Here in the states, we're used to classifying flours based on how much gluten (protein) they contain, and that's reasonable, since the gluten in our wheat, regardless of the type of wheat, is pretty much all the same. It's elastic and strong, which means the molecules readily link up with each other to form long, stretchy chains that don't pull apart very easily. That's not true of a lot of European flours, which often contain glutens of very different characters. In Italy, for example, most wheat gluten is weak (which is to say, not stretchy), but very, very hard (i.e. firm to the bite). So when we say an Italian flour is "high in gluten" that's technically correct, though that gluten doesn't deliver the same result as an American high gluten flour, if you follow me. And that's why, when American bakers start talking about foreign flours as they relate to baked goods like pizzas and baguettes, things tend to get very confusing very fast.

Italians are far more likely to speak of their flours in terms of the fineness of the grind. The French, how high the "ash" content is. Try talking gluten to bakers in either one of those countries and you're likely to be greeted with a blank stare. It's part of the reason baked goods are so hard to translate from say, France to America. We not only speak different literal languages, we speak different technical languages.

The main thing to remember, the more you get into the finer points of international baking, is that on the far side of the ocean gluten is a highly variable thing. It's not like fructose in an apple or citric acid in a lemon — it's either there or it isn't. Rather, it's more like, oh don't know...coffee or pizza. Wherever you go you're pretty much guaranteed to find it, but it changes (sometimes radically) from place to place.

The majority of the flour we consume is made from a single species of wheat: Triticum aestivum, also called "bread wheat" or "common wheat". It's a species that's been cultivated for hundreds of years, and like all crops that have been widely grown over long periods, different forms of it have evolved and/or been created over time. Nowadays we grow many different types of T. aestivum, all with different properties.

In America our most common wheats are Hard Red Spring Wheat, Hard Red Winter Wheat, Soft Red Wheat, Hard White Wheat and Soft White Wheat. All are used, sometimes alone but usually in combination, to make the flours we find on grocery store shelves. Of the varieties, the hard wheats make up about three quarters of the annual harvest in the US, soft wheats about 20%, and oddballs like Club Wheat and Durum (both of which are different species of wheat, and are used for cake flour and pasta respectively) make up the rest.

"Red" wheats are so named because of the reddish-brown color of the bran that surrounds the endosperm and germ. "White" wheats, by comparison, have a pale tan seed coat (and since they don't require the same bleaching as red wheats, are typically more expensive). "Spring" wheats are so named because they're planted in the spring and harvested in the fall. "Winter" wheats because they are planted in the late fall and harvested in the summer.

The ground seed of wheat grass. How complicated can it be? In fact flour is a much more complicated subject than most people think. Far from being a simple white powder we buy in five pound bags, flours come in a bewildering variety of types and styles. High gluten and low gluten, high extraction and low extraction, bleached and unbleached, finely ground and coarsely ground, foreign and domestic. Understandably, I get quite a few questions about it. This week I hope to sift through (no pun intended) a lot of the questions I've received over the past several months in the interest of creating a permanent resource that will answer basic flour questions. Let's start with the standard flours available at the supermarket.

I refer you to Mexico Bob's masterful post on the subject, here.

This week I'm going to deliver on a promise that I've made to several readers over the past six months or so, and put up some posts — some "crib notes", shall we say — on different types of flour. The content will be used to make up a new category under Joe's Baking Basics that everybody will be able to refer to in the future. But, since it's no fun going through a whole week with nothing but technical information to read, I'm also going to do some cobbler as well. I've talked about cobbler in the past, but never put up a recipe. The Pastry family will be heading off to do our annual blueberry pick this week, so I'll have some good fresh filling for it.

Readers Ellen and Linda both pointed out last week that part of the reason lard fell into disrepute in the middle of the last century was because of its association with poverty. I think that's at least partly true. If you look around at all the places where lard has been popular (the American south, rural Mexico, Hungary, Italy, France, the list goes on...), one thing that's common to them all, at least historically, is poverty. As I wrote last week, pigs are terrific poor peoples' food. They're easy to take care of, they grow quickly, breed prolifically and eat just about anything.

Of course, these days poor peoples' food is all the rage (except of course among the poor). However in the past one of the ways people of wealth distinguished themselves from poor people was by avoiding the things they wore, ate and drank. It's been observed that haute cuisine contains very few pork dishes relative to other meats. I've never thought about that particular point, but on the face of it, it rings true.

I think if most of us (at least here in America) are honest with ourselves, we'll admit that one of the first associations most of us have with the word "lard" is poor southern and/or hillbilly folk. Does that make us all closet "lardists" in some way? I think it does, and suggest that, as penance, we all eat more lard.

Last week's posts really brought the crackling lovers out of the woodwork! I received all sorts of great stories and literally scores of recipes. Here's one from reader Brigitta:

Your blog post brought up old memories for me! My mother was Hungarian, and she would occasionally render her own lard. She did it on the stove top, in a wide stew pot, but otherwise she did it the same way as you describe: dicing up the leaf lard and starting it off with water in the pot. The best part of the process is what she would make with the cracklings. She made a yeast biscuit with cracklings which we would immediately scarf up. They wouldn't last even half a day. Crackling biscuits are a VERY traditional and ubiquitous Hungarian ...er...dish, I guess. Hungarians eat them with tea, or coffee, or with beer, or with wine, or with brandy, or with pretty much everything.

Brigitta sent in a variety of recipe links including this one and this one. Don Cuevas from My Mexican Kitchen wrote:

Funny, I was just thinking a little about cracklings. Here in central western Mexico, we have access to a good supply of cracklings, in the form of the asientos derived from cooking carnitas. There's als lots of chicharrón about, which might lend itself to some cracklin' cornbread; or better, hot water corn cakes with cracklin'.

Distantly related, from Ashkenazic Jewish cuisine, is a salad of coarsely grated black radish, chopped hard cooked egg, chopped onion, a little salt, and a light dressing of melted chicken schmaltz plus some grebenes. The latter are the cracklings from rendering chicken fat with the nearly ubiquitous onions to an almost burnt state. I suggest a nice slice of rye bread to go with the black radish salad.

I also learned that cracklings are called scratchings in Britain, grillons in France, and that variations of cracking bread and buns are enjoyed in places as disparate as Germany, Italy, Greece, Afghanistan and Iran (though in the Middle East their cracklings are made from lamb fat, and in Argentina, they're made from beef).

Quite a few lard lovers also checked in, as you might imagine, talking about all the ways lard is enjoyed around the world. A story from an Australian world traveler reminded me of a beer hall I once went to in Prague, some 25 years ago now, where I was served slices of lard with slivered onions and paprika. Who needs dinner with pub grub like that?

It's darn good to know that there are so many crackling and lard lovers out there. In fact it feels like a subculture. Maybe we need to start our own pan-national society. Could cracklings bring peace to the world? I wonder...

Like all truly great things to eat, this is extremely simple. Start by preheating your oven to 450, and measuring out your (room temperature) ingredients. Add a tablespoon or so of bacon drippings or lard or butter to a 10-inch cast iron skillet:

Put the pan in the oven to heat while you make up your batter (you only want it there for a couple of minutes, so the fat doesn't burn). Whisk together the dry ingredients:

Next, whisk together the wet ingredients:

Combine the two...

...and whisk until incorporated.

Lastly, whisk in the cracklings.

Remove the pan from the oven and pour in the batter. It will sizzle a bit. Turn down the heat to 350 and bake for 25 minutes until golden. Flip the bread out of the pan so the crispy side is up. Slice into wedges and serve.

What's a great use for cracklings? Brothers and sisters, here's one of the best: cracklin' corn bread. Talk about a definitively southern bread, this one has it all: lard, corn, buttermilk. Pleasantly coarse and rustic, you'd have found southerners eating something almost exactly like this 150 years ago. To give it that extra country flare, make it in a 9- or 10-inch cast iron skillet.

9 ounces (2 cups) yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1 large egg
1 cup cracklings
1 tablespoon lard, butter or bacon drippings

Preheat your oven to 450°F. Once the oven is hot, put the tablespoon of fat into the skillet and put the skillet in the oven to heat. Meanwhile, mix up your batter. Whisk the dry ingredients together in a medium bowl. Whisk the buttermilk and egg together in another bowl, then combine the wet and dry ingredients, whisking just until combined. Lastly, whisk in the cracklings. Remove the pan from the oven and pour in the batter, it will sizzle appealingly. Turn the heat down to 350 and return the pan to the oven. Bake until golden, about 25 minutes. When baked, flip the bread out of the pan so the crispy crust faces up. Slice into wedges and serve, with a drizzle of honey if desired.

Because big, greedy mega-corporations forced us to! That, at least, is the pat answer you'll find (expressed either implicitly or explicitly) in most major-media pieces on the subject. It's an answer that belies a shocking ignorance of our food history (as well as basic economic principles like supply and demand).

Flash back about 125 years in America and you'd find a nation of cooks who, just like today, wanted/needed fats for various purposes: baking, cooking, frying, spreading on toast, that sort of thing. In those days, different fats were favored in different regions of the country according to price and local availability. In the wealthier north and northeast, where dairying was common, people used a lot of butter. In southern states, which were far poorer, people used a lot of lard.

Liquid oils were largely unheard of then, because extracting oils from seeds was a laborious, and therefore very expensive, process. Solid fats were the order of the day. The problem was that they were often quite expensive. Butter prices fluctuated even more wildly then than they do now. As for lard, it wasn't uncommon, depending on market conditions, for the fat on a pig to be worth more than the meat. Rancidity was also a big problem for both types of fats, which prevented them from being kept very long, or being shipped very far.

Things began to change when technology made it possible to start extracting large amounts of edible oils from the germs of seeds (notably cotton seeds). However the end product was a liquid oil that most Americans were ambivalent about, in part because they had very little flavor, but mostly because they weren't as versatile as solid fats. That changed with the invention of hydrogenation. Crisco (crystallized cottonseed oil) was invented by Proctor & Gamble in 1911, and was considered something of a miracle at the time. It was not only solid, it was cheap and kept at room temperature for up to two years.

So, it wasn't very long before shortening began to cut severely into lard sales. Soybeans were introduced to the U.S. in the 30's, introducing another abundant source of vegetable oil into the market. And then of course, in the 50's and early 60's, medical studies linking animal fats with cholesterol and cholesterol with heart disease, began to be published. It was the death knell for lard in most of the first world, and not coincidentally, the time when ad campaigns like the one I put up two weeks ago were launched by desperate meat packers. All was for naught, however, as lard quickly faded to semi-obscurity. Shortening and margarine (the hydrogenated alternative to animal-based butter) were ascendant.

Which pretty much brings us up to where we are now — with lard, perhaps, poised for a reversal of fortune. Of course it's doubtful that it'll ever return to its former prominence, liquid oils being so prevalent now. But who knows? We may be entering the new Great Age of the Pig.

There's good news and bad news here, though overall it seems the scales tip in lard's direction. Calorie-wise, lard has more of them, about 15% more, which makes a lot of sense when you consider that butter is about 15% water. Compositionally, though, there are certain factors that make lard more desirable, at least based on the (ehem) current thinking of many researchers and nutritionists.

Fat, you see, is not a uniform substance. It's made up of lipid molecules of many different configurations. As I've mentioned many times before, lipids are basically "E"-shaped molecules, consisting of a "backbone" of glycerol and three fatty acids. The fatty acids on the backbone are all different from one another, and more than that, vary from molecule to molecule. Where molecules in a fat have similar structures, they will often form solid crystals. Others won't. It's this mixture of solids and liquids that gives fats like butter and lard their semi-solid consistency.

As I mentioned in my posts on trans fats, fats that are saturated tend to be firm at room temperature, those that are unsaturated tend to be liquid (for a helpful metaphor on that subject, see this post on shortening and oil). Unsaturated fats, it's thought, are better for you, said to have the effect of raising the so-called "good cholesterol" in the body.

Butter has unsaturated fats in its lipid mix, but it has more saturated fats. Lard is just the reverse, more unsaturated fats than saturated fats, which makes it a "better fat" as the present-day thinking goes. It's even said that the saturated fats that are present in lard have a neutral effect on the "bad" cholesterol in the body. I don't know about that. Come to think of it, I don't know about any of it, for according to the results of the Women's Health Initiative study, none of it really matters to your health anyway. But what are you gonna do?

Personally, I don't think it really matters which fat is "better for you" and which fat is "worse". Splitting hairs over it, to me, makes no sense whatsoever. Eat happily but moderately, and exercise, and I can't see how a body can go wrong.

You can start by piling some onto a piece of toast, adding salt to taste, maybe a drop or two of tabasco sauce, and consuming them greedily with beer. However it is possible to get a bit more creative...

Two primary applications spring to mind: pie crusts and southern biscuits (though there are dozens more in baking and probably hundreds in cooking). What makes lard so desirable for pies and biscuits? Simply, because unlike butter, it's all fat. Butter contains roughly 12% water, and that water causes trouble in a pie or biscuit dough. What sort of trouble? Gluten. As I've written so many times before, water + flour + agitation = developed gluten. Developed gluten is stretchy stuff that makes crusts tougher, and is also responsible for the shrinkage that happens when a pie crust hits the heat.

There are precautions one can take to minimize both the creation and impact of developed gluten in a pie crust (the semi-complicated technique on the right side menu is specifically designed to defeat gluten). However it never hurts to stack the proverbial deck in one's own favor by cutting out, to as great a degree as possible, the main culprit in gluten formation: water. Replacing half the butter with lard (or shortening) is a time-tested technique for creating crusts and biscuits that are tender (due to reduced gluten) and also flaky (because even a little water can dampen a crust's texture and/or ruin its crispiness).

Why not go hog wild and use 100% lard in your crusts or biscuits? You certainly can, and many people, especially poorer people, do. However lard, like shortening, has one big drawback: it doesn't have much flavor (leaf lard barely has any flavor at all). That's why many bakers have historically split the difference between the two, sacrificing some of lard's flake for the flavor (and color) of a part-butter crust. But by all means, feel free to experiment.

There's something so elementally satisfying about the process of rendering lard, I...I don't know how to fully express it. A sort of manly do-it-yourself pride combined with the boyish thrill of breaking a food taboo. As Patton might have said: God help me, I do love it so.

Be aware that the rendering of lard is something that's best done outdoors, since rendering at its best is a long, slow process, and even relatively non-smelly leaf lard will still leave your house smelling like an all-day luau. You can render over a low flame or even better, in an oven. Since I'm in the very privileged position of having an outdoor brick oven, I do it there, with the residual heat leftover the morning after a pizza party. Crikey! Do I sound like Martha Stewart today or what? I don't normally cook on an engine block, but if you happen to have a Rolls, the nice, flat piston covers are perfect for searing scallops after a jaunt to Martha's Vineyard! I deserve all the ridicule that's due me. Anyway, an oven temperature of 325 is about perfect.

Start with about 5-8 pounds of leaf lard (back lard will work also). As you can see, taken directly from the animal, it's clumpy white with some greyish impurities (membranes and such) running through it. If you get it fresh off the farm, it will likely be in long pieces roughly in the shape of tenderloins.

Cut the lard up into medium dice. If you're using back lard, which will have more bits of meat in it, you'll probably want to grind it instead. Place the fat in a roasting pan or Dutch oven.

Here's an important part: add enough water to come a quarter inch up the pan. This will keep the lard from scorching, which affects the flavor. Some people like it that way: roasty-tasting. For baking though, the more neutral, the better.

Insert the pan into your oven, or put it over a low flame. Below I've got mine on a rack to keep it off the oven floor, which is hotter than I want at the moment. It's important to heat it up slowly, because the longer the render, the higher the yield. Leave the pan in the oven (or over a flame) for several hours, until the lard reaches a temperature of 255 - 260 degrees (mine took five hours). This is the temperature at which all the water will have boiled out, leaving nothing but the pure lard.

Oh, wait! What are those crisping, crackling things floating on top? They're what are known among the leading households of Europe as cracklin's. You'll want to save those, trust me.

Using a ladle, begin to spoon the liquid fat out of the roasting pan.

Pour it through a sieve lined with several layers of cheese cloth into a large, clean pot.

When the fat level gets low and the pan starts to cool, simply pour all its contents into the sieve and press the cracklings down with the ladle to squeeze out the last of the liquid (you may have to tip the sieve a little from side to side since the cheesecloth will start to get clogged with bits). When you've gotten most of the liquid out, put the cracklings back in the pan and the pan back in the oven to crisp them.

Ladle the golden lard into muffin tins...

...and put the tins in the refrigerator. The lard can be left at room temperature to firm, but the more quickly the lard comes down in temperature the smaller the fat crystals will be and the finer the texture of the finished product. Once the lard has firmed in the fridge, put the tins into the freezer.

Oh, and what about those cracklin's? Ah yes, another 45 minutes and they're nice and crisp. What do you do with those? If you have to ask, you don't deserve any. Send them here to me by overnight mail (address to follow).

Now then, back to the lard. The next day, your frozen lard muffins will look about like this:

To de-pan them, insert a butter knife at the edge of the cakes...

...and just pop those puppies right out.

Put the cakes into plastic bags and store in the freezer for up to a year.

Lard will also store well in the refrigerator for a month. DO NOT store this kind of fresh lard at room temperature. It contains lots of unsaturated fats, and they'll go rancid with time. Nope, for maximum enjoyment of your home-rendered lard, treat it well. Use for biscuits, pie crusts, breads, cakes, to cook or fry with.

This post originally went up a few years ago, however this seems like a good time to put it back up again. It's one of my personal favorites:

Ever ask yourself where pigs come from? I mean…historically? And why are they so popular in the South? It all goes back to Spanish explorer and so-called “Father of the American Pork Industry”, Hernando de Soto. Pigs, you see, aren’t from this neck of the woods, geographically speaking. They’re native to Asia, where they were domesticated by the Chinese some 7,000 years ago. Hogs had to be imported into America — and were, somewhere near Tampa Bay, Florida in 1539. Hernando de Soto landed there with thirteen of them, and in just three years’ time they multiplied into a herd of some 700 (not including the ones he and his men ate, the ones they sold, they ones that ran away, that died, or were stolen in Indian raids).

How is this possible? Because the pig is an eating, growing and reproducing machine, my friends. Fully 25% of everything a pig eats is converted to more pig. Compare that to a cow that converts just 5% of what it eats to bovine flesh and bone. Female pigs can bear two litters of between 5 and 15 piglets a year, each of which can grow to weigh as much as 250 pounds. Add all that together and what you have, my brothers and sisters, is serious meat on the hoof.

They’re also amazingly adaptable. Runaways from de Soto’s original stock took to the wilderness like pigs to, well…you follow me. Their eating and foraging habits initially disgusted the Indians, though one taste was about all it took to turn even the most committed hunting-gathering Seminole into a die-hard barbecue buff. And of course nothing goes to waste in the hog world. As pork connoisseurs like to say, you can eat everything on a pig but the oink.

So, by a combination of accident and intention, pigs became a fixture of the South, well before most people of European descent ever arrived there. Indeed, by the time settlers began moving into the area en masse some 150 years later, de Soto’s runaways had evolved (or de-volved depending on how you look at it) from plump dopey buffets on four legs into boney, nimble, ugly and decidedly foul-tempered “razorbacks”.

Southern settlers initially couldn’t decide if these creatures were more threatening or hilarious, but one thing they did agree on was that they’d rather eat the home-grown variety, which they did in great numbers. Being far more economical than cows, they were the perfect livestock for poor country farmers. Space efficient, cost efficient, and above all delicious, what was there not to love?

How is it that fat — and especially lard — has come to be seen as such a good thing all of a sudden? Just this last weekend I was in the checkout line at my local Whole Foods. There I noticed a "health food" magazine cover that featured a piece of bread slathered with what appeared to be lard. The headline exclaimed something to the effect that fat is good for you! The drill-down copy then proceeded to bullet out all the ways in which fat aids the metabolism. I'm not going to disagree with any of it, though I get whiplash reading the popular food press these days.

So what happened? How did fat — especially pig fat — become a the de-facto health food item it's become the past couple of years? Sure, celebrity chefs like to credit themselves with changing the popular perception of fat. Tom Colicchio got famous for serving braised, fresh pork belly at Gramercy Tavern five years ago, and Mario Batali has always enjoyed his bits of guanciale and lardo. Yet such indulgences would never have captured the public imagination were tectonic shifts not already occurring in the realm of food and health.

What were those shifts? One of them was of course the public move away from trans fats, which began to occur almost a decade ago and needs no further examination here. The other was the failure of the Women's Health Initiative. If you don't know what the Women's Health Initiative was, suffice to say it was no ordinary medical study. Not a normal university sampling of a hundred or so participants, the kind that are churned out by the thousands each year. No, the Women's Health initiative was designed to be the grandaddy (I guess technically grandmommy) of all fat studies. Conducted by the US government at a cost of $415 million, it was a fifteen year study of some 50,000 women — the biggest, longest of its kind ever undertaken. One of the primary objectives of the study, to demonstrate definitively and for all time the connection between fat consumption and diseases like cancer, heart attacks and strokes. For years before the results of the the study were tabulated and published, dietary scolds around the country were licking their collective chops at the prospect of ruining our enjoyment of grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches — forever.

And then, in January of 2006, the results came out. To say that they stunned the dietary and health establishments of the nation is putting it mildly. Doctors, nutritionists and dietitians were left numb, stupefied. For the results of the study showed, and showed clearly, no connection between the intake of fat — any kind of fat — and incidence of disease. Cheers went up at fried chicken stands around the nation.

Of course not everybody was convinced. A variety of health experts and journalists (including the ubiquitous Mr. Michael Pollan) came out against the study, citing its various defects. Had the results gone the other way, however, I'm quite certain none of them would now be scrutinizing the methodology and calling for a do-over. Do I myself completely buy the results of the WHI? I'd be lying if I said yes. I can't quite accept the notion that diet and health aren't linked in that way. However I do firmly believe that diet is but a single aspect of one's overall health, other important factors being things like exercise, stress levels and overall happiness. A little pig fat every once in a while, people are coming to see, has a way of making a person quite, quite happy. And that is a very healthy thing indeed.

I missed this announcement over the weekend, but the Nestlé company is recalling all of its cookie dough products due to fear that they might be contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7. If you have any of them in your pantry, throw them away.

Price check: one tub of lard.

Sure, you can, however there are good reasons for bakers to avoid lard in plastic tubs. For one, because it tends to be the lower grade stuff with the piggier taste. Second, store bought lard is partially hydrogenated to extend its shelf life — and partial hydrogenation produces trans fats. As regular readers already know, I don't worry about trans fats. Many other people, however, do. That's the reason so many are turning back to solid animal fats over processed shortenings. Buying store lard, therefore, rather defeats the purpose.

There's a lot of good lard on a pig, though admittedly not nearly as much as there used to be. Demand for leaner and leaner pork over the years has yielded pigs with less fat on them than your typical Parisian runway model. But more on that later. Though fat can be found all over a pig, the main deposits are on the back, between the flesh and the skin (high-grade hard fat used for "fat back" and salt pork), amid the organs (low-grade soft fat historically used for cooking) and in the so-called flare region, the area around the loin near the kidneys. This is where leaf lard comes from, and for bakers, it's where the money is.

Leaf lard is the highest grade fat that can be found on the animal. It is desirable for several reasons. First, its consistency, which is neither too hard nor too soft and quite butter-like. Next, it's the mildest tasting lard on the pig, practically neutral in flavor. Lastly, it's quite pure even in its raw form, which makes it easier to render. Some people, in fact, just use it as-is. I recommend against that for reasons which will be obvious later in the week.

I'll admit, leaf lard can be a little hard to find, though it's becoming more common now that animal fats are hip again. The pork purveyors at the farmers' markets here in Louisville usually have it, or at least allow customers to order it ahead of time. Some butcher shops have it, or can order it. If all that fails, it can be had over the internet, though at considerable expense. In fact, between ordering leaf lard off the internet and buying back lard from the local butcher, I'll take the butcher every time. The lard will be a little "porkier", but still fine for rendering and decent for baking.

This week, we'll be talking lard. Ever since those posts on trans fats appeared on the blog several weeks ago, there's been quite a lot of interest in it. Lard has a long history as a baking ingredient, especially in pie crusts and biscuits, and of course it's been enjoying a resurgence in popularity the last few years. However you don't want to use just any old lard in a pie crust. So this week — because we're starting to get into pie season — we'll learn about lard: how to select it, how to process it (render it) and how to use it. So all of you who've always dreamt of making a lard crust like grandma used to make, this is your week!

This is a very American scone. It's big, it's triangular, it's rich. Note, however, that it's possible to do a lot of different things with this dough. I generally favor small scones, and indeed I normally make 12 little triangles with this recipe instead of eight large ones. You can use round cutters if you wish, cut them square, whatever you want! Start by combining your dry ingredients in a mixer bowl...

Stir on low to combine them, then add the butter and lemon zest.

Continue to stir on medium until you have a coarse, meal-like consistency. You can also do this by hand if you wish!

Add the ginger and stir it in.

Then make a well in the middle of the mixture and pour in the lightly whipped cream (yes, all you eagle-eyes, I did mix up my steps a little here...just do as I say, not as I do!).

Fold everything together until a dough starts to form...

...and knead it lightly a few times by hand to bring it into a ball.

Pat the ball into one big disk if you're making large scones, or divide the dough and make two disks if you want smaller ones.

Cut the disk into eight pieces (or cut the small disks into six pieces each if making smaller ones). This is where the American scone-making process diverges somewhat from classic methods. The Scots, for example, often eat triangular scones, but they cut their dough disk ("bannock" as it's sometimes referred to) after they bake it.

Arrange the wedges on a parchment-lined baking sheet and paint with additional cream. Bake at 400 for 14 - 18 minutes.

Jenni over at Pastry Methods and Techniques wrote in with this interesting tidbit on Friday:

So, get this: pain au chocolate is filled w/chocolate that has seized! This is keen, because it gets melty but doesn't run all over the world. So, if you ever accidentally seize some chocolate, save for these little guys. :)

Never thought of that, though it makes all the sense in the world. There's heat in there, plus a small amount of moisture (steam from the dough and the butter)...all the right ingredients to cause the chocolate to seize into clumps after it melts. Great stuff, Jenni! Thanks!

Oh, and by the way, anyone out there know how to "un-seize" a pan of melted chocolate? Just add a little water. But Joe! A little water is what causes the chocolate to seize in the first place! That's right. A few drops of water is just enough moisture to make the chocolate solids in the pot stick together. A few more will lube them up to the point that they flow again. Problem solved!

There's a new doughnut shop opening in Saigon this month, featuring cake doughnuts made with the Joe Pastry recipe! Above is a picture of some of the first production, and I'll be darned if those don't look exactly like my doughnuts! I couldn't be prouder if I was a peacock. Best of luck to you all, and may the doughnuts keep rolling!

Debuts nationally this weekend. For easy reference, I've bundled all the posts on the subject under this link. Happy weekend to all!

Today is the first very hot day of the year in Louisville, and it seems that increased demand for power has resulted in a blackout, at least in my neighborhood. The scone tutorial will have to wait for Monday.

An extremely patient reader by the name of Bee put in a request several weeks ago about whipping cream. She asked me if I could demonstrate the differences between lightly whipped cream, cream whipped to "soft peaks" and cream whipped to "firm peaks". Since I'm whipping cream (and talking cream) for this week's topic, I thought now would be a good time.

By far the easiest way to whip cream is with a stand mixer or a hand mixer. You can do it with a whisk, but it requires a good deal of arm strength and stamina. You want to start with extremely cold, heavy cream, since cold milk fat holds it shape better when it's whipped. Some pastry makers even chill the bowls of their mixers, which is an inconvenience, but a good idea. So then, pouring your cold cream into your cold mixer bowl, turn your mixer (fitted with a whip) up to medium-high and begin whipping.

After about a minute and a half, you'll get foam, but a rather soupy sort of foam. Inserting a spoon...

...you'll see it'll just fall off it like so. You'll see small mounds, but they'll disappear pretty quickly. This is "lightly whipped" cream, great for chocolate mousse. I like to put it in my scone mixes, too.

Keep going another 30 seconds or so and the cream will get firmer. So much so that when you dip in the whip...

...then quickly remove it, you get rather tall "peaks" that quickly flop over. This is the "soft peak" stage.

Continuing on and the cream starts to take on an entirely difference character. Deep "trenches" start to form as the cream firms up and stops flowing:

This is often called "stiff peaks" though you really don't get "peaks" when you remove the whip, just clumps of whipped cream. This is about as firm as I can whip this cream before it starts turning into butter, but there's a separate tutorial for that.

Reader Dario, a food scientist from Italy, wrote in with this to say about last week's agriculture flap:

I read your "series" on Pollan and GMO, and I agree with you. I have just finished writing a book on GMOs in Italian to be published in the fall. I know the subject very well and I thought you might find these two reports useful. You can even suggest them to your readers as a bedtime reading.

Well THAT makes me feel a little better after all the hate mail I've been receiving! For those with a serious interest in the impact of GMO crops around the world in the decade since they've been introduced, Dario offers one report from the European Commission Research Center:

http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu/publications/pub.cfm?id=1458

...and another from the USDA Economic Research Service:

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/EIB11/.

You weren't going to do anything this weekend anyway.

Got that question in overnight, and while it's a little off-topic, my baking and photo schedule has been interrupted by some torrential late spring storms. So why not? As far as I know the term is derived from the way your arteries look when a Devon Cream Tea is over. But then I guess that's probably not exactly textbook.

"Clotted" or "double" cream is made via a process that's unique to Devon, Corwall and a few regions of southern Asia and the Middle East, where the end product is known as Malai or Kaymak, respectively. In the East it's made from buffalo milk as opposed to cow's milk, but other than that it's treated the same. Just like in the West Country, Eastern clotted cream is eaten with bread and pastries, though in some parts of India they make it into ice cream (don't knock it 'till you've tried it).

We all know that milk, given time, will separate into cream and whole milk (or so). Yet some particularly rich creams, given time, can further separate into heavy clots and liquid. You've probably seen this in action in cartons of whipping cream, where semi-firm blobs will sometimes come plopping out of the container (it's not spoiled, it's just "clotted"). Homogenization interferes with clotting, however, which is why we only see these cream lumps incidentally.

Actively encouraging the clots is a simple and time consuming process that's fascinating to watch (I saw it done once at a farm in Devon, and the results nearly made a West Country farmer out of me). First, a few gallons of fresh, unpasteurized milk are poured into shallow copper pans. Then the pans are floated over cauldrons of boiling water until they reach a temperature of 190 degrees, at which point they're removed from the heat and allowed to cool very slowly. This process has the effect of both speeding the rise of fat globules to the surface and melting them together, so when they cool they form a thick layer on top of the milk that's skimmed off before the process is repeated.

Depending on how long the pans are left out to cool, a certain amount of bacterial action occurs, and this has the effect of rendering the cream slightly tangy. Combine that with the nutty flavors that heating process brings out, not to mention the richness produced by an astounding 65% milk fat content (heavy whipping cream is 30%) and the result is Elysium on a scone. These rough edges are of course what make true Devon or Cornish cream impossible to come by in the States, in the same way that real French cheeses are both geographically and legally out of our reach. The stuff in the little jars in the gourmet shops, forget it.

But airfares are cheap nowadays, and there's nothing like the fresh air of the West Country to put the pink back in your cheeks. Remember as you're making reservations: two seats will be required for the return journey.

...but I'm still getting a fair number of emails from folks about the agriculture posts from last week, a surprising number of them about pesticide use and health. I can't speak to them with any real authority, and at any rate, I'm more of a GMO man myself (though I should say that many GMO crops still require the application of some chemicals). However there are a couple statistics out there that might add some perspective to the discussion. For example: the total number of deaths ever connected to pesticide residues in conventionally-raised produce: 0. And then there's my favorite: the total number of good, strong cups of coffeehouse coffee it takes to put back the carcinogens you save from eating organic for a year: 1. Kind a makes you think, eh? Or not...back to our regularly scheduled programming.

...a delightful essay on the ceremony of English tea from Rachel Laudan.

Quick: what's the first thing that comes to mind when someone says the word "scone"? Other than sawdust, I mean. Right: English tea. Or more specifically, the ritual of English afternoon tea. Erroneously called "high tea" here in the States (probably because of the formality that's associated with it), the meal is actually, technically, "low tea". Oh blast those infernal Brits and their fussy, high falutin' terms! Yet the words aren't intended to indicate the status of the meal, but the location where they're taken. "High" tea is taken at the "high", i.e. "main" table, the dining table. "Low" tea is taken, well, pretty much anywhere else.

The tradition can be traced back as far as the 1760's among the British gentry, where it was thought to be a kind of stop-gap meal between lunch and the "high" meal, which typically took place around eight. Yet it really didn't come into its own until the mid-1800's, the golden age of British rule in the far East, when the so-called "Orientalist" craze that swept the Commonwealth. British afternoon tea, some say, may be an Anglified version of the Japanese tea ceremony.

There are as many afternoon tea traditions as there are counties in Britain. Yet one of the most famous is that which occurs the county where I once lived: Devon. There, afternoon tea was called "cream tea", and well, you can pretty much imagine what went on. Devon is rich and rolling farm country, known for its dairy herds, which are said to produce a higher fat milk than is typical in the rest of the British Isles. Dairy folk in Devon make a one-of-a-kind indulgence out of it, known as "double" or "clotted" cream. It's thick as mud, the perfect spread for a scone, especially when topped with a dollop of jam.

I was a nihilistic college student when I was first exposed to the stuff (oh yes, I considered myself quite the counter-cultural). Yet my black clad, amply pierced, heavily tattooed friends and I thought nothing of packing into a dainty, pink doily-draped tea shop two or three times a month to eat ourselves into a creamy coma. I mean, who cares about class politics when the milk fat content is this high? And anyway, the little old ladies were glad to have us. They'd graciously bring out a few pots of Darjeeling and a heaping tray of fresh, hot scones, then politely turn their backs while we made West Country pigs of ourselves.

I can still remember the gluttonous joy of it. Slather on the cream, a spot of jam for color, protrude the pinky and...stuff the whole thing into your mouth! People have been doing that as long as there's been tea in Devon. Of course they do the same thing just down the coast in Cornwall, only there they put the cream on top of the jam instead of the other way around. Animals.

...that a little thing like the pronunciation of the word "scone" would generate so much email! Since yesterday, people all across the anglosphere (though also from places like Greece and Taiwan) have weighed in on the issue. Most have expressed utter disbelief that there's any way to pronounce "scone" other than as rhyming with "gone". What can I say? That's the standard here in midwestern America. We're plain-spoken people. We pronounce every vowel and consonant we see. If we come across a word that looks like "cone" but has an "s" in front of it, odds are we'll pronounce them the same way. More than a few of us also say "wor-chester-shire" when speaking the name of the sauce aloud.

However we're not at all alone, as Aoife (pronounced EE-fah, I believe) of The Daily Spud points out:

Here in Ireland, it's the inverse situation to the one described by your New Zealand reader - the predominant pronunciation here is the one that rhymes with 'bone' and, when someone uses the rhymes with 'gone' version, I consider that a bit posh!

Reader Dave, as counterpoint, submits Monty Python-related testimony. That's the second time they've been up in a week, I think.

Brownyn from New Zealand submits this from Wikipedia:

"The pronunciation of the word across the United Kingdom varies. According to one academic study, nearly two thirds of the British population and 99% of the Scottish population pronounce it as /skɒn/, to rhyme with "con" and "John." The rest pronounce it /skəʊn/, to rhyme with "cone" and "Joan." British dictionaries usually show the "con" form as the preferred pronunciation, while recognizing that the "cone" form also exists.

The academic who undertook that study must have been pretty hard up for dissertation ideas. But, people have to get their degrees somehow, I guess...

This is probably my favorite scone recipe. The ginger adds what I think is the perfect zing and textural contrast.

12 ounces unbleached all-purpose flour
2.5 ounces sugar
pinch salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon finely chopped lemon zest
6 ounces unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch cubes and frozen
4 ounces candied ginger, finely chopped into 1/4-inch pieces
3/4 cup heavy cream, plus extra for the tops

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Meanwhile, whip the cream until frothy, not quite to soft peaks. In a mixer fitted with a paddle, combine dry ingredients and stir on low to blend. Add lemon zest and butter and continue to stir until the mixture looks like corn meal. Transfer to a large bowl, add the chopped ginger and stir it in. Make a well in the center and add the cream. Fold the ingredients together until combined, then knead by hand once or twice, lightly, until the dough gathers into a ball. (If making small scones, divide the dough into two balls).

On a lightly floured board, pat the dough into disks (or a disk) about 3/4 inch thick and using a long knife, cut into wedges (cut the large disk into eight if making large scones, cut the half-size disks into six pieces each if making smaller ones). Arrange the wedges on a baking sheet and paint with additional cream. Bake for 14 - 16 minutes until slightly browned.

Makes 8 large or 12 smaller scones.

Reader Diane says:

I am from Texas so I pronounce "bone" and "gone" (and scone) exactly the same.

So what are the "national styles" of scones?. For the Brits (and I'm generalizing greatly) a scone is not unlike what we Americans call a biscuit: a fairly small and round baked item, slightly moist, slightly sweet, rich and flaky. Like a biscuit they're usually split before they're eaten, often slathered with jam. The British scone does exhibit marked differences from the American biscuit, notably in that it's shorter, denser and wheatier tasting.

The Aussies make scones that are almost exactly like our biscuits: tall and fluffy, often times with buttermilk. Yet while we tend to be rather puritanical about our biscuits, just about anything goes Down Under: banana, pineapple, pumpkin, sweet potato, cheese....the list goes on. At the end of the day, however, the American biscuit and the Australian scone are more alike than different. Is the New Zealand scone like the Australian scone? I honestly don't know, and will rely on a reader from there to tell me.

But why is it the American scone is such a bizarre creature? Not only is it triangular, it's huge. At once stone-like, it's also packed with butter, and can be frosted, filled, covered with nuts, or drizzled with icing or chocolate. What gives?

Personally, I think the American scone's lack of focus comes from the fact that the scone is still so new to us. True, American biscuits are surely descendants of scones. However quick breads with that name didn't start showing up in American bake shops until the 80's. Pressure to differentiate them from American biscuits in the minds of consumers is certainly what's led to all the scattershot experimentation. And the fiddling goes on. To my mind, as a culture we're still not sure if we want to keep them or not.

Which is not to say there aren't good American scone recipes out there. I'll be putting up one shortly, and while it's surely not "authentic", it is extremely tasty.

Several New Zealanders chimed in overnight to tell me that in their part of the world "scone" is indeed pronounced as that which rhymes with "gone". Reader Bronwyn (I love that name) says:

Actually, scone rhymes with gone in a great deal of the English speaking part of the world. I.e., New Zealand and Australia, and all of the English people I know. The only people I have known to rhyme it with bone have been a very few "trying to be posh and failing miserably" people in my childhood - the sort of people who would drink their tea with their little finger sticking out.

It's my recollection that in Devon (England) where I once lived, people pronounced it like "bone", but I wouldn't swear to that. Does anyone else get the sneaking suspicion that I'm well behind the 8 ball with this particular project?

If you're a Scotsman, you pronounce "scone" as that which rhymes with "gone", not "bone" as most of the rest of the English-speaking world does. Does that really matter? Well yes, because scones are Scottish breads. Originally they were made from either ground oats or barley (definitive Scottish grains), though very few people eat them this way anymore (even the Scots). But once upon a time they were a very simple griddle cake, made from grain and water, probably leavened with yeast.

Oh, how times change. Today scones can be just about any small bread or cake. They can be leavened with yeast, though almost all now employ baking powder or soda. And virtually all are made from white wheat flour and are baked instead of griddled. But that's where the commonality ends. Today you can find sweet scones and savory scones, plain, peach or pumpkin scones, round, square or triangular scones, dry and crumbly or rich and cakey scones. There really are no rules anymore, though there are predominant national styles, which I shall get into shortly.

Let's face it, the scone is a British staple that's been horribly abused in the America. Go to a chain bake shop, ask for a scone, and you'll likely be handed a giant, thick-as-a-brick wedge of flour and (probably) shortening. Most often, they're crumbly, dry and almost totally flavorless. No wonder Americans, by and large, detest the things. It's time they were reclaimed for civilization.

I'd heard of it before, but until last night, when some friends dropped by for dinner, I'd never tasted any. For those of you who don't know what it is, it's one of those (very American) concoctions of pre-made storebought...stuff! In this case Oreo cookies combined with a whipped topping of some sort, blended with layers of vanilla pudding mix. As a scratch baker, I'm honor-bound not to like such things. But you know what? It was excellent.

Reader Lee writes in to say:

I consider myself both a foodie and a lefty, but don't think the two have anything to do with each other. I get annoyed by lefty types who view their essentially sensualist desire to eat well as some sort of political/social virtue; I get equally annoyed by conservatives who mock all attempts at introducing questions of ethics and sustainability to discussions of food and/or animal production, or who use attacks on some of the more strident foodies, like Alice Waters, as attacks on progressives generally.

Well said, and indeed I've never considered this a left/right issue. A lot of progressive thinkers instinctively support the Pollanites, I think, because they're anti-corporate. Yet the movement exhibits a brand of wealthy elitism that one normally associates with conservatives. It is, indeed, a very odd ideology that has very little to do with ordinary people. That simple fact, I have a feeling, will severely limit Food Inc.'s box office appeal.

A lot of folks have written in to ask where they can go for more information on Food Inc.-related subjects. Meat and poultry producers have put up this site, safefoodinc.com as a rebuttal. Then for general reading there's the Center for Global Food Issues. More as I find out about them!

Maybe next week you can talk about how to get the hornets back into their nest after you've finished kicking it! That would be germane, and the possible honey segues are obvious!

You may just have an idea there, Mike. You may just have an idea...

…is that it is trying to manipulate you. How? With lots of shocking images of industrial food production. They aren't pretty, but then there’s no shortage of ugly things in the world of industry. Heck, there’s no shortage of ugly things in the world in general — one of them is blogging at you right now!

The problem is that what Food Inc. seeks to do is take the revulsion you feel for that ugliness and the rare (but let’s face it, inevitable) mistakes of the modern food system and try to turn it into political activism — and that makes it propaganda.

Ugly or no, the modern food system is the reason most of us are even alive to watch a film like Food Inc.. That system has many urgent problems, problems that need to be addressed soberly and constructively. The makers of Food Inc., however, aren’t interested in that, but rather with simply burning the whole thing to the ground — and throwing away the decades of advances responsible for feeding people and extending life expectancies the world over. They advocate a perfect, organic utopia that will never, indeed CAN never, exist.

So if you are concerned about what you’re eating, go talk to some farmers. Get informed — get involved! But get involved a real discussion about the real issues. Don’t get seduced by the sensationalism and easy answers served up in Food Inc..

And with that I’ll get off my own personal soap box, thank you very much. Monday, we return to our regularly scheduled programming. Happy weekend — and happy movie going — to all!

The elephant under the carpet of the organic discussion is and always has been: land. There's only so much of it on the planet we can grow food on. About a billion and a half sqaure hectares by UN estimates. That's twice the amount of productive land that was being farmed 100 years ago, though there are now about three and half times as many people. Most of them would be starving right now if we didn't have conventional and GMO agriculture to feed them.

Farmed organically, it's estimated that the current arable acreage of the world could sustain about 2.4 billion people. The current global population is 6.5 billion. In our lifetime we'll see that population increase another 50% or so, to about 10 billion before, some statisticians say, global population will start to level off. Feeding all those hungry mouths will require 35% more calories than we're producing right now.

So just clear more land, you might say. If we did — plow every available piece of park land and forest (including rain forests) — it's thought we might be able to just feed 4 billion people. But that's it. To feed humanity in the coming years, farmers around the world will be under consistent pressure to increase yields by 3% per year, every year. That simply won't happen under a totally organic system.

One of the things Michael Pollan tries desperately to do in his books (and I presume will attempt in Food Inc.) is to make organic farming appear more efficient than conventional or GMO. This he does through various argumentative tricks, some of which I listed below in the Bad Logic post. The reality is that there is no efficiency argument to be made for organic farming, at least in conventional terms. When it comes to getting the maximum out of land relative to what went into it, conventional and GMO win every time.

So let's change the definition of efficiency say the organic crowd. And they do, by pouring more and more context (external costs like the overall economic impact of runoff and pollution) into their equations until they arrive at numbers they're happy with. That makes a certain amount of sense, since one of the cornerstones of the organic philosophy is that everything is connected. But of course changing the math still doesn't change what goes on at the farm level, nor increase the total amount of food that an entirely organic system would be capable of producing.

Reader Dan P. writes in to ask:

Joe, I read your post on GMO farming with great interest. Would you mind telling me, other than increasing the yields of a crop we don't need and tinkering with the building blocks of life, what GMO crop developers have really achieved?

Dan, I couldn't be more pleased to answer that. Here's what Norman Borlaug wrote in the Wall Street Journal about a year ago:

• Since 1996, the planting of genetically modified crops developed through biotechnology has spread to about 250 million acres from about five million acres around the world, with half of that area in Latin America and Asia. This has increased global farm income by $27 billion annually.

• Ag biotechnology has reduced pesticide applications by nearly 500 million pounds since 1996. In each of the last six years, biotech cotton saved U.S. farmers from using 93 million gallons of water in water-scarce areas, 2.4 million gallons of fuel, and 41,000 person-days to apply the pesticides they formerly used.

• Herbicide-tolerant corn and soybeans have enabled greater adoption of minimum-tillage practices. No-till farming has increased 35% in the U.S. since 1996, saving millions of gallons of fuel, perhaps one billion tons of soil each year from running into waterways, and significantly improving moisture conservation as well.

• Improvements in crop yields and processing through biotechnology can accelerate the availability of biofuels. While the current emphasis is on using corn and soybeans to produce ethanol, the long-term solution will be cellulosic ethanol made from forest industry by-products and products.

And those numbers don't even begin to address reductions in the overall "carbon footprint" of agriculture worldwide, from carbon release (from tilling) to air pollution (from machinery). (For those who don't understand the headline, I'll refer you to Monty Python 101.)

Today is going to be a day of summary and conclusion — mainly because I can't keep up with the volume of email I'm getting! My hope is not to continue this week's subject into next (as a main theme anyway), for while the political animals and information junkies out there are yelling "Go on! Go on!", the bakers are yelling "Please stop! Please stop!" I have to defer to the latter group, since joepastry.com is, first and foremost, a baking blog. I've never liked politics in my food (they leave a medicine-y aftertaste), however this week I felt it was important to take a stand against something I genuinely believe is dangerous. Expect updates in the future on Food Inc., though starting Monday I'll be back to baking as my primary occupation. For all you bakers out there — thanks for your patience!

Notice I didn't use the word "corn" in the header, primarily because the data I have is for organic agriculture generally. Organic farming is the hardest of all to summarize since organic practices vary so widely. In fact there's very little agreement these days as to what "organic" actually means. Originally organic was a holistic idea. Which is to say, it envisioned a nation of small, highly localized agricultural systems in which crops and waste products were continually recycled and reused. Organic grain would be used to feed organically-raised cows and chickens, which would go on to produce organic milk and eggs, with their organic waste going to fertilize crops, to use a very simplistic example.

In fact very, very little organic food is produced this way, mostly because organic, for good or for ill, has become big business. And big business requires volumes of ingredients that smaller systems simply can't supply consistently. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Nowadays the popular conception of "organic" simply means food raised without artificial "inputs", which is to say synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.

Of course it wasn't all that long ago that all farming was organic. About 80 or so years ago, before the advent of nitrogen fertilizers and gas-powered tractors, when farmers relied heavily on field rotation to replenish the nutrients that particular crops (like corn) took from the ground. By and large today's organic farmers seek to emulate those pre-industrial practices, though they do use modern gas-powered equipment, and take advantage of the technical learning that's been accumulated since the bygone days.

So how does the practice of organic farming compare to conventional or GMO? In general organic farming uses quite a bit less fuel, up to 50% less according to some estimates, mostly because organic farmers don't spend time in the fields applying chemicals. But because organic farmers don't use chemicals, they're forced to till more, both to aerate the soil and undercut weeds, which they can't kill in any other way. This is a practice, as I mentioned before, that on the one hand releases quite a bit of earth-bound CO2 into the atmosphere and also leads to soil erosion. Organic farming has been criticized on both counts, though the overall "carbon footprint" of organic farming is less than either conventional or GMO and causes less erosion.

The main problem with organic farming is output. Organic yields are on average 25% less than conventional, and up to 50% less that GMO, for reasons that should be obvious. GMO crops can be planted far closer together. Also, without pesticides, organic farmers lose quite a bit more of their crops to plant predators. Frequently they're forced to plant "bait" crops on adjoining land in an effort to lure the bugs away. Organic farmers also frequently require fallow "buffer zones" around their crops to prevent intermingling with conventional varieties. Both practices are wasteful from the standpoint of efficiency, though in fairness it should be pointed out that growing small quantities of multiple crops on the same land is part of the organic philosophy. GMO farmers themselves employ insect "refuges" in their fields — a percentage of conventional crops that bugs can feed on to prevent them from becoming immune to the GMO varieties. Though of course the difference there is that those refuges are still producing significant quantities of usable crops.

But then the point of organic farming is not efficiency by industrial standards. From the vantage point of an organic farmer, the main efficiency of an organic farm lies in the fact that it requires less from the earth, especially its non-renewable resources.

Which is to say genetically modified farming, the use of genetically engineered corn strains to stave off pests and increase yields. Though again, that's just the beginning of what GMO corn farming actually is. But we'll get to that. At this juncture I should once again emphasize that everything I'm about to write applies to field corn only, since GMO corn has yet to be approved for human consumption.

So when people say a particular strain of corn is genetically modified, what do they mean? They mean that specific genes have been inserted into the corn's DNA to make it more resistant to the various pests I talked about earlier. The first genetically modified corn product went by the name of "Bt" corn, since it contained a gene from a common bacteria found in soil, Bacillus thuringiensis. The gene causes the corn to produce a toxin (which is also found in certain types of caterpillars and moths) that repels a variety of unwanted bugs.

The next step in the evolution of GMO involved the insertion of a gene that made the corn resistant to a Monsanto-produced herbicide called Roundup. The active ingredient in Roundup is a chemical called glyphosate, which isn't particularly toxic to humans (in fact far less so than many conventional herbicides) though deadly to just about any type of plant, particularly perennials like weeds. Applied to a field, it wipes out pretty much every plant-based form of life it touches, except the plants that have been engineered to resist it. Amazing…if a touch on the scary side.

Today the leading edge of GMO corn agriculture is a Monsanto product that goes by the name "Triple Stack"; a type of corn genetically engineered to be at once resistant to Roundup and to two especially, pernicious pests: corn borers and root worms.

So what does it all add up to? Farmers who use Triple Stack scarcely need to till, and can vastly reduce the amount of pesticides and herbicides they apply to their crops. That means significant savings in time, money and fuel, plus an increase in yield. From the standpoint of the land and environment the benefits are just as striking, since all that reduced machine time means a lot less pollution, carbon release, and vastly reduced soil compaction and erosion.

What are the drawbacks? Mostly in public perception, since the GMO technology that's in current use has yet to be linked to any significant risks to either nature or human health. True, in 1999, GMO corn was blamed for inhibiting the reproduction of monarch butterflies, though that theory was disproved definitively in 2001. Fears that GMO corn would hybridize with native grasses causing an environmental crisis have never been come to fruition. More recently, GMO corn has been blamed for Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), that mysterious bee disease we've all been hearing so much about. The problem with that idea is that in Europe CCD is every bit as bad as it is here, and they grow virtually no GMO corn (about 0.04% of their annual field corn crop compared to 40% in the US). All of which seems to indicate that the media hysteria about GMO corn isn't very well founded.

For my part, I'd be lying if I said that GMO corn doesn't intimidate me a little. But then the more time that goes by and the more I learn about it, the better I tend to feel. Critics of GMO will forever claim that not enough testing has been done to absolutely, positively prove that GMO corn is safe. My feeling, though, is that as the years pass, the benefits of GMO will become increasingly hard to deny.

I'd also like to add that blogging from the inside of a McDonald's play place, crammed with screaming children, is extraordinarily difficult.

For most people a "conventional farmer" is another way of saying "a farmer who is willing to use chemical fertilizers and pesticides". That doesn’t really do conventional farmers justice, but for a thumbnail description on a busy Thursday morning, it’ll do.

As anyone who's ever tried to maintain a garden knows, the hardest thing about bringing up a food crop is preventing other forms of life from horning in on a hard-earned meal (insert in-law joke of your choice here). Those party crashers can include insects like aphids, beetles and mites, but also microbes like fungi and rusts. And then there are the weeds. It's a lot to contend with, but conventional farmers have a variety of means at their disposal for dealing with them.

Among the simplest is tilling. Which is to say, applying a disc to the land and turning weeds under in the springtime. More aggressive measures like herbicides are of course common. For the bugs like corn borer and root worm, there are applications of pesticides, and for the disease-causing microbes, further applications of fungicides (which are often applied by plane).

That all adds up to a lot of activity in the field (especially when you consider that’s all in addition to the normal seeding, fertilizing and harvesting), and working land like that has its drawbacks. For one, it's expensive. Equipment consumes fuel, and the chemicals certainly aren't free. Multiple passes with machinery also causes "compaction", which prevents the land from absorbing water, fertilizer and oxygen, and cuts down on yield. Also, because rain water tends to run off compacted soil instead of soaking in, it contributes to soil erosion.

And there are other problems. The simple act of tilling soil releases huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, where it bonds with atmospheric oxygen to create CO2, a greenhouse gas. It also leaves land highly susceptible to erosion, since water will simply wash it away.

The good news is that over the last fifteen or so years great strides have been made in so-called "no-till" farming, whereby farmland is left undisturbed to limit carbon release, erosion, expense and labor. But where you don't till, of course, you invite weeds. That’s why no-till farming is typically conventional (you need the chemicals to stop the weeds you didn't kill by turning them under). Currently the trend in tilling is toward "limited tilling", whereby farmers run a disc or harrow over the land in the springtime to open it up to moisture, air and early season warmth.

Gad, I'm taking up a lot of space and time and I really need to get back in the car and get moving (what made me think taking on a topic like this during a travel week was a good idea?). Sadly, I've only scratched the surface (no pun intended) of what conventional farming is all about. But suffice to say for all its drawbacks it has been the way American farmers have achieved maximum gain from the land while at the same time doing everything possible to preserve and protect it. Is it a perfect system? Certainly not. But then no form or farming is perfect — even organic — as we’ll soon see.

A LOT of people are writing in asking why a.) I would choose to side with horrible “agrobusiness” companies like Monsanto, especially when b.) only a tiny proportion of Americans follow Michael Pollan’s advice on organic eating. To that all I can say is a.) I’m not taking sides with Monsanto (you want to hear a conventional or GMO farmer really complain, ask him how he feels about Monsanto), but with what I consider the side of sanity, and b.) the “tiny” Pollanite minority out there is a very elite group, consisting of some of the wealthiest and most influential people among us. After the last election, there was a serious movement afoot to nominate Michael Pollan Secretary of Agriculture. If that doesn’t chill your bones…you need to keep reading.

Corn, as I've written before, is a New World crop. It's been said that corn is to the Americas what wheat is to Europe and rice is to Asia. More than just a food, it’s practically part of our DNA. Ancient Mesoamericans liked to describe themselves as "corn people" or "corn walking". Art from the period depicts stern Mayan faces peeking out from inside corn husks where the cobs should be. It’s very neat stuff.

The plant, so it's thought, didn't "evolve" in the typical sense. Rather it appeared very suddenly — virtually out of nowhere — about 10,000 years ago, a freak mutation of the teosinte grass. But it was a mutation that the people of the time (ancestors of modern-day Mexicans) quickly seized upon. In fact pre-Columbian peoples were so good at growing and hybridizing corn, northern Native Americans were cultivating at least six distinct strains by the time the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock. It's no exaggeration that had it not been for corn, the early colonists would never have survived in the New World. The wheat they brought with them was very poorly adapted to New World conditions. Corn had the home court advantage.

It's interesting to think that for thousands of years, even through the industrial revolution, corn cultivation in America didn't change all that much. People by and large treated corn the way the Indians did. Right up until the early 20th century, per-acre yields were about the same as they were before the colonists arrived: roughly 20 bushels per acre. But it's amazing the difference 100 years can make. Today, in a very good year, yields can exceed 200 bushels per acre.

How is this achieved? Not by sowing plants that give up more ears. Individual corn stalks grow but one ear each. No, the tremendous increase in yield has come from learning how to grow more stalks in closer proximity to one another. In days past it wasn't possible to grow corn in the dense-pack we do today. For while pre-industrial corn may have been tall, it's roots were weak. Which meant a strong wind could blow a stalk right over. Not a big deal if you're talking about just one stalk, but if its neighbors were too close, they’d fall down like dominoes.

Today's hybridized corn has far stronger roots. Not only that, it can get by with far less water and is naturally resistant to more types of pests. Though that's just the beginning of what modern farm technology has achieved — even for organic growers. But I'm getting ahead of myself. More on this soon.

Let’s stop beating up on poor Michael Pollan for a while, why don’t we, and switch gears to farming. For obviously there are more than a few misconceptions about it out there. I'm not a farmer mind you, though I am descended from a long line of corn and soy farmers and elevator operators (grain elevator, that is…though there is at least one of the “going up?” kind in the gene pool as well). I certainly don’t know everything about farming, though I know enough, as my father likes to say, to keep non-farmers off balance.

Over the next day or two I’ll spend a little time writing about the three major types of corn agriculture practiced today: conventional, GMO and organic. Each is very different from the others, though all — at least to my mind — are misunderstood. But before I dive into that I think it's worth talking a little bit about the plant itself…

So far I’ve done my best to call attention to what I think are some of the major logical fallacies that underlie Omnivore’s Dilemma, and by extension Food Inc.. There was Pollan’s cobbled together “agrobusiness” nemesis, an amalgam of everybody from Exxon and Monsanto on down to small family farmers, all of whom think and act with a single mind. Assigning motive where it doesn’t necessarily exist is known as a straw man argument (I’m an old philosophy student from way back). After that there was the false cause, where Pollan blamed the existence of processed foods (and indeed much of the clutter of modern life) on corn. That was follow by the hasty generalization, whereby he charged corn with consuming petroleum when pretty much everything humans make, grow or use consumes petroleum.

Perhaps my favorite of the book, though, is this next one. One might call it a fallacy of omission or suppression of evidence. It goes like this:

It takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer [farmers] produced more than two calories of food for every calorie of energy invested.

This one is really a whopper, masterpiece of misdirection. How so? Because what Pollan conveniently leaves out of his calculus is the fact that 80 years ago horses and other beasts of burden — not machines — did most of the heavy work around a farm (especially a small farm). So of course we invested less petroleum in farming, there were almost no petroleum-burning machines! But that doesn’t mean it took any less total energy to raise an ear of corn, in fact it probably took more, since low-yield subsistence farming is so much less efficient.

Reader Michael writes in to say:

Sorry, Joe, but corn is, in fact, primarily fertilized with a petroleum product. Mass scale corn production requires a massive infusion of fixed nitrogen fertilizers. The primary fertilizer of choice for use with corn is anhydrous ammonia, which is a primarily petroleum based product. So, corn is, in fact, drenched in oil, if you want to put it that way.

Of course putting it that way is exactly what I have a problem with — and fertilizer, though it's derived from oil, isn't actually oil. To my broader point, however, many, many other types of crops require the application of nitrogen fertilizers. Corn is no particular offender in this area.

UPDATE: There's been a TON of response to this particular post on both sides of the argument, with critics claiming that corn does consume a greater amount fertilizer per acre, and defenders claiming that on a per bushel/per calorie basis, the statement is correct. Complicating the issue is that fertilizer applications vary according to the type of farming you're doing. Down the middle of the road are still others who say that while corn does consume more fertilizer, not all of it is petroleum-based, so the argument about oil still holds. I clearly have more investigating to do in this area. Thanks to all who weighed in!

This is one of the main tropes to have emerged about corn from the pages of Omnivore's Dilemma since its publication, and one which it seems we'll be stuck with for a while. Indeed it's hard to read a food blog or a major newspaper food section nowadays without coming across at least one instance in which a conventional agricultural product is described as being "soaked in oil". What does that mean? Well it's a metaphor, one that represents one of Michael Pollan's main indictments of conventionally raised corn.

Of course, corn isn't watered with oil. It isn't planted with oil, it isn't fertilized with oil, it isn't processed with oil. In fact at no point in the life cycle of a corn plant does it come into contact with petroleum. So what, then, does Pollan mean when he says that corn and corn-derived foods are "soaked in oil"? He means of course that the machines we use to plant, fertilize, harvest and transport corn run on petroleum.

That is indisputably true. But then so do the machines that are used to plant, fertilize, harvest and transport soybeans. Or carrots. Or organic buckwheat, or heart-healthy iron-rich baby greens. In fact there isn't much in our modern-day society that isn't "soaked in oil" by Pollan's standard. The coffee that I'm drinking at the moment, and for that matter the cup. The keyboard I'm typing on, the glasses I'm wearing. All the bricks that make up my office, the window panes in its walls, and pretty much everything I can see out of them: the grass in my lawn, my dogwood hedge, the sidewalk, my new brick patio, my charcoal grill. In fact the only thing that I can see that isn't swimming in a giant, Pollanean pool of petroleum is the giant 80-year-old black cherry tree on my fence line (which I'd better do something about before it falls on my oil-soaked house). My two-year-old daughter is positively dripping in oil, which is going to give her mother fits because that's a brand new dress she wearing.

The entire notion that any one food crop is any more "soaked in oil" than any other is completely ridiculous. I can think of a lot of things that require more oil than a field of corn — the jet that flew Mr. Pollan around on his book-signing tour to name just one. It is a fact of life — in fact it is one of the immutable laws of the universe — that work requires energy. Planting crops takes energy, harvesting them takes energy, transporting them takes energy, hell even eating them takes energy. For all but the latter, it's true that the energy input we use today is largely derived from oil. Pollan is right on that count, and it's fair to debate whether or not that's a good thing in the ultimate sense. But singling out corn as any special consumer of oil is deeply disingenuous and profoundly misleading.

As anticipated, a lot of feisty emails in my box — and it's only Tuesday — most of them stuffed with arguments about that's wrong with the modern food system. Let me clarify something: my purpose is not to argue that everything's hunky dory with modern agriculture. There are problems — serious ones — as any farmer, conventional or otherwise, will tell you. Only a fool would try to pretend otherwise (so those of you who are even now composing more treatises on farm runoff for me, please stop now). My purpose is to argue that on balance, our food production system is worth keeping. Does that mean I think we can afford to be complacent about the problems we have? By no means. I am, however, optimistic they can be solved.

It's tough arguing against a utopian. Why? Because utopias by definition have no problems. Existing not in the real world but in the minds of their creators (and adherents), they promise us only what is good and nothing that is bad. Anything real looks like dog meat by comparison, because real things have real pros and cons. The primary weakness of utopias, of course, is that they're impossible. I hope to demonstrate just how impossible Michael Pollan and Food Inc.'s utopia is over the course of the week.

Also, I wish to point out — many accusations to the contrary — that I am not attacking organic/vegan/local food lovers (my joke about organo-nuts not withstanding). What I'm doing is defending conventional food growers and producers against what I believe is an unfair attack. There's an important difference there. I've said before and I'll say again: I like organic food. I eat it regularly as part of a varied diet and encourage others to do so if they wish. The big difference between myself and the Pollanites is that they won't extend me the same courtesy. They're not content to eat the food they like and allow others to do the same. The totality of the conventional food system must be destroyed (or radically reorganized) in the bargain. Call me crazy, but I don't think that's reasonable, fair or possible.

The thing I love so much about the paragraph from Omnivore's Dilemma I quoted earlier is the insinuation that the sheer versatility of corn somehow makes it bad. As though processed foods, consumer packaged goods, and ugly retail architecture would all just disappear — or better still, would never even have been invented — if it weren't for bloody corn. The reality of course is that in a market economy demand drives production, not the other way around. Which means all those things would still be here without corn, their component parts would just be made from lots of other things. And that would be a shame, since the ability to derive so many useful things from a single source is not only efficient and cheap, it's far better for the environment.

Let's take wood as an example. Just like starch, wood has any number of uses. In its unadulterated state we build with it, burn it, make furniture out of it, and tacky chainsaw art. Yet there are quite a few other things we can make out of its primary component, cellulose. Paper is only the most obvious of these. Cellulose is also used to make clothing, animal feed, plastic, glue, photographic film, insulation, explosives, paint, waterproof coatings and artificial muscles for robots (who knew?). It's also used as a food ingredient, notably as an emulsifier and thickener.

Like starch, cellulose is found widely in nature. It's a basic architectural component of pretty much every plant-based thing: grasses, lawn weeds like nutsedge (which is driving me crazy at the moment) shrubs, bushes, fruits and vegetables, you get the idea. Now, to harvest the cellulose we'd need to make a piece of clothing, a bomb or a nice thick bowl of soup, we could go around collecting it from lots of small plants and shrubs, using lots of different vehicles (all of them fuel-burning) and assorted redundant processing facilities (all of them electricity-consuming) — or, we could just harvest one nice big tree from a tree farm.

This is pretty much the situation we find ourselves in with corn. Yes, we could go around collecting all the starch we need to make, well, everything, from all sorts of other, less prolific food plants. But if we can get all that raw material from a single source, one that's reliable, renewable, easy and inexpensive to grow, that's a whole heck of a lot better for us, and a whole lot better for the planet. Pollan damns corn for its primary virtue: of delivering up to us, in abundance, a raw material that's as basic to our food system as wood is to our building, printing and miniature flying robot-making industries. Does that make sense to you? Not to me. As they say in the world of used car advertising: that's not a drawback, it's a feature.

Why do we grow corn? I mean, I don't eat a whole lot of corn on the cob. Do we really need that much? It's a fair question, for indeed worldwide, we grow a ton of corn. More than a ton, in fact, much more. 700 million metric tons according to recent UN figures, with about 300 million metric tons of it grown right here in the USA. It is, by a considerable margin, the world's most popular grain.

But the question is: why? One answer is because corn delivers up more calories per acre than any other grain, indeed any other food or feed crop. With today's high-yield farming techniques a single acre of planted corn can yield over ten thousand pounds of food. And that's amazing, no matter what you think of conventional farming. Corn is also easy to grow. Sure it has a low tolerance for cold, but it's hardy, can get by without terribly much water, and is relatively undemanding of the soil it's grown in. In fact just three percent of what makes up a corn plant comes from the soil. The other 97%, if you include water, comes literally out of thin air. No wonder then that corn has been such a boon to starving regions of the world. It is truly the greatest of all of the agricultural gifts that the New World gave to the old.

So OK then, corn is a prolific, easy-to-grow calorie producer. Does it have anything else going for it? Indeed so. For it is a cereal grain, and as longtime readers of Joe Pastry know, cereal grains are rich repositories of starch, which they store in almost completely pure form in the region of the kernel known as the endosperm. So what's so great about starch? you may ask. Well as you may recall from other posts on the subject, starches (a.k.a. carbohydrates) are long-chain molecules made from simple sugars. In their natural state they have hundreds of possible uses. Dissected into their component parts, they have literally thousands more, as Mr. Pollan so eloquently summarizes in Omnivore's Dilemma:

Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food, and provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you'll find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HCFS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheese Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressing and the vitamins and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleaners, charcoal briquettes, matches and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn...in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed the supermarket itself—the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built—is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.

Pollan clearly hopes his readers will find this shocking. Rather counter-intuitive for a fellow you'd think would be into renewables. I mean, what would he prefer these items — most of which we all need or use to some degree in our lives — were made from, petrochemical derivatives? In fact the more you dig into this passage, the more you get the distinct impression that the big problem Mr. Pollan has is with modernity itself. But more on that later.

Speaking for myself, I find nothing objectionable here and everything commendable, just more examples of human ingenuity at work. Does that mean I'm some sort of unhinged processed food fanatic? No. Am I in love with military-industrial complex? No. Am I going to go and try to literally eat my corner grocery store? No. However it does mean that I stand in thrall at how amazingly useful and versatile a thing like a starch molecule can be. And while starches of various types can be harvested from a wide variety of plants, nowhere can they be had as abundantly and economically as they can in a kernel of corn.

More on that tomorrow...

Because, as I’ve written numerous times before, the pastry maker is the natural enemy of the organo-nut. Just about everything we pastry types touch is tied to technology in one way or another: milling (flour), refining (sugar), shipping (chocolate), the list goes on. Even the tools we employ are often highly technological. We also produce and consume quite a lot of concentrated carbs. Put it all together and you have a group of people that are practically (if not always philosophically) at odds with just about everything that has to do with organic food activism. Try going to an organic/local foods/vegan restaurant and asking for the pastry menu. You’ll see what I mean.

More than that, though, there are precious few others in the food blogophere who are interested in questioning this movement. In fact I suspect that most “foodies” consider themselves, by and large, members of the Pollan camp. They like to eat, they generally don’t like the idea of chemicals and additives, and want the highest quality foods that are available to them. There’s nothing wrong with any of that (just about every conventional and/or GMO farmer I know shares those attitudes). The problem is that few foodie types have ever taken much time to really investigate the agricultural system that’s responsible for delivering the groceries they enjoy so much. As a result they have little appreciation for the modern food system, its wonders or its limitations.

The people who work so hard within that agricultural system — who aren’t faceless corporate robots but people, many of whom run businesses their families have owned for generations — are well aware of those wonders and limitations. Indeed they’re at a loss to explain why they aren’t more apparent to the rest of us. Many of the farmers I know regard the conversations that take place in big newspaper food sections and on food shows with utter bewilderment. How could any half-way informed person ever believe such nonsense?

The problem of course is that we live in an insular world. Most people don't have farmers in their families anymore. For them, the workings of the food system, like the electrical work in their homes, is mostly invisible. It’s that very insularity, of course, that provides people who write books like Omnivore’s Dilemma and make movies like Food Inc. with an opportunity. To do what? Simply, to advance an elitist, luddite agenda, one that is fundamentally threatening, not only to farming families, but to the core mission of agriculture: of feeding and nourishing the population of the planet.

I think it deserves a little scrutiny.

The bad news is that I’ll be out of town on business again this week. The worse news is that I’ll still be blogging anyway. However, since I won’t be able to bake at all, this week will be devoted solely to information. What sort of information? Well, for those of you who haven’t heard, a film by the name of Food Inc. is set for release this week. What is Food Inc.? Suffice to say it is a documentary about food, but no ordinary documentary about food. It is a heavily biased sermon, featuring — and this will hardly surprise you — Michael Pollan, plus a host of other food scolds and activists. Its primary goal will be to lionize organic food producers and critics of the modern food system, while demonizing conventional farmers — especially corn farmers — as collaborators with an evil faceless enemy known as “agrobusiness”.

It promises to be quite the spectacle, and will no doubt be hailed as a triumph by major media film critics, food celebrities and art house theater audiences. In other words, lots of people who have no concept of, nor any direct experience with, modern agriculture.

Though I have yet to see the film, I’ve watched the trailer and read a good deal of the pre-release press. I’m quite confident I know what the film is: Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Movie, with a healthy dose of Pollan’s political manifesto, In Defense of Food, mixed in. Therefore I’m going to spend the week launching a preemptory rebuttal, a pre-buttal if you will, of the overall Pollan perspective. It will be comprised of a broad range of material, much of which has appeared on the blog before. All together I hope it will serve as a refutation, if not of the movie per se, of the base arguments that underlie it…which to my mind aren’t really arguments so much as they are inflammatory exclamations, misleading statistics, and general bellyaching. It should be fun!

I like sprinkles every bit as much as the next guy, but sometimes even the working man's delight needs to be taken uptown for the day. Pictured above is one of my old best-sellers: the lemon-lavender doughnut. Lemon and lavender were a hip combo six or eight years ago, but I'm pretty sure I was the only one putting them together in a doughnut icing. This really made some waves — in fact a fellow from Krispy Kreme once even offered to buy the recipe from me! I refused, but then they never would have been able to pull it off. No corporate purchasing agent would ever have sprung for lavender blossoms, not in a million years!

To make it, start with two tablespoons and a teaspoon of lavender infusion (from the infusions tutorial). Add to that eight ounces of powdered sugar, 1/4 teaspoon of lemon extract and four drops of yellow food coloring. Dip and top with curly strips of lemon zest (not strictly necessary, but a very nice addition).

For today is NATIONAL DOUGHNUT DAY. You heard me right! What does that mean for you? It means a free doughnut at your closest Dunkin' Doughnuts or Krispy Kreme store. Rock on! You know, people say this country has a lot of problems, and we do. But it's days like this that reaffirm my faith that fundamentally, we've got our priorities straight.

Hat tip: Sula Blue and Mexico Bob — thanks!

Infusions are highly useful things in the world of baking and sweets. If you've ever wondered how your local pastry shop gets the flavor of thyme into a tea bread icing, or how confectioners introduce the flavor of earl grey tea into a truffle, infusions are the answer. They allow a cook to import a flavor — usually one from an herb or spice — without having to import the herb or spice itself. That's a very handy thing when you want an icing or a topping that's free of flecks or lumps. Making an infusion is about as complicated as making tea. Here I'm making an easy lavender infusion.

I start with about two tablespoons of lavender blossoms, to which I add about a cup and a half of very hot (near boiling) water. I stir and allow the lavender to steep for 20 minutes...

...then strain.

And here I have a great lavender base to use in place of water in a simple powdered sugar-and-water icing:

It adds a nice perfume without being overpowering (and despite being purple-brown, adds virtually no color to the final mixture). Useful as a simple concoction like this is, you need not limit yourself to water. You can just as easily infuse milk, half-and-half or heavy cream (which can then be combined with chocolate to make a ganache). The applications are unlimited.

There's more to the doughnut life than just chocolate and vanilla, and I don't mean toppings (although one can have a lot of fun with nuts, sprinkles...even things like chips and breakfast cereals if you want to get crazy). No, I'm thinking more about icings. Back when I was making doughnuts in volume, one of my favorite tricks was using infusions to sneak extra flavors into otherwise very simple sugar-and-water toppings. What are infusions? I'm glad you asked...

They ban trans fats because they're so dangerous, laws are needed to keep people from ingesting even a gram. But they bring absinthe back because hey, a little thujone never hurt anybody. Here's to the public health!

A lot of people have asked me why I'm so skeptical about the dangers of trans fats when the science is so totally clear. One big reason is the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), the biggest and most prominent of the anti-trans fat pressure groups. They're the ones who've been running around suing (and/or threatening to sue) the likes of KFC and Starbuck's over the last few years. Their contention is that the food industry should never have switched from natural saturated fats to hydrogenated fats in the first place. I'm inclined to agree. The irony here is that they were the ones who, back in the late 80's, were primarily responsible for pressuring food companies and restaurant chains into making that switch in the first place.

A fair minded person might say: c'mon Joe, can't a person — or a whole big group of people — make a mistake? Absolutely. However where I get hung up is: did they make the mistake then? Or are they making it now?

A very wise person once said that there's no such thing as helpful hysteria. Case-in-point the madness surrounding trans fats these past few years, which has had some very odd consequences. For cow's milk — any cow's milk — contains trans fats, as I explained below. That means that organic butter contains trans fats, local hormone-free milk contains trans fats, free-range grass-fed artisan heavy cream contains trans fats.

In any non-food neurotic society that wouldn't be any big deal. But in ours, where the label "Contains Zero Grams of Trans Fat" has become the most coveted in the food industry, a mad rush to scrub every last gram of trans fat off the ingredients list has meant that some food makers — especially wholesale bakeries — are now substituting processed ingredients for natural ones because (you guessed it) they contain no trans fats.

I doubt this is what anti-trans fat crusaders had in mind when they began their campaign against the demon fat a decade ago. Such, however, are the consequences of fueling mass hysteria. A panicked mob doesn't do anything halfway.

So, trans fats. Invented by humans...unheard of in the natural world...a "biological novelty" (to quote our dietary bellyacher-in-chief, Michael Pollan). Is it true?

No. The number one "fact" we hear about trans fats — that they're entirely synthetic, lab-created compounds — is false. The arch conspirators in the global trans fat cabal are actually cows. Trans fats are, and always have been, present in cow's milk. About 5% of the fatty acids present in milk are trans fats, which means about 5% of the fat in beef is trans fat — which means up to a third of the trans fat human beings currently consume is naturally occurring trans fat.

Why do cows (as well as other ruminants like sheep, goats, buffalo, llamas, deer, wildebeest and giraffes) produce trans fats? Unknown. What role might trans fats play in animal metabolism? Unknown. Do the trans fats cows make act differently in the body than man-made trans fats? Again, unknown.

I bring this up not to imply that trans fats are good for us (or that cows may be receiving residuals from Procter & Gamble), but only to point out that there is so much that's unknown about them. And really, about fats in general. That's evident in the see-saw research we see about fat: fat is bad for you. No wait, fat is good for you. No no hang on, some fats are good for you and some fats are bad for you. Or actually I should qualify that: some good fats are bad for you some of the time, and other bad fats are actually very good for you other parts of the time.

Add it all up and you get lots and lots of very understandable confusion, plus the big sign I saw atop an organic meat purveyor's stand at my farmer's market this past Saturday: "Healthful Lard!" it shouted in big capital letters. Imagine what the reaction would have been to that even two years ago.

Are trans fats really any worse for you than other fats? Lately, and only very lately, some fairly definitive evidence (from the Nurse's Health Study, or NHS) has come along that they are. That to me is neither here nor there, since I've never consumed much in the way of trans fats, nor do I intend to do so. However it makes no sense, to my way of thinking, to be irrationally afraid of them either. A lot of what we eat is potentially harmful to us in large enough quantities (table salt springs to mind). Following the time-honored path of moderation in all things, I believe, is the surest road to both health and happiness.

This one is a no-brainer, save for one very important detail: never (really, never) use high quality chocolate to top a doughnut. Why not? Because truly good eating chocolate deserves to be eaten on its own. Combining high quality chocolate with a high quality doughnut ruins them both, as they compete for attention (kind of like pairing a truly great wine with a truly great dinner...a waste). Use the absolute cheapest chocolate you can find. In fact, don't even use chocolate if possible, use a "coating" chocolate, one without cocoa butter in it. Occasionally you can find it in big grocery stores. If that fails, then let your wallet decide. Trust me on this, you won't be sorry. Just melt the chocolate in the microwave (one burst of 20 seconds on high, followed by 3-4 more 10 second bursts) until the chocolate is completely melted:

Dip...

...and remove to a rack or plate to let cool and harden.

Or not.

No, only partial hydrogenation does it. You've heard that term before, I'm sure. Why are liquid oils only partially hydrogenated? Because the more you hydrogenate fatty acids, the more hydrogen atoms you add to those hydrocarbon chains, the firmer the fat gets. Fully hydrogenated cottonseed oil, for example, is so uniform and crystallizes so well, it's rock hard at room temperature. Try spreading that on a piece of toast! So, the process is usually stopped before the reaction progresses that far. The problem of course is that any time you have partial hydrogenation you get those darn trans double bonds. It's one of those all-or-nothing propositions.

The new "trans free" solid fry fats, so I understand, are a combination of fully hydrogenated vegetable oil and liquid oil, which gives the fat that in-between, butter-like consistency.

So then what, in technical terms, is a trans fat — really? And in what way is it different from other, more common fats? To answer this question, we must return to that "E"-shaped triglyceride molecule I mentioned last week. As you'll recall, triglycerides are "E"-shaped because they're composed of a molecule of glycerol with three fatty acid molecules attached. Fatty acids come in many, many different kinds. You even get different types of fatty acids on the same triglyceride molecule, but for purposes of explanation, I'm going to assume that they're all the same.

So then, you remember what I wrote about hydrogenation, the process by which hydrogen atoms are added to a fatty acid (hydrocarbon) chain. Here's a convenient and "after" and "before" visual aid. Notice in the unsaturated example that when a carbon atom in the chain isn't bonded to two hydrogen atoms, it uses its available bonds to double-bond to the carbon atom next to it. Carbon atoms are like that, they hate loose ends.

Follow me? Good. Now, suppose you get an instance where there are only two hydrogen atoms missing in a chain, but the vacancies are right next to each other. Carbon atoms being what they are, they'll use their available bonds to hold on to one another in a double bond. That double bond puts a kink in the chain, like this. It's this kink that would make this particular fat a liquid, since it's odd shape would prevent it from being easily "stackable", and as you may recall from other posts on crystallization, it's this stacking action that creates crystals, and crystals create solidity.

Still with me? Excellent. Now here's the critical bit. These types of double-bonded carbon atom configurations come in two types, "cis" and "trans". If both of the hydrogen atoms in the bond are on the same side of the hydrocarbon chain, as in the previous "kinked molecule" example, it's a "cis" which is Latin for, you guessed it, "on the same side". If the two hydrogen molecules are on opposite sides of the chain, then you get a "trans" bond which means — anyone? anyone? — that's right, "across".

What's the difference between the two bonds? Not that much, save for the fact that, as you saw, the trans bond straightens the fatty acid molecule back out again. The result is a fat molecule that stacks, which means it crystallizes, which means a fat composed of it solidifies. Pretty easy, no? Actually not so much, which is why very few of the people who talk so loudly about trans fats actually know what they are.

This is my favorite way to enjoy a cake doughnut, without any fancy flavors, just a good honest scratch doughnut glazed with a thin coat of icing. As you might expect, it's a very easy thing to do. Just combine:

8 ounces powdered sugar
2 tablespoon plus two teaspoons water or milk
a few drop of vanilla extract

Stir until your icing is smooth:

Dip your slightly warm or cooled doughnut...

...and quickly remove it to a wire rack where the icing will drip down the sides and harden.

Now where did I put that cup of coffee?

...it's good to know there's somebody out there swimming upstream against the whole thing, throwing fat wads of cash to the four winds. That man is Nick over at imafoodblog.com, who dined with all the humility and restraint of a rubber baron this past weekend, with his Kobe beef carpaccio with shaved black truffles and champagne panna cotta. I consulted (slightly) on the panna cotta. The meal was funded by Foodbuzz, who I'll make a mental note to call when I finally decide to make that gold leaf puff pastry I've been designing.

You know enough about fats and frying now to know why solid fats are valuable to the food (and especially baking industry). Solid fats are durable and far less prone to both "weeping" and rancidity than liquid oils. Which means foods that contain them are less prone to spoilage, and that's good for pretty much everybody. The problem is that historically solid fats — because they were derived from animals — were more expensive than liquid oils. Wouldn't it be nice, people once thought, if we could find a way to make liquid fats solid?

That way was discovered in 1902 when a German chemist by the name of Wilhelm Normann bubbled hydrogen through plant seed oil in the presence of a catalyst metal. The process, called hydrogenation, had the effect of saturating unsaturated fats. Which is to say, it caused unsaturated fatty acid (hydrocarbon) chains to pick up hydrogen atoms, and so become firmer.

The only thing odd about this new fat (which Proctor & Gamble started to market a few years later under the name “Crisco”) was the shape of some of the fatty acids in its molecules. Normann found that while he could add hydrogen atoms to unsaturated fatty acid chains, he couldn’t control the configuration of those atoms once they attached. No big deal though, since the fat performed exactly like all other solid fats. Better, really. It would be many, many decades before anyone thought to question the safety of this very important process.

I went and mentioned trans fats, which means I'm getting a lot of mail, some of it from people who are angry that I'm not angry about trans fats, some of it from people who just want to know what trans fats are. Since I'm not someone who enjoys controversy very much (even though I find myself in the middle of it quite a bit), I'll stick to the second part. This may take a few posts, so bear with me...

Reader Matt wrote in over the weekend to ask:

I read your post "The True Sinker" and it made me wonder. According to your other posts on fry oil, only oil that's pretty far gone soaks into food that fast. Does this mean most doughnut shops don't change their oil very often?

Actually, Matt, the truth is that most doughnut shops don't change their frying fat at all...ever. Does that mean their oil is horribly old, black and soapy? No, not really. However the commercial doughnut industry long ago arrived at a balance that they felt they could live with, whereby the oil gets old but not too old...and the doughnuts soak up shortening but not too much (at least so it's not all that noticeable). The result was the "add-to" system, where fry guys simply replenish their fryers with scoops of fresh shortening between batches — the shortening that the previous batch of doughnuts soak up — forever. Is this so horrible a thing to do? I can think of worse crimes that have been committed by makers of mass-produced bakery goods. However it's very far from ideal frying. Just one more reason, as if you needed another one, to make your own.