"cuisine" news and stories

Tomato and Olympus camera. Photo: Emily Farris.

These days, food porn seems almost to be giving the old-fashioned kind a run for its money. Everyone with a digital camera and an appetite fancies him or herself an amateur food pornographer, which is to say there's a lot of bad food photography out there alongside the good stuff.

Camera companies are catching on to the trend and trying to make a buck, with digital point and shoot models that are manufactured with food photography settings, like this Olympus which has a "cuisine" option, and this Sony, with its "gourmet food" mode. Chances are good that if you purchased a camera recently, it has some kind of food photography option and you don't even know it. If your food photographs are less than porntastic (like the tomato shot here), it might be worth your while to consult your camera's manual or look online to find out.

If you don't have a food setting, don't rush right out to buy a new camera that does.

One pro shutterbug's opinion, after the jump.

Have you ever found yourself staring blankly at the contents of your refrigerator, knowing that you have mountains of good groceries, but no idea how to put them together into something that sounds appetizing and satisfies your current cravings? (If you haven't found yourself in this state, I am truly impressed by your culinary wisdom and creativity.) For the rest of, the fine folks at Cookthink have invented a new tool, designed to help you pull those separate ingredients and amorphous cravings together into that tasty meal we like to call dinner.

You can search by ingredient, which is handy for using half an eggplant and some elderly french bread. You can also search by cuisine, dish or even the mood you find yourself in at the moment. I have but one word of warning. Make sure you don't use this tool in the hour before lunch time, as it has the ability to stir up cravings you didn't even know you were capable of having. After a search for 'salty' and 'pasta' I am now craving Fettuccine With Guanciale, Egg And Parmesan.

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The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization does a lot of things, including set international standards, disseminate new ideas, and "help build human and industrial capacities in diverse fields." One of the organization's most important functions, in my opinion, is to set and protect cultural heritages, which are determined by the World Heritage Committee.

The World Heritage Committee of UNESCO has a wide range of criteria they use to determine world heritages, and France wants to add its cuisine to that list. According to AFP, though, not many people think this bid is going to go through, especially after the committee rejected a similar bid from Mexico a few years ago.

Sure, most of the World Heritages are physical places or arts and traditions associated with them. Most of the criteria that World Heritage Committee uses have to do with monuments or geological locations, but criteria number three leaves cuisine open, at least in my mind: to bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or which has disappeared

If national cuisine doesn't bear unique testimony to cultural tradition, I don't know what does. What do you think?

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The Japanese government wants to set up a certifying board to regulate sushi served in restaurants abroad. Japan's Agriculture Ministry has convened a panel of food experts who will establish certification standards for Japanese restaurants outside the country. The standards should be decided upon sometime in the next month or so. They will focus on all foods that are part of the Japanese cuisine such as sushi preparation and styles, noodles, teriyaki, etc.

The thought behind this is that by certifying restaurants as authentic it will raise the level of the quality of food prepared, and educate people as to what the food should be like when prepared properly. There are around 10,000+ "authentic" Japanese restaurants in the US, double what there were a little over a decade ago. This has led to a shortage of classically trained chefs, especially sushi chefs.

Becoming a sushi chef is a big deal in Japan. It takes many years of apprenticeship. First a few years learning how to make rice before you are even allowed to touch it, then learning about fish, types, slicing, arrangement, tastes, preparation, etc. Chefs of this quality are lacking in many Japanese and sushi restaurants abroad, leading to poor quality and "inauthentic" sushi.

In The US I have seen sushi chefs who have only a few weeks experience and don't know anything besides how to throw together a few messy maki rolls. They don't know the proper ways to slice fish to present it best and have it melt tenderly in your mouth. Instead you end up eating slabs of fish filled with tough connective tissue because it was cut the wrong way.

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Most every country or region uses a trinity, or a basic mix of flavors (generally vegetable-based, spice-based, or a combination of the two) for a majority of their signature dishes which include soups, stews, sauces, or variations thereof. Though we have touched on this a few times in the past, I think it bears repeating - especially as to why these flavor combinations are so important for regional dishes.

The Szechuan trinity is a mix of ginger, green garlic, and chili peppers. In Lebanese cuisine, it is a combination of garlic, lemon juice and olive oil. Italy has two - the first is tomato, garlic and basil, which is obviously used for anything with a tomato-based flavor, and the second trinity is olive oil, onion and garlic which is used for just about everything else. In France they use a combination of onions, carrots, and celery called Mirepoix. Admittedly, I make a fresh batch of Mirepoix twice a week and simply keep it in a Zip-lock bag in the fridge because I use it so often.