Slow roasted vegetables is one of those things I started making years ago to make use of whatever I had left in the fridge and lower pantry storage bins, but it's become not only a family favorite but also the dish most requested at the potlucks and holiday office parties we go to. It couldn't be easier, or less expensive, and yet it's got the earthy elegance of something well worth eating.
Pour about an eighth of an inch of good-quality olive oil into a roasting pan -- if you're going to cook these on the woodstove, make it a cast iron, or enameled cast iron one; if it's going in the oven, any large glass or metal roaster will do. Then add in assorted root and winter vegetables cut into large stew-sized chunks (about 1.5 inches square, roughly speaking). Carrots, celery, potatoes, quartered medium sized onions, whole cloves of garlic, sweet potato, beets, turnips, rutabagas, pumpkin, squash, parsnips, whole button musrooms, whatever you have on hand. Sprinkle ground rosemary and thyme, as well as salt or sea salt and black pepper over the top, then toss until all are coated with the olive oil and herbs.
Now, cover them with the roaster pan cover or with aluminum foil, and let them roast at low temperature for as long as you can. The vegetables will certainly cook if you put them on 350 degrees or right on top of the woodstove for an hour or so, but they will be simply cooked vegetables. Put them in the oven at 200 degrees, or on a stack of trivets on the outer shelves of the woodstove, for the whole day, and the sugars in the vegetables carmelize and the flavors seep into one another and it becomes a whole different beast.
About an hour before serving, take off the cover and sprinkle with balsamic vinegar, then leave the pan open for a while to dry out the juices a little bit and bring them all to just the right texture: soft but still with the separate pieces of vegetable still recognizable, you don't want it to become a mixed puree. To this end, try not to stir the vegetables too vigourously; if you need to turn them to re-coat with oil, use a flat spatula and lift and flip them rather than stirring.
When I make this at home, I often top it with feta-stuffed portobello mushroom caps. About an hour and a half before serving, remove the stems from several large portobello mushrooms. Open the roasting pan and scoop out a few tablespoons of the juice. Mix it with some feta cheese and cream cheese, adding herbs, salt and pepper to taste. Add a little more juice or some milk if it needs to be thinned to spreadable consistency. Spread this thickly in the caps, and put them right on top of the roasting veggies. Cover the whole thing over again for about a half hour, then open to dry out for a little while, then run it briefly under the broiler before serving to brown the tops of the cheese.
Because of all the starches, this doesn't really need accompaniment, but brown rice or a wild rice pilaf seems to go nicely, as does baked beans and brown bread for a rich warm winter meal.
The special gourmet-tasting elegance of roasted vegetables comes from the long cooking time -- and yet, that's not time when you are doing anything. Cutting up the vegetables may take twenty minutes to a half hour, but then your work is effectively done. Put your feet up by the woodstove and knit or read while heat converts simple root and winter vegetables to extraordinary effect. Now that's multi-tasking, the Satisfying Living way.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Monday, December 3, 2007
Snow Day
It's a snow day-- the first for this school year. The woodstove is glowing and crackling away, there's the lovely gingerbread house my daughter made in the middle of the table, the Christmas tree is lit (though not yet decorated). Oh, there is work to be done; in fact, it gets downright frustrating sometimes how few weeks I actually manage to have five full workdays. Who sets these school calendars, anyway? Three days off for Thanksgiving, two days off for parent-teacher conferences, one day off for teacher trainings; add to that days when my daughter's been sick, and months on end can go by without a full workweek.
But living in Vermont or any northern snowy clime, you learn the peaceful surrender to snow days. People say that living in a northern climate builds fortitude and character, to deal with all that ice and snow. But I think it does something better than that: it develops flexibility. Fact is, in winter, there are days when you adapt your schedule to accomodate the weather. And come to think of it, not only in winter.
One of the great joys of rural living is being closer to the land, nature, the cycles of the year and the foibles of weather. If the day is sunny and gorgeous, get out and take advantage of it. Hike, bike, garden, get that outdoor painting project done. If snow is falling, load up the woodstove and get the oven going for cookies, or curl up with a book, or clear off the kitchen table for a craft project. And when some things are in season, they have to be attended to immediately or missed until the next year: fiddleheads are around for picking for only about a week in the early spring, and then they've gone by; cherries and wild grapes are perfectly ripe for only a day or two before the birds and critters have them picked clean. When tomatoes are ripe, they're ripe; miss them by a day or two and they are rotten.
If you drive from a suburban house or apartment to an artificially-lit office cubical five days a week all year regardless of the weather, and book vacations based on calendar days or when you own your timeshare slot, it's easy to miss things like fiddlehead season, the perfect day for picking wild grapes, or that wonderful sigh of peaceful surrender to a snow day. True, it means that your paycheck and expenses are steady and you can schedule vacation time with family in a more organized fashion -- but I think something is also lost along the way. There is a deep, natural satisfaction in a life tied even in these simple ways to the rhythm of life in all the wider Creation rather than the rhythm of bricks, pavement, and the dashed yellow lines of highways.
But I don't think living in a more urban area necessarily means you have to sever this connection with the world outside human constructions. Open a window; plant a garden in a window box; take a walk when the sunshines, and sit peacefully on a park bench or even in a bus-stop kiosk on days it rains. Start household traditions based on the seasons: drive out to a farm and pick strawberries or apples, find a local pond and try to catch spring peepers.
And today, it's snowing. Stay home. Bake cookies. Experience serenity.
But living in Vermont or any northern snowy clime, you learn the peaceful surrender to snow days. People say that living in a northern climate builds fortitude and character, to deal with all that ice and snow. But I think it does something better than that: it develops flexibility. Fact is, in winter, there are days when you adapt your schedule to accomodate the weather. And come to think of it, not only in winter.
One of the great joys of rural living is being closer to the land, nature, the cycles of the year and the foibles of weather. If the day is sunny and gorgeous, get out and take advantage of it. Hike, bike, garden, get that outdoor painting project done. If snow is falling, load up the woodstove and get the oven going for cookies, or curl up with a book, or clear off the kitchen table for a craft project. And when some things are in season, they have to be attended to immediately or missed until the next year: fiddleheads are around for picking for only about a week in the early spring, and then they've gone by; cherries and wild grapes are perfectly ripe for only a day or two before the birds and critters have them picked clean. When tomatoes are ripe, they're ripe; miss them by a day or two and they are rotten.
If you drive from a suburban house or apartment to an artificially-lit office cubical five days a week all year regardless of the weather, and book vacations based on calendar days or when you own your timeshare slot, it's easy to miss things like fiddlehead season, the perfect day for picking wild grapes, or that wonderful sigh of peaceful surrender to a snow day. True, it means that your paycheck and expenses are steady and you can schedule vacation time with family in a more organized fashion -- but I think something is also lost along the way. There is a deep, natural satisfaction in a life tied even in these simple ways to the rhythm of life in all the wider Creation rather than the rhythm of bricks, pavement, and the dashed yellow lines of highways.
But I don't think living in a more urban area necessarily means you have to sever this connection with the world outside human constructions. Open a window; plant a garden in a window box; take a walk when the sunshines, and sit peacefully on a park bench or even in a bus-stop kiosk on days it rains. Start household traditions based on the seasons: drive out to a farm and pick strawberries or apples, find a local pond and try to catch spring peepers.
And today, it's snowing. Stay home. Bake cookies. Experience serenity.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Can I Bake an Organic Cake?
There are plenty of desserts that are at least nominally good for you, like carrot cake, oatmeal cookies, or gingerbread. But if the occasion calls for towering swirls of buttercream or rich waves of chocolate (like, for instance, Valentine’s Day), you can’t think about it as a source of positive nutrition. Think of it instead as edible art.
My daughter and I are graduates of the entire three-phase Wilton cake decorating classes, meaning for fourteen weeks I was baking and frosting at least two cakes every week. This had me buying tubs of Crisco and sacks of white flour and sugar. But as I wandered the aisles of our natural food co-op, I wondered: could I make a cake purely from organic, or at least ‘real’, ingredients instead of commercial grade products stripped of flavor and full of chemical additives? The challenge began....
Flavorings and Fillings
I began the organic cake challenge cautiously, one ingredient at a time. I already used organic vanilla, so I simply replaced my other flavorings with purchased organic flavorings as they ran out – almond, peppermint, lemon, even butterscotch. The taste is vastly superior to commercial brands from the supermarket, and because the flavors are more intense, less is needed, and the price evens out. The only two flavors I can’t find organic alternatives for are rum flavoring (for a favorite holiday eggnog cake) and imitation butter, which I do away with by using a combination of butter and shortening in frosting.
Liquid and Shortenings
Organic milk, cream, and butter, including unsalted butter, are easily available on natural food co-op or natural food supermarket shelves, again better-tasting and better-baking than commercial alternatives.
Vegetable shortening is unfortunately necessary in most cakes. In many recipes you can substitute room-temperature butter for shortening, but since shortening melts at a higher temperature, the substitution can cause problems with the structure of the cake. The water content of butter also spurs gluten development – a problem when using organic flours which are just aching to launch gluten strings, blissfully unaware that we’re trying for fluffy cake, not chewy bread.
Spectrum Naturals manufactures an organic white, no-trans-fats, non-hydrogenated vegetable shortening. I had my doubts about it. There’s no point in mincing words: it’s expensive – over $8 for a tub the size of a $2.50 tub of Crisco. I was even more skeptical when I opened it and scooped out my first cup. The mealy-slippery texture seemed pretty gross. But how would it bake? It turns out quite terrific; there’s no noticeable difference in cake texture with it.
Then came the real test – using it in frosting recipes. So-called "buttercream frosting" rarely contains real butter and cream – made with all butter, it tends to have too strong a flavor and is too soft for artful cake decorating. I used to opt for a happy medium of half and half.
How would this wierd-textured, slightly off-white palm oil shortening work for frosting? Absolutely amazing! Blended with powdered sugar, milk, and flavorings, this stuff turns to pure silk. I like the texture so much that I now use 3/4 shortening and 1/4 butter in my frosting. Everyone who has eaten it remarked that even with oodles of frosting on the cake, they don’t wind up with that heavy, sickening, I-ate-too-much-frosting feeling. Now that I think of it, maybe that’s not a good thing....
Eggs and Leavenings
Some local organic eggs are smaller than commercial extra-large or jumbo eggs but since most recipes call for the old standard ‘large’ eggs, this usually does not present a problem. Fresh eggs have superior leavening power, so a smaller egg substitutes fine for a ‘large’ egg in terms of leavening. However, it may not quite add enough liquid to the batter for the proper pouring texture. You can add an extra teaspoon or two of milk, cream, or water to the batter if necessary, or water mixed with some meringue powder (dried egg whites).
Other leavening agents include baking soda and baking powder. Natural food co-ops and natural food supermarkets carry high quality varieties of each of these, as well as cream of tartar. While as far as I know, there isn’t an ‘organic’ version of these chemical components, Rumford baking powder is as close as it gets. Rumford doesn’t contain aluminum sulfate, found in most commercial brands. While this improves flavor and eliminates one ingredient that some people are sensitive to, it does require special handling.
Baking powder is ‘double acting’ because it works at two points: first, in the bowl as soon as liquid hits it, and second, in the oven, activated by heat. Aluminum sulfate delays reaction to the second stage, so with Rumford powder, about 2/3 of the response happens in the bowl, and about 1/3 in the oven. This means you need to be doubly sure that the oven is preheated, the pans greased and ready, and all other ducks in line before liquid hits the dry ingredients. If you thoroughly blend your dry ingredients first, you’ll be ahead of the game. It’s even better if you have a heavy-duty mixer instead of a handheld variety, since you can get away with shorter mixing time.
Salt is another tiny, yet critical component of cake baking. I love sea salt, but for cake, salt has to be very fine. Stick with fine table salt, or grind your sea salt several times to ensure it’s dissolvable.
Flour
Beautiful cake starts with equal weights – weights, not volume – of white flour and white sugar. Everything you have learned about what makes a ‘good’ flour for bread or other healthful cooking goes out the window for cakes. To get that delicate crumb, you want flour with no gluten, no germ, no oil, nothing but stripped-down dried-out odorless tasteless powder to hold all that butter, sugar, and flavoring. Stuff sold as ‘cake’ flour is heavily bleached, and there’s little left in it to indicate it was ever alive.
I have long used King Arthur’s ‘normal’ unbleached white flour in baking. The King Arthur Flour Cookbook points out that this all-purpose flour is not technically a "cake flour". That said, I’ve had great results with it, taking a little extra care in the handling.
Remember flour sifters? Nobody has used one in generations because flour no longer contains weevils and chaff, and is labeled "presifted". But if you want a light cake with good flour, you’ll have to learn to use one again. Sift flour onto a piece of parchment (so you can dump leftovers back in the bag), then using a fork, lightly sprinkle the flour into the measuring cup. Do not tamp it down – you want it fluffy. Level off the top of the cup with a flat edge. Each cup will contain an ounce less flour than if you’d scooped the flour with the cup measure.
More recently, I jumped over one flour bin at the food co-op to try King Arthur Organic White Wheat flour. For this, I follow these same directions for sifting, but on the advice of the folk sa the King Arthur bakers' helpline, before I put the flour in each cup, I put in two tablespoons of cornstarch. Cornstarch helps counteract the gluten and protein in the organic flour.
Another technique for working with organic flour in cake is to change the mixing order. Most of us were taught in home-ec class to start by creaming the shortening and sugar, add the liquid ingredients to this, mix our dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then add the liquid to the flour. But as soon as that liquid hits the flour, you’re starting gluten production (as well as triggering baking powder reaction). An alternative is to first blend your dry ingredients, then add shortening into the dry ingredients for about 30 seconds on low mixer speed – this thoroughly blends the dry ingredients, and gets your flour particles coated with a protective raincoat of fat before you throw liquid on them. Then, add the liquid and beat on high speed for 3 minutes; with a heavy duty mixer you can cut this time in half. This has always yielded a great cake for me, with just slightly more body than a store-bought mix cake, just perfect for holding flavor and standing up against mounds of frosting.
White Sugar
My local co-op carries a few varieties of organic white sugar. It is very expensive, and creamier in color than the ordinary industrial varieties (as is the organic white flour). If it is critical to get a pure white cake, this will give you problems; but I’ve never had occasion where a slightly ivory cake color would be unacceptable, so it hasn’t been an issue for me.
Most organic white sugars look more like brown or demerara sugar. I hesitated to use organic sugar at first because chunky texture that would not blend well with silky smooth flour. Then I discovered Florida Crystals. Not only is it made in the U.S., its texture is close to superfine sugar. Still has a slight molasses smell and beige color, but it bakes beautifully.
I’m particularly fond of cake recipes which include brown sugar, which the Co-op also carries in organic varieties. Ironically, the brown sugar in bulk seems softer than the pre-bagged brands; just get it right into an air-tight container when you get home or you’ll wind up with a sugar brick.
Powdered Sugar
Here is an organic-cake sticky wicket. Powdered sugar is the main ingredient of almost every frosting. And yes, there is organic powdered sugar, believe it or not. Packaged, the Co-op carries two brands – Hains and Organic Sweeteners. The Hains is about three times the price of the other, with no difference in product whatsoever as far as I can ascertain in side by side taste tests (it’s a terrible job, but somebody has to do it).
Both brands of packaged powdered sugar come in 1 pound bags that are about half-full of rock-hard lumps. There’s no way around carefully sifting it, but the lumps in these bags are so hard that I can’t even crush them with a hammer; after paying the exorbitant price for them, I throw away a quarter of every bag.
Then I tried the organic powdered sugar sold a the co-op in bulk. At first glance, it looked the same – full of lumps. But the lumps in the bulk stuff were soft enough to bust up with my hands. It still must be carefully sifted, especially for decorating purposes (lumps of powdered sugar jam up decorating tips and lead to colorful expletives). But once it’s sifted, carefully scooped into measuring cups with a fork, gently sprinkled into organic vegetable shortening and butter and organic vanilla and other flavors, you’ll have the silkiest frosting you could ever imagine. Sure, it takes all day. But like, what else were you doing but making this cake, anyway.
The downside is color. Organic powdered sugar leaves a slightly grey, unappetizing color if it’s untinted. If you can’t live with it, you’ll have to add something to it.
Coloring
Food coloring is, obviously, artificial. Or is it? Some food colorings are synthetic; others are from natural sources, like beta carotene for orange and turmeric for yellow. When added to a food product, however, FDA considers them all ‘artificial coloring’. Beet juice added to strawberry ice cream, for instance, would be listed as ‘artificial coloring added’. When you buy food coloring for frostings, it will be a mixtures of synthetic and natural pigments.
If you don’t want to surrender to food coloring, one option is to forgo the color issue in favor of black and white. A chocolate cake with chocolate frosting looks gorgeous decorated in plain white uncolored decorator buttercream. A few drops of maple flavoring turn it a creamy carmel color; a few drops of chocolate turn it a deeper tan. Other flavor extracts provide light tints along with the flavoring, like orange-orange, or lemon-yellow.
There are suggestions for creating your own natural colors at www.allergygrocer.com, but I couldn’t see using pureed spinach to create green icing. On the other hand, some fruit puree for purples or pink would be nice.
I’ve recently acquired a set of samples of all natural (not organic, but at least non-synthetic) food colors from a wholesale manufacturer called ColorMaker. ColorMaker supplies bakery departments of whole-food supermarkets. Their colors are available for individual sale – but only in 2.2 pound bottles. That’s a lot of food coloring! The colors are light and pH sensitive, so I’m still experimenting, but they show a lot of promise.
If you go the commercial food coloring route, try professional cake decorating colors, available at our local Ben Franklin. They come in gel form in little canisters. The color is intense, so you only use a tiny bit to make vibrant colors, and the artificial additive is minimized.
The End Result?
It can be done! A gorgeous, all natural, organic cake. Fewer calories? Less carbs? Lower fat content? Sorry, no. Just real food, with real flavor. And that’s beautiful.
Valentine Cocoa Cake with Buttercream Frosting
Cake:
1 and 2/3 cup King Arthur organic white wheat flour
(sifted and measured by sprinkling lightly into cup)
1 and ½ cup Florida Crystals organic white sugar
2/3 cup dutched cocoa (sifted)
1 and ½ tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
½ cup organic vegetable shortening
1 and 1/4 cup organic whole milk mixed with 1.4 cup apple cider vinegar to clabber, OR 1 and ½ cup organic buttermilk
2 large eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two 8 inch round layer pans or a 13X9 inch rectangular pan.
Blend sifted dry ingredients together on low in a large mixing bowl for 30 seconds. Add the shortening and blend another 30 seconds on low. Add remaining liquid ingredients all at once. Beat on high speed 3 minutes with hand mixer, 1 to 2 minutes with countertop mixer, and pour immediately into pans. Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, until pick inserted into center comes out clean and cake feels slightly springy on top. Cake should not start to pull away from the sides of pan until just as it comes out of the oven. Baking times vary depending on your oven’s vagueries and environmental factors like humidity. Let cool ten minutes in pan, then turn out onto cooling racks and let cool one hour before frosting.
Frosting and filling:
1 and ½ cups organic vegetable shortening
½ cup organic butter (unsalted is preferred)
2 tsp. organic vanilla extract
2 tsp. organic flavoring of your choice
4 tablespoons milk or cream
1/4 tsp. salt
8 cups sifted organic powdered sugar
optional: 2 tablespoons merinque powder (powdered egg whites – ‘sets up’ the icing for decorating texture)
Note: For chocolate buttercream, add 2 tablespoons sifted cocoa and increase milk or cream by one to two tablespoons until the consistency is right. You can also add four ounces melted bakers chocolate or white chocolate, also increasing the liquid until the proper consistency is reached.
Blend the shortenings with the milk or cream and flavorings; add the salt and, if using, the meringue powder and melted chocolate or white chocolate. Add the sifted powdered sugar one cup at a time. If you are adding flavorings, be aware that most of them increase in intensity once they are allowed to sit for an hour or two, so don’t overdo it (I always do, can’t help it). Feel free to adjust the consistency with a little more or less powdered sugar, a little more or less milk, as dictated by your tastes and the wattage of your mixer.
If you are doing layers, remove ½ cup of icing and mix it with a non-liquid food material related to your flavoring to give your filling between layers added interest. For example, with orange flavor, add grated organic orange peel; for peppermint, try crushed peppermint candies; with maple or vanilla frosting try chopped crystallized ginger.
Flip your first layer over from the cooling rack, top with filling, and cover with the other layer (without flipping it over, so you have a smooth top). Ice the top first, then smooth excess icing over the edge and down the sides. Decorate as desired and enjoy fresh within twenty four hours; refrigerate for up to 3 or 4 days (like it’s going to last that long!).
Enjoy!
My daughter and I are graduates of the entire three-phase Wilton cake decorating classes, meaning for fourteen weeks I was baking and frosting at least two cakes every week. This had me buying tubs of Crisco and sacks of white flour and sugar. But as I wandered the aisles of our natural food co-op, I wondered: could I make a cake purely from organic, or at least ‘real’, ingredients instead of commercial grade products stripped of flavor and full of chemical additives? The challenge began....
Flavorings and Fillings
I began the organic cake challenge cautiously, one ingredient at a time. I already used organic vanilla, so I simply replaced my other flavorings with purchased organic flavorings as they ran out – almond, peppermint, lemon, even butterscotch. The taste is vastly superior to commercial brands from the supermarket, and because the flavors are more intense, less is needed, and the price evens out. The only two flavors I can’t find organic alternatives for are rum flavoring (for a favorite holiday eggnog cake) and imitation butter, which I do away with by using a combination of butter and shortening in frosting.
Liquid and Shortenings
Organic milk, cream, and butter, including unsalted butter, are easily available on natural food co-op or natural food supermarket shelves, again better-tasting and better-baking than commercial alternatives.
Vegetable shortening is unfortunately necessary in most cakes. In many recipes you can substitute room-temperature butter for shortening, but since shortening melts at a higher temperature, the substitution can cause problems with the structure of the cake. The water content of butter also spurs gluten development – a problem when using organic flours which are just aching to launch gluten strings, blissfully unaware that we’re trying for fluffy cake, not chewy bread.
Spectrum Naturals manufactures an organic white, no-trans-fats, non-hydrogenated vegetable shortening. I had my doubts about it. There’s no point in mincing words: it’s expensive – over $8 for a tub the size of a $2.50 tub of Crisco. I was even more skeptical when I opened it and scooped out my first cup. The mealy-slippery texture seemed pretty gross. But how would it bake? It turns out quite terrific; there’s no noticeable difference in cake texture with it.
Then came the real test – using it in frosting recipes. So-called "buttercream frosting" rarely contains real butter and cream – made with all butter, it tends to have too strong a flavor and is too soft for artful cake decorating. I used to opt for a happy medium of half and half.
How would this wierd-textured, slightly off-white palm oil shortening work for frosting? Absolutely amazing! Blended with powdered sugar, milk, and flavorings, this stuff turns to pure silk. I like the texture so much that I now use 3/4 shortening and 1/4 butter in my frosting. Everyone who has eaten it remarked that even with oodles of frosting on the cake, they don’t wind up with that heavy, sickening, I-ate-too-much-frosting feeling. Now that I think of it, maybe that’s not a good thing....
Eggs and Leavenings
Some local organic eggs are smaller than commercial extra-large or jumbo eggs but since most recipes call for the old standard ‘large’ eggs, this usually does not present a problem. Fresh eggs have superior leavening power, so a smaller egg substitutes fine for a ‘large’ egg in terms of leavening. However, it may not quite add enough liquid to the batter for the proper pouring texture. You can add an extra teaspoon or two of milk, cream, or water to the batter if necessary, or water mixed with some meringue powder (dried egg whites).
Other leavening agents include baking soda and baking powder. Natural food co-ops and natural food supermarkets carry high quality varieties of each of these, as well as cream of tartar. While as far as I know, there isn’t an ‘organic’ version of these chemical components, Rumford baking powder is as close as it gets. Rumford doesn’t contain aluminum sulfate, found in most commercial brands. While this improves flavor and eliminates one ingredient that some people are sensitive to, it does require special handling.
Baking powder is ‘double acting’ because it works at two points: first, in the bowl as soon as liquid hits it, and second, in the oven, activated by heat. Aluminum sulfate delays reaction to the second stage, so with Rumford powder, about 2/3 of the response happens in the bowl, and about 1/3 in the oven. This means you need to be doubly sure that the oven is preheated, the pans greased and ready, and all other ducks in line before liquid hits the dry ingredients. If you thoroughly blend your dry ingredients first, you’ll be ahead of the game. It’s even better if you have a heavy-duty mixer instead of a handheld variety, since you can get away with shorter mixing time.
Salt is another tiny, yet critical component of cake baking. I love sea salt, but for cake, salt has to be very fine. Stick with fine table salt, or grind your sea salt several times to ensure it’s dissolvable.
Flour
Beautiful cake starts with equal weights – weights, not volume – of white flour and white sugar. Everything you have learned about what makes a ‘good’ flour for bread or other healthful cooking goes out the window for cakes. To get that delicate crumb, you want flour with no gluten, no germ, no oil, nothing but stripped-down dried-out odorless tasteless powder to hold all that butter, sugar, and flavoring. Stuff sold as ‘cake’ flour is heavily bleached, and there’s little left in it to indicate it was ever alive.
I have long used King Arthur’s ‘normal’ unbleached white flour in baking. The King Arthur Flour Cookbook points out that this all-purpose flour is not technically a "cake flour". That said, I’ve had great results with it, taking a little extra care in the handling.
Remember flour sifters? Nobody has used one in generations because flour no longer contains weevils and chaff, and is labeled "presifted". But if you want a light cake with good flour, you’ll have to learn to use one again. Sift flour onto a piece of parchment (so you can dump leftovers back in the bag), then using a fork, lightly sprinkle the flour into the measuring cup. Do not tamp it down – you want it fluffy. Level off the top of the cup with a flat edge. Each cup will contain an ounce less flour than if you’d scooped the flour with the cup measure.
More recently, I jumped over one flour bin at the food co-op to try King Arthur Organic White Wheat flour. For this, I follow these same directions for sifting, but on the advice of the folk sa the King Arthur bakers' helpline, before I put the flour in each cup, I put in two tablespoons of cornstarch. Cornstarch helps counteract the gluten and protein in the organic flour.
Another technique for working with organic flour in cake is to change the mixing order. Most of us were taught in home-ec class to start by creaming the shortening and sugar, add the liquid ingredients to this, mix our dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then add the liquid to the flour. But as soon as that liquid hits the flour, you’re starting gluten production (as well as triggering baking powder reaction). An alternative is to first blend your dry ingredients, then add shortening into the dry ingredients for about 30 seconds on low mixer speed – this thoroughly blends the dry ingredients, and gets your flour particles coated with a protective raincoat of fat before you throw liquid on them. Then, add the liquid and beat on high speed for 3 minutes; with a heavy duty mixer you can cut this time in half. This has always yielded a great cake for me, with just slightly more body than a store-bought mix cake, just perfect for holding flavor and standing up against mounds of frosting.
White Sugar
My local co-op carries a few varieties of organic white sugar. It is very expensive, and creamier in color than the ordinary industrial varieties (as is the organic white flour). If it is critical to get a pure white cake, this will give you problems; but I’ve never had occasion where a slightly ivory cake color would be unacceptable, so it hasn’t been an issue for me.
Most organic white sugars look more like brown or demerara sugar. I hesitated to use organic sugar at first because chunky texture that would not blend well with silky smooth flour. Then I discovered Florida Crystals. Not only is it made in the U.S., its texture is close to superfine sugar. Still has a slight molasses smell and beige color, but it bakes beautifully.
I’m particularly fond of cake recipes which include brown sugar, which the Co-op also carries in organic varieties. Ironically, the brown sugar in bulk seems softer than the pre-bagged brands; just get it right into an air-tight container when you get home or you’ll wind up with a sugar brick.
Powdered Sugar
Here is an organic-cake sticky wicket. Powdered sugar is the main ingredient of almost every frosting. And yes, there is organic powdered sugar, believe it or not. Packaged, the Co-op carries two brands – Hains and Organic Sweeteners. The Hains is about three times the price of the other, with no difference in product whatsoever as far as I can ascertain in side by side taste tests (it’s a terrible job, but somebody has to do it).
Both brands of packaged powdered sugar come in 1 pound bags that are about half-full of rock-hard lumps. There’s no way around carefully sifting it, but the lumps in these bags are so hard that I can’t even crush them with a hammer; after paying the exorbitant price for them, I throw away a quarter of every bag.
Then I tried the organic powdered sugar sold a the co-op in bulk. At first glance, it looked the same – full of lumps. But the lumps in the bulk stuff were soft enough to bust up with my hands. It still must be carefully sifted, especially for decorating purposes (lumps of powdered sugar jam up decorating tips and lead to colorful expletives). But once it’s sifted, carefully scooped into measuring cups with a fork, gently sprinkled into organic vegetable shortening and butter and organic vanilla and other flavors, you’ll have the silkiest frosting you could ever imagine. Sure, it takes all day. But like, what else were you doing but making this cake, anyway.
The downside is color. Organic powdered sugar leaves a slightly grey, unappetizing color if it’s untinted. If you can’t live with it, you’ll have to add something to it.
Coloring
Food coloring is, obviously, artificial. Or is it? Some food colorings are synthetic; others are from natural sources, like beta carotene for orange and turmeric for yellow. When added to a food product, however, FDA considers them all ‘artificial coloring’. Beet juice added to strawberry ice cream, for instance, would be listed as ‘artificial coloring added’. When you buy food coloring for frostings, it will be a mixtures of synthetic and natural pigments.
If you don’t want to surrender to food coloring, one option is to forgo the color issue in favor of black and white. A chocolate cake with chocolate frosting looks gorgeous decorated in plain white uncolored decorator buttercream. A few drops of maple flavoring turn it a creamy carmel color; a few drops of chocolate turn it a deeper tan. Other flavor extracts provide light tints along with the flavoring, like orange-orange, or lemon-yellow.
There are suggestions for creating your own natural colors at www.allergygrocer.com, but I couldn’t see using pureed spinach to create green icing. On the other hand, some fruit puree for purples or pink would be nice.
I’ve recently acquired a set of samples of all natural (not organic, but at least non-synthetic) food colors from a wholesale manufacturer called ColorMaker. ColorMaker supplies bakery departments of whole-food supermarkets. Their colors are available for individual sale – but only in 2.2 pound bottles. That’s a lot of food coloring! The colors are light and pH sensitive, so I’m still experimenting, but they show a lot of promise.
If you go the commercial food coloring route, try professional cake decorating colors, available at our local Ben Franklin. They come in gel form in little canisters. The color is intense, so you only use a tiny bit to make vibrant colors, and the artificial additive is minimized.
The End Result?
It can be done! A gorgeous, all natural, organic cake. Fewer calories? Less carbs? Lower fat content? Sorry, no. Just real food, with real flavor. And that’s beautiful.
Valentine Cocoa Cake with Buttercream Frosting
Cake:
1 and 2/3 cup King Arthur organic white wheat flour
(sifted and measured by sprinkling lightly into cup)
1 and ½ cup Florida Crystals organic white sugar
2/3 cup dutched cocoa (sifted)
1 and ½ tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
½ cup organic vegetable shortening
1 and 1/4 cup organic whole milk mixed with 1.4 cup apple cider vinegar to clabber, OR 1 and ½ cup organic buttermilk
2 large eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two 8 inch round layer pans or a 13X9 inch rectangular pan.
Blend sifted dry ingredients together on low in a large mixing bowl for 30 seconds. Add the shortening and blend another 30 seconds on low. Add remaining liquid ingredients all at once. Beat on high speed 3 minutes with hand mixer, 1 to 2 minutes with countertop mixer, and pour immediately into pans. Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, until pick inserted into center comes out clean and cake feels slightly springy on top. Cake should not start to pull away from the sides of pan until just as it comes out of the oven. Baking times vary depending on your oven’s vagueries and environmental factors like humidity. Let cool ten minutes in pan, then turn out onto cooling racks and let cool one hour before frosting.
Frosting and filling:
1 and ½ cups organic vegetable shortening
½ cup organic butter (unsalted is preferred)
2 tsp. organic vanilla extract
2 tsp. organic flavoring of your choice
4 tablespoons milk or cream
1/4 tsp. salt
8 cups sifted organic powdered sugar
optional: 2 tablespoons merinque powder (powdered egg whites – ‘sets up’ the icing for decorating texture)
Note: For chocolate buttercream, add 2 tablespoons sifted cocoa and increase milk or cream by one to two tablespoons until the consistency is right. You can also add four ounces melted bakers chocolate or white chocolate, also increasing the liquid until the proper consistency is reached.
Blend the shortenings with the milk or cream and flavorings; add the salt and, if using, the meringue powder and melted chocolate or white chocolate. Add the sifted powdered sugar one cup at a time. If you are adding flavorings, be aware that most of them increase in intensity once they are allowed to sit for an hour or two, so don’t overdo it (I always do, can’t help it). Feel free to adjust the consistency with a little more or less powdered sugar, a little more or less milk, as dictated by your tastes and the wattage of your mixer.
If you are doing layers, remove ½ cup of icing and mix it with a non-liquid food material related to your flavoring to give your filling between layers added interest. For example, with orange flavor, add grated organic orange peel; for peppermint, try crushed peppermint candies; with maple or vanilla frosting try chopped crystallized ginger.
Flip your first layer over from the cooling rack, top with filling, and cover with the other layer (without flipping it over, so you have a smooth top). Ice the top first, then smooth excess icing over the edge and down the sides. Decorate as desired and enjoy fresh within twenty four hours; refrigerate for up to 3 or 4 days (like it’s going to last that long!).
Enjoy!
The Best Beginning of December Ever
I must confess that I usually have a little bit of the humbug thing. I love winter, cooking on the woodstove, stew and soup and baked beans, fresh bread, chili, getting outside for sledding, ice skating, and cross country skiing, and hibernating with knitting and reading. But Christmas... I like the lights and tree for, like, a week maybe. But not a month. And presents, that's the problem. With a tight budget and three kids, Christmas has for many years been the cause of unpleasant anxiety for me. Our adult relatives love hand-knit things and jars of canned goods for Christmas, but three little girls --even three whose worldview is tempered in a gentler way by virtue of not having television -- don't view wild grape jelly and wool hats as proper Christmas gifts.
But this year we suddenly found that the three little girls weren't little anymore. One's in college, the other two in high school. Asked what they wanted for Christmas, we heard,"gee, I don't know, nothing really. Maybe sheets."
And so Iturned my thoughts to how to make things festive this year. I started out by asking my youngest if she wanted to have friends over for a gingerbread house making party. And so December first found four young teens filling our kitchen for a full day of gingerbread house baking and making. Everybody brought some candy -- and of course we wound up with five times as much candy as one needs for gingerbread houses. The night before, I made three double batches of gingerbread house dough (the construction-grade recipe from the King Arthur Flour cookbook) and stuck it in the fridge. The kids plotted their cottage blueprints on stiff white paper, then set to rolling and baking.
Making four gingerbread houses is a lot of work. Heck, making ONE is a lot of work, and four is,well, four times as much work. But they did an amazing job.
There was one blunder, the same mistake I make every year: the mortar frosting is merely a 2 pound bag of confectioners sugar, six egg whites, and a teaspoon of cream of tartar. But, the first batch I make each year, I just beat until it's blended. This is about the consistency of white glue--and it'll hold.... eventually....though your arms may fall off waiting... No, you have to beat the mortar icing mixture for a looonnng time, until it becomes something akin to marshmallow Fluff. Then it holds instantly. This year, I made a Note-to-Self in the cookbook, so we'll see if I remember to read the note next year.
Getting ready for gingerbread house making was my excuse to clean the kitchen -- nice, as it really needed it. While buying supplies for the dough, I stocked up on extra brown sugar, molasses, cinnamon and other basics to prepare for cookie baking season. Then I sat back and listened to the kids as they finally set down, four hours of baking completed, and settled in to decorate their creations. There were long moments of quiet while they concentrated, long peaceful moments.
You know, one of them said, this is the best first of December ever.
Which really made me smile.
But this year we suddenly found that the three little girls weren't little anymore. One's in college, the other two in high school. Asked what they wanted for Christmas, we heard,"gee, I don't know, nothing really. Maybe sheets."
And so Iturned my thoughts to how to make things festive this year. I started out by asking my youngest if she wanted to have friends over for a gingerbread house making party. And so December first found four young teens filling our kitchen for a full day of gingerbread house baking and making. Everybody brought some candy -- and of course we wound up with five times as much candy as one needs for gingerbread houses. The night before, I made three double batches of gingerbread house dough (the construction-grade recipe from the King Arthur Flour cookbook) and stuck it in the fridge. The kids plotted their cottage blueprints on stiff white paper, then set to rolling and baking.
Making four gingerbread houses is a lot of work. Heck, making ONE is a lot of work, and four is,well, four times as much work. But they did an amazing job.
There was one blunder, the same mistake I make every year: the mortar frosting is merely a 2 pound bag of confectioners sugar, six egg whites, and a teaspoon of cream of tartar. But, the first batch I make each year, I just beat until it's blended. This is about the consistency of white glue--and it'll hold.... eventually....though your arms may fall off waiting... No, you have to beat the mortar icing mixture for a looonnng time, until it becomes something akin to marshmallow Fluff. Then it holds instantly. This year, I made a Note-to-Self in the cookbook, so we'll see if I remember to read the note next year.
Getting ready for gingerbread house making was my excuse to clean the kitchen -- nice, as it really needed it. While buying supplies for the dough, I stocked up on extra brown sugar, molasses, cinnamon and other basics to prepare for cookie baking season. Then I sat back and listened to the kids as they finally set down, four hours of baking completed, and settled in to decorate their creations. There were long moments of quiet while they concentrated, long peaceful moments.
You know, one of them said, this is the best first of December ever.
Which really made me smile.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Message in a Bottle
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE:
What is Bottled Water Saying to You?
It seems the very definition of ironic: tucked on my local natural food Co-op shelves between those "shop local" signs are plastic-shrink-wrapped cases of plastic bottles from, of all places, Fiji. No matter which of the hotly-argued definitions of "local" you happen to embrace, Fiji will not fall within your adopted parameters, unless you take a galactic-scale approach. Then again, neither do Spain or Italy, the source of, say, almonds or olive oil, so what is it that Fiji water is shouting at me that so catches my attention?
Water, Water Everywhere
The first distinction I make is that, no matter which local definition you apply, we simply don’t grow almonds or olives here. That means to acquire almonds and olives, we trade with other places. There has always been such trade, as archaeological evidence of distant food products and other items in the earliest human settlements attests. Today that trade is less likely to be direct item-for-item: we don’t take our maple syrup to Spain and barter it for olive oil. Instead we use money. Many of us also do bring back food products from places outside our local region when we travel: I always come back from Boston with canolis from Mike’s pastry in the old North End, for example, or seafood from Connecticut or New Jersey– we don’t have Mike’s pastry, or locally fresh-caught seafood, in Vermont. (Okay, you caught me, I’m pushing my example on the canolis; we certainly have the ability to make a canoli here in Vermont, and there are bakeries that do it, it’s just, well... it’s not the same thing.)
Water, on the other hand, we have here in abundance. In nearly as much an abundance as, say, tomatoes or zucchini in late August. Unlike a large percentage of people in the world, we do not live in a desert. We do not live in the kind of city where the drinking water pipes and open sewer ditches are one and the same. We do not live on an island or coastal plain where desalinization plants are required to make water drinkable. Many of us have town water, treated, tested, and certified as appropriate for human consumption. Many of us live near springs of fresh mountain water. Others of us have wells, that we have tested, and are mostly quite good, though chemical problems do occasionally require addressing and correcting or filtration.
So why are we buying little plastic bottles of water from anywhere at all, much less Fiji? The answer is we may well be simply buying a message – a marketing message aimed at convincing us that bottled water is better. But defining "better" can be even more controversial than defining "local."
What’s In –and Behind– that Bottle?
In the United States, tap water is regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The standards are extremely strict – so strict that many people complain their tap water is flat, stripped of all taste personality, de-oxygenated, and over-chlorinated (then there’s the question of drinking flouride, another hot topic for dinner-table debate).
Bottled water, on the other hand, is regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration – and the standards are much more lenient. Bottled water suppliers are not required to test their water for a whole host of nasty critters, compounds, and chemicals. The primary regulations relate to labeling: Bottled water suppliers do have to tell you accurately where the water in the bottle comes from. Most that bottled water comes simply from someone else’s tap, or from a spring. FIJI water, and a few others on the market, come from artesian wells, which are water pockets deep underground, usually quite free from any man-made pollutants (though often with a heavy mineral content, which may or may not be desireable for your tastebuds or healthy for you body depending on any medical concerns you may have). An interesting, mostly unanswered question is whether chemicals from the plastic bottles leach into the otherwise-pure water contained in them over time. Many bottled-water-drinkers report a "plasticky" taste, but it’s unclear whether that’s from the smell of the rim of the bottle under your nose, or whether the water has developed a perceptible flavor.
According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, bottled water sells over $11 billion of product per year. The Pacific Institute reports in its extensive Wikipedia article on the subject that Americans purchase over 28 billion water bottles per year, using about 17 million barrels of oil a year to produce, and–more irony–something like 3 to 6 liters of water used in manufacturing each 1 liter plastic bottle. The vast majority of these bottles wind up in the landfill.
Then comes shipping: Pacific Institute further estimates that 250g of CO2 is released for each bottle of FIJI water transported to the U.S.: 93g manufacturing the plastic bottle in China, 4g transporting the empty bottle to Fiji, then 153g for shipping the full bottle to the U.S. Of course, even locally-bottled water will have some of these same costs, especially if the empty bottles are manufactured on the other side of the globe before filling up in Poland Spring or Saratoga or wherever.
On the other side, the FIJI water website reports that the bottling company has teamed up with Conservation International to become a "carbon negative" product by preserving a piece of Fiji rainforest. I find the claim confusing; first, it would need to be one heck of a big rainforest; and second, preserving what’s already there is obviously a help, but it doesn’t negate an added carbon impact, in only holds the present status quo. The company, however, is also doing other good social works, spreading supplies of safe public drinking water to poor rural villages in Fiji.
Tasteful Hydration
Maybe it’s that bottled water just tastes really good. These issues surrounding food packaging, transportation, and marketing were the focus of the first four weeks of this fall’s Introduction to Ethics class that I teach at Middlebury CCV. (We used the Michael Pollan book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, as our text for this first unit of the course.) Bottled water made it into the curriculum when discussing the various brands of H2O beverages that the students were bringing to class with them, where they came from geographically and geologically.
So I devised an admittedly not all that scientific blind taste test. I filled four carefully-washed Strafford Creamery glass milk jugs with water from my tap in Middlebury, a spring in Middlebury where many people go to fill their water jugs off the mountainside, FIJI water, and Poland Spring water. Thirteen student, staff, and passersby were given four small paper cups marked W,X,Y,Z, and filled with the four blind samples.
Four tasters preferred the Middlebury spring water: Cost, zero, transportation costs, whatever it takes you to get to the spring and fill your own containers; doesn’t contain additives, but no one is monitoring it, either.
Three tasters preferred the Middlebury tap water: cost, 367 gallons for $1, but does contain chlorine and flouride.
Three tasters preferred the FIJI water: cost, $3.65 per liter at the Co-op, plus the ample externalities of oil, trade, and landfilling costs.
Three tasters preferred the Poland Spring water: cost, $1.19 per liter, plus external costs of oil, trade, and landfilling.
The Message in the Bottle?
My class’s blind taste test showed that water taste preferences are pretty close to random; there was no distinct taste advantage to that expensive bottle of FIJI water once it was removed from its colorful packaging and put into an ordinary cup next to other water sources. I suspect that like most spring waters, it tastes awfully good coming out of the deep well in Fiji. But something is lost in bottling and transportation over thousands of miles in Chinese-made petroleum-based plastic bottles.
The ethics class I teach is, at heart, a class in critical thinking about right and wrong. What is the "right way to live" as the ancients would have put it, relative to drinking bottled water? My class learns to apply numerous different schools of ethical thought. We could consider our Kantian duties to the people of Fiji and of Maine and of Middlebury; we could list all the pros and cons of the various options; we could attempt to assign numerical values to the benefits and disadvantages of each option and do a utilitarian analysis of which bottled or unbottled water leads to the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Trying to weigh the benefits of employment and the company’s social betterment programs verses transportation and petroleum costs versus supporting jobs in Poland Spring Maine or Saratoga Springs NY, or opting out of the entire system and filling up a carload of jugs at the spring up the road, is mind-boggling.
Here’s one thought from outside the box, or the bottle: Instead of the FIJI water company bottling artesian water there and selling it and using a portion of the profits to aid local safe drinking water development, why don’t the poor people of Fiji who don’t have safe drinking water drink the pure artesan water that would seem to be their birthright; then we drink our local water, we all don’t burn several billions of barrels of oil making bottles and transporting them empty and full, and we send a donation of a portion of the money we saved to help preserve the Fiji rainforest instead?
The older I get, the more I find that the philosophies of Thoreau rather than Aristotle, Kant, and Bentham take a stronger sway over my thinking: simplify, and live deliberately. I’ll opt out of the plastic and petroleum based alternatives and fill up empty bottles from my tap and the spring up the road, keeping a few cold in glass in the fridge. Which isn’t to say I won’t buy bottles of other stuff to drink from the Co-op: things from a distance that we don’t produce locally, like orange juice and pomegranate juice. And local beverages as well: milk, cider, and of course, beer. All that thinking makes me thirsty.
What is Bottled Water Saying to You?
It seems the very definition of ironic: tucked on my local natural food Co-op shelves between those "shop local" signs are plastic-shrink-wrapped cases of plastic bottles from, of all places, Fiji. No matter which of the hotly-argued definitions of "local" you happen to embrace, Fiji will not fall within your adopted parameters, unless you take a galactic-scale approach. Then again, neither do Spain or Italy, the source of, say, almonds or olive oil, so what is it that Fiji water is shouting at me that so catches my attention?
Water, Water Everywhere
The first distinction I make is that, no matter which local definition you apply, we simply don’t grow almonds or olives here. That means to acquire almonds and olives, we trade with other places. There has always been such trade, as archaeological evidence of distant food products and other items in the earliest human settlements attests. Today that trade is less likely to be direct item-for-item: we don’t take our maple syrup to Spain and barter it for olive oil. Instead we use money. Many of us also do bring back food products from places outside our local region when we travel: I always come back from Boston with canolis from Mike’s pastry in the old North End, for example, or seafood from Connecticut or New Jersey– we don’t have Mike’s pastry, or locally fresh-caught seafood, in Vermont. (Okay, you caught me, I’m pushing my example on the canolis; we certainly have the ability to make a canoli here in Vermont, and there are bakeries that do it, it’s just, well... it’s not the same thing.)
Water, on the other hand, we have here in abundance. In nearly as much an abundance as, say, tomatoes or zucchini in late August. Unlike a large percentage of people in the world, we do not live in a desert. We do not live in the kind of city where the drinking water pipes and open sewer ditches are one and the same. We do not live on an island or coastal plain where desalinization plants are required to make water drinkable. Many of us have town water, treated, tested, and certified as appropriate for human consumption. Many of us live near springs of fresh mountain water. Others of us have wells, that we have tested, and are mostly quite good, though chemical problems do occasionally require addressing and correcting or filtration.
So why are we buying little plastic bottles of water from anywhere at all, much less Fiji? The answer is we may well be simply buying a message – a marketing message aimed at convincing us that bottled water is better. But defining "better" can be even more controversial than defining "local."
What’s In –and Behind– that Bottle?
In the United States, tap water is regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The standards are extremely strict – so strict that many people complain their tap water is flat, stripped of all taste personality, de-oxygenated, and over-chlorinated (then there’s the question of drinking flouride, another hot topic for dinner-table debate).
Bottled water, on the other hand, is regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration – and the standards are much more lenient. Bottled water suppliers are not required to test their water for a whole host of nasty critters, compounds, and chemicals. The primary regulations relate to labeling: Bottled water suppliers do have to tell you accurately where the water in the bottle comes from. Most that bottled water comes simply from someone else’s tap, or from a spring. FIJI water, and a few others on the market, come from artesian wells, which are water pockets deep underground, usually quite free from any man-made pollutants (though often with a heavy mineral content, which may or may not be desireable for your tastebuds or healthy for you body depending on any medical concerns you may have). An interesting, mostly unanswered question is whether chemicals from the plastic bottles leach into the otherwise-pure water contained in them over time. Many bottled-water-drinkers report a "plasticky" taste, but it’s unclear whether that’s from the smell of the rim of the bottle under your nose, or whether the water has developed a perceptible flavor.
According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, bottled water sells over $11 billion of product per year. The Pacific Institute reports in its extensive Wikipedia article on the subject that Americans purchase over 28 billion water bottles per year, using about 17 million barrels of oil a year to produce, and–more irony–something like 3 to 6 liters of water used in manufacturing each 1 liter plastic bottle. The vast majority of these bottles wind up in the landfill.
Then comes shipping: Pacific Institute further estimates that 250g of CO2 is released for each bottle of FIJI water transported to the U.S.: 93g manufacturing the plastic bottle in China, 4g transporting the empty bottle to Fiji, then 153g for shipping the full bottle to the U.S. Of course, even locally-bottled water will have some of these same costs, especially if the empty bottles are manufactured on the other side of the globe before filling up in Poland Spring or Saratoga or wherever.
On the other side, the FIJI water website reports that the bottling company has teamed up with Conservation International to become a "carbon negative" product by preserving a piece of Fiji rainforest. I find the claim confusing; first, it would need to be one heck of a big rainforest; and second, preserving what’s already there is obviously a help, but it doesn’t negate an added carbon impact, in only holds the present status quo. The company, however, is also doing other good social works, spreading supplies of safe public drinking water to poor rural villages in Fiji.
Tasteful Hydration
Maybe it’s that bottled water just tastes really good. These issues surrounding food packaging, transportation, and marketing were the focus of the first four weeks of this fall’s Introduction to Ethics class that I teach at Middlebury CCV. (We used the Michael Pollan book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, as our text for this first unit of the course.) Bottled water made it into the curriculum when discussing the various brands of H2O beverages that the students were bringing to class with them, where they came from geographically and geologically.
So I devised an admittedly not all that scientific blind taste test. I filled four carefully-washed Strafford Creamery glass milk jugs with water from my tap in Middlebury, a spring in Middlebury where many people go to fill their water jugs off the mountainside, FIJI water, and Poland Spring water. Thirteen student, staff, and passersby were given four small paper cups marked W,X,Y,Z, and filled with the four blind samples.
Four tasters preferred the Middlebury spring water: Cost, zero, transportation costs, whatever it takes you to get to the spring and fill your own containers; doesn’t contain additives, but no one is monitoring it, either.
Three tasters preferred the Middlebury tap water: cost, 367 gallons for $1, but does contain chlorine and flouride.
Three tasters preferred the FIJI water: cost, $3.65 per liter at the Co-op, plus the ample externalities of oil, trade, and landfilling costs.
Three tasters preferred the Poland Spring water: cost, $1.19 per liter, plus external costs of oil, trade, and landfilling.
The Message in the Bottle?
My class’s blind taste test showed that water taste preferences are pretty close to random; there was no distinct taste advantage to that expensive bottle of FIJI water once it was removed from its colorful packaging and put into an ordinary cup next to other water sources. I suspect that like most spring waters, it tastes awfully good coming out of the deep well in Fiji. But something is lost in bottling and transportation over thousands of miles in Chinese-made petroleum-based plastic bottles.
The ethics class I teach is, at heart, a class in critical thinking about right and wrong. What is the "right way to live" as the ancients would have put it, relative to drinking bottled water? My class learns to apply numerous different schools of ethical thought. We could consider our Kantian duties to the people of Fiji and of Maine and of Middlebury; we could list all the pros and cons of the various options; we could attempt to assign numerical values to the benefits and disadvantages of each option and do a utilitarian analysis of which bottled or unbottled water leads to the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Trying to weigh the benefits of employment and the company’s social betterment programs verses transportation and petroleum costs versus supporting jobs in Poland Spring Maine or Saratoga Springs NY, or opting out of the entire system and filling up a carload of jugs at the spring up the road, is mind-boggling.
Here’s one thought from outside the box, or the bottle: Instead of the FIJI water company bottling artesian water there and selling it and using a portion of the profits to aid local safe drinking water development, why don’t the poor people of Fiji who don’t have safe drinking water drink the pure artesan water that would seem to be their birthright; then we drink our local water, we all don’t burn several billions of barrels of oil making bottles and transporting them empty and full, and we send a donation of a portion of the money we saved to help preserve the Fiji rainforest instead?
The older I get, the more I find that the philosophies of Thoreau rather than Aristotle, Kant, and Bentham take a stronger sway over my thinking: simplify, and live deliberately. I’ll opt out of the plastic and petroleum based alternatives and fill up empty bottles from my tap and the spring up the road, keeping a few cold in glass in the fridge. Which isn’t to say I won’t buy bottles of other stuff to drink from the Co-op: things from a distance that we don’t produce locally, like orange juice and pomegranate juice. And local beverages as well: milk, cider, and of course, beer. All that thinking makes me thirsty.
Welcome to Pantry Shelves: Satisfying Living
Getting out of the rat race is a matter of letting go. Pry your fingers off that cold steel bar, close your eyes, lean back, and fall. Instead of being dashed to bits on the jagged rocks below, you'll land in a warm feather bed, listening to a crackling woodstove fire while smelling soup simmering on the stove and bread just ready to come out of the oven. Think about prosperity instead of the race to accumulate wealth; healthfullnes instead of the anxiety of trying to secure health insurance; contentment with what you have instead of the drive to accumulate more--or to even keep up in today's sliding economy.
I don't have all the secrets; I'm still on the grid, I still own a car, and I can't realistically completely homestead on my half-acre small-Vermont-town residential lot. But I've got wood enough to get me through the winter, and my pantry shelves are groaning under the weight of all the food I've put up this summer--food that I scavenged and gathered, grew and harvested, supplemented with stuff bought from the local farmers market. I've still got kale and beets in the garden, and stir-fry greens growing in the cold frames. I've got sweaters and socks I've knit by hand, many of them of my own hand-spun yarn.
The downward economic turn will compel many people to turn to simple things out of necessity, and they'll be looking for the lost wisdom of how to can applesauce and cook on a woodstove. But in many quiet corners of the world and the U.S., even here in the fast-paced northeast, that wisdom never got lost. Winter comes every year, and even when the stock market isn't volatile and rumours of recession are not taking on that frightening edge, nothing beats the simple satisfaction of stocked-up pantry shelves.
I don't have all the secrets; I'm still on the grid, I still own a car, and I can't realistically completely homestead on my half-acre small-Vermont-town residential lot. But I've got wood enough to get me through the winter, and my pantry shelves are groaning under the weight of all the food I've put up this summer--food that I scavenged and gathered, grew and harvested, supplemented with stuff bought from the local farmers market. I've still got kale and beets in the garden, and stir-fry greens growing in the cold frames. I've got sweaters and socks I've knit by hand, many of them of my own hand-spun yarn.
The downward economic turn will compel many people to turn to simple things out of necessity, and they'll be looking for the lost wisdom of how to can applesauce and cook on a woodstove. But in many quiet corners of the world and the U.S., even here in the fast-paced northeast, that wisdom never got lost. Winter comes every year, and even when the stock market isn't volatile and rumours of recession are not taking on that frightening edge, nothing beats the simple satisfaction of stocked-up pantry shelves.
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