Welcome to the final bits and bobs of August.
Reader mailbag after the End of Butter post also contains this, from a cauliflower nationalist. Take it with a grain of parm:
Dear Lydia,
We need to talk about cauliflower.
This humble cruciform is transformed into juicy, salty, crispy deliciousness with the simplest grilling in olive oil, salt and pepper, with a nice dollop of ground Parmesan for the last minute. You have to eat it to believe it.
Method: Take a head of cauliflower and slice it into steaks about 1.5-2cm thick. Chuck them in an oiled backing sheet, then drizzle with a tonne of oil, salt and pepper. Grill on oven top shelf for about three-four minutes, the flip the cauliflower. Grill for three-ish more minutes, then sprinkle with grated parm (I grate it directly over the baking sheet) and return to the oven for another two-ish minutes.
A reader from UK sent this recent video chat with Dr. Alice Lichtenstein about the dietary fat and cholesterol on the Zoe app podcast. (“I haven’t seen it yet, tablet dying, wifi bad in this hotel room in Lyon,” thanks for your curatorial attention to this matter, fam.) I’m not a massive fan of the Zoe corp and am inclined to trust Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan more when she lists ‘pre-diabetes’ as one of the inflationary not-yet-illnesses that we as a society don’t really need - and entire Zoe business model used to be based on obsessive monitoring of glucose levels in blood. (They have since corrected to focus on gut biome and personalized AI monitoring.) But they often have good guests on, and I love it when a scientist confirms all my priors, as it happened here, though I did not know that I might as well use canola and soybean oil for sauteeing, it’ll be even better than light olive oil.
Meanwhile, Terroni’s Spaccio, which sells my favourite wholewheat bread, increased the price a further dollar and cancelled their loyalty program after less than a year. The loaf is now practically $10 - just because they can - and because greed. I’ve gone back to (sometimes) making my own bread. I’ve been using this recipe, which is based on the Jim Lahey classic no-knead loaf that I’ve been using (via Deborah Cameron) for years. I haven’t perfected this version yet. “Instant yeast” and “traditional yeast” annoyingly demand different treatment and time investment, and all-purpose flour and bread flour are two different beasts, and that’s even before we start talking about grain.
I promise that Long Play will not become a food newsletter. One more thing and I’m done: I’ve found superlative white fish in supermarket freezers. Hello, seabream. (I think I might have even caught one in the Adriatic the summer before I left for Canada, apparently the southeast European sea has tons, and then forgot about their existence until last week.)
This is not a paid promotion! Though - if anyone from Ocean Jewel wants to get in touch you know where to find me. This seabream is just terrific. A drizzle of olive oil, a few slices of lemon in and around, some herbs if you like them, a bit of salt, stick it in a pocket of parchment paper and to the oven at around 400F about 20 min, and leave it to steam a while before opening. Grilling is even quicker and what you lose in moisture you get back in crunchable skin and extremities. Don’t forget the cheeks. (Vegans, look away.)
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