TABASCO

A condiment that is a spicy hot sauce made from Tabasco peppers, vinegar, and salt. The hot peppers are picked by hand as soon as they ripen to the perfect shade of bright red. The same day the peppers are picked, they are mashed, mixed with a small amount of Avery Island salt, placed in white oak wooden barrels, and allowed to ferment and then age for up to three years. When deemed ready by a member of the McIlhenny family, the approved, fully aged mash is then blended with all natural, high grain vinegar. Numerous stirrings and about four weeks later, the pepper skins and seeds are strained out. The finished sauce is then bottled.
Avery Island is not really an island – it is a huge dome of rock salt, three miles long and two and a half miles wide. At it's highest point it is only 152 feet above sea level. It is located seven miles south of New Iberia, surrounded by wet marsh and the Bayou Peiti Anse. It’s one of five along the Louisiana Gulf Coast, formed when an ancient seabed evaporated, depositing pure salt, which rose up in large chunks and pushed the ground into a hill.

Long before its namesake Avery family settled there in the 1830s, American Indians discovered that Avery Island’s verdant flora covered a precious natural resource—a massive salt dome. There the Indians boiled the Island’s briny spring water to extract salt, which they traded to other tribes as far away as central Texas, Arkansas, and Ohio.

19^th Century

1850s – Edmund McIlhenny (1815-1890), a New Orleans banker, was given a gift by a soldier returning to New Orleans from Mexico of some dried peppers that were acquired in Mexico during the United States-Mexican War (1846-1848. The soldier told him to try them in his food. He used one or two and like it, so he saved the seeds from the remaining peppers and planted them. He grew them in his wife’s garden at Avery Island. McIlhenny did not raise them commercially for another twenty years.

1863 – In April of 1863, during the Civil War (1861-1865), Edmund McIlhenny fled with his wife when the Union Army entered the city. They took refuge on Avery Island in rural Iberia Parish, where her family owned a salt-mining business.

Because of the salt on the island, the Union forces invaded the island and captured the mines in 1863. The McIlhennys fled to Texas and didn’t return until the end of the war. The area that would became Iberia Parish was hotly contested by Union and Confederate forces during the Civil War. Their battle lines moved back and forth through the area, and Union troops twice looted the town. They also seized the Weeks family mansion, now called "Shadows-on-the-Teche," and used it as a command post — but not before it, too, was looted. As a Union officer noted, "the boys were allowed to go through it, sack, pillage and destroy every article within its walls."

When the McIlhenny family came back, they found their plantation ruined and their mansion plundered. One possession remained, a crop of capsicum hot peppers.

1868 – Determined to turn the peppers into income, he devised a spicy sauce using vinegar, Avery Island salt, and chopped capsicum peppers. McIlhenny packaged his aged sauce in 350 used cologne bottles and sent them as samples to likely wholesalers. He passed some of his sauce onto General Hazard, who was the federal administrator in the region. The general knew a good thing when he tasted it. His brother happened to be the larges wholesale grocer in the United States. General Hazard sent some of the hot sauce to his brother in New York, and told him it was made from a new kind of chili pepper. On the strength of the purchase orders that followed, Edmund McIlhenny began a commercial operation in 1868.

At first he wanted to call this new sauce Petite Anse Sauce (after the island), but when family members baked at the commercial use of the family’s island name, he opted for his second choice “Tabasco.” Some historians say it’s a Central American Indian word that means “land where the soil is hot and humid.” This certainly describes the climate of Avery Island. Other historians have put forth that it actually means “place of coral or oyster shell.”

1870 - McIlhenny secured a patent Pepper Sauce. In 1872, he opened an office in London to handle the European market. Bottles with metal tops replaced the corked bottles sealed with green wax as the increasing demand for Tabasco sauce caused changes in the packaging.

1893 – Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Club produced a play called “Burlesque Opera of Tabasco” with the approval of Edmund McIlhenny’s son, John Avery McIlhenny. He bought the rights to the production and had it staged in New York City.

1895 – Lord Horatio Herbert Kitcherner’s (1850-1916), British Field Marshal and statesman, troops brought Tabasco pepper sauce on their invasion of Khartoum in the Sudan.

20^th Century

1906 - In 1898, another Louisiana entrepreneur (and former McIlhenny employee) named B. F. Trappey began growing tabasco chiles from Avery Island seed. He founded the company B. F. Trappey and Sons and began producing his own sauce, which was also called "Tabasco." The McIlhenny family eventually responded to this challenge and a several decades-long feud by receiving a trademark for their Tabasco® brand in 1906.

1920s – In 1921, an American bartender in Paris, Fernand "Pete" Petiot, mixed up some vodka and tomato juice. According to legend, Petiot said, “It was suggested we call the drink 'Bloody Mary' because it reminded him of the Bucket of Blood Club in Chicago, and a girl there named Mary." In 1934, Petiot brought the drink to the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. It was in New York that he added pepper, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, lemon, lime and horseradish. Petiot pushed his tomato-based drink as a hangover cure. Born the Bucket of Blood, the drink was later called Red Snapper and Morning Glory before finally being christened Bloody Mary, supposedly after American entertainer George Jessel accidentally spilled one of the crimson beverages over a young woman named Mary.

1929 - In 1929, Trappey's expanded to two plants, one in Lafayette and one in New Iberia. That same year, the McIlhenny family won a trademark infringement suit against the Trappeys. From that time on, only the McIlhenny sauce could be called "Tabasco," and competitors were reduced to merely including tabasco chiles in their list of ingredients. The two companies had competed with identically named sauces for thirty-one years.

1932 – When the British government began an isolationist “Buy British” campaign, Parliament banned the purchases of Tabasco Pepper Sauce, popular in England since 1868 and available in the House of Commons dining rooms. The result protest from members of Parliament was dubbed “The Tabasco Tempest,” and inevitably Tabasco pepper sauce returned to parliamentary tables. It is said, that to this day, Queen Elizabeth uses Tabasco pepper sauce on her lobster cocktail.

21^st Century

2002 - Archaeologists digging at the site of a black-owned saloon in the historic Old West mining town of Virginia City unearthed a 130-year-old bottle of Tabasco brand hot sauce. The bottle, the oldest style of Tabasco bottle known to exist, was reconstructed from 21 shards of glass excavated from beneath the site of the Boston Saloon, which was owned by an African-American from Massachusetts and catered to blacks and whites from 1864-75, was among the first eateries to introduce the now-popular spicy sauce. “The Tabasco bottle is particularly intriguing because of what it implies about African-American cuisine and the development of the West,” said Kelly Dixon, the administrator of the Comstock Archaeology Center who is supervising the dig in Virginia City about 20 miles southeast of Reno.

Did You Know?

Each 2-ounce bottle of Tabasco Sauce contains at least 720 drops?

The U.S. Territory of Guam is the world's largest per capita consumer of Tabasco sauce, according to the McIlhenny Company. Some people say that Guamanians acquire a passion for hot sauce in the cradle, when mothers lace their babies' bottles with Tabasco. True or not, that story started because those Pacific islanders consume the equivalent of almost two 2-ounce bottles of Tabasco sauce per person each year, a feat unmatched in any other country on Earth.

During the Vietnam War, the McIlhenny company sent thousands of copies of the Charley Ration Cookbook, filled with recipes for spicing up C-rations with Tabasco pepper sauce, wrapped around two-ounce bottles of Tabasco pepper sauce in waterproof canisters?

SECRETS OF GREAT BREADS

Often we field questions about making great bread. Great bread is a matter of using the right ingredients and the right techniques—there’s no single secret that will make perfect bread. But really great bread is readily attainable. We’ve compiled our list of what goes into great bread.

1. The right flour.
2. An understanding of yeast.
3. A good dough conditioner.
4. A baker’s thermometer

Now this isn’t everything that goes into great bread but the baker that is armed with these four tools are likely to be baking great bread.

Recently we stated that if there is a secret ingredient that bakers use it’s the flour. So we put the right flour on the top of our list.

To understand how important flour is, you need to understand just a little about gluten. Gluten strands are formed from the proteins naturally occurring in wheat flour. It's what gives bread its chewy texture. If you use a flour with a higher percentage of protein, you will have more gluten. Most commercial bread bakers are going to use flours with 10 to 14% protein--bread flour.

Commercial bakers have access to dozens of different flours. If you want really good bread, buy a good quality bread flour--even if you have to make a deal with a local baker.

If you buy your flour at the grocery store be aware that all flours are not equal. For bread you want a bread flour. Name brands are likely to do a better job of holding to a specification and will provide more consistent results. You can get an idea of the protein content from the nutrition label. Divide the grams of protein by the grams in the serving size to get the approximate percentage of protein in the flour (subject to rounding error). For home baking, you want at least ten percent and preferably higher.
Yeast is a living organism. The gases expelled by the growing yeast are what leavens the bread. The skilled baker recognizes that with the dough, he or she is culturing a living organism and that the yeast must be growing in the right culture to create the gases to make light airy bread. The right culture is primarily a function of moisture, temperature, and pH or the acidity level.
This brings us to our dough conditioner. Dough conditioner alters the pH of the dough (among other things) so that it enhances the growth of the yeast and it makes the dough more extensible. All else being equal, dough conditioner can make a good bread great. You can buy dough conditioner (or dough enhancer as it is sometimes called) in some grocery stores or you can order it online at www.preparedpantry.com

And finally, a thermometer has been called the baker’s secret weapon. We would not think of making bread without one. We use it to measure water temperature. (When we use our bread machines, we measure the water temperature to exactly 80 degrees—not one degree off. When we make bread in our stand-type mixer or by hand, we use water between 100 degrees and 110 degrees.) We nearly always measure the temperature of the bread when it comes from the oven. And you can use a thermometer to measure the temperature of the dough to make sure that you have the right temperature for your yeast to thrive in. An insta-read thermometer is best.

Blue Cheeses (Bleu Cheeses)

Blue Cheese History and Facts (also spelled ‘bleu cheese’)

Blue cheese is a general classification of cow's milk and/or goat's milk cheeses with a blue or blue-green mold. The blue mold in these cheeses is due to mold spores from Penicillium roqueforti or Penicillium glaucum, etc. Today most blue cheeses (bleu cheese) are either injected with the mold, as with Roquefort, or the mold is mixed right in with the curds, as it is with Gorgonzola, to insure even distribution of the mold. Most of these cheeses must still be aged in the original caves where they were developed to bear the name.
Most Blue cheeses are made from whole cow's milk, but there are also made with ewe's or goat's milk. These complex blue veined cheeses are generally ranked as some of the best cheeses in the world. They are strong flavored, and have a unique 'tang' that distinguishes these cheeses. Some of the best are Roquefort, Stilton, Gorgonzola and Danablu.

Lanark Blue is a Scottish blue cheese made from ewe's milk. It has blue green veins, a strong salty flavor, with a creamy white inside.

Some Blue Cheese History
Most of these cheeses were originally produced in caves in their respective areas, where the mold was naturally present. This combined with the unique nutrients that the mold grew on in the caves affected the flavor, texture and blue-green color of the mold in each of these cheeses. In the beginning, this was most likely discovered by accident when cheeses were stored in the caves, and they developed mold. Then someone decided to taste the cheese that others might have thought to be ruined, and realized how exquisite the taste had become.
Some blue cheeses, such as Danablue, were developed later as less expensive alternatives to the higher priced Roquefort cheese from France.

The process for making America's ‘Maytag Blue Cheese’ was developed by the Iowa State U. in 1941 (it is a process for making blue cheese with pasteurized milk.) Production was begun by Fred Maytag II (of dishwasher fame) when he heard about the new process. Maytag blue is also aged in specially designed caves.

ARAK, RAKI, OUZO, SAMBUCA AND PASTIS

ALL ARE TYPICALLY MEDITERRANEAN DISTILLATES

Around the Mediterranean from Lebanon in the east to Spain in the west practically all countries produce a version of anise flavoured distillates under a range of names: the Arabs call it arak, Turks raki, Greeks ouzo, Italians sambucca, French pastis and Spaniards anisado.
While Muslims are not supposed to consume alcoholic beverages according to one of the tenets of their religion, historians and researchers widely attribute the discovery of distillation to Arab alchemists in the 13th century. In fact, the word alcohol is derived from Arabic al-cool, and alembic still from al-embic.
Although there are theories that Chinese had discovered the secrets of distillation well before Arab alchemists, nothing has been unearthed to even remotely corroborate such claims.
Mary the Jewess and Hypatia of Alexandria, an important learning centre well into the 12th century had invented a contraption to separate liquids by heating but they never thought of exploiting the difference of boiling points of water (100 C) at sea level and alcohol (78.3 C).
It is thought that the Roman Emperor Diocletian’s order to burn all alchemists books in 296 A D contributed to the delay of the discovery of distillation principles by western scientists.
Regardless of historical facts and twists of events arak was and remains one of the most famous and widely consumed distillates in the world, but oddly enough not in the English speaking countries of the world. Maybe arak consumption requires the right environment and food. There is something to be said about drinking in the right environment, a pastis in one of Marseille’s quayside cafes tastes much better than the same drink in Toronto.
Of all the Arabic, speaking countries Lebanon reputedly produces the best arak and the very best of them sells for more than Scotch whisky in that country.
For Lebanese arak means a clear flavourful distillate to be diluted with sufficient water and consume alongside food.
The Bekaa Valley south east of Beirut, considered the pearl of the Mediterranean before the almost 20 year of armed conflict ruined it, is well known for its arak, but the best of all comes from artisan distillers with very small operations or restaurant owners who also distil their own.
In the valley, there is at least one restaurant owner who buys obeidah grapes (supposedly the mother grape of Chardonnay) presses them and ferments the juice naturally. After the fermentation, the weakly alcoholic liquid is left to settle and then filtered to remove the crudest suspended matter. Subsequently the liquid is distilled in copper stills produced by skilled Arab masters.
During the first and subsequent runs the fore shots and faints are carefully separated, collected and redistilled to minimize methyl alcohol content.
In fact, it is the separation of alcohol and water that Arab alchemists discovered and then refined it by redistillation of the aforementioned parts for purity.
After the first distillation at 70 percent ABV, the distillate is diluted to 53 percent ABV and redistilled in the presence of unwashed, uncrushed anise from the village of Hinel on the Mount Hermon close to the Syrian border. Still the second run is separated, and redistilled twice more to obtain the ebst arak imaginable.
If you want to experience this, arguably best arak, you must travel to Kesrouan in southeastern Lebanon and ask Maronites to direct you to the restaurant. Only 100 bottles per year are produced for consumption in her restaurant.
Ksara, Fakhra and El Massaya are commercial brands of fine Lebanese araks but cannot compete with the both depth and sophistication of flavour and fine texture of the artisinal arak.
The best way to enjoy arak is to pour it into a tall glass with a few ice cubs one part of arak and dilute it by pouring five parts of water. At this instant, it will turn milky white and will have been diluted to approximately 10 percent ABV. Arak requires Middle eastern food, (Small servings of feta cheese, rice and pine nut stuffed vine leaves, marinated olives, spicy, thinly slices sausages, cracked wheat balls stuffed with raw, chopped lamb, fried mussels, fried cubed lamb liver sprinkled with chopped parsley, red mullet roe blended with mie de pain, olive oil, lemon juice, fried smelts, poached sliced cold lamb’ brains with vinaigrette dressing, roast leg of lamb with vegetables, soy beans cooked in olive oil and tomatoes, plenty of flat bread), and good company.
In effect, Middle Eastern food is designed for communal eating and never satisfying in a restaurant for a party of two.
Turkish raki, Greek ouzo resemble arak but are lighter in flavour. Italian Sambuca is a liqueur meant to be a digestive and pastis contains anis, many herbs and a little sugar making it quite different from its Arabic counterparts.