Baconfest: A Great Place to Make a Pig of Yourself

Bacon....It's Not Just for Breakfast Anymore!

I'm fortunate to live in a place with a great local butcher shop. I've got a good relationship with my butcher. He appreciates that I never purchase meat anywhere else, and I appreciate that because of him I don't have to. With one little exception. I will blatantly cheat on my butcher with Allan Benton every chance I get. My local guy knows it and he doesn't really care because I also bring him a pound or two of Benton's Hickory Smoked Country Bacon whenever I stop at Allan's place in Madisonville, Tennessee to stock up.

So I happened to mention to him the other day that I'll be heading off to Baconfest in Johnson City, Tennessee next week, where they'll have a supply of Benton's bacon on hand. To my great surprise, he had never heard of Baconfest. Not just of this relatively modest event but of Baconfests in general. Where's he been?

Baconfests and/or bacon festivals are taking the country by storm. Formerly the province of big cities with big epicurean populations, celebrations of bacon are now turning up in hamlets – sorry, but I had to go there – across the nation. Sometimes these paeans to pork are day-long events and sometimes organizers just pig out and pack everything into a few hours. Occasionally a bacon festival will be held as part of a larger food event and once in a while you'll find one paired up with beer or an equally compatible comestible. Baconfests can be held for the benefit of a particular charity or community cause or they can exist just for fun and porky pleasure.

So what happens at a baconfest? Well, people bring in these chickens.........C'mon! It's all about bacon! In general, baconfests are made up of three elements: an exhibition of bacon and bacon products by national, regional, and/or local artisans and vendors; a sampling menu of bacon dishes provided by area chefs and restaurants; and a selection of bacony beverages. Usually the exhibition area is open to the public for a nominal fee with access to the food and beverage areas granted to those who choose to purchase a “V.I.P.” upgrade.

Chicago began praising pork bellies back in 2009 with what it describes as a “humble beginning” to a now world-class event, one that was featured on the Travel Channel in 2012 and included 120 participating chefs and restaurants in 2013.

New York and Washington, D.C. boast a Baconfest and so do San Francisco and San Diego. In between the coasts are events in DesMoines, Kansas City, Atlanta, Boston, and Orlando. But smaller venues like River Falls, Wisconsin; Littleton, Colorado; Grand Forks, North Dakota; and Ann Arbor, Michigan also see queues of rabid bacon lovers lining up to party.

Dayton, Ohio hosted its first Bacon Fest in 2013, an event that caught virgin vendors off guard and resulted in nearly everybody at the sixteen participating restaurants running out of bacon. After the social media backlash organizers promise to be better prepared next year.

Another fledgling pork party happened in Coconut Creek, Florida this year. They also underestimated the appeal of bacon to the approximately 2,500 folks who showed up and ate them out of a literal ton of bacon. They're planning to double the size of their event next year.

Twenty local restaurants and more that twenty craft beers were highlighted at Richmond, Virginia's inaugural Bacon Fest this year. Elsewhere in the Old Dominion, Roanoke will get its bacon on on Labor Day weekend in honor of International Bacon Day, August 31.

They're planning a Bacon Bash in Hoboken, New Jersey on September 7.

Also on September 7, the aforementioned Johnson City will host its 2^nd Annual Tri-Cities Baconfest at VENUE downtown. The event sort of evolved from an attempt in Knoxville that was short-lived because of conflicts on the part of the initial organizers. A local non-profit revived the East Tennessee festival, bringing it to Bristol, TN/VA last year and broadening the scope and range by relocating to Johnson City for 2013. A big plus is that this will be an indoor party. Another selling point is the all-inclusive nature of the tickets. On the downside/upside, tickets are limited, but such limitation insures that attendees get their money's worth. Nobody leaves hungry or unsatisfied because of shortages. And it's all for a good cause. Proceeds benefit Special Spaces, a San Francisco-based charity that creates dream bedrooms for children with life-threatening illnesses. And there'll be Benton's bacon. What more could you want? Information? http://tricitiesbaconfest.com.

If you can't make the Tri-Cities event, fear not for there is likely a celebration of bacon coming to a city near you. Bacon Today, the online source for everything bacon, keeps track of such things at http://bacontoday.com/bacon-festivals-2013. Events still on the horizon as of this writing include:

The San Diego Hormel Black Label Bacon Fest, San Diego, CA – August 31, 2013
Baconfest VA, Roanoke, VA – August 31, 2013
The Camden Riversharks Bacon Fest, Camden, NJ – August 31, 2013
Tri-Cities Baconfest, Johnson City, TN – September 7, 2013
River Falls Bacon Bash, River Falls, WI – September 8, 2013
Alferd Packer Bacon Party, Littleton, CO – September 14, 2013 (And, yes, “Alferd” is correct.)
The Orlando Festival of Bacon, Orlando, FL – October 5, 2013
Happy Harry's Beer and Bacon Festival, Grand Forks, ND – October 5, 2013
Baconfest San Francisco, San Francisco, CA – October 11, 2013
Ozarks Bacon Fest, Springfield, MO – October 12, 2013

And organizers of the Chicago, St. Louis, and DesMoines festivals are already gearing up for 2014.

The biggest problem I foresee here is how I'm going to make San Diego, Roanoke, and Camden all on the same day. Same for Orlando and Grand Forks in October. But I'm working on it.

Bringing Home the Benton's Bacon

I just had another wonderful visit with the Bacon Whisperer, Allan Benton. I stopped by his

The "Bacon Whisperer"-- Allan Benton

establishment in Madisonville, Tennessee to see how work was progressing on repairs after the recent smokehouse fire. And I also really needed to get some more of the world's best bacon, Benton's Hickory Smoked Country Bacon.

Allan is an amazing man. He greeted me warmly as soon as he saw me standing in his shop drooling on his bacon. I mean, this is a guy who counts lauded and applauded celebrity chefs among his customers and yet he drops everything to recognize and chat with a hack food blogger like me.

Construction on the building appears to be coming along well. Allan downplays the fire, saying only, “It could have been worse.”

We talked about quality. “My daddy told me when I got in this business to never cut corners on quality,” Benton says. “Always make it the best way you can no matter what it costs.”

Allan alluded to nearly “starving to death” in the early years of his business partly because of his dedication to quality. “I was aging hams for up to twenty-eight months and was up against people aging them for eighty days. I was selling to people who just wanted it as cheap as they could get it and was about starving to death because of it. If somebody came in and undercut my price by two cents a pound, buyers would just drop me and go with the cheaper guy.”

Fortunately, a sea change in food culture over the past twenty years or so has brought about a greater emphasis on quality. People are learning that “cheap” and “good” are often mutually exclusive. More and more, cooks are seeking out less processed, higher quality food to meet the demands of more educated consumers. This is true both in the home kitchen and at the restaurant level, where the “farm to table” movement continues to expand and move forward.

But for Allan Benton, a man ahead of the curve, it wasn't always an easy sell. “When I first started out, I tried calling these chefs to tell them about my product and they hung up on me before I even got finished telling them my name.” Not anymore. Nowadays, Allan Benton's name is on “speed dial” in Michelin- starred restaurants across the country. It's even indexed in David Chang's Momofuku cookbook. And how did this transformation come about? It started right in Allan's metaphorical back yard.

You wouldn't think it really likely that you'd find a profusely acclaimed luxury resort tucked away in the hills of East Tennessee. But Blackberry Farms, near Walland, is a really unlikely place. Called “Eden in the Tennessee foothills” by Gourmet magazine and dubbed “a Ritz-Carlton in the woods” by Country Inns, Blackberry Farms' list of accolades from James Beard, Zagat, Fodor's, Wine Spectator, and a host of others is nearly endless. It would be easier to cite the awards the place hasn't received. And when former executive chef John Fleer was developing his renowned “Foothills Cusine” at the resort, he turned to local sources for as much product as possible. Since Madisonville was just a stone's throw away, that, of course, included incorporating Allan Benton's bacon.

In case you weren't aware, big time chefs kinda pal around together. They visit one another's restaurants and “borrow” one another's recipes and concepts. They sit around and talk food. And so it was that Tom Coliccho happened by Blackberry Farms one day and was turned on to Allan Benton's bacon. Colicchio immediately began importing Benton's porky ambrosia to his multi-award-winning Craft in New York. David Chang was in Colicchio's kitchen in those days, and he immediately went gaga over Benton's bacon, ultimately making it a staple in his evolving Momofuku restaurant empire. (Chang now has his own rack in the smokehouse.) Soon Charleston's Sean Brock, Chicago's Paul Kahan, Napa Valley's Thomas Keller, New Orleans' John Besh, and a score of other cutting edge chefs were all featuring this spectacular but humble ingredient spectacularly produced by a very humble man. “Some writer once called me a 'rock star'”, says Benton. “I wish he could have been here a little while ago when I was sweeping out the back.”

Indeed, Allan Benton presides over one of the most unprepossessing food empires you're ever likely to encounter. The cinder block building squatting beside Highway 411 a few miles out of Madisonville does nothing to scream “success.” It looks like an old-timey meat market, an image that continues once you pass through the door. With its old-fashioned display cases and handwritten signs, except for a modern POS system, it could be a time machine trip back to the 1960s. The only thing that betrays the fact that this is not just some little hole-in-the-wall country store is the underlying bustle of a large number of white-coated employees working at peak speed and efficiency to keep up with the increasing demands of what has become a national business.

As we chatted about bacon, I mentioned Neuske's bacon as being worthy of consideration. While Allan agreed, he quickly pointed out what separates his bacon from the Wisconsin-produced variety that is also quite popular with chefs. “Mine's a dry cure. Theirs is wet. It's good for a wet cure bacon, but mine is totally different.”

Indeed. In a dry cure process, a cure mixture – usually consisting of salt, sugar, curing salt and other flavoring ingredients – is applied to the surface of the meat. Dry cured bacon is then hung on racks in cold rooms and allowed to age and cure for several months, being “overhauled” (flipped and rotated) at regular intervals to ensure uniform curing. Excess salt is rinsed off and the meat is allowed to air dry before being smoked by either a cold-smoke or hot-smoke method.

Wet cured bacon is immersed in a brine solution for up to two weeks and is sometimes injected with brine in order to achieve deep penetration and to shorten curing time.

Dry cured bacon tends to be...well...drier when you cook it, so you have to be careful not to get it too crispy. As Allan puts it, “It has to have a little bend in it.” But there is virtually no shrinkage in a dry cured bacon and the flavor is generally more intense.

Wet cured bacon, on the other hand, is, by definition, full of water. The more you cook it the more water it exudes and the more it shrinks up. Wet curing usually results in a milder, less salty flavor. A lot of premium bacon producers use a combination curing method that kind of gives you the best of both worlds.

Most commercial bacon, however, is cured by another method – a variation of wet curing that involves pump injecting the meat with brine and then tumbling it in big drums to distribute the curing solution. Pump injecting bacon adversely affects the quality of the finished product. Supermarket bacon is cured in this manner because the process allows manufacturers to make a lot more of it in a much shorter period of time. Bacon produced this way is usually ready for the smoker in twenty-four hours or less.

Watching commercial bacon production is like watching a Detroit assembly line. Pork bellies come in on trucks. They get run through a machine that slices off the skin. Rollers flatten the bellies out and they move into another machine where more than a hundred tiny needles inject a blend of chemicals into the meat. This blend is usually made up of water, salt, sugar, sodium phosphate, sodium erythorbate, and sodium nitrite. Then the meat is heated, smoked, and cooled for up to 72 hours before it hits yet another series of machines that press it into uniform slabs, slice it into uniform slices, and vacuum-pack it into uniform packages.

so exquisitely, exuding a rich, unctuous fat that is almost totally absent from water-laden supermarket bacon. Many chefs and cooks – including yours truly – reserve these decadent drippings for use in other dishes. (I pour the fat directly from my cast iron griddle into my cast iron skillet and cook my seasoned breakfast potatoes in it.)

Benton's Hickory Smoked Country Bacon

Allan doesn't do any of that. All of his machines and processors have two hands and experienced, discerning eyes. The slices are rustic, thick, and decidedly non-uniform. But they cook up

Comparing Benton's bacon to supermarket bacon – especially the cheap, off brand stuff – is like comparing fine Swiss chocolate to the waxy brown substance produced by Hershey. There simply IS no comparison. Ever ready with an analogy, my wife likens the difference to driving a stripped down Yugo versus driving a tricked out Cadillac SUV. They'll both get you there, but you'll enjoy the ride a lot more in one than in the other.


The first thing I said to Allan when I saw him the other day was, “Five hundred miles is a long way to go for a pound of bacon.” But, you know what? It's worth it.

Benton's Smoky Mountain Country Hams
2603 Hwy. 411 North
Madisonville, Tennessee 37354-6356
Phone: (423) 442-5003
http://bentonscountryhams2.com

A Few Things Italian Cooks NEVER Do

Nearly everybody loves Italian food. Survey after survey shows it to be one of the world's most popular cuisines. Not only do people like to eat Italian food, they like to cook it, too, largely because of a basic tenet of Italian cooking: simplicity. Italian food is tasty and easy to prepare. What more could you want?

Italian food came to American shores in the hearts and souls – and occasionally in the luggage – of Italian immigrants in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. And it caught on like wildfire. Americans couldn't get enough of the stuff in neighborhood Italian restaurants. They wanted to be able to cook it at home, too. Italian cook Ettore Boiardi – the real life “Chef Boyardee” – got the ball rolling by packing up take out containers of his sauce for customers in his Cleveland eatery. Pretty soon, everybody in America was cooking like an Italian. Sort of.

Along the way, American cooks developed some horrible habits that make Italian cooks cringe. Unfortunately for the culture, Italians are, by and large, too polite to correct mistakes they observe in those trying to imitate them. Unlike the French, who spare no effort in reaming you a new one over the slightest infraction, the Italians have a “whatever” attitude toward everything from proper pronunciation of their language to correct preparation of their food. "You want to screw up our language by saying 'mare-uh-NARE-uh' and 'broo-SHET-uh' instead of 'mah-ree-NAH-rah' and 'broo-SKET-ah'? Whatever! You want to screw up our food by employing all manner of bad cooking techniques? That's okay, too. We're Italian. We don't mind."

Here are a few random things you will never see an Italian cook do.

Putting oil in pasta cooking water. I've been trying to find out how this awful habit got started and I just don't know. I even contacted the folks at the National Pasta Association. They don't know, either. It's just one of those things your mother told you to do because her mother told her to do it that way. Unless your mother was Italian. Putting oil in the water is one of the things you will never see an Italian cook do.

The theory behind the silly practice is that adding oil to the cooking water will magically keep the pasta from sticking together. But think back to Chemistry 101. What happens when you pour oil on water You get water with a film of oil on top. The only thing you need to pour into pasta cooking water to prevent sticking is more water. You need at least a gallon of water to cook a pound of pasta. If you try to dump a whole box of spaghetti into a two-quart saucepan half full of water, it's gonna stick. Pasta releases starch as it cooks. That's what gets sticky. The oil you pour on top just floats around up there and never gets down to where the stickiness happens. And by the time you pull the cooked pasta up through the layer of floating oil, the stickiness has already happened. And, no, stirring it in doesn't help. Unless you really stir it in enough to create an emulsion, the oil is just going to drift lazily back to the surface as soon as you take your spoon out of the pot. If you have enough water for the pasta to swim around in, the starch disperses and the noodles don't stick. No oil needed.

Some people say the oil helps prevent boil overs, and there is something to that. But I've got an even better, more foolproof way to prevent boil overs: lower the heat and watch the pot! That's how an Italian cook does it.

Cooking pasta without salt. Salt has become the universal culinary villain in recent years. To listen to the “experts,” you'd think that everybody who even looks at the stuff risks dropping dead of a stroke or a heart attack. But you know what? There are some foods that just absolutely need salt. Eggs, for instance. There is nothing worse than an unsalted egg. Pasta is the same way. In and of itself, it is fairly bland and flavorless. I mean, dried pasta is made of flour and water, okay? How much flavor can it have? So you have to salt it to make it taste like anything and the salting has to be done during the cooking process. In order for it to taste right, it has to be cooked in – as Mario Batali puts it – aggressively salted water. An Italian cook would never use less than one or two tablespoons of salt per gallon of water. The salty flavor is absorbed into the pasta as it swells during cooking. A long-time chef of my acquaintance suggests that cooking pasta in unsalted water actually leeches what little flavor there is out of the pasta, leaving it even more dull and bland. The salt also helps reduce the gelation of the starch released by the pasta. And, no, it won't give you an instant heart attack because the pasta will only absorb so much salt. The rest is drained away. If you wait until after the pasta is cooked, you can dump salt on it to little avail. There is no substitute for salting the water.

Rinsing cooked pasta. Another thing everybody's non-Italian mother taught them to do was to rinse the cooked pasta. “It gets all that starch off there.” No, no,no! You want all that starch on there. It's what helps the sauce adhere to the noodle. If you're ever served a nice big bowl of pasta where the noodles are bright white and naked and sitting in a pool of sauce, you can bet somebody listened to his non-Italian mother and rinsed the pasta. An Italian mother would never think of rinsing the pasta, so it's another thing an Italian cook would never do.

Oiling cooked pasta. Same thing goes for oiling the pasta after you cook and drain it. Like rinsing, you would only do that in a pasta salad or some other application where you don't want anything to stick to the pasta. Otherwise, you're gonna make that pasta as slick as a bambino's bottom and all the work you put into opening that jar of spaghetti sauce will be wasted because it'll just slide right off the noodle and back onto the plate. Or onto the front of your shirt. So, okay, I can't say Italian cooks never oil pasta, but they only do it in specific instances. Never for spaghetti or fettuccine or linguine or anything you serve hot with sauce.

Breaking up uncooked pasta. Don't break the pasta. What did it ever do to you? The Italian ear is very sensitive to the screams of spaghetti noodles as they're being viciously and cruelly snapped in half before being tossed into a pot of oily water. If you don't like or want long pasta, don't buy long pasta! Italians are artists at twirling up long strands of pasta on a fork and if you ask one, he'll be happy to show you how to do it without staining your shirtfront or resorting to breaking the noodles into bite-size pieces that you could eat with a spoon. An Italian cook never breaks up the pasta.

Overcooking pasta. I'll let you in on a little secret: In spite of what you get in a can of Chef Boyardee's eponymous product, pasta is not intended to be soft and mushy. The perfect pasta is cooked to a perfect chewy firmness – something Italians call al dente. Al Dente is not the name of the Italian guy who lives down the street, and for heaven's sake, it's not al DANTE. No doubt Dante was a great Italian poet, but his name has nothing to do with the proper texture of pasta. He may have, however, reserved a ring in hell for people who overcook it, something an Italian cook simply never does.

Cooking with “cooking wine.” Cooking with wine is very common in Italian cuisine. What is not common is so-called “cooking wine.” You've seen it in supermarkets. It's usually labeled “Italian Red Cooking Wine” or “White Italian Cooking Wine” or some such. Don't be fooled. An Italian cook would never cook with this stuff. It barely qualifies as wine, being made from the cheapest, thinnest base wine to which a ton of salt, colorings, and other substances have been added to make it resemble wine. Rule of thumb: never cook with a wine you wouldn't drink. And believe me, you wouldn't want to drink “cooking wine.”

There are numerous other things Italian cooks don't do. Popular notions to the contrary, they don't cook with egregious amounts of garlic and they don't serve everything swimming in seas of red sauce. And they don't put twenty toppings on a pizza. These are all stereotypes and adulterations brought about by years of misinformation coupled with the inherent Italian inability to say, “No! Che non è giusto!”

So, forget what your mother taught you. Stop oiling, rinsing, breaking, overcooking, over-saucing and all the other things an Italian cook would never do. You will be amazed at the difference and your home-cooked Italian food will start looking and tasting like the delicious food you love at your favorite authentic Italian restaurant. (Olive Garden and Pizza Hut don't qualify.) Take some classes, get some books, interact with some real Italian cooks. If nothing else, watch Mario and Giada and Lidia and Mary Ann on TV. Cook and enjoy beautiful, simple Italian food the way it was meant to be cooked and enjoyed. Those are things Italian cooks always do.

Lorena Garcia's Dangerously Stupid Taco Bell Commercial

I know for a fact they teach knife safety at Johnson & Wales University. I guess Lorena Garcia was absent that day.

The latest Taco Bell TV spot featuring the “Top Chef” contestant is a travesty. Of course, I think Taco Bell is a travesty in and of itself. And how the addition of a paralegal from Venezuela who now cooks Latin cuisine in Miami is supposed to convince us that the fare at the Yum! Brands faux-Mexican franchise has suddenly gone “gourmet” is a stretch of a whole different fabric. But I digress.

The newest ad for the Cantina Double Steak Quesadilla is a nightmare to watch for anybody with the most rudimentary scrap of culinary training. I am frankly shocked that Garcia would allow herself to be so poorly used. The commercial was totally ineffective for me because I was so transfixed on Garcia's flagrant transgression of basic kitchen safety that I completely missed the product for which she was shilling and had to look it up in order to write this piece.

In case you don't know what I'm babbling on about, you can see it here: http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7tpo/taco-bell-cantina-double-steak-quesadilla-waving-knife

The spot features “Chef” Garcia standing in the midst of a group of decidedly nervous-looking cooks discussing her newest creation for Taco Bell. The cooks are nervous because Garcia is standing there waving around a 10-inch chef's knife like a conductor's baton. She gestures with it here and pokes with it there and points with it somewhere else. And the obvious consternation of her fellow cooks is apparently supposed to be hilariously funny.

The first rule of knife safety posted by the National Food Service Management Institute at the University of Mississippi is, “Concentrate on what you’re doing when using a knife. Do not engage in conversation when using knives; pay attention to the task underway.” Even the greenest culinary student can tell you that when you are not cutting something, your knife should be resting on your board with the sharp side of the blade turned away from you. You don't walk around with knives, you don't run around with knives, and you sure as hell don't stick them in people's faces. The idiots who write TV ads might think it's funny, but kitchen professionals will not. And here I thought Lorena Garcia was a professional.

Worse still, kids watch these things. I can't wait for the first lawsuit to be filed after some kid whacks another kid's ear off emulating the reckless actions of Lorena Garcia. “Gee, Mom. It looked funny when that lady chef did it on TV.”

Bad move, Taco Bell. Might want to rethink your relationship with whatever agency sold you this one. And Lorena........you should be ashamed. I'm sure your instructors at Johnson & Wales are. Sacrificing your integrity as a professional chef for the sake of a poorly-conceived fast food television commercial is pretty low class. If Taco Bell is just going to dress you up as a clown to sell their mediocre crap, you might want to do some rethinking, too.

This ad needs to be pulled quickly before something other than Lorena Garcia's image gets hurt.

UPDATE: I don't know if there was a general "backlash" regarding this moronic commercial or not, but it disappeared very quickly and quietly. Many of my readers were horrified enough to comment on it. I'm sure the suits at Yum! got an earful, too. One hopes it will preclude anything this foolish from airing again.

UPDATE: Paula Deen and “The N-Word”

Food Network Leads the Pink Slip Parade for the Controversial “Butter Queen”

Pity poor Paula Deen. She's stepped in it again. But this time it keeps getting deeper.

After being castigated by nearly everyone with access to a computer keyboard – including yours truly – for her disingenuous faux pas of hiding her diabetes diagnosis until a drug company made its revelation profitable for her, all the while shoveling pounds of butter and sugar down the gullible throats of her teeming fan base, the “Butter Queen” reinvented herself by slimming down a bit and adopting a pseudo-healthy approach to her signature Southern cuisine. Of course, that includes fronting a line of flavored “finishing butters” that her sycophantic legions could purchase at Walmart, but that's beside the point.

Now the very same media that raised a nondescript, dumpy, middle-aged Georgia home cook from a seller of bag lunches on the streets of Savannah to the Olympian heights of international culinary superstardom is threatening to bring her back down by branding her with the scarlet “R” of racism.

While defending a discrimination lawsuit brought against her and her brother, “Bubba,” by a former employee who surely knows a rich target when she sees one, Mrs. Michael Groover, aka Paula Deen, admitted to having uttered the infamous “N-word.”

Initially, Paula admitted to using the word a time or two in her life. But she says that was a long time ago and she doesn't do it anymore and she doesn't condone its use and nobody she associates with condones its use and she's all about equality and opportunity and love and acceptance and blah-blah-blah. And you know what? That facade drops the minute the cameras and microphones turn off. I guarantee when Mrs. Groover goes home and closes the bedroom door and talks to Mr. Groover, she ain't a-callin' her dark-skinned neighbors “African-Americans.” She's of an age and from a place and a culture where calling blacks “niggers” is as natural as calling your mother “Mama.”

Believe it or not, the sentence you just read was enough to get this article refused by the Yahoo! Contributor Network on the basis of "offensive language." Have we reached the point where we can't even talk about the subject of being offensive without being offensive? 

Anyway, an elderly gentleman of my acquaintance is a decade or so older than Paula and from even deeper in the Deep South. And he makes me cringe every time he opens his mouth. Whenever he sees a black person walking down the street, whenever he encounters a black waitress, nurse, store clerk, or whatever, whenever he sees a black actor, entertainer, or athlete on TV, it's always “that nigger.” And you can't change him. You can't correct him. You can't say, “Don't you know that's wrong?” He won't hear it. He gets angry and defensive if you even try. And yet if you accuse him of being a racist, he is utterly astonished. “I ain't no racist. I just don't like niggers.” He is mentally, psychologically and socially incapable of making the connection.

 At first, I thought Paula was smarter than that. I figured that she understood that you can't go around doing politically incorrect things in an increasingly politically correct world without being held accountable for it. So, Paula Deen, the celebrity cook, the Food Network star, the face of an incredibly lucrative franchise probably doesn't use or condone public use of the "N-word." But Mrs. Michael Groover, born and raised in the Jim Crow South? I'll bet she uses a lot of politically incorrect words when the spotlight goes out.

That's the problem with celebrity. Living up to the expectations of millions of adoring people who think you are perfect is a difficult cross to bear. You're going to slip, you're going to stumble, the facade is going to crack and expose the “you” underneath. And the media is a fickle bitch. It is both Brahma and Shiva. It creates fame and destroys it with equal alacrity. And when the “you” that is exposed has warts or flaws, the facade crumbles, aided and abetted by the sharp pickaxes of a scandal-hungry press.

And boy howdy, has it cost Paula a bundle. Her principal employer, Food Network, after “monitoring” her current crisis of character, decided to pull the plug on their controversial creation, saying, “Food Network will not renew Paula Deen's contract when it expires at the end of this month.” The announcement came on the heels of a pair of poorly conceived Internet video “apologies” issued by the Deen camp, in which Paula begs for forgiveness from her family and fans, saying, "Your color of your skin, your religion, your sexual preference does not matter to me." Deen continues, “I want people to understand that my family and I are not the kind of people that the press is wanting to say we are." And later, "The pain has been tremendous that I have caused to myself and to others."

The weirdness of the YouTube videos and their vaguely non-apologetic character just added fuel to the fire as did Paula's terribly ill-advised last minute bailout on a scheduled "Today" show interview.

And then the dominoes started to fall. For days it became a kind of morbid sport to log on and see who dropped Paula today. Food Network led the pink slip parade and was quickly followed by Smithfield. Then Walmart pulled the plug, leading to similar measures by Home Depot and Target. Ceasar's Entertainment stripped her brand from four of their restaurants. Even the rats at drug maker Novo Nordisk --the company that drilled the first holes in the bottom of her boat -- abandoned ship. QVC, Kohl's, Macy's, and Sears were all "evaluating" or "reviewing" their relationships.

While it's unlikely Mrs. Groover will be back selling bag lunches any time soon, her empire has fallen in a way that would astonish ancient Rome.  

As you may have determined, I am not a fan of Paula Deen. I've seen her on TV and I've seen her in person, and, frankly, I've seen enough. My biggest complaint is that she comes off looking as fake and as plastic as her fellow Food Network “star”, Sandra Lee. I live in the South. My sister married into a Southern family. My wife was born and raised in the Deep South. Most of my friends and associates are from the South. And we all agree on one thing: Paula Deen is too Southern to be real. If Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were to watch her on TV, they would both say, “Damn, girl. Tone it down a little.” She's like that annoying relative who can't complete a three-sentence thought without saying “you know” eighteen times. Except in her case it's “y'all.” If y'all are reading this in some locale other than the South, y'all need to understand that y'all would never hear “y'all” spoken by anybody y'all might meet in the South as often as y'all would hear it said by Paula Deen, y'all. Curiously, she managed to muddle her way through her string of mea culpas -- which actually came off as more mea NON culpas -- without uttering a single "y'all." She is a caricature.

But is she a racist? Probably not. At least not in the most repugnant sense. The dictionary definition of “racism” describes “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.” I don't think Paula wants to rule anybody and I don't think she believes herself to be superior. Like most people in the contemporary South, she has educated and elevated herself beyond such reprehensible and primitive thinking. But she is still the product of a culture that openly promoted such ideas when her morals and attitudes were being formed and she's probably going to revert to that upbringing from time to time until the day she dies. Does that mean that she launders sheets for the Ku Klux Klan in with the table linens from The Lady and Sons? Of course not. But the fact that she even elucidated a thought about a scenario involving a “plantation-style wedding” in which “a bunch of little niggers” would wear white shirts and black shorts and bow ties and dance around like they did in the Shirley Temple movies proves that she is still capable of reverting to that unenlightened upbringing. And yet she remains puzzled by it all. “I can't, myself, determine what offends another person.”

Honey, you offended a bunch of other people by ending your crocodile tear-stained interview with Matt Lauer by openly and defiantly saying, "I'm not gonna change." And reverting to stereotypical black dialect with, "I is what I is" was a nice touch, too. Way to convince the fence sitters, girl.

The South has changed in the last fifty years. It has evolved and it continues to do so. But some people of Paula's generation are at the tail end of that evolutionary process. They won't completely evolve until they are completely dead. Even so – and I can't believe I'm saying this – give her a little slack. If you want to criticize her for being a fake or a fraud or a hypocrite or a caricature, go for it. But I think “racist” is a little overblown. I might give you “classless, ignorant, backward redneck,” but not “racist.”

Do you know what a “sweven” is? Probably not. It's an archaic word for a dream. It's been out of use for centuries. Friends, I have a sweven of a day in which “the N-word” and all the controversy surrounding it will be archaic and out of use, as well. Unfortunately, I don't think it will come true in my lifetime. Or in Paula Deen's.

Making Processed Food LOOK More Natural

These days, “natural” food is cropping up everywhere. Some of it actually is natural and some of it is just lipstick on a pig – almost literally.

The purveyors of processed food products are pretty adept at riding the latest waves of popularity and there's little doubt that “natural” is at the crest of the current wave. But when average consumers look at a package of, let's say, sandwich meat in the grocery store and see perfectly round, perfectly thin slices of ham or beef or chicken or turkey all neatly and uniformly stacked in shrink-wrapped plastic packages, they're not thinking, “Oh! That looks natural.”

Once upon a time, “modern” shoppers wanted food that looked “modern.” They liked the uniformity, because it said “this is neat and clean and perfect.” But the new “modern” shopper eschews the obviously processed and wants things a little more rustic, a little less formed and molded, a little more “natural.” And so the food processors have set out to give the customer what he or she wants: food that looks natural. Not that it's any less processed or any more “natural” than it was before, but, by golly, it sure looks that way.

In fact, Kraft Foods -- the company behind Oscar Mayer products – has spent years of time and tons of money developing – get this – specialized equipment designed to make processed food look natural by cutting it unevenly. They've got whole teams of people analyzing the way dads hack up turkeys at Thanksgiving and then creating machines to replicate that hacking in order to produce a more “natural” look. They even paint the edges of the slices with caramel coloring to make them look more like something that was carved right off a freshly roasted bird. Never mind that certain caramel colorings were recently determined to be carcinogenic. They just look so darn natural!

They say you eat with your eyes. I tried that and found it extremely messy. I prefer to eat with my

mouth and use my eyes to read labels. For instance, Oscar Mayer's Carving Board Oven Roasted Turkey Breast looks really natural. Right down to the turkey breast, water, cultured corn sugar, less than 2% of salt, sugar, vinegar, sodium phosphates, sodium ascorbate, sodium nitrite, and caramel color that you'll find in those “naturally carved” slices.

Or, you want natural? How about Oscar Mayer's “Natural” Oven Roasted Turkey, containing turkey breast, water, less than 2% of potassium lactate, (from corn), sea salt, evaporated, cane juice, carrageenan, celery powder, lactic acid, and starter culture. Carrageenan, in case you were wondering, is a gelling agent derived from red seaweed. It's considered safe in small quantities, but I don't know about “natural.” And what's a “starter culture? It's a bacterial culture used in cured meats to help develop color, flavor, and aroma. Just screams “natural” to me.

Of course, when compared with Oscar Mayer's plain old unnatural Oven Roasted Deli Turkey and its chemistry lab of turkey breast, water, modified cornstarch, less than 2% of sodium lactate, salt, sugar, sodium phosphate, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, (made from sugar), sodium nitrite, and caramel color, I guess the “natural” stuff looks pretty natural at that.

I'm not just riding OM. Hillshire Farm Deli Select Smoked Ham has water, less than 2% of salt, sodium lactate, dextrose, sodium phosphate, sodium diacetate, sodium ascorbate, vitamin C, and sodium nitrite, and Healthy Choice loads up its Oven Roasted Chicken Breast with potassium lactate, modified food starch, salt, corn syrup, sodium phosphate, and sodium diacetate.

The point I'm belaboring is this; don't be taken in by buzzwords and marketing ploys. Currently, neither the FDA or the USDA has any rules regarding the use of the word “natural” in food labeling, although the FDA does actively discourage it. But there are no legal standards – or legal consequences – so manufacturers can slap the word on anything their greedy, market-driven little hearts desire. And since they know that the American sheeple are flocking to “natural” things these days, they're gonna do their darnedest to fleece them by any means necessary, including engineering processed food to look more “natural.”

If you are cooking at home with fresh, wholesome ingredients that you prepared yourself, then by all means make it look as good and as appetizing and as tantalizing as possible so that people will, indeed, enjoy the sight and eat with their eyes. But when it comes to prepackaged processed food products, don't let your eyes deceive you.

Buying Quality Dried Pasta – There IS a Difference

One of the more egregious falsehoods ever foisted off on unsuspecting cooks is this: “pasta is pasta.” Nothing could be further from the truth. To clarify, I'm talking about dried pasta, or pasta secca, as opposed to pasta fresca, or fresh pasta. There is a world of difference between fresh pasta and dried, but that's a discussion for another time.

I was once called upon by a friend to help prepare a “spaghetti dinner.” Everything was provided; all I had to do was cook. So I started about five quarts of water boiling. “You sure use a lot more water than I do.” Then I added a couple of tablespoons of salt to the water. “Oh, my God! That's too much salt!” My hostess/helper questioned the fact that I did not add oil to the pasta water (“It's gonna stick!”) and was rather shocked when I yelled at her just as she was about to break the pasta in half. Okay, so now I understood the source of half of her cooking problems. Then I got a look at the pasta itself; it was the best two-for-a-dollar, no-name-brand spaghetti money could buy. “That's what we always use. Spaghetti is spaghetti.” There was the other half.

I knew what was going to happen and it did. I put the spaghetti in the gallon-plus of well-salted, unoiled water, gave it a quick stir, and let it cook for about eight minutes. I tested it. Not even close. So I let it go another two minutes. Still not al dente. I checked it every minute for four or five minutes more, and suddenly it turned to mush. I was upset with myself for overcooking the spaghetti, but my friend was nonplussed by my frustration. “That's the way we always have it. What's wrong with it?” Uffa!

When it comes to taste, pasta is pretty much pasta. Only a really refined palate can detect an appreciable difference in the taste of properly prepared pastas. And even that subtle difference disappears when sauce is applied. No, the real differences in pasta are related to body and texture.

Good quality dried pasta is made from two ingredients; water and durum semolina. Durum is a type of hard wheat and semolina refers to a milling process that produces a texture like very fine sand rather than soft powder. Producers of cheap, off-brand dried pastas often add regular flour to the mix as an extender. Some cheap pastas are made entirely of common wheat flour, a manufacturing practice that is actually illegal in Italy, although a sub-class of lower grade pasta made there may contain up to three percent soft-wheat flour, but must be labeled accordingly.

Unlike the fresh pasta you whip up at home, producing quality dry pasta is a fairly painstaking process. Semolina flour is piped into a mixing machine. Water is added. The standard moisture content in the dough stage is about thirty percent. The mixture is mechanically kneaded until firm and somewhat dry, then it is pressed into sheets. It then goes to a vacuum machine that removes any air bubbles and further reduces the moisture content to a target level of about eleven or twelve percent. The pasta is steamed to kill any potential bacteria that may have accumulated, then it is sent off to be cut or extruded. Finally, the finished product is dried under very specific conditions related to the type of pasta.

Here's what to look for in a good quality dried pasta:

Ingredients – The only ingredient should be durum semolina (or sometimes semolina durum) wheat. The label will also display the mandatory enriching ingredients niacin, iron, thiamine, riboflavin, and folic acid. There should be no other chemicals or preservatives or additives.

Color – Good pasta should be a uniform amber yellow to rich cream color. Pale, pasty pasta probably contains additives and extenders.

Appearance and texture – High quality dried pasta will have a slightly rough surface texture. This helps sauces adhere to the cooked noodles. When held up to the light, there should be no dark or light spots evident. Some pastas will have slight ridges caused by extrusion and that's okay, as long as the ridges are uniform. Uneven, bumpy, spotty pasta is a sign of either adulteration or poor manufacturing – or both.

Taste and aroma – Good pasta should not have an aroma or odor of any kind. If it does, it's probably rancid due to the age and quality of the ingredients and/or to unhygienic manufacturing or drying processes. And although there should be no obvious taste for the same reasons, good pasta will have a slight sweetness when raw.

Clean fracture – Good pasta will break cleanly with a distinct, crisp snap. Cheaply made pasta will fracture unevenly with a lot of bits and slivers and may also exhibit air bubbles when examined closely.

If you have fallen for the “pasta is pasta” line, here's where you're going wrong. Quality pasta made from premium ingredients is manufactured to maintain a certain consistency when cooked. There is a complicated chemical balance of starch and gluten that must be maintained in order for the cooked pasta to come out soft and spongy but still firm and well-formed. As I said, the dance between the starches that absorb water and swell up and the proteins or glutens that coagulate and hold the pasta together is very complex. But it's the reason that good quality pasta is so far superior to the cheap stuff.

Pasta made with cheap ingredients and inferior techniques often contains uneven particles in the dough. Particles that are too small make for soggy dough while particles that are too large absorb too much water and compromise the structure. Pasta made with soft flour and extenders tends to shed too much starch, turning the cooking water a milky white and making that desired soft-but-firm texture almost impossible to achieve. Because the starch component overwhelms the protein element in the cooking process, the pasta remains rigid until it turns to mush.

So what's a good pasta to buy? Open question. There are hundreds of brands on store shelves at varying price points. As a rule, I prefer De Cecco or Barilla. While Barilla is Italy's largest producer of pasta, the Barilla pasta you buy at your neighborhood store is actually produced in the United States. Nothing wrong with that, but De Cecco products are all manufactured in Italy. Other Italian sounding names like “Ronzoni” are also made in America, although Ronzoni holds up fairly well by comparison. Same goes for Da Vinci products, most of which are produced in Italy with a few lines (lasagne and jumbo shells, for instance) coming out of American factories. Generally speaking, you can rely on the name brands for consistent quality. That said, specialty shops and Italian markets are overflowing with “product of Italy” labels that you've probably never heard of. Just keep in mind the five quality points outlined above and you'll be fine.

The owner of a little Italian place I used to frequent was amazed the first time I complimented him on the beautifully textured quality of his pasta. Turns out it was custom made and I was the only one who had ever commented on it. Conversely, the waiter at an Olive Garden was not surprised when I told him that the pasta was bland and overcooked and had probably come prepackaged. “Yeah,” he admitted, “People like you can always tell.”

“Pasta is pasta?” Don't you believe it.