A couple of months ago, Chow’s “Gear” columnist Louisa Chu began her solid review of garlic presses with this announcement: “There are two kinds of cooks in the world: those who use garlic presses, and those who denounce them as useless gadgets.”

While anti-garlic press rhetoric has been fashionable for some time, the haters fall into more than just the “useless gadget” camp. Here are four vocal groups we’ve noticed:

Who: Anti-unitaskers
Chief complaint: A garlic press is a unitasker, a kitchen tool that does only one thing. A tool that does only one thing is a waste of money and takes up space that could be used to store tools that do more than one thing.
Spokesperson: Alton Brown
Money quote: “Don’t go there. You don’t want that. That thing is a one-trick pony, okay? If you’re going to hang with me, you’re going to have to learn how to appreciate multitaskers.”

Who: Extreme economizers
Chief complaint: The garlic press promotes general wastefulness by leaving a little bit of the clove unpressed. Those little bits of garlic add up. Plus, a garlic press is difficult to clean.
Spokesperson: Martha Stewart
Money quote: “A press is meant to be a convenience, but in addition to being wasteful — some of the clove is always trapped inside — it doesn’t save much time.”

Who: Supertasting flavor geeks
Chief complaint: The flavor of pressed garlic is, depending on the denouncer, either “too aggressive” or “lost entirely.” Both sides like to delve into the chemistry involved — “cell walls” and “volatile oils” and so on.
Spokesperson: No single voice, but the spiritual guide is kitchen scientist Harold McGee
Money quote: “The pungent nature of garlic is carried by the oils within it, which happen to have a rather low vapor pressure, but fairly high dissolution and absorption rates, hence why they can be easily emitted from the garlic (which obviously has high concentrations) and doesn’t really come out of anything else.”

Who: Kitchen purists
Chief complaint: The liquidy pulp that garlic presses produce is a lesser form of garlic, one that “completely disrespects food” (as one commenter wrote in response to one of Brys’ posts on garlic). This camp likes to invoke the supremacy of “knife skills.”
Spokesperson: Anthony Bourdain
Money quote: “I don’t know what that junk is that squeezes out of the end of those things, but it ain’t garlic.”

Actually though, it is garlic, and sometimes putting it through a press makes perfect sense. (See How to mince garlic.) While it’s not the solution to all your garlic needs, the garlic press is definitely not the “abomination” Bourdain and others say it is.

We think Chow commenter CestMoi nailed it in response to more anti-garlic press rhetoric:

You know, sometimes all I want when I get home after a loooong day at work is a bowl of pasta with garlic and olive oil.
And you know what else?
To get that bowl, I’m certainly not going to pull out my knife and my chopping board.
I’m going to grab my rolly thingy, pop a clove of garlic in it, rub the skin off and then put that clove of garlic in the press and smoosh it out into my bowl, then I’m going to pop the warm pasta on top of it, season with salt & pepper and a healthy glug of olive oil, and then I’m going to sit on my a** and make raspberry noises at the TV chefs that think they’re too good for the humble garlic press.
Haters!

Yesterday morning I picked up some long red Italian radishes at the Dupont Circle farmers market. I was going to eat them with a little coarse salt and dollop of softened butter like you might find in Paris. But when I dug around in the fridge I saw that I had some leftover prosciutto. My mind did a quick rundown of butter vs. prosciutto — rich and fatty vs. rich, fatty and salty — and the prosciutto won. (Really though, either would balance the crispy, hot pungency of the radishes.)

Leaving the radish stems intact as a grip, I peeled them, wrapped them in prosciutto, drizzled them with olive oil and seasoned them with coarsely ground black pepper. It was a match worthy of looking into further, which I’ll do later.

I’ve just placed a pre-order for Lauren Ulm’s VeganYumYum, a cookbook named after and based on one of our favorite food blogs. The book is being published by Herbivore and will ship in early December.

As a former cheesemaker and life-long carnivore, I am far from vegan. But I am excited to get this cookbook because I love the variety of Lauren’s recipes and the way she explains their qualities. (Who knew cheeseless mac and cheese could be so good?) I also love her photos and her style — beautiful but not overstylized — and her “real” looking food. Most of all, I love her writing. She’s funny, honest and personable, but she doesn’t strive for laughs or try to bare her soul. She tends towards brevity but leaves nothing out. How better to start a post on cabbage than with this sentence: “I never know what the hell to do with cabbage.” (In this case, she made a delicious hot and sour cabbage soup.)

Pre-order the book: Lauren Ulm’s VeganYumYum.
Visit the blog: VeganYumYum.

At MetaFilter, Flibbertigibbet is looking for good recipes with the fewest number of ingredients. “Bonus points if they travel well, and don’t contain some of the foods that immediately get stuck in globs in braces (like just about every bread known to man) when you take a bite. Yes, I can cut, but knives aren’t always available when I’m out and about, and it gets… impractical (read: messy) to cut large sandwiches up.”

This Linguine With Chickpeas has only four ingredients and holds up well to travel. It’s hearty, it’s delicious hot or cold, and it’s pretty easy on the mouth. (Same goes for this slightly more complicated — but still really simple — Whole Wheat Linguine With Andouille, Carrots And Tarragon.) And when I think of well-rounded recipes with few ingredients, I think of salads. Try this White Bean Salad With Garlic, Lemon And Parsley or this Arugula, Pear, Ham and Walnut Salad.

Who doesn’t love white beans? If you love beans — and you do, don’t you? — you should read this week’s root source on white beans. (Like what you read? Why not sign up to get it in your inbox every Thursday? It’s free and it’s easy to unsubscribe at any time.)

You may also want to check out these recipes from white bean-loving bloggers:

White Bean Soup with Roasted Turkey Italian Sausage, Zucchini, and Basil (Kalyn’s Kitchen)
Garlic Lover’s White Bean Soup (Farm Girl Fare)
White Bean Soup with Sausage (Cook & Eat)
Dreamy White Beans (Orangette)
Minestrone Soup (Gluten-Free Girl)

In Wednesday’s NYT, Melissa Clark wrote a short essay on the risks and rewards of ordering dishes that sound worse than everything else on the menu. Her thinking: “If a chef dares to offer something as unappealing as, say, a raw kale salad, chances are it’s fantastic.” (This line of thinking is related to the produce maxim that if it’s ugly it must be good.)

Her practice of doing this led her to the discovery that some kales are better raw than others. (Specifically, lacinato is the way to go.) Clark’s essay reminded me of the raw kale phase Brys went through this past spring. He happened to try the raw kale with garlic dressing at a D.C. Whole Foods and got hooked. On one of my later working trips down there, we drove around to several different stores trying to find the raw kale so that I could try it. (We did find it, and it was good.)

Anyway, when we were working on the mustard greens root source, we tried a bunch of different raw winter greens with various dressings. It may be that we were just in a mustards greens kind of way at that point, but even lacinato couldn’t compete with raw mustards greens with homemade garlic mayonnaise.

Early this morning, it was chilly and drizzling outside. I was craving something rich and filling. I wanted my apartment to smell warm. I had six eggs, some milk and a chunk of parmesan in the fridge, so I decided to make a soufflé.

I had made a few soufflés before, so I knew I basically needed to make a béchamel sauce, add parmesan cheese (officially making it a mornay sauce), then fold beaten egg whites into it.

To start the béchamel, I melted a tablespoon of butter in a heavy saucepan.

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Until I moved recently, my most-used kitchen appliance was the radio. I relied on it as a weight for stubborn parchment paper and as a prop for cookbooks, but mostly I used it in the way it was built to be used, since I almost always have music playing when I’m in the kitchen.

These days, since the setup of my small studio apartment allows it, I use my computer speakers and the 53.5 gigs of music at my disposal. This has also allowed me to be a little pickier than just choosing between classical and jazz public radio.

I have go-to music and genres for everything I do in the kitchen. When I’m cooking, I like something upbeat, something that’s motivating and energizing, especially if I’m entertaining. If the prep is easy and the cooking is pretty straightforward, I like vocals, something I can sing along to during the chopping and washing, but nothing so distracting that I stop paying attention and slice a finger (as I did one time belting out, I think, Guster). Right now, I’m hooked on the new self-titled album by Elana James, the fiddler formerly of Hot Club of Cowtown. The album is a great mix of bluegrass chops and sweet melodies.

When I have to hover over a cookbook and really focus on what I’m doing, I usually go for something instrumental. I’m a classical musician, so this is easy enough. But I also try to put on something that won’t just fade into the background. Bela Fleck’s Perpetual Motion is in heavy rotation right now. I love the crystalline precision of his banjo cutting through the classical repertoire.

If I need a bit more drama, it’s the Gidon Kremer/Astor Piazolla album Eight Seasons, an adaptation of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. You get each of the original Vivaldi, and then the paired movement of Piazzolla’s Seasons in Buenos Aires. It burns with the sun, blows with gale force winds — a completely gorgeous experience.

Cleaning up is a different matter. It’s a hard balance: I need the distraction of a sing-along, but it’s also usually late and it’s been a long night, so something peaceful is in order. Amos Lee’s first album is one I turn to whenever I’m wound up; “Keep it Loose, Keep it Tight” never fails to make me feel better when I’m stressed. Another one I’ve been using to ease into the end of the evening is Vienna Teng’s album Warm Strangers. It’s perfect to listen to with one last drink — heartfelt, spatial, and intelligent songwriting, with a gentle alto and beautiful piano.

Of course, the music I play when we’re actually eating depends on the day, my mood, the company, and what I’m cooking. Choosing music for a meal is like choosing wine - it can either enhance or detract from the experience. I’ll get into that in a later post. But I’m going to tackle broiled balsamic salmon and sautéed spinach, sweet potatoes and cranberries for tonight, and I’m thinking that calls for a little Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto. Off to download.

The University of Minnesota’s U.S. patent on the Honeycrisp, the “iPod of apples” will expire next fall, making this the school’s last year to earn anything off sales of the tree. Plant patents last 20 years from the date the patent is filed. The school receives a patent payment of $1.30 for every tree sold to commercial and home orchards. So far, it has made $6 million in royalties off of the tree, making it one of the school’s five highest earning patents. Over the next year, the school expects to make another $2 million off of Honeycrisp.

Honeycrisp is often called the antidote to the relatively one-note Red Delicious, the glossy red apple that was so overproduced it almost took down the entire apple industry. (Adrian Higgins wrote an excellent story on the Red Delicious’s decline for the Washington Post.)

A handsome apple, if not consistently spit-shined, the Honeycrisp possesses all the qualities of old-fashioned appleness that you don’t get from readily available grocery store varieties. It stays crisp forever, it’s absurdly juicy and, while the flavor is not exactly “winy,” it’s got more tartness going on than any other “sub-acid” apple. It’s not as widespread as, say, a Gala or a Jonagold, but it’s being planted in large numbers that will just get larger once the patent expires and the trees go into the public domain.

I’ve had some interesting conversations about Honeycrisp with plum and pluot growers, who always have the apple industry in the back of their minds. Like apple growers with Red Delicious, for too many years plum growers favored tasteless varieties that “looked good, shipped good but didn’t eat good.” Predictably, people quit buying plums, and now the plum industry is struggling to restore some consumer confidence in plums by focusing on flavor and growing high-sugar plums and pluots. Everybody’s hoping to find the plum equivalent of Honeycrisp and help raise demand for plums.

Interesting back story on the development of Honeycrisp: It was the result of a cross made 47 years ago (when Kennedy was president). It was evaluated for years, selected in the mid-1970s, tested for another dozen years then patented in 1988. For years, it was thought to be the offspring of a Macoun and a Honeygold apple, but genetic testing done by the school revealed that neither apple was a parent. Instead, another of the university’s patented varieties called Keepsake was one parent. The other parent is still and will probably always be unknown.

To read more about the history of Honeycrisp, visit Minnesota Harvest.
To read more about plant patents, visit the US Patent and Trademark Office.
To stay gold, Pony, read Robert Frost’s After Apple-Picking.
At Serious Eats, Teri’s looking for non-pie recipes to use up a bushel of Honeycrisps.

(via Minnesota Public Radio)

Over the weekend I put together a beef stew. I’m no stranger to stew-making, so I kept my improv thing going and dove in without a recipe.

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