NYTimes: Marc Bittman says you don't really need the expensive kitchen stuff

I have a friend who says he can't cook without a posh knife. Really don't get it. Mine cost 5 quid for a set from Birmingham rag market, about 10 years ago. Still working okay. Anyway, pressing down HARD on everything to make the bloody things go through is GOOD EXERCISE.

I have two woks, very rarely used. Kept them because I thought there was some sort of secret advantage to them that I just didn't understand - also because they were presents so I felt guilty about getting rid. Are you meant to be able to do anything with them apart from stir-fries? Anyone ever tried to sell a wok on e-bay??

I would sort of like a bread machine, though.

I finally got a food processor! Well, a little one. pesto!pesto!pesto!pesto!pesto!pesto!

oh nice, i'm going to bowery kitchen supply! i always thought those stores were mostly professional/restaurant equipment...

Bittman has new column in Cooking Light and also How to Cook Everything iphone app! ($1.99, contains all recipes in the book and menu ideas generator thing?)

I was about to cancel my CL subscription, but I may have changed my mind. (even though his first column was a bit choir-preachy and featured a "almost meatless sloppy joe". i'm on board with the almost-meatless concept but i don't much care for sloppy joes. never have, really. mostly i like that magazine for the pictures and ideas, but the latter is getting pretty stale these days. less 'comfort food' and NO makeup tips pls.

anyway. this is the only bittman thread i found, so here is this news.

word, may check out that iphone app

I bought an induction burner; I'm addicted to technology, I think. It's pretty magical and amazing, though picky about what pans it will work with.

I was looking into them and it seems they are superior to other methods in almost every way. they even make them with convex indentations so you can use them with woks.

yeah my mum has an induction hob, she says that as long as a magnet will stick to the pan then it will work on the stove?

That's true about the magnet.

All my cast iron pans work, and the stainless Kitchenaid bowl, but none of my other stainless ones are magnetic.

The Minimalist wraps up:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/dining/26mini.html

I am so over this condescending clown. And I used to love him. Posted yesterday:

Regulating Our Sugar Habit
By MARK BITTMAN

Mark Bittman on food and all things related.
When Ronda Storms, a Republican state senator in Florida, is accused of nanny-state-ism for her efforts on behalf of a sane diet, it’s worth noting. When she introduced a bill to prevent people in Florida from spending food stamps on unhealthy items like candy, chips and soda, she broke ranks: few of her party have taken on Big Food. And as someone who has called for the defunding of an educational Planned Parenthood program and banning library book displays supporting Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, she is hardly in her party’s left wing. Not surprisingly, she’s faced criticism from every corner: Democrats think she’s attacking poor people, and Republicans see Michelle Obama. Soon after Storms proposed the bill, she told me, “Coca-Cola and Kraft were in my office” hating it.

Yet she makes sense. “It’s just bad public policy to allow unfettered access to all kinds of food,” she told me over the phone. “Why should we cut all of these programs and continue to pay for people to use food stamps to buy potato chips, Oreos and Mountain Dew? The goal is to feed good food to hungry people.”

To some, dictating what recipients of benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program can eat seems unfair. But when the program began in 1939 it aimed both to feed the unemployed and to aid farm recovery. Participants received $1.50 in stamps for every cash dollar spent, 50 cents of which was designated for purchase of agricultural surplus. That’s already a directive on spending, but perhaps more important is that nearly three-quarters of a century ago almost the only thing you could buy — with or without regulation — was real food. Since then Big Food has moved our diet in the wrong direction, and now we have a surplus of empty calories.

The argument for limiting the use of food stamps to actual food is consistent with established policy. They’re already disallowed for tobacco, alcohol,vitamins, pet foods, household supplies and (with some exceptions) food meant to be eaten on premises. Payments have been based on the cost of a “nutritionally adequate diet.”

Let me state the obvious: there is no nutritional need for foods with added sugar.

All of this is part of the bigger question: How do we regulate the consumption of dangerous foods? As a nation, we’ve accepted the need to limit the marketing and availability of tobacco and alcohol. The first is dangerous in any quantity, and the second becomes dangerous when overconsumed.

And added sweeteners, experts increasingly argue, have more in common with these substances than with fruit. In a recent paper in Nature, Robert H. Lustig, Laura A. Schmidt and Claire D. Brindis remind us that for the first time, chronic diseases pose a greater health threat than infectious ones, and of the three main risk factors for chronic diseases — alcohol, tobacco and diet — two are regulated and one is not.

The authors specifically target “any sweetener containing the molecule fructose (which makes sugar sweet) that is added to food in processing” as the key problem in our current diet, and correlate the rise in consumption of sugar with a rise in disease, listing the many ways in which sugar’s effects on the body are similar to those of alcohol. Their contention is that sugar is hardly “an empty calorie,” but rather an actively harmful one: “Fructose can trigger processes that lead to liver toxicity and a host of other chronic metabolic diseases.”

Added sugar is not the only dangerous food. But unlike animal products, for example, which we also overconsume, it has no benefits. Yet we down it at the rate of 150 pounds per person per year, and while scientists argue whether it is addictive in humans (it meets the criteria for addiction in animals), it is most certainly habit-forming. Lustig and his co-authors suggest that actions like imposing taxes on added sugar or establishing a minimum age for purchase of sodas (they mention 17 in their paper) would reduce consumption.

The question “Is this necessary?” is unavoidable. But as obesity and its consequences ravage our health care system, we struggle not only with our own diets but also with preventing our children from falling into the same traps. Last year a brigade of parents stood watch outside a corner store in North Philadelphia in an attempt to prevent their kids from buying junk food.

They’ve been called foot soldiers, but you might call them vigilantes. Vigilantism occurs when people believe the government isn’t doing its job. We need the government on our side. It must acknowledge the dangers caused by the most unhealthy aspects of our diet and figure out how to help us cope with them, because this is the biggest public health challenge facing the developed world.

i'd be v. curious to see the data (or lack thereof) behind these proposals--i.e. how ppl actually use food stamps

Yah. I'm sure most SNAP recipients "abuse" their benefits according to the noblesse who are oblige-ing them with "nutritionally adequate" payments amounting to a monthly pittance. The issue isn't with poor people eating poorly, it's with everybody eating poorly. At any rate, so much for bake sales.

Things I'm kinda fascist-y about: Storms and Bittman otm.

I won't send you the cookies I made, either.

I need you to keep them from me, I'm fat as a freaking hog.

I have no problem w that proposal.

The argument for limiting the use of food stamps to actual food is consistent with established policy. They’re already disallowed for tobacco, alcohol,vitamins, pet foods, household supplies and (with some exceptions) food meant to be eaten on premises. Payments have been based on the cost of a “nutritionally adequate diet.”

uh yeah, the 'established policy of food stamps is that they should be for food'. if you want to establish a policy where they can only be used for some food, they should be called 'foods-I-think-are-okay stamps'

I already got into this in some other thread the answer to every problem is to just give poor people wads of cash

whether or not we should make it harder to buy sugary foods should have nothing to do w/ poor people in particular

otm

if you limited food stamps to foods that don't contain added sugar, probably the only food people could buy with food stamps are cardboard and shredded newspaper

ok even i officially can't stand this guy
1) mark bittman -- you do not own the concept of "healthy sensible eating"
2) anyone who names his own diet and tries to sell it to people is an asshole

i appreciate that he is trying to help people and i understand that what he's selling is good -- i just object to the commodification of eating practices in general. yuck.

OK who is more insufferable Bittman or Pollan?

bittman's got a good oatmeal cookie recipe in the food matters book.

pollan's got nothing. shoot him into the sun.

Good question.

I haven't read Pollan and honestly I don't know much about him beyond his mantra and his name. Bittman started as someone who wanted to help people learn how to cook, and ended up being someone pushing his own thing. Not sure who's grosser, but I'm gonna go with Bittman because I expect more than scolding/diet books from people who like to cook and eat and serve food to people. Stop talking about diet and keep talking about food. What's so hard about that?

tbh I will take both over Gwyneth, I mean how the fuck did she ever get to do a food show with Mario Batali, also her new book gah.

also she was featured on the cover of Bon Appetite shortly after the demise of Gourmet; inside, she offered up "her recipe" for mango salsa, which went like this: mango, avocado, red bell pepper, onion diced, toss with cilanto and lime. Fuck you and your 2010 "mango salsa recipe" that ever decent cook ever has known how to put together since like 1982.

we should have a rolling bon appetit thought/taste crimes thread. amazing article in the current issue about a chef travelling from rich lady's house to rich lady's house and learning the true meaning of home cooking and being friends with rich ladies.

barf @ all of this preposterous attention-hogging

I had to suffer from about nine months of Bon Appetite (I really hate that Andrew "The Foodist" douche) after Conde Nast used it to fulfill the remainder of my would-be Gourmet subscription, and seriously I might as well have just gotten Cooking Light.

Actually there are a couple of issues here at the house we are renting; I will be happy to contribute to the BA-bashing thread.

I don't think I've ever read that magazine, so I've got nothin

every month i excitedly turn to the "foodist" column and read all the preposterous shit out loud to my appalled fiancee. yes we subscribe to bon appetit. i honestly couldn't tell you why.

it is like Us Weekly for people who like food.

Bittman's "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian" is a good cookbook. I think he's wrong upthread about "buy cheap knives, who gives a shit" but I rather like his "throw in this ingredient or that ingredient, it'll be cool" approach - I'm cooking from Ottolenghi's cookbook a lot lately which is the exact opposite (" add 1/8 tsp pink himayalan salt + 1/18 tsp kosher salt. stir one minute, then add white from one duck egg"). however I can't lie Ottolenghi's recipes are ridiculously delicious if you have the time to make them

How to Cook Everything is indeed a good cookbook, one that I have given as gifts to people who want to cook but don't really know where to start; I also liked his Minimalist column in the NYT. But dude has jumped a shark.

I'm on board with cheap paring knives that you throw away when they get dull, but gtfo with a cheap chef's knife. Get a good one, keep it sharp, profit. Skimp on crap like nonstick cookwear imo.

I like Bittman's original How to Cook Everything approach because it frees the cook from the recipe -- you have the power to make it however you want, you're not gonna fuck it up, go ahead, try different things. That's not ego-oriented food advice. I guess I really dislike ego-oriented food writing -- make my recipe my way, etc. It's like insisting on a brand name -- I just find it gross.

i turn to "how to cook everything" when i need proportions for a pancake recipe or something--he's good at sort of calmly delineating the basic shit that needs to get done to realize a given dish.

it's when bittman tries to go ottolenghi that it all goes wrong.

bon appetit is the worst

at least you can get the occasional good recipe out of Cooking Light. Bon Appetit's not even a decent bin liner.

maybe it's yelp fallout but even good food writers i'm starting to find faintly obnoxious

otm

i can't even really roll/w beloved ol jonathan gold much anymore, idk why.

but can you bun?

That's why I liked Old Bittman -- he was like "you can do this!", the end. No weight loss/"health" bs, no rhapsodizing over olives from an old Lebanese woman's backyard, just unfussy food-making and -eating.

rhapsodizing over olives from an old Lebanese woman's backyard

irl lols @ this

i think bittman is coming to terms with his own mortality; he's spent a lifetime eating well and eating richly. he's worried. he's trying to unwind the odometer.

I just wish he would keep it to himself. Proselytizing is gross even if his recipes are good. As I said before, imo naming and selling your own diet is what assholes do (among other things).

i've got a new diet i'm calling "the leong game", which involves kale, spinach, and tomato juice smoothies at every meal. $19.99 for the recipe and a free diet calendar.

the vegemite solution: eat healthy snacks during the day and then pig out on icecream because you had a crappy day at work

Leong Gamers gather fortnightly to exchange algae cultures and shame each other for eating > 6 almonds.

almond unen-joy

oh hey like every issue bon appetit has a feature on some restaurant in some stupidly far-flung part of the world (well, far-flung if you are american). like, some place in darkest fucking sweden or, this month, some dude cooking with flowers in a strip mall outside of melbourne. every one of these articles is a hilarious and transparently desperate bid to "discover" the next rene redzepi or adria or whoever.

i read this and then i go lie down and read elizabeth david until sanity returns.

mark bittman says
who the hell cares what mark bittman says anymore?
that's what i want to know at this point

i bought some ocean perch at the store yesterday with the intention of doing something lemon-buttery with garlic and dill, and i consulted his book Fish (that's the kind of book title I appreciate), which confirmed what i thought i should do and gave me a few other ideas for next time i want to eat this (very delicious, inexpensive, and tender) fish. It didn't have a stupid name and claim to elongate my life. It just told me how to make the fish in a variety of ways. RIP that mark bittman :(

can you give me an example of the new bittman article

i mean, an article written by the new bittman

he is selling a diet book with a special name that he claims is "his" diet -- isn't that enough?

doesn't really raise any red flags for me

yeah see i guess i feel that's gross -- i can stand personal branding! it grosses me out.

UGH
i meant can't
my outrage (i'm not really that outraged) has made me typo crazy

i guess because i believe in his general philosophies w/r/t food i don't mind that he's building his personal brand

i agree with him and i still think it's gross
he has become a pontificator, and i preferred him as an educator. i realize it's a fine line, but still somehow in my mind he has crossed it

that's probably true but i think the enemies on the other side of the line (corporate food laboratories and taste labs and advertising and etc. etc. etc.) are so numerous, that....

you're totally right -- i realize not everyone would feel the same way
cooking is a basic life skill, imo, and treating it like a program/commodifying it is kind of antithetical to that
again, imo
what could a businessman ever want more, etc. i'm a product of my times! it's inescapable.

How to Cook Everything was the first cookbook that made me feel like I could actually succeed at cooking, and it opened me up to a lot of foods -- it's like the ipad/iphone of cooking in terms of user-friendliness compared to most of the other available stuff, at least when it came out.

I mean, it's not like Julia Child wasn't heavy into personal branding, there just wasn't that term for it yet.

Oh hell no you are not equating MB and JC!

Rachel Ray or Paula Deen, yes. But not Julia Child.

I hate Bittman too.

I'm trying to imagine Julia Child or James Beard "branding" stuff and failing. Links required for proof. The only similar thing I recall from that era is Graham Kerr's spurtle.

i do kind of avoid reading bittman's stuff now that he's less of a cooking writer. not having those weekly minimalist columns let him wander too far into dr. oz land. i still like his videos when he does them.

His minimalist stuff is great; the title of his new "work" has made him my enemy 4evah

Like I will not even type it out here because it makes me spit.

I'm trying to imagine Julia Child or James Beard "branding" stuff and failing. Links required for proof. The only similar thing I recall from that era is Graham Kerr's spurtle.

― Jaq, Monday, May 13, 2013 11:20 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it seems kind of naive to think that a chef with a long-running television series and a number of bestselling cookbooks with her name directly in the title is not engaging in branding

A cookbook or tv show is not a line of cookware, patented spices, tableware, appliances, or "must-have" utensils.

Yeah but the ". . . lose weight in X days" uuuuuuugh fuck that dude.

A cookbook or tv show is not a line of cookware, patented spices, tableware, appliances, or "must-have" utensils.

― Jaq, Monday, May 13, 2013 11:59 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Bittman has these things?

The Dr. Oz relationship is omg u dead to me dood

Telling me how to cook something is so very different from telling me what to eat. I'll stick with Harold McGee for now.

It's only a matter of time before Bittman has a line of supplements.

Or he jumps on to homeopathy.

i'd like to know why no one (no public figure at least) seems to be satisfied/gratified by simply teaching people how to cook
that's what he used to do really well, and in a way that wasn't insulting
i no longer care what he says about anything because he's a pontificating weight loss salesman instead of a teacher

Mark Bittman's fearmongering is starting to remind me of Glenn Beck -- what's wrong with this guy?

He's the worst and I hate myself every time I'm baited into clicking one of his articles.

What now? I haven't been paying attention.

Chicken. Fucking chicken.

i.e. DON'T EAT IT U ASKING FOR DEATH

It's just that he's always Mr Everything Is Killing Us and it's really tiresome! I understand that there are battles to be fought, but at this point it just seems like he is riling people up for the hell of it.
I'm bored/somewhat affronted by activism of this nature, I guess.

It really is a shame, because his mac and cheese recipe walked the spouse through making his very first roux, and it all came out great and delicious, and he (spouse) felt very happy and accomplished and no longer intimidated by roux/cheese sauce that isn't microwaved Velveeta.

He's definitely not a teacher anymore. He's a pontificator, and the worst kind! Blech.

Like, "being angry about Monsanto" is not a pastime, and I think he is feeding some people's hunger for outrage-as-pastime, which is both boring and offensive imo.

He could be teaching people to feed themselves and their families.

Which he used to be so good at doing! And I really don't understand why the NYT feels they need a sub-Michael Pollan pontificator when they already have Michael Pollan pontificating.

Ugh. Thx for the update, what a shame.

chicken is awesome, buzz off bittman

What if chicken blood gets on my lettuce in a shopping bag? What if someone else’s chicken contaminates my apples on a supermarket conveyor belt?

then you're a dummy

I don't mind his cookbook but I'll be damned if I choose to read his ideas about food policy.

file under 'nope'

Op-Ed | Mark Bittman
Years Ending in 4

Disaster has been well represented in years ending in “4,” but probably not disproportionately so. Does history give us reason to be optimistic about 2014?

...

geez louise, what's wrong with him?!

That this man, instead of me, got to spend time with Marcella Hazan in her final weeks is just so wrong!