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Food

Greg Blanchard at WSU
Summer 2013

Greg Blanchard—On timing and taste

Greg Blanchard is making dinner for 224. From the cramped confines of the CUB kitchen, he and his staff have just a few hours to create three different types of crostini, chicken parmesan and linguine, garlic bread, Caesar salad, and strawberry shortcake, with exceptions for vegetarians, the lactose intolerant, avoiders of gluten, and one person who just doesn’t like cheese.

Come 6:30, student waiters and waitresses in black ties will serve the food on individual plates, a timing play that ups a chef’s game from, say, a buffet. If the food is ready too soon, lettuce will get flat, chicken will get dry, strawberries will … » More …

Concord grapes—primarily a Vitus labrusca (fox grape) cultivar. Courtesy NGWI
Summer 2013

Juice Grapes

I should point out right up front that I haven’t tried unfermented grape juice in a long, long time. In fact, the last time I had it may have been as a teenager during communion at our teetotaling church, where grape juice was our “wine.”

So it’s intriguing now decades later how familiar the taste is as I sip a glass of Concord grape juice, most likely grown—in spite of the Massachusetts address on the bottle—in the Yakima Valley.

Familiar, and also quite delicious. Full-bodied, not too sweet, with a pleasing astringency and a distinctly Concord flavor that Craig Bardwell ’84 refers to as “foxy.” … » More …

Bread loaves
Summer 2013

Let everyone eat bread

For the better part of four decades, Mark Wildung (’89 BS, ’92 MS) felt lousy.

He felt like he had a flu, but wrote it off, thinking everyone felt that way. He had a hollow leg, packing twice as much food as his friends on backpacking trips, but his body was withering away, his weight dropping to 138 pounds.

Finally, at a going-away party before a trip to Germany, a physician-assistant friend suggested he might have celiac disease, an autoimmune reaction to certain gluten proteins found in grains like wheat, barley, and rye. His symptoms got worse in Germany, a land of great bread and … » More …

Spring 2013

How Washington tastes: The Apple meets Cougar Gold

Much of Carolyn Ross’s work involves training people to quantify their taste. The sensory evaluation panels that she and her graduate students organize assess taste attributes in fruit and other foods and beverages such as sweetness, acidity, bitterness, and astringency. And “mouth feel,” which contributes enormously to the taste experience.

But for these panels to arrive at a consensus of, say, how sweet a given apple is, or how tart, or how much it crunches in relation to other apples, everyone must agree on the intensity of those attributes.

Before the panel members can evaluate a given food, they will train for a number of … » More …

The barns at WSU’s research station in Puyallup.
Spring 2013

The Essential Egg

More than a century ago one man’s longing to live in the country led to a course in chicken farming offered through Washington State College, laying the groundwork for one of the largest and oldest egg operations in the Pacific Northwest. Along with just a few other large egg companies, the family-run Wilcox Farms is now a pillar in Washington’s 1.9 billion-egg-a-year industry.

In the early 1900s, a Canadian transplant named Judson Wilcox settled in Seattle. He had a home on Queen Anne and a hat shop in Pioneer Square. But city life wasn’t for him. In 1909 he visited a site east of … » More …

Winter 2012

Onions

Think of all the recipes that begin with this simple instruction: Cook (saute, melt, etc.) onions. In spite of that ubiquitous beginning, however, the literature of food, which can wax poetically and extensively about salt or beans or wine, gives the onion, which provides the savory structure for thousands of dishes, short shrift.

Maybe it is just that onions are so fundamental that we take them for granted, chopping and ingesting them as casually as we breathe air or drink water. Perhaps it is that the onion is a basic and ancient staple, like rice, corn, garlic, its wild ancestors an inherent part of our … » More …

Winter 2012

A place of taste

Chimacum Corner is more than just the busiest intersection in Jefferson County. It’s a yellow-walled farmstand where tomatillos from Finnriver Farm meet Roma tomatoes from SpringRain and where bread from Pane D’Amore bakery can find Cape Cleare tuna or cheese from Mt. Townsend Creamery. And it’s where locals can find the ever-growing bounty of the local farms and fisheries.

The market is just two years old. And with the motto “Eat your food from here” it grew out of a need for the small-scale producers in the region to reach customers outside the farmers’ markets. Rather than one day a week at the farmers’ market … » More …