Culinary // Current TV

Voilà! The Top 40 French Cooking Blogs

Have you ever left a bistro wondering what it would be like to whip up a French... more

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50 Best Southern Food Blogs

The article gathered the 50 best Southern food blogs. With everyone from professional... more

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1 year ago
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Delicious Reads: 50 Fabulous Food Novels

These 50 books will help to educate and inspire you, whether you're a college... more

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1 year ago
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The DANGER of a badly pre-pared Cornish Pasty

Short video on how the Cornish religiously protect the sanctity of their National... more

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1 year ago
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Top 100 Twitter Feeds for Food Lovers

This list contains some of the best feeds out there for following food news, learning... more

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1 year ago
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20 Fascinating Lectures for Serious Foodies

Food plays a part in culture, history, and even revolutions. These 20 lectures will... more

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1 year ago
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Fresh Produce Rating Website Is Uniting the Local Food Movement Nationally

Fresh Produce Rating Website Now has over 2500 Farms, Farmersmarkets, CSAs, and other... more

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1 year ago
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Sichuan button: Trendy Electrocution

The Sichuan button is a small, yellow flower bud that, when eaten, creates a strong tingling sensation in the mouth -- not unlike biting down on an iPhone -- and a sudden increase in salivation. The active ingredient is spilanthol, a chemical that’s used in food manufacturing and candies (to counteract astringents, which dry out the mouth, and to create the sensation of "freshness"). The full Sichuan button experience comes in three stages: first, a grassy taste, followed by a tingling and numbing sensation, then salivation, and, finally a fresh, clean finish. (It's usually broken up into smaller pieces in cooking.)

Clearly, having something feel like it’s electrocuting your mouth is the highlight of Sichuan button consumption, and, as one blogger described it, "the closest that anybody could compare was putting a 9V battery on your tongue." The Washington Post has more demurely called its taste a "mix of Altoids and Tellicherry."

The button comes from the acmella oleracea plant (also known as para cress or, more adorably, the "toothache plant"). It’s long been used for flavoring and health reasons in South America, Africa and Asia. Indian manufacturers use the buttons to flavor chewing tobacco, for example, while others use its numbing qualities to help relieve toothaches and stomach ailments, and some believe it can help treat blood parasites. (The bud is unrelated to the Sichuan peppercorn, which was long banned in the U.S.)

Koppert Cress, a Dutch micro-vegetable company, helped pitch the button to American high-end restaurants when it opened its first American greenhouse in 2006. In the past two years it’s been gaining buzz among chefs and mixologists, who use it to create a carbonation-like effect in cocktails (especially those with a citrus flavor), and add snap to sauces, ice cream or even chocolates. It also works as a palate cleanser between meals. It's since popped up on NPR and in the Culinary Institute of America alumni magazine (along with the Washington Post).

he appeal of the buttons (mostly because they're very hard to find in the U.S.) remains largely confined to high-end chefs. In 2006, chef Jeff Ramsey used the buttons in his winning entry into the Seven Sushi Samurai contest. Among restaurants that have caught button fever: The East Coast Haru Japanese restaurant group (which has used it in cocktails), Poste in Washington, D.C. (which has used it in a halibut sauce), and Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli restaurant in Spain (which serves Sichuan button-infused milk). Marc Forgione, the chef at Tribeca’s creatively named Marc Forgione (formerly Forge), has even posted a Facebook video showing his love for the buttons.

http://www.salon.com/food/feature/2010/02/02/faddy_foods_sichuan_buttons/index.html?source=yahooThe Sichuan button is a small, yellow flower bud that, when eaten, creates a strong... more

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2 years ago
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Pork Congress - Minnesota

Jan. 16-18 The Minnesota Pork Congress at the Minneapolis Convention Center kicks off... more

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2 years ago
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First Foodies? "The Kennedys Were Very Sophisticated About Food," Says JFK's Chef

It seems that the fascination with the Obamas' eating habits, from their garden... more

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2 years ago
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The next step in cheap, local food: Eat your weeds

Ready for nettles and dandelions on your plate? Langdon Cook talks foraging, the next (cheap!) step in local food

It's been three decades since Alice Waters made microgreens a culinary cliché, and by now most diners take the lingo of local food for granted: chefs who raise their own heritage chickens, restaurants with hand-lettered blackboards that outline the lineage of every lamb chop, and salads that sport farmers' Christian names. But what if the next menu you picked up offered nettle pesto picked from the ditch next to Route 6? Or garlic-sautéed dandelion greens gathered from the overgrown lot behind the grocery store? As the meanings of "organic" and "local" grow ever more slippery -- and in lean times, when fewer folks than ever can afford to pay a premium for dinner -- are wild edibles poised to emerge as the next gastronomic zeitgeist?

Langdon Cook, the author of the new memoir-cum-cookbook "Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager," and a popular blog by the same name, might put money on it -- but he isn't waiting around for the masses to catch up. Cook, an outdoorsman, amateur naturalist and former editor at Amazon.com, first began foraging as a trailside diversion but has spent the better part of the last decade getting in touch with his inner hunter-gatherer, schooling himself in the art of "shooting" razor clams, mapping out burn sites for signs of morels, and cataloging a veritable crisper-full of delectable weeds. That education -- combined with a year spent living off the grid in southern Oregon with his wife and young child, growing and canning most of their food and foraging the surplus -- proved a transformative experience for Cook, and inspired him to bring the gospel of wild food (in all of its muddy, wet, prickly and, yes, tasty glory) to the wider world. His message: Foraging food will make you a healthier, happier eater, a more thoughtful consumer and a more adventurous cook. And his best evidence? Himself. This is, after all, the same guy who once, in order to woo a lady, bragged about making a killer Egg McMuffin.

Now settled in Seattle, Cook does most of his foraging in the mountains and waterways near Puget Sound, but sometimes even a stroll around his urban neighborhood leads to an unexpected edible encounter. (Case in point: The dried buds of the lowly pineapple weed, a common sidewalk crack-filler and relative of chamomile, makes excellent iced tea.) Salon spoke with him recently about recession-proof dining, the large-scale sustainability of foraging, the hidden charms of the stinging nettle, and why it's time we all got out there and started searching for our suppers.Ready for nettles and dandelions on your plate? Langdon Cook talks foraging, the next... more

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2 years ago
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Fancy Fast Food

Fancy Fast Food is a new blog dedicated to making your typical fast food look a little... more

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2 years ago
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Julia Child Finally Hits #1 On New York Times Best-Seller List After 48 Years

Almost 48 years after it was first published, "Mastering the Art of French... more

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2 years ago
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In Mexico, Tar-Like Fungus Considered Delicacy

In Central Mexico, locals are feasting on a unique delicacy that sprouts to life this... more

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2 years ago
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Burrito: The Conquest

Two dudes go on a conquest all over the Bay Area to find the best burrito!!! On... more

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2 years ago
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Throw Away The Recipe; Learn The Ratio Instead

Michael Ruhlman wants to free home cooks from what he calls the "shackles of the... more

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2 years ago
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Blueberry Limoncello Cooler-Food Network

Giada is awesome and tasty!

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2 years ago
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Gourmet Magazine's History of Space Food Reveals Our Ultimate Goal: Distilling Cheap Liquor In Space

Tiny red light-emitting diodes infuse potato plants with life even in the unnatural... more

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2 years ago
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Behind the Burner

I myself LOVE cooking - I came across this site I thought I'd share - extremely... more

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2 years ago
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Four pounds of bacon and sausage..., recipe for Superbowl

FOR a nation seeking unity, a recipe has swept the Internet that seems to unite... more

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3 years ago
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