Appearance: If it wasn't for the head, you'd swear you were looking at unfiltered apple cider. Opaque with a hint of deep yellow gold. The head itself is strong, with a slight tan tint. The head is good and bold and lasts for a bit, and leaves a nice bit of belgian lacing.

Smell: Not strong, in fact it could be a little more bold. Malt with a hint of bitter hops in the back. Not subtle, but certainly not overpowering.

Taste: Deep and rich up front, but becomes quickly watery on the finish. One would think that the flavor would last a little longer. The hoppy bitterness is slightly there and partakes in whatever finish is there. Better tasted with a big gulp than a little sip. No sourness was apparent which is against the standard, but doesn't really detract overall.

Mouthfeel: eh. There's a little zip here, but for being a Belgian brew, I was anticipating more of a party on the tongue. As it is, it's okay, and meets the light mouthfeel standard of the BJCP, but a watery finish leaves it less than it can be. Keep in mind that this may be due to packaging, and may not be indicative of the beer as intended.

Drinkability: This seems an average beer in that it forgettable. Not good enough to instantly recalled when talking about great beers, nor bad enough to draw any harsh criticisms.

Rating: C if you're looking to get a review against type, B if you want to know how palatable it is.

As always, my food porn pics are a means to remind me what I love about food. They are often a result of depressing and/or unsettling food news items of some significance.

From the Reuters wire:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Foodborne illnesses cost the United States $152 billion in health-related expenses each year, far more than prior estimates, according to a study released by consumer and public health groups on Wednesday.

Food safety advocates are hoping the study will boost efforts in Congress to overhaul the nation's antiquated food safety system that has seen consumer confidence plunge.

In recent years, the food supply has been battered by a series of high-profile outbreaks, many involving produce, such as lettuce, spinach, peppers and peanuts, leading to a rash of illnesses and even death for consumers.

Dozens of pathogens, many of them unknown, creep into the food supply each year. The price tag includes medical costs, lost productivity and quality-of-life, according to a study from the Produce Safety Project.

"This is significantly more than previous official estimates and it demonstrates the serious burden that foodborne illness places on society," said Sandra Eskin, a spokeswoman with Make Our Food Safe Coalition, a group of consumer, public health and other groups pushing for stronger food safety laws.

The study being talked about here is called, Health-Related Costs from Foodborne Illness in the United States, and was written by Dr. Robert L. Scharff, a former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) economist. The .pdf of the report itself can be found here, in order for you to judge for yourself.

To put this number into some context, let's compare it against other big numbers.

• n 2007 the field of presidential candidates for '08 raised $582.5 million and spent $481.2 million (source)
• Sales of chocolate, non-chocolate and gum confectionery approximately $28 billion at retail per year (source)
• Overall US Beer Market in 2008: Approximately $101 billion (source)

The 152 billion number is fives times as large as previous estimates of the costs incurred from these outbreaks. I try to curtail my preference for hyperbolic language when it comes to these sort of reports, but if the numbers hold, it is a staggering amount of money.

From a very weird article in the Wall Street Journal:

Like the cupcake before it, the macaron, a French confection that resembles a pastel-colored sandwich cookie, is ready for its close-up.

It has been featured on film and television, in magazine articles and a new book called "I Love Macarons" by a Japanese pastry chef. Once the preserve of high-end French patisseries such as Ladurée and Pierre Hermé, macarons are showing up at retailers like Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and Starbucks. Even McDonald's is selling a scaled-down version in its McCafés in France, backed by ads showing two hands holding the tiny treat like a hamburger.

Instead of celebrating, however, fans of the meringue-like pastry have been whipped into a frenzy.

"Macarons are not meant to be mainstream," sniffs Laetitia Brock, a native of Paris who has been blogging about French culture from Washington for the past six years.

I...jus...Bwah?? Macarons are not meant to be mainstream? What does that even mean?

I say this as a tremendous fan of the delicate pastry, and am lucky enough to have a bakery within walking distance from my house that makes a passable version (although they do tend to let them sit out too long.) To imply that these treats are too "French", or too "upscale" is ludicrous both at face value and after a minute of introspection. Yes, mainstream, large-scale chains and corporations who tread down the path of making macarons will offer up passable, yet mediocre versions. But that's what these places do for nearly every product they offer to the public. Why should macarons be any different?

You know what I would love to see happen? Starbucks and/or McDonalds should start offering their mediocre versions in their restaurants, and then local coffee shops/bakeries who have been offering cupcakes for the past three years realize they can do a much better job at making them will start doing so. Voila!

Macarons entering the mainstream is a good thing. And because there are so many people who love them passionately, we're almost assured of finding better alternatives to the mediocrity that corporate chains will invariably produce.

What tickles me about all of this is the air of arrogance that the article alludes to within some of the interviewees. They sound nearly as pretentious as a few indie rock critics I've read in the past who've said things along the lines of, "Pfft. Macarons were so much better before they sold out."

Yes, yes, yes, "saison" is the French word for season. But this is not the answer I am looking for. Instead of 10th grade French classes, let's look at the other topic of desire when some of us were sixteen years old - beer.

Now if you happen to be a bit of a francophobe, this is not a French beer. Rather, it's a Belgian beer made popular in the French speaking region of Belgium. I'd explain this aspect of European history to you, but it requires Gantt charts and Venn diagrams, and quite frankly, that's more effort than I'm willing to indulge in on a Monday.

The reason this beer is called "saison" is that it is, or rather was, seasonal. It was made with the later harvests of barley, around the fall/winter-ish timeframe. The beer was allowed to ferment over the next nine months or so before it was served to farmhands working the fields around the start of the next years harvest. This once again proves the fact that beer can make any job bearable, including plucking grain from French-Belgian farmlands.

However, nowadays this type of beer is available year round, making the name rather irrelevant to the current production schedule.

So what does Saison taste like? Well, coming from Belgium, even the French speaking area of Belgium, you can expect some tartness. But not an overwhelming sourness that you'd get with Gueze or others in the lambic family. Instead, it also carries within it a peppery-ness (which isn't even a word, I know) that is found at the other end of the Belgium beer spectrum, the pale ales. So, from a high-level, broad definition point of view, Saisons can be seen as the middle ground between young lambics (of the non-fruity variety) and Belgian pale ales. It's a definition that's a bit simplistic to be sure, and there are breweries who have their own approach to the style, to be sure. But it's a good place to start.

They are higher in alcohol content, however. This is a trait which is recognized by most brewers of the style. Where Belgian pale ales hang out in the 4.8 – 5.5% ABV range, saisons check in between 5 – 7% ABV. This makes sense when taking into its history into account, as the beer had to sit for nine months before serving, and the yeasts had ample time to convert the sugars to alcohol. It's not the punch-you-in-the-nose kind of ABV that barleywines have, but it's different enough from other Belgian beers that it makes it distinctive.

Offered with no comment:

...federal agents descended on Kraft’s offices near Chicago and confronted Mr. Watson. He admitted his role in a bribery scheme that has laid bare a startling vein of corruption in the food industry. And because the scheme also involved millions of pounds of tomato products with high levels of mold or other defects, the case has raised serious questions about how well food manufacturers safeguard the quality of their ingredients.

Over the last 14 months, Mr. Watson and three other purchasing managers, at Frito-Lay, Safeway and B&G Foods, have pleaded guilty to taking bribes. Five people connected to one of the nation’s largest tomato processors, SK Foods, have also admitted taking part in the scheme.

Okay, I lied. I have one comment. For all of this talk about deregulation in various industries, the one fact that is rarely talked about is that a percentage of people out there in the world are, quite frankly, unscrupulous bastards. Granted, it's a small percentage, but it's certainly high enough of them to put public safety at a greater risk.

So the choice of policies comes down to this. Place hope in the government to implement safety and legal measures that are easy to implement and don't stifle competition and innovation? Or do we place hope that the industry doesn't have people who would neither figuratively or literally put moldy tomatoes into the public food supply?

And people wonder why I don't like talking about the food industry. With it being populated by folks like Robert Watson, it often comes across as a bleak and cynical place.

If I have to point to one thing that I love about delving into the history of food, it's uncovering influences upon diets that we have forgotten or have never had explained to us.

I have a mind made for trivia. I'm not bragging here, but simply establishing the baseline for my knowledge. When someone says something along the lines of "Columbus sailed to America in 1492", it becomes a fact in my mind without corresponding evidence. When I hear the date "1492", the thought of Christopher Columbus immediately comes to mind. What doesn't come to mind was the fact that Columbus was likely quite the Royal sycophant looking for ways to become famous, without doing the hard work of navigation such as basic math. An example of this was his theory that the world only had a circumference of 10,000 miles. When he approached the Portuguese court looking for investors to his journey west and told them of his 10,000 mile theory, they nearly laughed him out of Lisbon.

The Portuguese had been making north/south journeys with their Caravels, trying to find a way around South Africa in order to circumvent the monopoly held by the Venetians on trade. They had determined many years prior that the distance going these directions was far greater than 10,000 miles. If Columbus believed his numbers, then the world would be shaped like an American football. The idea was laughable to anyone with a passing knowledge of astronomy and/or navigation. This why Columbus ended up at the court of Isabella I of Castile, and sailed under her flag.

Doesn't the back-story mentioned above make the "1492" date, learned by rote, far more interesting?

Food history is full of things like this. Well, okay, history is full of things like this, but it becomes readily apparent when finding out about food, because I find myself taking little pieces of food trivia for granted without placing it in context of the times.

Let's take Catholicism and food. One of the basic doctrines is that of mortification, the act of taking care of oneself against the mortal and venial sins. In broad terms it means, from a Christian point of view, mortification is the personal battle against extravagance, gluttony, greed, discouragement, wrath, envy, and pride. Remember, this is a broad interpretation, and differed from century to century based on beliefs of Popes and Cardinals. In reality, Rome offered interpretations on many aspects of life, beyond what we know of as the seven deadly sins.

How did this manifest itself in diet? Religious holy days occurred more often than we see today, so much so that the restriction of foods from warm blooded animals often took place up to a third of the year. The middle and upper classes had to do without staples such as eggs, meat, and butter during these days. We still see this manifesting today with fish Fridays during Lent.

Now if you lived in Italy during these times, replacing an animal fat wasn't a difficult proposition. After all, olive oil was readily available, as was a healthy supply of fish from the warm waters of the Mediterranean.

But what if you lived in Germany during this time period? Good luck finding a fat to cook with that isn't butter or lard. And oh, yeah, fishing is more difficult in the cold waters of the regions. It didn't help that the longest fasting part of the year, Lent, took place right at the end of winter, when food supplies would be at their barest.

Sure traders from Venice, Genoa, and Lisbon would gladly supply olive oil with the folks up north. But they would have to pay for it. And they wouldn't necessarily supply the best olive oil out there. They could (and did) offer the lowest grade oils and still make a substantial profit from the commodity.

And Amsterdam? They had the bounty of the sea at their disposal, and ready access to salt to cure the fish. So when the lean months of February and March occurred, traders in these low Countries could make a fair bit of profit as well. And they did. From an economic perspective, it makes sense that traders in Lisbon and Amsterdam became trading centers of Europe, as they saw a void in the Northern markets and profit from it.

But like I alluded to above, context here is important, because two key events occurred during this time frame which would change Europe ate.

1) Shipping technology evolved to such a point that long voyages around South Africa could occur. This is how the Portuguese under Vasco Da Gama ended up in India in 1498, which was the beginning of the end for Venetian traders.
2) Martin Luther wrote his 95 Theses in 1517, staring the reformation.

The partial result of these two events on European food culture was as follows: Firstly, the Protestants gladly gave up on fasting. Secondly, the two cities of Lisbon and Amsterdam, who already had the infrastructure for trading in place, replaced the products used as Lenten commodities with more exotic fare, such as black pepper, ginger, and cinnamon from India. Then later products from the New World entered into the marketplace.

Granted these weren't the only variables at play here, nor were they the most significant in the grand scheme of things. But they did affect how and what the regions of Europe ate, not to mention the economies of any given areas. That these two moments in time happened within a generation of each other is remarkable.

Knowing this, the fact that Vasco Da Gama landed in India in 1498 becomes less important to me than knowing that his journey resulted in changing the culinary landscape in Europe for generations later.

All of this I mentioned above? This is why food history gives me a warm fuzzy. It helps give me context for the bigger picture.

Through Metafilter, I recently discovered news of a beer that states it has an Alcohol-by-Volume(ABV) of 41%.

41%? That's a beer that has a proof of eighty-two! To put this in some context, your average beer weighs in somewhere between 4-12% ABV, depending upon the beer. Even those nose-punchers known as Barleywines can only get up to 20% ABV, give or take. 41% is rather remarkable, and one wonders what yeast combo they are using to get such a high alcoholic content, as most yeasts are incapable of living through such a high concentration of alcohol.

A quick look at their description of the beer lets all of us in on their secret:

Sink the Bismarck is a quadruple IPA that contains four times the hops, four times the bitterness and frozen four times to create at a staggering 41% ABV.

Um...it's frozen four times? So the alcoholic content is not created by some strain of super-yeast, but rather by ice-distillation, a process so old that Applejack, that liquor made from distilling fermented cider was often made the same way?

Folks, this doesn't sound like it's a beer, it sounds as if they're making a whiskey. Granted, an over-hopped, carbonated whiskey, but still... whiskey. If the intent of the freezing is to remove water from the beer and to concentrate the alcohol, that's distillation in the oldest definition of the process.

I'd be very interested in seeing how it looks after poured. What kind of coloring does it have? How kind of head does it carry? My guess is that it would be lacking on both of these fronts.

That's not to say I don't get a kick out of the idea...I do. But this sound more novel than marketable. It's sort of the craft beer version of "The world's hottest hot sauce", or "The $10,000 Sundae". It's purpose? To get us talking about Brew Dog.

A few weeks back, I asked the basic question of "just what the hell makes up candy?" There was some mulling about in the comment section, and a few of you suggested (and one said very definitively) that:

Sugar, no flour = candy

sugar + flour = pastry

Coincidentally, this is close to the definition of candy that the state of Washington (my home state) is giving to candy as well, as they go down the road of taxation of any and all candy bars. House Bill 2388, page 8 provides this definition:

"Candy" means a preparation of sugar, honey, or other natural or artificial sweeteners in combination with chocolate, fruits, nuts, or other ingredients or flavorings in the form of bars, drops, or pieces. "Candy" does not include any preparation containing flour and does not require refrigeration.

The problem here, as any candy aficionado would point out, is that there are several candies out there where flour plays a vital ingredient.

First that comes to mind is Halva, a Middle Eastern candy that one can find in a few select stores throughout the city (I can get some a mere two blocks away from my house at the Husky Deli in West Seattle). The whole raison d'etre is to combine flour and sugar, and it is, most assuredly, candy.

"But Kate!", I can hear some of you thinking, "Halva is for Muslims and hippies, and 95% of the country hasn't heard of it anyways. Who cares if Halva is taxed or not?"

To them I say, "Okay, what about...

TWIZZLERS!"

The ingredient list for Twizzlers includes the following:

Corn Syrup , Flour , Sugar , Cornstarch , Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil 2% or Less , Salt 2% or Less , Artificial Flavorings 2% or Less , Citric Acid 2% or Less , Potassium Sorbate 2% or Less - a Preservative , Artificial Coloring 2% or Less - Includes Red 40...

I see you shifting uncomfortably in your seats there. You're probably thinking "Yeah, okay. But people who eat Twizzlers are always a little off anyways. They don't really count."

Uh-huh. And what about fans of

TWIX BARS??

Milk Chocolate , Sugar , Cocoa Butter , Chocolate , Skim Milk , Lactose , Milkfat , Soy Lecithin , PGPR , Artificial Flavors , Sugar , Enriched Flour , Flour , Niacin , Reduced Iron , Thiamine Mononitrate , Riboflavin , Folic Acid , Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil , Corn Syrup , Skim Milk , Dextrose , Lactose Less Than 2% , Salt Less Than 2% , Cocoa Powder Less Than 2% , Baking Soda Less Than 2% , Soy Lecithin Less Than 2% , Artificial Flavor Less Than 2%.

"...Uh..Well, it's the cookie, not the chocolate..."

Then there's

KIT KAT BARS!!

Sugar, Flour, Cocoa Butter, Nonfat Milk, Chocolate, Refined Palm Kernel Oil, Lactose, Milk Fat...

The point here isn't to prove that I was right in my belief of defining what constitutes candy is difficult, but to point out that candy really is a product with no clear definition. As more and more states look to tax candy in order to bring in income during these times of budget shortfalls, the more we're going to have to pay attention to what the government decides what is candy and what is not. Because if state governments decide that candy doesn't have flour in it, you can bet within five years we're going to see more candies with flour in them.

(h/t Slog)

Today is essentially a "reference post" kinda day, as I need to start gathering notes and ideas into one centralized location (for reasons soon to be made apparent). If your looking for food pontification, it's best if you come back at a latter day.

Stages of sugar boiling

1. Thread:215° F–235° F
   /108° C–118° C - The sugar is is quite fluid at this stage. Syrup and Jellies are often representative of this stage, and there are only a few actual "candies" can be made from sugar heated to only this stage. Around 235° F, very delicate structures can be spun from the sugar. Representative Types: Icings, fruit liqueurs, Syrups.
2. Soft Ball:235° F–240° F
   /118° C–120° C - A small amount of syrup dropped into chilled water forms a soft, flexible ball, but is quite malleable and easily shaped by hand or equipment, or even by looking at it crossly. Representative Types: Fudge, fondant, and pralines.
3. Firm Ball:245° F–250° F
   /123° C–125° C - Drop a bit of sugar cooked to this temperature into cold water and it will form a firm ball, one that won’t flatten when you take it out of the water, but remains malleable and will flatten when squeezed. It has a bit more structure to its form than sugar cooked to the soft ball stage. Representative Types: Caramel candies. But don't confuse the candy with the boil stage mentioned below. The two are different beasts.
4. Hard Ball:250° F–265° F
   /125° C–133° C - The sugar will form thick threads as it drips from the spoon. The sugar concentration is rather high now, which means there’s less and less moisture in the sugar syrup. A little of this syrup dropped into cold water will form a hard ball. If you take the ball out of the water, it won’t flatten, and retains its shape. Molded candies now are possible. Representative Types: Nougat, marshmallows, gummies, divinity, and rock candy.
5. Soft Crack:270° F–290° F
   /135° C–145° C - The cooked sugar becomes less "smooshy" and more "stretchy" at this stage. Depending upon the temperature, the sugar can be worked, but it stretches and requires some effort to do so. Representative Types: Taffy, Pulled sugar candies such as candy canes.
6. Hard Crack:300° F–310° F
   /150° C–155° C - There is almost no water left in the sugar at this point, and it become quite difficult to work with. Often candies cooked to this stage are left to harden and that's all the work that's done to them. Representative Types: Brittle, Toffee.
7. Caramel:320° F–335° F
   /160° C–168° C - Caramel is defined here not as a type of candy, but rather what happens to the sugar when the Maillard reaction takes place. Think the crispy bit of sugar on top of flans and you'll have a basic idea of what caramel sugar actually is.

Most, but certainly not all, of this information I gathered/yanked/copied from baking911.com. I