noodsletter #.0020
Merlot; links, the return.
Hello!
You’ve received this email because you’ve signed up for noodsletter. Thank you. The recipe section is usually at the end, everything else on top. I don’t have a recipe for you this week, but I do have a suggestion. It’s this cut of meat:
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Book Bit
I think it would be nice to go somewhere else to eat, but not the Golden Spike obviously, where I never want to go again, just somewhere where I don’t have to try and make the most of whatever pitiful shit we have on hand. I have the same or better tools as my grandmother but for some reason I can’t re-create any of her efforts. “Fix,” she would say, instead of “make,” as in, “I’ll fix us some tuna fish sandwiches,” and the sandwiches were tidy little squares on white bread I would never buy, with a lot of mayonnaise I would never buy, and a piece of iceberg lettuce I would never buy, but I loved them loved them loved them, with chips on the side and a glass of sun tea, everything so tidy and symmetrical on the plate.
From The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling.
“News”
Truly Disturbed: This Woman Is Making The Casserole Recipe Listed On The Back Of Her Cereal Box
The culinary influence of the founder of the Seventh Day Adventist Church on this country is staggering.
This profile of Michael’s is top-notch.
Milky Way doughnut black hole.
The whole fetishization of Shaker food and decor is really off-putting. I can’t even really put my finger on what’s icky about it, since one of the last remaining Shakers, who has been interviewed a lot recently, seems so relaxed and nice about it. But…it’s weird!
The way the Russian invasion of Ukraine exposed the fragility of the global wheat supply is truly terrifying.
A review by Amethyst Ganaway (great cook/recipe developer!) of a new cookbook by Emily Megget, matriarch of Gullah Geechee cooking. The recipe for deviled crab looks good.
The story of how Megget’s book came to be.
Belluci’s vs. Belluci: Good piece on the cutthroat world of slinging slices.
Americans buy Brazilian beef and the world is dying.
Articles like this one about kitchen burnout underline for me that other people, they’re different. (I do not suffer from this weakness!)
Nice exploration of the origins of La Choy.
I don’t agree with this piece, but I do agree with this, about superhero movies and sandwiches: “It’s a fun genre but there’s just not much you can do with it. Like sandwiches. Sandwiches are great but at the end of the day, it’s just stuff between two pieces of bread.”
Bird flu is messing with the foie gras supply in France.
Beautiful illustrations depicting scenes from the fables of the Brothers Grimm. Scroll down for the clay figurine of Rapunzel.
This novel about a literary grocery store clerk sounds both kind of insufferable and right up my alley.
Having dinner with William Blake sounds like a very odd experience:
Through his attempts to understand his new friend, Robinson only became more confused. Some of Blake’s declarations appeared to be foolish nonsense. When they first met, Blake told him that he did not believe that the world was round, and that he believed it to be quite flat. Robinson attempted to get Blake to justify this outrageous claim, but the group were called to dinner at that moment and the thread of the conversation was lost. While some of Blake’s opinions appeared obviously wrong, others were simply baffling. When Robinson asked him about the divinity of Jesus, Blake replied, “He is the only God. And so am I and so are you.” How could Robinson even begin to interpret an answer like that?
Mushrooms are actually aliens, part 1 million.
Anna Wintour’s go-to, not-caprese salad. (Excellent article, just A+ to everyone involved.)
If there’s one thing I’m most excited about in a post-Covid reopening New York, it’s trying some of the new Taiwanese restaurants.
Ok, make that two, since there’s apparently a Burmese food renaissance, too. Never forget the first time I ate Burmese food, at some small spot in Hong Kong. Totally blown away by the tea leaf salad and this staggeringly spicy fish head curry.
Lucy Sante essay on Louis Feuillade, which has this neat metaphor: “Les Vampires is an improbable goulash of elements.”
What can you even say about this story? Criminal, appalling, infuriating, depraved. “Top U.S. meatpacking companies drafted the executive order issued by President Donald Trump in 2020 to keep meat plants running and convinced his administration to encourage workers to stay on the job at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report released on Thursday by a U.S. House panel.”
Plants can grow in lunar soil! The catch is that they all look like plants I grow on my crappy balcony.
Cheap(er) palm oil is destroying Guatemala.
Have You Had a Merlot?
Not the wine, but a cut of beef. It comes from the calf muscle of the hind leg of a steer; the sub primal it’s cut from is called, in American butchery terms, the “outside round, heel.” I found out about it from the Ends Meats butcher over in Industry City a couple years ago, and it’s where I’ve picked them up since (including the one pictured here), but apparently it was the cut I should have been eating back in 2017, according to this Huffpost article1. And you know what? That article is right! I should’ve been eating it then, as you should’ve (if you eat beef, of course), because it’s a nice and tender and very beefy cut of meat, and it should be relatively inexpensive.
I say “relatively” there just because it’s unlikely you’ll find this at a supermarket, so you’ll probably have to pick it up from a butcher who cuts primals or subprimals down themselves; in my experience, those butchers tend to sell pricier meat. I found it at the online butcher shop Porter Road for $9 a less-than-half-pound piece, which is a great price; I paid $22 for this piece, which was about a pound.
That’s not to say I am annoyed by the pricing; good beef should be expensive. For part of the pandemic, I signed up for a weekly meat subscription that I couldn’t really afford, and as a result I was eating some very good quality beef, lamb, and chicken that I couldn’t really afford regularly, which ended up ruining my relationship to supermarket meat. I have since canceled the subscription and stopped eating supermarket beef and pork as frequently because the taste…it isn’t what it once was. It’s a truly sad state of affairs, so I sometimes splurge on good beef, but have to settle for off-cuts and butcher’s cuts like the merlot. Which, again, is great, no complaints.
Thing about the merlot is it’s very lean, so it’ll cook up quite tough if you cook it hard, and it’s also quite thin, which makes cooking it a little tricky. I’ll show you how I cooked it (which was semi-badly), but it illustrates the challenge of getting a decent sear on both sides of the thing without overcooking. I cooked the half merlot pictured below to a relatively high 122 degrees F; ideally you’d sear the exterior and get it to no more than about 115 on the inside, since carry-over cooking will take it well into medium rare territory.
The meat salad I made was a little bit of a failure, as I was working with what I had in my house, and due to many, many bouts of various illnesses my house is a little understocked at the moment. I had ginger, but no garlic; I had red onions, but no shallots; and I had, inexplicably, two varieties of fresh green chiles—Thai and serranos.
I did, however, have some unfiltered fish sauce on hand and one rather dry-ish lime, which is only because I’d been into work on Monday to do some recipe photo shoots, and thus expensed some limes. The price of limes has been so crazy ($5 for…FOUR? No.) that I don’t think we’ve had limes in our house for like four weeks.
Usually for meat salads, I’ll do a quick Thai-ish dressing by smashing some garlic, cilantro stems, chilies and shallots in a mortar and pestle and then adding some sugar (palm or granulated), fish sauce, and lime juice, then I’ll toss the meat with the dressing, some cilantro, red onion and more chilies…bing bang boom, very quick, very satisfying, spicy enough to make you feel alive. When I made this I made do with what I had, which included some very sad-looking parsley, and at that point I figured I’d also throw in some fresh, sliced pork belly I had lying in the fridge. This last decision ruined the whole thing, because there is literally nothing on earth that is as delicious as fresh pork belly, salted aggressively, and cooked hard in a pan or a grill; it was distracting.
So heed this lesson: get yourself a merlot; sear it on both sides; cook it no more than medium rare; do not eat it at the same time as delicious fresh pork belly.
It also seems like merlot might be excellent in stir fries, since it’s pretty intuitive to cut against the cut’s grain, and it’s got good flavor while being lean. It might even be a great candidate for the alkaline deep tissue massage Kenji López-Alt calls for in his new wok book (and on our site). I might fool around with the technique with the other half of the merlot I’ve got in my fridge!
The expert in that HuffPo article notes that there’s a whole industry group—called…The Beef Innovation Group!—that just tries to figure out how to rebrand and market different cuts of beef. Incredible!