those buns - which leads to some, ahem, startling comments from some otherwise unassuming blue haired little old ladies...
  
• Their Signature Dog ($4.50) is a 1/2 pound Angus dog. I haven't had it but it sounds good.
• Even if you just get the regular $2 dog, you have a variety of toppings to put on it. I'd still recommend the Dijon or (even better) the onion-tomato jam. But there are a few toppings.

Since Dara's story on them, the Haute Dog Carte seems to have gone to seven days a week. This is lucky for the hot dog-lovin' public. Lake and Falls, right across from the Royal Farms. You can't miss it.

Green v Black Iced Tea

Just a brief note: I've been making a lot of iced tea lately. I have been making iced green tea and iced black tea. I am finding the black tea to just produce a richer, tastier tea. That's all.