We should get to have real cuts of meat,'" Cosentino says over Zoom, his eyes blazing from behind thick-rimmed, teal-blue glasses and tattoos peeking out from underneath his short sleeve Vans T-shirt. (Incanto closed in 2014, and Cockscomb closed this fall during the pandemic.) "It just fell out of favor in this country due to the optics of it … as immigrant food, poor food," says Cosentino, who won Top Chef Masters in 2012 published a cookbook about organ meats called Offal Good: Cooking from the Heart, With Guts in 2017 and ran two popular popular San Francisco restaurants, Incanto and Cockscomb, that featured haute-cuisine offal on the menu. And meat has long been relatively inexpensive in the US, which has meant people have opted for roasts and steaks over kidneys and livers.Ĭhris Cosentino, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is outspoken in favor of using organ meats in cooking. Enslaved people typically were given offal while their owners kept the choice cuts, and immigrants often could only avoid the less-expensive organ meats. Organ meats have long been viewed in the US as "food of the poor," as Cosentino puts it. But such cuts are rare at traditional American restaurants. And now, anyone can get offal delivered through the mail from butchers like Oakland (California)-based Belcampo Meat Co. Chitlins (hog intestines) are beloved in the South, and Jewish delis carry sliced beef tongue. Restaurant after restaurant in New York's Chinatown serves tripe, which is the small intestine or stomach lining of an animal. It's common to walk into a Vietnamese restaurant in the heart of Silicon Valley and find pig's blood or ox penis on the menu. But in the US, it's a different story."Īs Sun noted, the love of organ meats hasn't extended to much of American cuisine. "From the head to the feet, even the tail, we eat every part of a pig except maybe the hair and the eyes. Qi Sun, an associate professor in Harvard University's departments of nutrition and epidemiology, says in an interview. "In China, we basically eat anything," Dr. Pork belly and pork cheeks are offal, as are bone marrow and oxtail - all dishes now seen as prime, succulent cuts. Offal isn't just kidneys or other organs that tend to make some people uneasy. In some countries, organ meats are everyday food, while they're considered delicacies in others. Offal has long been a key ingredient in dishes from places like Asia, Latin America, France and Italy. When combined with other efforts like eliminating meat waste, livestock emissions could be cut by 43% from the current level, the study said, "implying a tremendous opportunity for sustainably feeding the planet by 2050." That study found that eating kidneys, livers and other organs could reduce emissions by 14% because fewer animals would need to be produced for the same amount of protein. Aside from eating less meat overall, the best way to curb that contribution from animals is by consuming offal, according to a study of the German meat supply chain published last year in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. It wasn't from a lack of food but was because hungry households didn't have the money to buy what they needed.Īt the same time, livestock generates nearly 15% of the world's greenhouse gases through methane emissions, according to a widely cited 2013 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. But the USDA also says nearly 11% of US households didn't have enough food to eat at some point during 2019. In the US, about 30% to 40% of the food supply is wasted, according to the US Department of Agriculture. "The idea is to bring the circularity into the food system again so that there's no waste." "Part of that ethos is very complementary to things like eating nose-to-tail," Blay-Palmer says in an interview. Josh Niland has pushed for using more parts of a fish in cooking at his Sydney restaurant, Saint Peter. The fish's pink flesh stands out against the room's bare concrete walls, as Niland cuts apart the seafood to explain his butchery process. "The opportunity with fish isn't limited to its two fillets," the 32-year-old Australian says as he prepares a fish in Saint Peter's minimalist kitchen. But Niland aims to use as much as 95% - basically everything except the fish's gills and gallbladder. Chefs typically assume they can only use about half of a fish in cooking, he says. "We decided to cut fish differently, and it worked out that we could turn an eyeball in a fish into a chip … and make black sausage a fish's blood," Niland says in an interview over Zoom. In the US alone, about half of all edible seafood supply is lost each year largely due to consumer waste, according to a 2015 report from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. And it follows a core tenet of his cooking philosophy: Eliminate the waste typically generated by restaurants when cooking seafood. All of Niland's food is fresh (well except for the dry aging).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |