Who's Yurmami?

We're all familiar with the four primary tastes we experience on our tongues: sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. Food scientists and restaurant critics desperate for novel terms have also added two more semi-tastes: astringent, and spicy. But a century ago the Japanese identified a fifth primary taste -- "umami" -- which can be roughly translated as "deliciousness." Writers and scientists have had a hard time describing exactly what umami is -- not a flavor, not quite a sensation. Many people agree that when you encounter it in food, umami imparts a feeling of fullness, roundness, savoriness, or yumminess.

Umami comes from glutamate (yes, as in MSG, which is glutamate in a shaker. MSG has been mostly given a bum rap, but that's another story). Glutamate is an amino acid that is found in many foods. One of the great challenges for chefs in both the East and the West is finding ways to combine foods to get the biggest glutamate punch, because the more umami a dish has, the more likely customers and stray food critics are to fall into ecstasies of devotion. Umami is probably the main reason why spaghetti & meatballs is so universally loved.

Wanna guess which of the foods pictured below contain glutamate? PS: If you're really an umami devotee, as I am, you can join the Umami Information Center, and learn all about the fun conferences and symposia and seminars they sponsor around the world.

*the photo above is from hoosierburgerboy.com, a great blog about all things burger.

Hit the jump to identify yer umami.

Gagnaire & friend: "Ees eet timed to explode en schedule?"

This confirms it, we are in The End of Times. French chef Pierre Gagnaire at Hong Kong's Mandarin Oriental has created what he's calling the first entirely food-free restaurant dish, at least according to the PR the hotel is sending out. The recipe for "Le Note a Note", just one course in an 11-course synthetic tasting menu, is comprised of ascorbic acid, citric acid, glucose, and maltitol. Isn't that the exact recipe for chewable C tablets? Reports say the dish looks like little pearls and tastes a bit like apple and lemon. Or like a Flintstones vitamin, take your pick.

Can I just put this out there -- isn't there enough synthetic food on our grocery store shelves that we don't necessarily want a kitchen lab approximation of Cocoa Krispies or Fruity Pebbles when we book a table at some high-end restaurant? Am I being a hopeless curmudgeon? I mean, I'm sure Gagnaire and his sous chefs are having a blast back there playing mad scientist, but I can't imagine that his customers are similarly enthralled. The dish below, for example, looks like a pickled pig's testicle set alongside a souvenir model of the World's Fair, interesting....but edible?

No, please, you go first...

Here's a way-cool graphic showing U.S. slaughter of meat, per second. Click here.

Chicks and ducks and bees better scurry: Tonight at 8 p.m. the Lake Worth City Commission is set to discuss an ordinance to allow up to seven chickens and ducks and "a limited number of bees" to be raised within city limits. The "chicken on every plot" movement has taken off around the country, as city folks are starting to get into raising a hen or two for fresh eggs (and the occasional roast chicken). Viz, this snippet from the New York Times:

City dwellers who raise chickens are springing up around the country. Groups organized on the Internet in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin, Tex., are host to chicken-centric social events, and there are dozens of books -- a whole new form of chick lit -- on raising chickens, including Barbara Kilarski's "Keep Chickens! Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs and Other Small Spaces," and related titles like "Anyone Can Build a Tub-Style Mechanical Chicken Plucker," by Herrick Kimball.

Leave it to Lake Worth to be the South Florida city marching bravely forward into urban farming (Key West is the only other city to allow legal chickies). We already have an anarchist city commissioner and a transgendered city manager -- flocks of domestic fowl will only add to the general sense of a town gone pleasantly haywire. I've had a yen to keep guinea fowl for the past couple of years, and I've even considered trying to do it secretly: Now there'll be no reason for subterfuge. And frankly, it's not like nobody's doing it already. I have personal knowledge of at least one very pretty black hen that has made B street her home; she roams freely in my neighborhood (and she's gotten very good at dodging the pit bulls). No doubt my planned guinea hen project will go down as yet another wildly expensive agricultural hobby, right alongside the pathetic heirloom tomatoes, the citrus trees that manage to squeeze out one tangerine every other year, and the pineapples underwhelming us with their lack of fecundity. But it's nice to know that I'm part of a large movement of silly yuppies with way too much time on our hands. And this time I'll have a government body to blame for encouraging me.

We celebrate our post-Easter holiday around here with a ritual: our annual Peeps Stations of the Cross, Peeps Crucifixion, and Peeps Heresy Trials. What is it about those little yellow, blue, pink, and purple marshmallow chickies that makes you wanna do nasty things to them? Why are there always so many leftover Peeps once the holiday has safely passed, just begging to be tortured? Are they really, as CNN reported, indestructible? 

For Peeps: The End of Times

Evidently the folks at Serious Eats are of the same mind, because they've posted a recipe for S'meeps in their latest issue (S'mores, made with Peeps). Shoving the Peeps into a toaster oven with chocolate and graham crackers might not be quite as much fun as affixing them to a burning cross or tossing them into the toilet bowl weighted with stones to see if they float (we've discovered through this experiment that many Peeps are in fact witches), but they sure look like they taste pretty good.

And we're not the only ones who go homicidal at the thought of leftover peeps. Check out laughing squid's Peepflagration here.

Psssst....Drink Me!

It isn't often that we New Timesers get a bottle of $200 whiskey in the mail. We did, not long ago, thanks to the folks at Canadian Club, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year with the release of a primo 30-year-old, 80-proof, white-oak-barrel-aged blended whiskey retailing for a cool two bills. That's priced well beyond the reach of even the most profligate New Times lushes; our admin assistant was obliged to hide the booze behind her desk, well beyond the reach of  sticky fingers, until we could get around to a proper tasting.

But at a recent staff meeting, we broke into the bottle, or at least Bob Norman did; Norman was so physically agitated by the sight of that black box with its fancy closure and the gold CC logo just sitting there that we had to wrestle it away from him just to snap the picture at left. In Norman's good opinion, whiskey is made to be drunk, not fondled and stared at. I guess old Hiram Walker would second that, and so would Don Draper, who drinks Canadian Club on the show Mad Men.

Hey Bob, over here!

Norman and the rest of our high-macho crew also pooh-poohed the notion that a splash of H20 added to this fine old brew would "open it up." They poured liberal shots and drank it straight. Over on the femme-gay side of the table, we added a little water and found the instruction sound: Give your whiskey a splash and it evens out the last edges, so your drink gives up its perfumes and complexities.

But both girls and boys agreed: This was the best whiskey we'd  tasted since that bottle of 30-year-old single-malt McCallam we drank back in '85. It's excessively smooth, sweet, and buttery, with a finish that lasts and lasts: a bit of oak (but not too much), a hint of butterscotch, something floral, like violets. And it leaves a serious afterglow: Once we'd polished off 3/4 of the bottle, you could say our staff meeting got right lively.

I conducted a blind tasting at home with the bit of drink I had left, lining up the 30-year-old CC against a 10-year-old Canadian Club reserve (retail around $30)  and a glass of Glenfiddich 12-year-old single malt (retail around $25). The 30-year-old cleaned their clocks in taste, fragrance, and finish -- it tasted almost like a good cognac. The CC 10 was close in color -- a rich, deep amber -- but was slightly more bitter and ragged when sipped. Both CCs are definitively better with about 3 tablespoons of water added. Glenfiddich doesn't improve at all with water, and it's really a different animal: lighter in color and fruitier.

Final report: Only 3,000 bottles of the 30-year CC were produced, and it's hard to find at this point (try ordering it here.) It would definitely be worth both the search and the price as a gift for a whiskey connoisseur, but I wouldn't waste it on anybody else: In their cups, most people wouldn't have the patience to dig for esoteric flavors or even care much about how smooth it is. And as a side note, I totally dig CC's new advertising campaign: "Your Mom Wasn't Your Dad's First," and would only like to add that he wasn't hers either, you chump.

But I actually prefer this slightly altered version of the ad:

Courtesy of Lola's Cupcakery

As far as desserts go, what's better than a cupcake? Think about it: these morsels of goodness are self-contained, portable, portion-controlled, and, when done right, can taste pretty swell. And now, they're showing up on Las Olas. Lola's Cupcakery is a new venture from Toronto restaurateur, Donald Kaplan, and his wife Laura (she's the "Lola"). The pair wanted to bring high-end cupcakes to an area that really has none, and their new storefront at 1523 E. Las Olas Blvd. will do just that. The store opens this weekend, and, as of now, will be take-out only. (The Kaplans have already applied for a change of use permit to allow in-store cupcaking.) Lola's will also deliver for orders of two dozen or more to just about anywhere in Broward, to the tune of $82 (a single cupcake runs $3.25).

They'll have it their way.

If you've somehow missed Burger King's hilarious not funny at all new marketing campaign, where they bring Whoppers to Hmong villagers in remote Thailand, the Inuit of Greenland, and a Transylvanian town in Romania, you have to check this out. Although the campaign generates a seriously sinking feeling (it's only a matter of time before these folks and their descendants give up hand-embroidering their clothing and turn to playing Wii), the ironies abound. For one thing, the Whopper doesn't look like recognizable food, so people have no idea how to eat it. And it doesn't taste nearly as good as seal meat. But we already knew that.

Until I saw Milk yesterday, the biopic starring Sean Penn as gay activist and San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk, I'd forgotten all about the Twinkie Defense. Fellow supervisor Dan White shot and killed Milk and Mayor George Moscone in their offices at San Francisco City Hall in 1978 and got off with essentially a slap on the wrist: White was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years (he ended up serving five, and committed suicide two years after he was released.) The defense argued that White was chronically depressed; they also argued, as a small aside, that his bipolar disorder wasn't helped by a steady diet of Cokes, HoHos, and DingDongs (Twinkies, apparently, were never mentioned.)