Everything Is a Berry Now

Answering your questions on unregulated broths and Difficult Milks.

Welcome to another Mailbag edition of Haterade, where I answer reader questions four weeks too late! Our first comes courtesy of Kevin:

Kevin Dilmore @🏡 @kevindilmore

@lizcookkc What will restaurants (new and existing) need to do to succeed in the post-pandemic KC? What cuisine and customer service habits have KC diners cultivated these past months that you believe will stick?

Half-serious answer: turn into a mid-priced Mexican restaurant. The most popular post-pandemic restaurant fantasy, if my social media feeds are any indication, is going to any Americanized Mexican restaurant—the kind where they automatically assume you want flour tortillas and serve you fried ice cream in a sombrero on your birthday—and mainlining chips and salsa like there’s a prize at the bottom of the basket.

No judgment from me. There’s something alchemical about dunking a restaurant chip, still dewy and warm from the fryer, into a soupy, onion-pungent tomato salsa. These days, I’d rather turn water into a syrup-y, neon-yellow house margarita than lead into gold.

More serious answer: I’m expecting a kind of Roaring-Twenties-esque return to bars and restaurants for those of us who haven’t been playing shuffleboard on the Titanic this whole time. I have some doubts about the shelf life of the casual concepts the pandemic spawned: in a newly vaccinated world, my guess is tasting menus are going to be more popular than tots. But I do think some demand for upscale carry-out is going to stick around.

Restaurateurs have waxed rhapsodic throughout the pandemic about how diners long “to be taken care of” once again by obsequious servers with table crummers, but that brand of hospitality was inaccessible to a large segment of diners before the pandemic hit. A lot of fine-dining spaces aren’t navigable for fat people or people with disabilities or parents with young kids. When those spaces started offering carry-out, they became hospitable to some diners for the first time.

I should acknowledge here that carry-out presents logistical challenges; I’ve heard it’s less profitable, too. But I hope restaurants are able to keep some carry-out presence in the After Times. The demand was always there, I think—many of us just weren’t paying attention.

Mark Maybon @MarkMaybon

@lizcookkc I’ve already done the research myself, but the other day I was thinking about cheese from various domesticated mammals and wondered why pig cheese isn’t really a thing.

I appreciate this half-question. If it can be milked, I wish to taste its cheese.

That said, there are a few good reasons why you can’t buy pig cheese at Hy-Vee.

Without exception, the major Cheese Animals of the world—cows, goats, sheeps, camels—are ruminants. They eat plants and pulverize the nutrients out of them with multi-chambered stomachs more efficient than any juicer. Because of that, they produce a pretty clean-tasting milk—and a lot of it.

Pigs, on the other hand, are omnivores, a label that doesn’t really do their appetite justice. I once watched a classmate’s pet pig hoover up about a pound of silly string from the floor of a park shelter.

Pigs also produce much less milk per teat (sorry) than a cow, and what little they do produce tastes like silly string. On top of that, pigs really fucking hate to be milked.

I’m still curious enough about pig cheese that I’d try it, but my “white whale” is deer cheese. Deer milk has the highest fat, protein, and casein content of all the ruminant milks, and I just know the Forbidden Cheese would be incredible.

If anyone owns a domesticated deer, HMU.

Kim Palmer @kjensenpalmer

@lizcookkc What’s the real difference between broth and stock and does it really matter which one I use?

This is a great question with a not-so-simple answer.

In theory, the distinction is easy: stock is made with bones and connective tissue, broth isn’t. As a result, the products themselves should have entirely different tastes and textures. Stock has a high proportion of collagen from animal bones/tissue, which makes it both thicker and slightly “sticky”—a spoonful of good stock should coat your tongue and the roof of your mouth. Broth, on the other hand, is typically made by simmering (boneless) meat and vegetables, so it’ll be both thinner and meatier-tasting.

But there’s a major caveat here, which is that the FDA doesn’t give a hoot. If you buy commercial cartons of “broth” or “stock” at most grocery stores, there’s almost no way of knowing which you’re getting, because the FDA allows companies to use those labels interchangeably.

The upshot: you can…use them pretty much interchangeably. That said, if you buy a commercial “stock” and are curious about its contents, there’s an easy test: put it in the fridge. If it turns into the texture of Jell-O, it’s got bone juice in it. If it it stays fully liquid when chilled, it’s probably just broth.

You didn’t ask, but there’s a third category of Meat Squeezins, “bone broth,” which started showing up in hippie markets a few years ago. Most manufacturers claim it’s a hybrid product, with the meaty flavor of broth and the collagen-based amino acids of stock.

But this term, too, is unregulated, so take it with 100 mg of salt. Technically, any hot tub I’ve ever been in is bone broth.

Invite me over to use your hot tub.

dylan little @dy11ionaire

@lizcookkc how come no one is talking about grapes being berries?

We were all so preoccupied arguing about whether a tomato is a fruit that we missed the paper-skinned wolf at the door.

“Berry” has a precise botanical definition, and Dylan’s right that grapes are technically berries—as are kiwis, guavas, and bananas. I’m sure there’s a pedant out there who’s made Melissa Clark’s berry buckle with bananas and grapes to prove a point.

We all know that botanists are Chaotic Evil, but I still can’t get my hackles raised about this stuff. You want to tell me that green beans are fruits* and rhubarb is a vegetable? OK! I don’t make the rules. I just ignore them and move on with my life—making a green bean compote.

*so help me, if anyone writes in with “actually, they’re a legume,” I will feed you a ranch popsicle.

Screenshotting Private Andrew for this week’s final question:

I keep a plastic tub of duck fat in my fridge at all times, and I don’t care that this makes me a pretentious goon. Duck fat is faddish, sure, but it’s also really ducking good. It’s got a lower percentage of saturated fat than butter, which I suppose makes it vaguely healthier. But I don’t think most people eat duck fat for health reasons.

Duck fat has a higher smoke point than some animal fats, which makes it pretty great at making things crisp. If you’re cooking for someone this Valentine’s Day, make them these crispy duck-fat potatoes. But the key advantage of duck fat is just that it tastes good. It has an assertive aroma—savory, dark, dank—that undermines its richness, like an evil dauphin. It’s not gamy, but it’s a little bit wild.

Because of that, I think duck fat works especially well in desserts, where its aroma crashes through sugar and cream like an errant gong. Room 39 used to sell a duck fat chocolate ice cream, and I would swallow a toothpick to eat it again. I don’t have an ice cream maker, so I’ve had to settle for the next best thing: duck fat cookies.

Recently, I swapped half the butter for duck fat in the old Cook’s Illustrated “Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie” recipe (the official version’s paywalled, but a food blogger republished it here).

A brief aside: this is my go-to recipe for chewy, saucer-sized cookies that don’t require any ingredients that aren’t already in my cupboard. I roll my eyes a little when recipe writers want me to break up a $5 fair trade chocolate bar with a hand-forged mezzeluna. Maybe it’s worth it, but I live my life in the middle of the Venn Diagram between “lazy” and “overwhelmed,” so: Costco bag of semisweet chips it is.

Anyway, these were delicious. The duck fat came through super strong in the batter, but it was way more subtle once baked; I’d probably up the ratio next time to make them birdier. You might notice some variation in the photo, also. I only added chocolate chips to half of them; the other half have pecans and ¡CRAISINS! which I thought might compliment the duck fat well. They did! If I had to choose, I’d go with the nutfruits, but both varieties were good.

Democratize duck fat, I say. In the Duck Tales universe, there’s a Scottish coal miner named “Dirty” Dingus McDuck. It is in the spirit of Dirty Dingus (and his excellent padding) that I lift my fork.

If you’ve got weird food/beverage questions you want answered in a future mailbag, drop them in the comments or shoot them over on Twitter: @lizcookkc. There’s a 50 percent chance I’ll take next week off while I wrap up a major writing project, but you can guilt-trip me into doing one, anyway, by sending me ranch money: @lizcookkc on Venmo/CashApp.