This Week on Good Food: Artisanal Toast, Blood Clams, Is Fat our Friend?

Photo by Erin Kunkel

We talk about the bread that’s helped launch the nationwide toast trend and how a newly lifted ban on some Mexican clams will change L.A. menus; plus, is fat our friend after all?

Highlights from this week’s show:

1. The King of Toast–Josey Baker is a San Francisco-based bread baker whose brick and mortar bakery The Mill is at the fore of the nationwide toast trend. In Baker’s new book Josey Baker’s Bread, he shares the tools to make great bread, the key ingredient for really great toast.

2. The Origins of Cream Cheese–Rabbi Jeffrey Marxof The Santa Monica Synagogue is also a scholar interested in American immigration and food history. He tells us how Philadelphia became the home of cream cheese and how Jewish immigrants came to love the schmear.

3. Blood and Chocolate Clams Coming to California–Bill Esparza is the blogger behind StreetgourmetLA and he also writes the Vitamin Tcolumn for Los Angeles Magazine’s Digest blog and is the tacorazzo behind Tacolandia. He talks about how the end of a prohibition on so-called ‘blood’ and ‘chocolate’ clams from Mexico will transform menus across Los Angeles.

Click here to buy tickets to this year’s Tacolandia on Saturday June 28th.

4. It’s Fish! It’s Pork! It’s Awu Delicious Food!–Jonathan Gold is the Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer of the Los Angeles Times. This week he reviews Awu Delicious Food, a new high-end Henan restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley where they’re serving koi jello, “a chilled concoction of jellied pigskin molded into the shape of a swimming fish.”

Jonathan recommends the Koi jello; steamed, sliced pork with preserved mustard; sautéed clear noodles; mashed eggplant with garlic; scalded spinach; boiled tripe; oxtail with peanuts; garlic smoked lamb chops with cumin; Taichi soup; pan-fried beef buns.

Awu Delicious Food

558 Las Tunas Dr

Arcadia

(626) 217-3612

Find all of Jonathan Gold’s restaurant recommendations on the Good Food Restaurant Map.

5. Is Fat our Friend?–Nina Teicholz’s new book is The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.

6. Back to Butter–Molly Chester co-wrote the book Back to Butter: A Traditional Foods Cookbook with her mother Sandy Schrecengost. We’ve got a recipe for her Creamy Deviled Eggs here.

7. Market Report–Laura Avery talks to cocktail chef Matthew Biancaniello about Surinam cherries. He muddles them with lime juice, wild honey and bergamot mint for a cocktail at his Wednesday night pop up at Cliff’s Edge in Silver Lake.

Farmer Marguerita Smith of Mud Creek Ranchbrings Surinam cherries to the market. At home she is experimenting with Surinam cherry vinegars.