Friday Food Finds
Edition 13
Hello there, friends. It has been a heavy week; one that has truly made me realize the importance of relentless advocacy and activism. In that spirit, I wish to start off this week’s “Friday Food Finds” by underlining the issue of food apartheid as it relates to Buffalo’s predominantly Black East Side neighborhoods.
According to Andrew Keshner at MarketWatch, the Tops market in Buffalo opened in 2003 in an area where there were no grocery stores within a three- to five-mile radius. Since then the store has become a resource for shoppers who would otherwise not be able to source fresh produce and other grocery items.
Even with the Tops store where it is, the access to fresh, affordable groceries is not easy for households that don’t have cars or the other resources they need to buy food for themselves. And now that Tops is closed while authorities process the crime scene, the food apartheid situation is even more dire.
Thankfully, as Jaclyn Diaz of NPR reports, organizations and churches from the local Buffalo community are chipping in to provide food and other grocery staples, like personal hygiene products and cleaning supplies, to support their neighbors. Efforts from Buffalo United Front, Buffalo Peacemakers, Buffalo Community Fridges, Resource Council of WNY, and others are all working to provide immediate access to food and supplies. Some (particularly those in the spreadsheet linked to from “others”) are also putting tremendous efforts towards ending food apartheid and violence long term.
Ultimately, it’ll take a much broader, national movement to end the white supremacist and anti-black beliefs, policies, institutions, and systems that led to the heinous shooting in Buffalo. But please do whatever you can to support this community that’s suffering and grieving after losing 10 of its innocent neighbors. And have a read through this Media Advisory/Call to Action from the Buffalo Food Equity Network. This work starts with educating ourselves and our communities.
As for recipes from this week, I have mostly been focused on my cookbook judging and recipe testing work for the International Association of Culinary Professionals. I can’t really share about those recipes quite yet (though I do hope to include them in future newsletter editions), so I’ll keep this week’s food finds fairly simple.
First up is this beautiful Flaky Butter Biscuit recipe from Cheryl Day1 of Back in the Day Bakery. To me, this recipe truly captures the essence of a great biscuit. It results in a sturdy yet flaky biscuit that has an almost melt-in-your-mouth quality to it. With just a hint of sweetness, these biscuits would be just as good with butter and jam as they’d be under a blanket of sausage gravy. We enjoyed them with a “roast” chicken (which I’ll get to in a little bit) and they worked wonders when it came to soaking up any lingering sauce/jus.
I did find the biscuits to be on the salty side, so if you’re sensitive to salt, I might suggest reducing the amount from 4 teaspoons to 3 (or 1 tablespoon). I also recommend watching the videos if you’re a visual learner. Cheryl is a great teacher and she demos useful techniques that are applicable to other recipes, like fraisage2.
Since I was spending a lot of time in my kitchen for cookbook recipe testing this week, I tried to spend less time there for dinner. And one of my favorite tools for cutting down on cooking time is the Instant Pot. I used it twice this week to cook the ribs you see above and a “roasted” chicken, which I didn’t manage to photograph.
The Instant Pot Ribs, from Gary White of The Foodie Eats, were great. They fell of the bone just the right amount, and the bones themselves did not disintegrate (that’s more than I can say for other versions of Instant Pot ribs I have made). I liked that the dry rub did not have any sugar in it, though as a result, I regretted not making the optional sauce. I think it would have added the sweetness that’s so complementary to ribs.
I did make a couple of recipe changes, including using spare ribs instead of baby back and finishing the ribs on the grill instead of under the broiler. Consequently, I upped the pressure cooking time to 24 minutes, but the grill time was about the same as was indicated in the recipe.
As for the Instant Pot Whole Chicken recipe I tried from Jessica Gavin of Jessica Gavin — Culinary Scientist, I definitely overcooked mine. I neglected to account for the smaller sized bird I was starting with, so when I pulled the cooked chicken out of the pot, it quickly fell apart on me. Fortunately, I did not end up with dry meat (even after finishing it under the broiler for a few minutes), and I quite enjoyed the ultra-tender meat. In the end, this recipe is worth trying again when I’m paying a little more attention!
And that brings me to the end of this week’s edition of Friday Food Finds. I’ll be wrapping up my recipe testing early next week, so I hope to return to more of my own recipe development projects in a short time.
Also, I got a request to go over and talk about the different kinds of salt out there and when it’s appropriate to use them. I’ll plan to incorporate this information into an upcoming post sometime soon, but if anyone else has specific questions you’d like answered, feel free to ask them. Maybe I’ll end up with a whole post just about salt! Are there other topics you’d want to read about? Feel free to share those too!
In addition to being a bakery owner and published cookbook author, Cheryl Day also co-founded Southern Restaurants for Racial Justice along with Lisa Marie Donovan and Sarah O’Brien. Cheryl learned to bake from her grandmother, and her great grandmother was an enslaved pastry chef. Her latest book, Treasury of Southern Baking, is a collection of all the baking knowledge Cheryl has accumulated from her heritage, her ancestry, and her own present-day community.
Fraisage is the technique of smearing a butter-based dough across a work surface using the heel of your hand (or another tool) to create long alternating layers of butter and dough. When the dough is baked, the moisture within these layers turns into steam and expands, creating flakiness.