Salmon Farm Force Power Flight Jacket

Introduction

Don’t overthink the title of this post. I had to get your attention. I’m sure nobody would read another word past the title “Salmon Farming – Pros and Cons.” But stop, don’t leave! I promise this will be interesting. Maximum strike open flight force! Stay with me! I’ll even include some gratuitous eye candy along the way. You’ll be glad you read this, trust me. I’m going to entertain you, improve your life, and empower you. Join me on my journey from aquaculture skeptic to true believer. Hyper strike epic!

Background

During a recent trip to Norway, my family was lured to the Havforsknings Instituttet. We thought this place would be devoted to the study of people who have foreskins, but it turns out to be a marine research center and aquarium. It was a great place, but despite all the cool otters, penguins, and exotic fish there, eventually we all got museum knees and had to sit down. So we headed over to the auditorium for a show about orcas, looking forward to some violent footage of their eating habits. At least, that’s what we thought was on the docket.

What we actually got was this long documentary about aquaculture—specifically, salmon farming. It could have been pretty interesting except it was pitched at the grade-school level. The best part was when an interviewer cornered an aquaculture scientist and asked, “Yes or no: is farmed salmon safe?” The scientist replied, “As far as we can tell, yes.” So tepid! So honest! In America the response would have been, “You bet your ass it is. There isn’t a safer food on the planet. Mega jacket open flash strike!”

I’d already been vaguely aware that Norwegian salmon was farmed. To be honest, this bothered me a bit every time we enjoyed it at a restaurant. When my wife declared that some salmon she ate in Oslo was the best she’d ever had, I had this cognitive dissonance—like, could it really be that the best salmon isn’t even wild? I decided her salmon was very good, but not as good as the local salmon I’d had in Scotland. This upheld my sense of myself as a sophisticated foodie until I considered that the Scottish salmon was possibly also farmed. After our trip, when I wrote my Food of Norway post, I tried to chase this Scottish thing down. But the more I looked into it, the more it looked as though I was in fact an uncultured rube, incapable of separating “real” food from rubbish.

Instinctive aversion

Upon reflection, I have to concede that my historical preference for wild salmon has been largely a knee-jerk thing. I recall Anthony Bourdain saying that, as a chef, he loved farmed salmon because it was relatively cheap, yet he could charge as much for it as for a nice lamb chop. (I’ve tried to find this quote, but Googling “Anthony Bourdain” is lately too depressing.) Meanwhile, I read years ago in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma that farmed salmon isn’t necessarily healthier than grass-fed beef. I’ve come to realize that at some point I unconsciously lumped farmed salmon into the broad category of “food that has been tampered with,” which I instinctively avoid (except that I don’t, not really, but let’s not think about that right now).

Above all, I must confess I have enjoyed being the kind of gainfully employed person who can afford the good, wild stuff. Maybe my kids don’t get to wipe their butts with raw silk, but damn it, they get top grade wild Sockeye salmon!

Visiting Norway had me challenging all of this. Boring though it may have been, that museum documentary did showcase an industry that is clearly careful and responsible. Can you imagine a zoo in Kansas showing a documentary about feedlots? Hell no—they wouldn’t dare. Nobody would want to watch it, and moreover, the beef industry would crucify everyone involved.

A brief pause for eye candy

Okay, I did promise some eye candy. Here you go.

What’s really wrong with farmed salmon?

Virtually all of the salmon from Norway—over a million metric tons a year, worth $8 billion, according to the New York Times— is farmed. Granted, Norway seems to do a nice job with it, locating the farms in the fjords; they’re just netted-off areas of ocean where fish are generously fed. Not so different from a cruise ship, really.

Still, some environmental advocates strongly deride farmed salmon, even the Norwegian stuff. Kurt Oddekalv, leader of the Green Warriors of Norway, described farmed salmon to the Times as “the most toxic food in the world.” And I read in the Guardian how Don Staniford, of the Global Alliance Against Industrial Aquaculture, “a Liverpudlian who has lived in Scotland for many years, argued that cramming carnivorous, migratory fish into crowded tanks and releasing toxins, diseases and parasites into the surrounding waters was inherently unsustainable.” I took this with a grain of salt, noting how the word “tank” was used to describe a facility contiguous with open ocean. (This guy kind of puts the “pud” back in “Liverpudlian.”)

I’ll admit that it has always creeped me out a bit that farmed salmon wouldn’t be pink without a little help. According to the website fromnorway.com, “The pink color of Norwegian Salmon comes from a natural oxycarotenoid called astaxanthin. In nature, salmon receive astaxanthin by eating crustaceans. Norwegian Salmon receive these same beneficial nutrients as supplements in their feed.” It must be said that salmon farmers don’t use very much. As Time magazine reports, “The pigmenting compound doesn’t come cheap. It is the most expensive element of salmon feed, according to a 2011 study, taking up nearly 20% of total fish feed costs. Controlling and optimizing the concentration of astaxanthin in fish food is time and labor intensive.” Reading this is, psychologically speaking, a mixed bag. It’s like, “Don’t worry, it’s all very precise—a tightly-run factory!”

But then, so is the production of just about everything we eat, honestly. I don’t kid myself:  the practice of agriculture is closer to a factory than to a farm. It’s easy to be skeptical about farmed salmon when we peek behind the curtain, but we ignore other industries that hide behind a fence or a wall.

I watched some candid Internet footage of salmon being fed. Their feed consists of little dusty brown balls, like dog food, which is kind of depressing—but then, I feed my beloved cat cat food, which is also little brown balls. I should just get over it.

The problem is, just when I’ve figured out a way to discard another misgiving about farmed salmon (I am a cheap bastard, after all), another issue pops up, like ideological Whack-a-Mole. Wikipedia questions the sustainability of aquaculture: “Salmon require large nutritional intakes of protein, and farmed salmon consume more fish than they generate as a final product. On a dry weight basis, 2–4 kg of wild-caught fish are needed to produce one kg of salmon.”

Should we trust Wikipedia? Maybe not, but NPR essentially agrees: “It takes about three pounds of feeder fish to produce one pound of farmed salmon … but feeding more salmon depletes the ocean’s smaller fish.”

There are other issues. When farmed salmon escape their enclosure, they can breed with wild fish and create nonviable offspring. There’s also an issue around the spread of sea lice to the wild population. According to the Times, these parasites “feast on the mucus and skin of the fish before moving on to the muscle and fat, making the fish vulnerable to infections and sometimes killing them.” Yuck! Makes me want to opt for the burger—unless I allow myself to remember the poor overweight cows standing around in their own waste in tiny pens, jacked up on antibiotics because their blood pH has been screwed up by a diet of corn that they didn’t evolve to eat.

Of course, eating only wild salmon isn’t an obviously practical solution. The Times reports that the wild salmon population in Norway has fallen by more than half since the 1980s. There just isn’t enough wild salmon there to produce the 14 million meals of Norwegian salmon that fromnorway.com says are consumed every day worldwide.

Meanwhile, even if you insist on wild, you’re probably being duped at least some of the time. According to this article in Time, researchers conducting DNA testing found that about a third of salmon they tested that was touted as wild was actually farmed, and “you’re three times more likely to get duped at a restaurant, where 67% of the salmon were mislabeled, than a grocery store.”

Here’s an interesting product: wild keta salmon from a company called Pacific Seafood.

So what is keta salmon? According to Wikipedia it’s a type of Pacific salmon. Hence “Pacific Seafood,” I guess. But look at the label closely: this fish is a “wild product of China.” I’m not a geographer, but I just checked and China is well beyond the range of wild Pacific salmon:

So I’m getting a little confused here. I also note that this product has FD&C Yellow #6 and Red #40. Why?! “(Color enhancer.)” Yeah, but—why? Isn’t this Chinese Pacific salmon naturally pink? After all, it’s wild!

So what is to be done? As is so often the case, there seemed to be no simple answer. I was on the verge of shrugging my shoulders, reconciling myself to a future of very expensive wild Alaskan salmon when I’m feeling flush, and otherwise settling for canned salmon—which is always wild, but not all that tasty, particularly because it’s got all these sections of softened vertebrae in it, which are probably really good for you but are kind of chalky and aren’t so pleasant to crunch. But then, when I mentioned to my wife I was planning a blog post on farmed salmon, she said, “Instead of doing a trifling amount of research, throwing in a largely ignorant dose of pure opinion larded with stupid gags, and releasing another half-baked, largely useless essay on the world, why not interview a real expert for once?”

No, of course she didn’t really say that. What she actually said was, “You could interview my friend R—, who really knows this stuff.” So I did. Her friend, who has a Master’s and a Ph.D. in Aquatic and Fishery Science and works for a scientific research agency, happily obliged. (She asked to be quoted anonymously, though, as she doesn’t need “any more hate mail.” Whether her name even starts with “R,” I refuse to divulge.)

Another brief pause

Still there? Good job! Here’s some more eye candy.

The real skinny on salmon farming

I had a fascinating 45-minute discussion with R— about aquaculture. To begin with, she corrected some of the misconceptions I’d come across. For one thing, regarding efficiency of production, the feed conversion rate is now closer to 1-to-1 (the 3-to-1 statistic being really outdated).  Theoretically, she said, the conversion rate could be 0-to-1 as alternative feeds are developed. She forwarded me a couple of very thorough articles on the subject. Without getting into too much detail, here’s an interesting statistic: as explained here, one study found that for a given amount of feed, farmed salmon produces over three times as much edible product as poultry, and five times as much as pork.

Regarding interbreeding between farmed and wild salmon, R— pointed out that this isn’t a big problem on the west coast of the U.S., because we’re mainly farming Atlantic salmon here, which cannot breed with wild Pacific salmon. She concedes that “there are risks of farmed Atlantic salmon interbreeding with wild Atlantic salmon when they are farmed in areas where Atlantic salmon are native (i.e., the east coast and Europe).”

On the subject of alternative (non-fish-based) feeds, R— explained that this is being pursued very carefully: “There are definitely studies around how you maintain health with fish using alternative feeds; for example, they know that taurine, an amino acid, is essential to a fish’s diet.” I find this a pleasant contrast to the beef industry, which is notorious for using antibiotics to make animals gain weight faster, and the poultry industry, which grows its chicken “so fast that they have trouble walking because their legs won’t support the weight, in addition to other related health problems” (according to the Chicago Tribune here).

R— confirmed that antibiotics are not widely used with aquaculture, and asserted that farmed salmon is very safe and sustainable if it comes from Norway, British Columbia, Scotland or the US. In this country, there are nationwide regulatory standards for aquaculture to make sure its practices are safe. As for Pollan’s suggestion that farmed salmon may have fewer Omega-3s than grass-fed beef, R— clarified that currently, given the fish-based diet farmed salmon eat, wild caught doesn’t have more Omega-3s than farmed. This could change, if the aquaculture industry formulates feed from other sources, but they’re “experimenting with using fish processing waste, marine algae, even kinds of yeasts to feed to fish so they’ll still have lots of Omega-3s.”

(By the way, you know that bit about astaxanthin being added to the feed to produce the pink color? Well, far from the dye that Pacific Seafood adds to their “wild” salmon, astaxanthin is also sold to humans as a health food supplement. Dr. Andrew Weil, whom I consider a pretty staid, reliable source, touts its health benefits here.)

R— had a lot to say about the issue of scale, and the impossibility of meeting an increasing demand for seafood with a declining supply of wild fish. “Every other food we eat is [mainly] farmed except for fish,” she pointed out. “Why should fish be the one holdout? What other endangered or declining species are we running out to eat?”

Aquaculture, she explained, is scalable because there’s so much ocean that we’re not using: “One team calculated that we could replace the entire global wild captured fisheries with aquaculture and use less than 0.01% of the ocean’s surface. It’s totally doable; the question is what scale people will accept.” She’s frustrated because so many people reject aquaculture due to outdated information. “It’s so engrained in people that farmed fish is bad. When it first got going in the ‘70s all these NGOs cried foul because there was no oversight; now, these same NGOs are admitting that globally, [aquaculture] is what we need to do, but we’ve got these entrenched ideas in place that are hard to overturn.”

Hunger games

Having enough money to demand wild salmon is a convenient dodge, for a wealthy subset of the population, but it doesn’t address the wider problem. “What it comes down to,” R— pointed out, “is there are too many people [on the planet], but nobody wants to have that conversation. Everything has its impact. We can have this high-and-mighty attitude [about insisting on wild-caught] but everything we eat, everything we wear has an impact on the environment. I heard a lecture once where the guy said, ‘If everybody became vegan, we’d have to cut down every tree on the planet to bring enough land under agriculture to feed everybody.’ I’m not sure if that’s exactly true, but it’s interesting to ponder.” 

I’ve long felt that vegans, while admirably innocent of the many crimes committed in the name of animal husbandry, aren’t necessarily helping to solve anything. It’s not like they’re inspiring any significant number of people to follow their lead. At least if I insist on grass-fed beef I’m helping to create the market for it, which can help reduce the proportion of cows incarcerated in feedlots. For years I felt like holding out for wild salmon was similarly reasonable, but in fact there just won’t ever be enough wild salmon for everybody, so my position was unrealistic—it carried a strong whiff of “let them eat cake.” I like to think of myself as a responsible and fair person, not some unapologetically snobby epicure, but as the playwright Wallace Shawn has observed, “Sympathy for the poor does not change the life of the poor.”

During our conversation R—pointed out, “Eating seafood shouldn’t be a rich-person privilege. Omega-3 fatty acids have huge health benefits; why shouldn’t everybody get this food?” I totally agree: but without economies of scale, how can farmed salmon compete, price-wise, with a Big Mac or Chicken McNuggets and all the other cheap crap so many Americans are lured into eating, at the expense of their own health and that of our environment? Given that aquaculture is one of the most efficient forms of protein production, don’t we ultimately have a responsibility to promote it?

Here’s where choosing farmed salmon gives us a rare opportunity to eat like a king but also save money, while contributing to the growth of a responsible, sustainable industry. For bonus points, put your money toward local, or at least domestic, farmed salmon. Here are a final couple of tidbits R— sent me: the US imports 90% of the seafood we eat, creating a $15 billion seafood trade deficit. Meanwhile, over half the seafood we import is farmed anyway—so why not farm it here, where we do it safely and sustainably, and benefit our own economy?

Let’s return to my question about whether the best-tasting salmon could actually be farmed. Well, why not? Think of the most expensive Wagyu beef: is it hundreds of dollars a pound because it’s from wild-caught cows? No. It’s from cows raised meticulously by humans in a very controlled environment. So what’s wrong with raising our own salmon, too?

Now, if I sound like a scold, just remember this: open fighter force power launch! Maximum strike zone flight scatter! Go! Go!

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Bolognese Ragu for Pasta!

Introduction

I posted awhile back about the who-what-where-when-why-how of hand-cranked homemade pasta.  That’s all well and good, but what are you gonna put on the pasta?  I’ll take care of that here.  (Note:  if you’re a vegetarian or adhere to a strict kosher diet, this post is not for you.)

Who, where, and when

I learned how to make this Bolognese Ragu sauce at a half-day class at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco.  We cooked a variety of dishes that day, including these squids that were flashy but weird, and a risotto that had so much butter in it, I couldn’t bear to watch.  I threw myself into the Bolognese, because somebody had to:  it’s supposed to cook for at least 4-5 hours, and we only had 2 hours, so it had to be reduced on high heat, which meant continuous—and fast—stirring for over an hour.  I missed some other dishes, but that’s okay because the Bolognese was one of the better things we made.  (There was a salmon dish that was also delicious when we were sneaking little tastes—okay, big hunks—of it, but by the time it was put in a steel tub, placed over a flame to stay warm, and eventually consumed, it was all dried out.  That was the most important thing I learned from that cooking class, besides the Bolognese.)

What

Bolognese is pronounced “bowl-ug-NAY-zay” (according to my Italian chef/instructor at CCA).  I’m torn as to telling you exactly what goes into this sauce.  On the one hand, the CCA surely retains the intellectual property rights to the recipe.  On the other hand, there are probably hundreds of recipes just like it all over the Internet; a cursory search just now turned up a recipe with almost exactly the same ingredients.  The only difference in this random recipe I found is that it calls for vegetable oil, which—being a thinking person—you would instantly swap out for olive oil, making this recipe identical to the CCA one.  So CCA couldn’t exactly call it a closely guarded secret.

That said, I will honor the implicit copyright their printed recipe holds—that is, I won’t scan in my hard copy—though this is a pity because it’s absolutely full of grammatical errors and repeated steps and other errors that make it comically hard to follow.  Instead I’ll give you my own version, which I wrote out on the whiteboard at my brother’s house so his family and I could make it together.

Perhaps that recipe is from memory, because it’s incomplete.  I forgot to list salt.  How much salt?  To taste.  This is because this recipe doesn’t scale perfectly (which you should know because the quantities listed above are for a huge amount).  Watch the salt if you scale up … I over-salted once.  Distraught, I called my mom, who described the potato trick (cook a bunch of potato wedges in it to absorb the salt) and I was saved.

Onions are a crucial ingredient because the first thing they always do in a cooking class is teach you how to chop an onion.  This is to impart the proper technique, of course, but also to trick the students into doing a lot of prep work for the CCA employees.  (Why else would they have us chop 2 or 3 onions each?)  The CCA doubles as a restaurant, you see.  What an ingenious idea:  it’s not just unpaid labor; people are actually paying to help the sous-chefs.  Anyway, my printed recipe says “coarsely chopped” but “coarsely” is crossed out and “finely” written in.  Whose intellectual property is this revision?  I can’t remember. 

A lot of butter is involved.  But don’t worry, it’s completely offset, health-wise, by the extra virgin olive oil.  Buy something expensive because cheap olive oil is sometimes stretched with other crap like hazelnut or sunflower-seed oil.  (Checking the ingredients won’t help—this stretching is often done illegally.  There was a whole exposé about it—click here.)  Don’t worry about the cost … when you factor in how much time you’ll spend on this sauce, the financial outlay becomes irrelevant.

Naturally there are celery and carrots to complement the onion, completing the mirepoix trifecta.  And then you’ve got your ground beef.  Just look at the beef in the photo above.  It’s beautiful.  I always use grass-fed ground beef.  Not only does it taste better, but it’s humane.  Feedlots are like concentration camps for cows, and even in your nicer feedlots (like Neiman Ranch’s) the practice is cruel because the poor cows can’t properly digest grain.  This leads to all kinds of misery and health problems.  I buy high-end organic beef from local grass-fed cows who are “encouraged to socialize.”  No joke.  As a kid I was never encouraged to socialize—in fact I was discouraged from it by the dickheads on the playground—so these cows have arguably had a better life than I.  Is grass-fed worth the money?  Sure!  Beef is bad for you, so it should be a treat, and our treats can and should be expensive, so we don’t get into the bad habit of enjoying them too frequently.

Is beef still bad for you when it’s cooked with good things like tomatoes and onions and carrots and celery?  Well, yeah, when it’s also cooked in a lot of butter and oil.  Look, this sauce is a solid at room temperature.  It can’t be good for you.  (But it’s good for your soul!)

Can you use buffalo instead of beef?  Sure, I’ve done it and to good effect.  And you don’t have to scrutinize the label because it’s a federal offense to give antibiotics to a buffalo.  I know this sounds crazy, but I just fact-checked it on the Internet.  In the process, I learned something else:

Isn’t it funny what people search on?  Just think:  countless people want to give people the finger, and they do it, but they also worry about getting arrested.  God help us all.  I also learned here that a) it’s illegal to give growth hormones to bison; b) it’s not actually illegal to give antibiotics to bison, but they’re not routinely used and “most major markets have strict protocols that call for verification that the animal wasn't treated with antibiotics”; c) bison aren’t really related to buffalo; and d) the stuff we call buffalo is actually bison so this distinction isn’t important.

Someone once told me not to use cheap wine for cooking, so I don’t.  And use good, organic, whole milk and some freshly grated nutmeg (or what the hell, pre-ground Spice Islands, it probably doesn’t matter). 

The whole, canned, peeled tomatoes you see above cost more, pound for pound, than commercial jarred  spaghetti sauce—but they’re worth it.  And of course there’s salt.  Morton’s table salt?  Fancy sea salt?  Doesn’t matter which … just don’t settle on x quantity of table salt this time and then use x quantity of sea salt later—that would be a disaster.  Sea salt is way saltier.  Salt to taste, always to taste.

(What?  No garlic?  Nope!  Weird, innit?  And there are no other spices either.  No oregano, no basil, none of that stuff that vegans feel compelled to throw in everything.  The other ingredients are so darn good, you just don’t need anything else.  Have I tinkered with this recipe by adding stuff?  Nope.  That would be like salting or sugaring a good Belgian ale.)

Why

I’ll caution you again:  a large batch this recipe takes half a day of basically continuous work.  That is, it’s even more work than reading this blog post.  So why would you take the trouble?

You take the trouble because it is:  So. Dang. Good.  An epicurean friend of mine, the first time I served this to him, chewed silently for a moment, staring off into space, seeming to deeply consider the matter of this sauce, before stating, “This is so good it’s making me angry.”  And I got his point.  Perhaps you will, too, once you’ve tasted it for yourself.

Moreover, if you’re going to make handmade pasta—which you really should do—you need to pair it with a suitably excellent sauce.  Nothing in the grocery store will do (not even these crazy high-end sauces that are like $8 a jar).  And let’s face it, that recipe you got from your friend’s mom isn’t bad, but isn’t anywhere near as good as what you’ll get in a fine Italian restaurant.  And this Bolognese is better than what you’d get in most restaurants.

(I came to this wisdom only somewhat recently.  As a teenager, I made hand-cranked pasta with my friends and brothers all the time, but we never did anything appropriate for sauce.  Usually we just grabbed “the paint can,” which was our nickname for the gallon can of Ragu Old World Style we could buy at King Stoopid’s, our local grocery, for like $7.  It looked and tasted about like tomato soup.)

The other reason to take the trouble is that this recipe isn’t actually that difficult.  It’s not like some soufflé, or a perfectly poached egg, or anything you bake, where practice, skill, and finesse are required.  Bolognese would be hard to screw up.  If you put in the time and energy, it’ll come out great every time. 

I mainly make this Bolognese when I have houseguests (especially family, since there are lots of nieces and nephews to whom I can outsource the endless task of stirring and simmering it), and every year I host a huge pasta party for my bike club.  I like to think I’ve made a lot of people angry.

How

So here’s what you do.  Get a very large pan or pot or a Dutch oven.  Don’t use some cheap tinny thing because your sauce will scorch.  (The stainless steel paella pan you’ll see in my photos has a copper core.)  If you’re making a lot, use two vessels or you’ll be at the stove all day.  Turn the flame to medium.  Melt the butter in the oil.  (You’ll be staring at a frightening amount of fat, perhaps more than you’ve ever seen in one place, but don’t kid yourself that restaurants don’t use just as much.  That’s why their food is so good, and why you shouldn’t eat out too often.)  Sauté the onion until it’s translucent.  (No, you don’t have to hold it up to the light.)  Add the celery and carrots, cook them a couple minutes, and then put in the beef.  Add a little salt.  Mash the beef around in there until it’s not so red, but not yet brown.  Don’t ever brown meat!  It should look just a bit more cooked than this:

Pour in the wine, turn up the flame to medium-high, and cook until the wine has pretty much evaporated.  This will take a good while.  And you have to stir it fairly often.   It can seem kind of pointless, but it isn’t.  While that cooks down, open your cans of tomatoes, measure out your milk, and add the nutmug to your milk.  When the wine is mostly gone, you add the milk.  Look at this photo … the wine isn’t completely gone, just mostly gone.

Ahh, look at how nice and opaque that milk is.  Don’t use 2% or skim.  Why would you?  The whole idea here is packing as much fat as possible into a food that somehow isn’t greasy.  That’s like alchemy.  I grew up drinking powdered milk, which was so thin and weak it was translucent and almost had a blue tint to it.  (But don’t use cream.  There’s a limit to this fat-equals-flavor principle.)  Now you cook this down again until most of the liquid has gone.  Why not just add milk powder?  Look, would you give that up already?  There are no shortcuts!  The point is that the meat cooks in the milk.  This makes it really tender to where it will practically dissolve later, in the tomatoes.  Think about it:  this sauce cooks for like 5 or 6 hours … if you didn’t do this magical thing with the milk, the meat could get tough eventually.

When the milk is cooked off, you throw in your tomatoes, whole.  You don’t have to pre-chop them or anything.  Throw the juices in there too … even though that’ll make this thing a liquid all over again.  Seems kind of futile, right?  How every time you reduce the sauce, I tell you to add a bunch more liquid?  Like you’re stuck on the wheel of life and can’t get off?  Yeah, it’s true.  At least you don’t have to go crazy mashing up the tomatoes.  They’ll basically dissolve on their own over time.

From here, you’re just going to spend the next 4 hours or so reducing the sauce over low heat, stirring it frequently.  Could you lower the heat to barely simmering and stir it less frequently?  Sure, but it’ll have to cook for 5 or 6 hours.  Your call.  (If you make a smaller batch it won’t have to cook quite as long.)

I snapped the photo above at 4:48 p.m., which was two hours into the process.  Note the timestamps, and the depth of the sauce in the pot, in the next 4 photos.

Salt this to taste toward the end.  Err on the side of too little, since diners can always add more later, but don’t underdo it either because some people don’t understand about salting their food.  I myself used to think salting food made it salty.  It doesn’t, if you do it right … it just makes it tasty.

That last photo should show you what the Bolognese looks like when it’s done.  Rule of thumb:  when you drag your wooden spoon through it, the bottom of the pan should be visible for a second before the sauce oozes back down.  It’s almost not a sauce at this point.  It should be very, very thick.  Thicker than chili.  Lift up a blob of it on the spoon, tip it over, and it should tumble off the spoon.  If it flows or pours down, it’s not sufficiently reduced yet.

Now, if you’re making a really large batch like this, you want to cool the leftover sauce down pretty quickly.  I learned this from a friend who worked at Skyline Chili in Cincinnati.  He said after they made a giant batch, they’d put a huge block of ice in the middle—“chilling it down”—so it wouldn’t hit that perfect temperature at which stuff starts to grow in it.  Now, I’m not about to add fricking ice (i.e., water) to my Bolognese once I’ve finally got it nice and thick.  So I spoon it into small glass containers to cool faster.  (Don’t use plastic.  The sauce is too hot, and besides, it’ll stain the plastic.)  Throw these in the fridge with the tops loose so the steam can escape.  Snap the tops down later.

So, how do you serve this sauce?  Over handmade pasta, of course, though good commercial pasta like De Cecco is perfectly good as well.  Now, you shouldn’t heap this sauce on there in the quantities of a normal marinara sauce.  Bolognese is super-rich.  Toss that pasta with extra virgin olive oil, and then add just enough Bolognese.  Mix it around a bit on the plate, or dab into it, whatever, and you can always add a bit more sauce later if you were too stingy at first. 

Don’t go serving a giant portion of this to a kid because he might not need that much, or (gasp) even want that much.  Kids can be such little trolls, picking at really good food before getting distracted and wandering off, or demanding more garlic bread instead.  It’s a crime wasting any of this glorious Bolognese, after all that work!  Those damn kids!  You know what I do?  When I have my big pasta party, I start the evening with a giant batch of homemade mac ‘n’ cheese and let the philistine little runts get full on that!  Save the Bolognese for the adults!  (Note:  my own children are an exception.  They would never waste this glorious food.  In fact, I sometimes worry they’ll join forces and attack me for my plate.)

And whatever you do, don’t use that horrible powdered parmesan, that comes in the green cardboard canister!  And don’t use the pre-shredded stuff in the tub, either.  Use a hunk of hard parmesan and grate it right over the pasta.  I like to use a Microplane grater (look at the photo of the ingredients—it’s there on the right), which is really more like a zester, and shaves the cheese so finely it melts like snowflakes.  Throw a little shredded Italian parsley on there too if you’ve got it.

Counterpoint

Is there more to life than Bolognese?  Well, yes, in fact, but that’s a whole other post.

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Fiction - The Lice Letters

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for an instance of mild strong language.

Introduction

What follows is a work of fiction.  The normal disclaimers apply.  Even the language used, though it bears a strong resemblance to American English, is made-up and used fictitiously.  The single reference to an actual person is purely jocular.

The Lice Letters

Midvale Elementary School

3312 Bean St

Anytown, USA

February 27, 2012

Dear Parent,

Yesterday, a student in your child’s classroom was discovered with a case of Pediculosis Capitis (head lice).

Pause for a moment and let that sink in.  I, too, feel it like a hard ball in the pit of my stomach.  This is a serious matter.  But rest assured, it was not your child who was discovered to have this condition.  If it was, you would be well aware by now.  The child in question was sent home immediately and I’m sorry to say his mother was not able to pick him up.  She was at work and sent her boyfriend, Steve, in her place.  This did not make it any easier on the child, I hasten to add.  Steve—who is on the “approved guardian” list in the office—was able to come right away because he is unemployed and probably spends his days playing violent video games.  I would like to take this opportunity to downplay the altercation some of you may have heard transpired when Steve came to the school.  It was merely a loud exchange of words:  our custodian innocently pointed out to Steve that his (Steve’s) P.T. Cruiser shares the chassis and engine of the Dodge Neon (which happens to be true), and Steve did not take it well.  No assault actually transpired and nobody was taken into custody.

Though your child was not discovered to have head lice, he or she yet may.  Lice spreads quickly at schools because of the jostling and other physical contact that persist among children.  You should prepare yourself for the possibility that your child will be next.  If this does happen, rest assured that head lice does not mean your child is “unclean,” “filthy,” or an “unwanted immigrant.”  Every year a few million Americans—born American—come down with head lice.  Many of these people are quite clean in their habits.  In fact, some studies show that blown-dry and/or chemically treated hair makes a less hospitable environment for lice.  As such, the school is relaxing its prohibition of brightly colored hair among students (though I still have trouble not snickering when I see a grade-school kid wearing a t-shirt featuring a rock band whose members are old enough to be his or her grandparent).  On a related note, if you have a daughter this might be a good time to turn her on to the music and style of Sinéad O’Connor.

There are simple precautions you can take against your child getting head lice.  If you have more than one child, make sure they don’t wear hats.  Even if they promise not to trade them around, they always do.  (Yes, one of our students is allowed to wear a hat at school.  That’s because, for medical reasons, he has a bald spot that the other kids would tease him about.)  Also, please  don’t allow your child to attend slumber parties, where pillows can be shared.  Though these precautions may help, the sad truth is that head lice is mainly a result of parents not loving their children enough.  (No, of course that’s not true, but since so many mothers would believe this anyway, I might as well say it.)

Please inspect your child’s head regularly.  Lice are hard to see, especially by fathers who a) don’t actually care very much, and b) tend to be so old, from what I’ve seen at this school, that they’re bound to be farsighted.  Look for “dandruff” that turns out to be alarmingly mobile, and the cobweb-like networks of eggs (nits) that collect at the base of the hair shaft like glue.  One other symptom would be a child who is falling behind in school.  This is because his or her brain is literally being sucked out by these little parasites (though it could also merely mean he or she watches a lot of TV).  Remember that it is far better to discover head lice at home than for our staff to discover it!  If you do discover lice, please keep your child home until the lice are completely eradicated.  You may fib and tell us your child is “sick,” and as necessary we will help perpetuate your cover story.

Every year there seems to be a lice outbreak at this school and we are determined to put an end to it.  To that end, we have decided to cancel this year’s Spring Fling, commonly known as “hot dog / crazy hat day,” if the lice are not controlled by early May.  You don’t have to be an epidemiologist to understand our rationale, given the opportunities for contagion presented by hundreds of kids wearing makeshift hats.  And while I’m on the subject:  assuming that the Spring Fling does take place, please tell your child not to ask if the hot dogs are grass-fed.  They aren’t, okay?  We don’t have the budget for grass-fed so every single frank represents dozens of cows from several continents and all the other atrocities Upton Sinclair wrote about.  (No, we won’t consider turkey franks, because they taste like ass.)  If you don’t like this, ask yourself what member of our generation didn’t grow up snacking on lead paint chips.  Get over yourself.  [Gloria—give this the usual tone-down but don’t take out the grass-fed thing, it’s important.]

Thank you in advance for you assistance in this important matter.

Sincerely,

C. Roger Nelson

Principal

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Midvale Elementary School

3312 Bean St

Anytown, USA

February 27, 2012

Dear Parent,

I am writing to apologize for the highly inappropriate letter that was sent home with your child earlier this week.  I have a highly unusual writing style—really more of a “venting” mechanism than anything—and rely heavily on my secretary to edit my letters for length and content.  The letter about head lice should have been edited down significantly, with certain details omitted, particularly the instance of crude language.  This letter “slipped through the cracks” in that my secretary never had the opportunity to edit it.  Somehow, the initial draft was sent out before she even saw it.

Of course much of my letter was inappropriate even for a rough draft and it is a huge embarrassment to me that my private snideness has become public.  All I can say in my defense is that it is hard to maintain the proper attitude when my scalp has the tickly sensation, almost certainly psychosomatic, of being infested with parasites.

The management of Midvale Elementary School, the District, and the Superintendent of Schools are working with the PTA to determine the appropriate disciplinary measures for my misconduct.  I hope that I shall be allowed to continue as your Principal.

Once again, please accept my humblest apologies for the letter.

Sincerely,

C. Roger Nelson

Principal

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Midvale Elementary School

3312 Bean St

Anytown, USA

February 27, 2012

Mr. David Ferguson

Superintendent of Schools

1123 Toll House Road

Anytown, USA

Dear Mr. Ferguson,

Yesterday I discovered that what had originally appeared to be an administrative error in the matter of the head lice letter was actually an act of perfidy on the part of my secretary, Gloria Johnston.  She actually did receive the rough draft, and though she had initially edited it per our normal arrangement, she subsequently propagated the initial draft.  What tipped me off was the little accent over the “e” in “Sinead.”  I do not even know how to type that special character.  That was one of her initial edits to the revised version, and the sole change that survived in the final version.

The fully edited version of my letter—the one that should have gone out—was found on Ms. Johnston’s computer.  When confronted she confessed to her treachery.  Her employment has been terminated.  We are trying to keep this affair as quiet as possible and have cited “budget cuts” as the reason for her dismissal.  In the event that members of your staff desire the “inside scoop” on this matter, I encourage you to suggest that Ms. Johnston was discovered to be a carrier of head lice and a long-time contributor to the frequent outbreaks.

I understand that my situation is, as yet, unresolved and will decorously accept whatever decision you hand down.

Sincerely,

C. Roger Nelson

Principal

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