Beer here!

Posted an item yesterday, here and on Seattlest.com, on the subject of “wine versus beer.” Lots of online response, including this email from St. Louis:

Good morning Ron,

I read the same piece in Slate, then the follow-up Q&A with Field Maloney at the Wash Post’s website. I loved your response post.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading the Q&A. Pay attention to the question from Cleveland.

Additionally, I think you may be interested to know that the premium Czech lager Pilsner Urquell–full disclosure, Pilsner Urquell is a client of mine–is stealing a page out of the wine marketer’s playbook with scores, food pairings and tasting notes….all the domain of wine, until now.

Perhaps this push can be most-simply illustrated with the Pilsner Urquell neck hanger, so I’ve attached an image.

Take care, keep drinking and please let me know if you’d like to talk to a Pilsner Urquell brand rep or their very own internal beer sommelier. We’ve got a great story to tell!

Sean Hixson

Thanks, Sean!

Two other notes: check out Pilsner Urquell’s cool food-pairing chart.

And take a look at Maggie Dutton’s comment on my post (same topic) over at Seattlest.com:

Crap wines probably outnumber crap beers, as the crappiest beers are the most omnipresent. Wine’s just scared. Because if beer was ever widely seen as a vibrant, layered, interesting beverage that pairs just as well if not better with food (cough, cough Belgium), wine’s marketing strategy to Boomers would be screwed.

Or unscrewed, as the case may be, given the snooty wine industry’s reluctance to embrace Stelvin (screwcap) closures.

Wine or beer?

Har, har, an article in Slate about brews titled “Beer in Headlights.” Shoulda been called “Beer is Flat.” Thomas Friedman-like, Slate’s Field Maloney takes 1,700 words to say what we already know instinctively: wine’s a drink for elitist snobs, beer’s for real men. Wine is “aspirational,” beer is practical. The current Henry Weinhard (*) campaign puts it bluntly: beer tastes better than soy milk. Well, duh.

Beer’s great, no doubt about it. Thirst-quenching, satisfying in ways wine can never be. Most wine people love beer.

But here’s the problem: beer has always been popular because of its predictability. A Bud while you’re mowing the lawn in Laurelhurst (assuming you mow your own lawn, probably won’t happen if you live in Laurelhurst) is going to taste the same as the one you swig at the Safe…or Shea Stadium. A Bud’s a Bud, and the production folks at Anheuser Busch spend a fortune making sure that one Bud tastes like all Buds.

So why is wine getting more cred than beer? Read on.

Kiddie food

Folklife, Sasquatch, Bite, Bumberpalooza, the fests and feasts just keep coming. Elephant ears, brats, shishkaberries, deep fried desserts. Don’t know whether to laugh, cry or reach for the Maalox.

Wine weekend

Destination marketing: it’s Patrick McFarlan’s specialty. Happens that he’s employed by Willows Lodge in Woodinville; that doesn’t stop him from marketing Washington’s distant vineyards. As president of the Woodinville Chamber of Commerce last year, he spearheaded an event called the Washington Wine Highway, held again this past weekend on the lawn at Chateau Ste. Michelle.

Food, drink, and roadsigns that let you pretend you were in Yakima or Walla Walla without having to spend hours and hours on the Interstate. They told the food vendors to expect 1,500 at each booth, but the hot tickets, like Elliott’s Copper River salmon filets and 0/8 Seafood’s scallop sashimi, served 2,000 portions on Saturday alone.

Numbers not as high back at The Bellevue Collection (high-end shopping in and around Bellevue Square), which piggybacked onto the weekend with a lower-key promotion of wine dinners and tastings. Not quite as focused, perhaps, on the simple pleasures of eating, drinking and snoozing on the grass.

Death penalty

Larceny pays, if you’re the ceo. Should you get caught with your hand in the company till (or fingering your back-dated stock options), you might have to submit to the indignity of a perp walk but the stockholders pay your legal fees and the odds are you won’t do a day in the pokey. (Get busted for stealing a loaf of bread, on the other hand, and it’s hard time for sure.) But what penalty awaits those who abuse public trust?

In this country, there’s always a convenient underling to take the fall for huge public scandals. It’s part of the job description, as in “Goat, comma, scape.”

So what a welcome surprise to see two developments from across the Pacific. In Japan, the agriculture minister committed suicide rather than face questioning in a corruption scandal. And in China, the official in charge of drug safety has actually been sentenced to death.

Can you imagine anything like that here? “Heck of a job, Brownie” would take on a whole new dimension.

Copper is still gold

Wasn’t that long ago, matey, we’d be lucky to see any fresh salmon in Seattle. Bristol Bay had a huge sockeye fishery, the largest in the world, but the catch was frozen stiff before it made it to local markets. Now, we’re spoiled silly, with fresh, wild salmon coming in from the mouths of rivers all along the Alaska coast: the Yukon, the Taku, the Stikine and, best of all, the Copper.

The folks at McCormick & Schmick are doing their darndest to promote the spring runs, enlisting an anthropomorphic “Wild Salmon” band (Sockeye Sam on vocals, King Karuthers on keyboard, Kenny Keta on bass, etc.), reminding diners about the health benefits of Omega-3 fatty acids and tweaking the twice-daily fresh sheet to highlight the runs.

At a media dinner this week, sous-chef Josh Westcott sent out a succession of delectable salmon dishes. A tartare made with Taku red and Stikine ivory was stunning (especially paired with a Willamette Valley Vineyards pinot gris). The highlight, though, was grilled Copper River atop plain risotto. Sure, the other salmon were wonderful, coming from recently reopened fisheries at the mouth of long, fast-running rivers. They might be cheaper, too, but that’s not the point; we live close to the source, we pay for the privilege of first crack at the Coppers.

Executive chef Eric Naruszewicz, whose previous assignment was in Boston, singled out Paul Tourangeau’s Koike Seafoods for supplying small batches of high-quality fish, no mean feat when demand is high and the P-I’s substitute restaurant writer surveys local eateries serving overhyped, overpriced and, gulp, undercooked fish.

So as we head into the wild salmon season, let’s pause and give thanks. Bless Jon Rowley, who first called Seattle’s attention to the Copper River run. Bless the salmon, of course. And bless those who call it “center-of-the-plate protein,” as long as they cook it right: till it flakes.

Puttin’ on the poutine

Montreal and Seattle versions of poutine

When will they learn, those pretentious New Yawk snots? With the solemnity befitting the announcement of a cure for cancer, the NYTimes reports that three Gotham spots now serve Montreal’s beloved junk food, poutine. Whazzat? Duh: french fries with cheese curds and gravy, dumbo.

In Australia, where Canadian eating habits aren’t automatically ridiculed, they’ve eaten poutine for decades. Aluminum to-go containers are filled to the brim with hot, glorious gravy so the fries stay warm. Aussie-born Teressa Davis insisted on having poutine on the menu at Steelhead Diner, especially since her Market neighbor, Beecher’s Cheese, provides fresh curds daily. “We’re so avant garde that I can’t even stand it,” she says.

Chinese checkers, anyone?

The feds are trying to get the Chinese to pay more attention to food safety.

Why is this even necessary? Because, as the Washington Post reported over the weekend:

Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical.
Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics.
Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria.
Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.
These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.

Oh, and don’t think you can brush your teeth and hope for the best; contaminated toothpaste was on the list.

Coordinating Homeland Insecurity, Ag Department and FDA efforts–the job of our new Food Safety Czar–isn’t made any easier by systematic, institutional denial that there’s even a problem (an upbeat article on Chinese “progress” in Ag’s Amber Waves magazine), insufficient funding for inspections and general indifference at the highest levels of government. Economist Paul Krugman, in the New York Times, blames the Bush administration’s laissez-faire approach: willful and deliberate neglect.

Seriously: safe food shouldn’t be sacrificed on the altar of free-market ideology. By all means, go after Chinese poisoners, but don’t forget about the distributors of dirty California spinach.

God is in the microbes

Mother Noella and her Bethlehem cheese

Mother Noella Marcellino, who visited Seattle this weekend for the Cheese Festival, knows the secret of life; she’s seen it through a microscope. The Cheese Nun, as she’s known, started milking cows 30 years ago at a cloistered Benedictine order in Connecticut. A Fulbright Fellowship took her to France to see, touch, smell and taste cheesemaking techniques. Today, having earned a PhD in microbiology, she’s considered one of the foremost authorities on the precise details of lactic fermentation.

Cheesemaking evolved as a means of transforming milk proteins (the essential nourishment of all mammalian species) into something more permanent and portable. It’s not terribly convenient, after all, to travel with a herd of goats. What we call the ripening of cheese is in fact its destruction by mold.

The question, once you get past the basics, is why France (for example) has so many distinctly different cheeses. The answer is in the diversity of molds; Mother Noella is particularly drawn to a particular strain: geotrichum candidum, which produces the unique ripening and flavor characteristics of one cheese from the volcanic Auvergne region in central France, St. Nectaire.

Much is written about terroir, the sense of place conveyed by cheese and wine. Mother Noella’s invaluable contribution to the discussion: terroir is not just what the animals eat, it’s also the naturally occurring bacteria in the cheese caves. The cheese is alive, and Mother Noella, like the poet William Blake, marvels:

To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.

Gnocchi-gnocchi! Who’s there?

Cheese! Cheese who? Cheez, let’s make some ricotta dumplings!

That’s what Ethan Stowell at Tavolata (still no website) and Sabrina Tinsley at Osteria La Spiga were up to this weekend, as part of the Seattle Cheese Festival.

Cornichon has been nominated as Best Food Blog by Blogger’s Choice Award (vote here) and Favorite Wine Blog by Local Wine Events (vote here).