Homemade, from scratch, is in the air.
Ruhlman announces his BLT from Scratch challenge:
From scratch means: You grow your tomato, you grow your lettuce, you cure your own bacon or pancetta, you bake your own bread (wild yeast preferred and gets higher marks but is not required), you make your own mayo. All other embellishments, creative interpretations of the BLT welcome.
And in the June 2009 Gourmet, a burger with homemade everything: homemade buns, ketchup, mustard, and pickle relish, with a burger made from ground skirt steak.
Raise your own pig. Grow the feed for the pig. Slaughter the pig yourself, in a slaughterhouse / smokehouse that you built with your own hands, from stones that you quarried yourself, cut yourself, stacked yourself. The wheat for the bread? Grow it yourself, harvest it yourself, mill it yourself, etc. Mayo made with eggs from the chickens you've raised yourself (fed with feed that you've grown yourself), oil that you've pressed yourself, etc., etc.
Oh, and I love that the ad that I'm currently seeing juxtaposed with this entry is one for an "ICE AGE, Dawn of the Dinosaurs" movie contest, brought to you by Safeway (ingredients for life). You can't get better content targeting than that.
Posted by: Michael Sippey | June 09, 2009 at 09:52 AM
It's pretty easy to regress "from scratch" ad infinitum, but I'm sure a BLT (don't tell my Jewish mother) made from home-cooked bread, garden veggies, and home-cured meat would be pretty damn good.
I feel like taste plotted against self-preparation would be pretty logarithmic: lots of gains from moving to farmers' market ingredients from preserved, mass-produced supermarket food, a little more from farmers' market to home-grown, home-cured, and less and less perceptible difference as you DIY more and more.
Then there's the time issue: every minute spent building a BLT from scratch is a minute spent not eating a BLT, scratch or no. Gluttony is no good, but neither is a life of eternal self-bacon-denial.
Posted by: Account Deleted | June 09, 2009 at 10:14 AM
I've got a friend making home-cured bacon now - he's been practicing and has his own industrial kitchen space he's renting. I may go with this, as it seems like it will be more delicious. (I proclaimed his first attempt "meat butter", which I meant as high praise indeed.)
However, my mom has sourdough starter back home that started here in SF in 1978. I think that may up the ante somehow? Could we all contribute one incredibly from-scratch item?
Posted by: Ginevra | June 09, 2009 at 10:31 AM
'Meat butter'? Isn't that just called lard? :)
Posted by: Andy | June 09, 2009 at 10:49 AM
true enough.
still - I am all about Iron Chef From Scratch BLT. Who's in?
Posted by: Ginevra | June 09, 2009 at 11:03 AM