Good for You: People Purple Eaters

Everyone else is wrong and I'm right, but for the sake of world peace (whirled peas?), let's just say it's my problem.
Purple eggplant skin is not an especially healthy food!

“The darker the eggplant’s skin, the more it has to offer in terms of antioxidant-rich anthocyanins.”

I gagged on this sentence when I read it in the New York Times, Recipes for Health: Easing Into Fall, Taking Eggplant With You. It's a recipe for Eggplant and Tomato Pie by Martha Rose Shulman, but not just any recipe. It's a Recipe for Health.

We have tomatoes, we have eggplants, and we like eating them together, especially as pizza pie. But that line about the antioxidant-rich anthocyanins sticks in my throat, and I will not make this recipe; I don't care how healthy it purports to be!

I'm reminded of an early episode of Julia Childs's, The French Chef. As I recall, she was making a classic ratatouille and explained that eggplants with innies tended to be bitter, while those with outies were not. This was wisdom she had gleaned from her green grocer referring to the flower end of the fruits.

What?! So much for the wisdom and bitter nonsense of experts. And now back to anthocyanins or anthocyans (the cyan root should give you a hint of color). Here's the definition from Wikipedia:

from Greek: ἀνθός (anthos) = flower + κυανός (kyanos) = blue) are water-soluble vacuolar pigments that may appear red, purple, or blue depending on the pH.

Not surprisingly, the purpler the eggplant, the greater the concentration of anthocyanin, at least in the skin. It's also true that anthocyanins act as powerful antioxidants, which many people want to believe provides untold health benefits (the keyword is untold). Here's an authoritatively well-footnoted quote from Wikipedia addressing the consumption of anthocyanin-rich foods (click here if you need to verify the footnotes):

“Although anthocyanins are powerful antioxidants in vitro,[34] this antioxidant property is unlikely to be conserved after the plant is consumed. As interpreted by the Linus Pauling Institute and European Food Safety Authority, dietary anthocyanins and other flavonoids have little or no direct antioxidant food value following digestion.[35][36][37]”

What are the health/nutrition/science editors at The Times thinking? Eat more eggplant skin, it's good for you? And don't bother eating white eggplants (they're called eggplants for a reason!), which have no detectable anthocyanins. That's according to The Handbook of Vegetable Science and Technology, in table 6 on page 234. Though the same table shows that white eggplants have a higher fiber content than most of the others tested.

Time for a radical conclusion: We may have to decide on the basis of flavor or seasonal availability which eggplants to put on our pies.

Business application: Sell dried purple eggplant-skin flakes, packaged in shakers like red pepper flakes, as a flavor enhancer and healthy addition to tofu and other favorite foods in need of enhancement. Call them AnthoFlakes and sell them in red, purple, and blue varieties—the world will beat (not beet) a path to your door!

Tomato Confit

I’ve been making batches of Tomato Confit. Timo found the recipe in the Zuni Café cookbook, exclaimed with satisfied glee, and passed it along. I’ve picked a lot of plum tomatoes at Waldingfield, washed, sliced, salted, added garlic and basil, covered all with too much olive oil, and roasted half-a-dozen batches at 300° for two hours or so. Almost every night we have a fresh batch to eat with bread and salad, and I’ve been piling up the left overs in a covered glass dish, which was almost full.

There’s enough oil in each batch that it’s easy to leave most of it in the baking dish and just layer in the next batch of tomatoes, garlic, and herbs. The oil becomes remarkably flavorful, almost rich with the concentrated flavors baked into it. The tomatoes themselves are baked long enough to remove almost all the water from them, and the effect is essentially sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil. 

Which brings up the question of what percentage of tomatoes sold as sun-dried are sun-dried? I suspect it’s very low. But oven-dried tomato isn’t a particularly appealing name. It brings up images of limp stewed tomatoes. So confit, which I’ve only known as various forms of meat packed in their own fat, seems like an apt name for the result of the long, slow roasting.

Today, I reheated the accumulated confit in the oven and canned it all in pint-size jars. It looks quite beautiful and the jars sealed nicely. I think that we have at last found a way to store tomatoes for use through the winter. I want to make much more, and I have another batch in the oven right now.

Book Review: "Kitchen Confidential," by Anthony Bordain

This is really yesterday's post, but I don't see a way to back date it from when I'm writing it, which is today.

I finished listening to Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bordain's autobiography in the restaurant business. It is profane in the extreme, descriptions are grossly exaggerated to the point of unbelievability, and it doesn't hang together with any sort of theme (does it need to?), but I liked it nonetheless. Partially, I just liked how true-to-character the whole book was, and having Bordain read it in his somewhat lower-class-sounding New Jersey accent, made it seem all the more genuine, despite the exaggerations.

The fact is, Bordain isn't as lower-class as he sounds. He's rather well-educated and well-read and this is evident from his vocabulary, powers of description, and knowledge of his craft. I liken him to the cooking equivalent of Bruce Springsteen—seemingly working class New Jersey on the surface, but completely savvy and talented in reality. Bourdain is proud of his accomplishments, but writes with vivid savageness about his past excesses as a drug addict and general live-for-the-moment type of guy. And while he doesn't seem to regret anything he has done, he speaks kindly of others who came up the ranks with their passion for food as primary motivator and not the love of rank and money as he did.

But if Bourdain had been refined, his book wouldn't be so entertaining. In the end, he really does love food and cooking and he's totally devoted to his faithful staff, which is clearly a big deal in the New York restaurant scene. Most surprisingly, after many descriptions of debauchery in and out of the kitchen, we learn that he's been married to the same woman throughout the book! So I even ended up liking Bordain. I wouldn't mind reading his other books, including a couple of kitchen novels.