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To help beat the summer heat, more of us are toting around water (well, except for Mark, who, as Kate says in the audio, she’s never seen carrying around a flask or bottle of water away from home). And whether that means we’re filtering tap water and filling up flasks, buying bottled water, or cracking open our favorite flavored seltzers, we’re doing just about all of it.

Bottled water has become more popular since the beginning of the pandemic, with accelerated growth in the first half of 2020 in part due to stockpiling, according to Gary Hemphill, managing director of research for New York-based Beverage Marketing Corporation. “Both still and sparkling waters are growing, but sparkling has seen greater growth in recent years due to consumers migrating from carbonated soft drinks and some very high-profile product launches,” Hemphill told Beverage Industry last year.

And while still water sales far outpace sparkling water, sparkling water sales increased over 18 percent in a year, according to Information Resources Inc. Still water sales grew 5 percent in 2021.

In the audio, we mention the products below.

Are you a from-the-tap water drinker? Do you carry a favorite flask? Do you have a favorite still water brand? Or have you converted to flavored seltzers? Maybe you have a favorite hack or you’re loyal to your sparkling water maker. Let us know what you drink and why in the comments — open to all members. We want to hear from you.

Kate’s newest favorite flavor comes from LaCroix, a longtime brand favorite among many for its flavor variety, price point ($3.99 for an 8-pack), and aggressive fizziness.

Melissa’s favorite is Spindrift, more expensive than most brands ($5.99 for an 8-pack) and while it’s not zero calories, you can really taste the juice. Polar Black Cherry is the runner-up.

Mark’s (and our) newest water gadget is the Philips sparkling water maker that operates on CO2 cartridges: It’s sleek enough that you won’t mind keeping it out on the counter and it allows for customizable carbonation levels. The plastic container is BPA-free. About $70.

Kerri is a fan of collapsible water bottles: they’re really great for the plane, they’re super lightweight, they don’t clank around, and they don’t leak. About $16.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bittmanproject.com/subscribe

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Almost 20 years ago, before Mark’s book, Food Matters: A Conscious Guide to Eating came out, Mark was trying to figure out how to eat better in a way that felt authentic to him. He wanted to choose ingredients that are good for us, good for the environment, and taste delicious, for starters. That journey has taken him beyond Food Matters to VB6 and the VB6 Cookbook — and continues today. In this audio, Mark talks about his eating-less-meat journey — how he started, how it ebbs and flows, and the role it has played in his daily life. Take a listen.

We’re pairing this audio with our newest product aimed at helping you make better choices for your health and the health of the planet, with Mark delivered right to your phone. Our new SMS-based meal planner, How to Eat Less Meat, delivers three different meatless recipes per week over the course of a month, along with audio clips that include a mini editorial and a brief cooking lesson. You pick what you want to cook — and when — and Mark will walk you through it, with terrific step-by-step photos.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bittmanproject.com/subscribe

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What’s the difference between quick breads and other kinds of bread? Is there a difference between a muffin and a quick bread? When it comes to quick breads, can you swap in whole wheat and swap out white flour?

Here’s the first of two days on quick breads on The Bittman Project; the audio includes the story about the evolution of The Mark Bittman Banana Bread recipe that we’ve included, below — along with a few others cited. Tomorrow, look for banana bread variations, zucchini breads, and more.

Mark's Original Banana Bread

Makes 1 loafTime: About 1 hour

I love all banana bread (especially toasted, the next day, with peanut butter), but I have been making them for thirty years and I do think this one is the ultimate —the coconut is what does it, although the butter helps too. This recipe from the original How to Cook Everything also has appeared for many years in The New York Times (and in New York Times Cooking), where it has earned five stars after nearly 3,000 reviews.

Ingredients

8 tablespoons (1 stick) softened butter, plus some for greasing

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs

3 very ripe bananas, mashed with a fork until smooth

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

1/2 cup grated dried unsweetened coconut

Instructions

Heat the oven to 350°F. Generously grease a 9 x 5-inch loaf pan with butter. Combine the flours, salt, baking powder, and sugar in a large bowl.
Cream the remaining stick of butter with an electric mixer (or by hand) in a medium bowl and beat in the eggs and bananas until combined. Stir this mixture into the dry ingredients; do not mix more than necessary. Gently stir in the vanilla, nuts, and coconut.
Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan and bake until evenly browned, 50 to 60 minutes. A toothpick inserted into the center of the bread will come out almost clean when it is done, but because of the bananas this bread will remain moister than most. Do not overbake.
Cool on a rack for 15 minutes before removing from the pan. Serve warm or at room temperature. To store, wrap in parchment or wax paper for up to a couple days. (Or wrap the whole loaf tightly and freeze in an airtight container for up to a couple months.)

— Recipe from How to Cook Everything

Fruit and Nut Bread

Makes: 1 loafTime: About 1 1/4 hours, largely unattended

A versatile quick bread that you can make again and again without ever having the same loaf twice. If you are using fruit other than berries remove any pits or cores and chop the fruit into small pieces. (By the way, this is a perfect place for blueberries, straight from the freezer.) Then mix and match with your favorite chopped nuts.

Ingredients

4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) cold butter, plus softened butter for greasing

2 cups flour, plus more for dusting

1 cup sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup whole milk

1 tablespoon grated orange or lemon zest

1 egg

1 cup blueberries, cranberries, apples, cherries, or any other fruit; chopped as you like

1/2 cup chopped walnuts, pecans, almonds, or any other nut

Instructions

Heat the oven to 350°F. Generously grease a 9 × 5-inch loaf pan with softened butter, dust with some flour, and tap out the excess.
Whisk together the remaining flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl. Cut the cold butter into bits, then use a fork or 2 knives to cut it into the dry ingredients until there are no pieces bigger than a small pea.
Beat together the milk, zest, and egg in a separate bowl. Pour into the dry ingredients, mixing just enough to moisten. Do not overmix; it’s okay if the batter is not perfectly smooth. Stir in the fruit and nuts.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake until the bread is golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out almost entirely clean, 50 to 60 minutes. Cool the pan on a rack for 15 minutes, then carefully turn it upside down to release the loaf. Serve warm or at room temperature or wrap loosely in cloth or paper and keep at room temperature for up to a couple days. (Or wrap the whole loaf tightly and freeze in an airtight container for up to a couple months.)

Variations

Vegan Fruit and Nut Bread. Grease the pan thoroughly with a good-quality vegetable oil. To replace the egg combine 1 tablespoon ground flaxseed with 3 tablespoons water; let sit for at least 3 minutes until it has a gel-like consistency. Omit the butter and add cut 6 tablespoons room temperature coconut oil to the wet ingredients. Replace the milk with unsweetened oat or almond milk. The rest stays the same.

6 ingredients to add to Fruit and Nut Bread

Dried fruit, chopped or sliced, up to 1 cup
Fresh rosemary or thyme leaves, chopped, up to 1/4 cup
Nut or fruit liqueur, substitute up to 1/4 cup for juice
Nut extract, up to 1 teaspoon
Almond flour, substitute for up to 1 cup of the all-purpose
Chopped candied ginger, up to 1/2 cup

— From How to Bake Everything

Vegan Walnut Banana Bread

Makes 1 loaf Time: About 1 hour

Whenever you have leftover brown rice and overripe bananas around, try this whole-grain banana bread packed with fruit, spices, and nuts. It’s a real treat that's hearty enough to count as breakfast. As the loaf bakes, it forms a rice-flecked crust for a pleasant crunch and a contrast of textures in every bite. You can substitute other cooked whole grains (like steel-cut oats, quinoa, or millet) or use cooked mashed apples, pears, or apricots instead of the bananas. Whichever way you go, serve it with some mashed fresh berries or fruit compote alongside and you're set.

Ingredients

1/4 cup vegetable oil, plus more for greasing

4 overripe large bananas

1 1/2 cups cooked long-grain brown rice

3/4 cup maple syrup

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground allspice

1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Instructions

Heat the oven to 375°F. Generously grease a 9 x 5-inch loaf pan with some oil. Mash the bananas in a large bowl until smooth. Add the rice, maple syrup, vanilla, and the remaining oil; stir until thoroughly combined and let sit while you combine the other ingredients.
Put the flour, baking powder, salt, and spices in a medium bowl; stir until everything is evenly distributed.
Fold the dry ingredients into the banana mixture along with the nuts. Gently stir until the mixture is just combined.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake until evenly golden and a toothpick poked into the middle comes out fairly clean, 45 to 50 minutes. Let sit on a wire rack for 10 to 15 minutes before inverting, then cool completely before slicing. Store loosely wrapped in the refrigerator for up to a day or two. (Or wrap the whole loaf tightly and freeze in an airtight container for up to a couple months.)

Variations

Sweet Potato–Hazelnut Bread. Instead of the bananas, roast or steam 2 or 3 small sweet potatoes; peel and mash them (you should have about 2 cups). Use hazelnuts instead of walnuts.

Double-Pumpkin Bread. Use 2 cups cooked or canned pumpkin and green pumpkin seeds instead of the bananas and nuts.

— Recipe from The VB6 Cookbook

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With a little more down time than usual during what’s left of the December holidays, we thought we’d make a suggestion: If you haven’t heard the latest on “Unfair Dairy,” now is the time. It’s part of the “For a Better World” podcast from Fair World Project, with Anna Canning writing and narrating the series.

“For a Better World,” in its second season, is about fair trade and worker-led movements that fight for equitable food and farming systems. It’s a deep-dive into environmental and social costs of common items — for people who want to understand the impacts of their consumption on each other and the planet.

Season one is about Nestle’s KitKat bar, while the second season that we’re discussing today focuses on the dairy industry that’s been hit hard by the last four decades of corporate consolidation and deregulation. Low prices for farmers, inhumane conditions for workers, exploitation of animals, and emissions that are fueling the climate crisis are all addressed in the podcast, in addition to how “fair trade dairy” appears to be a rebrand of the exploitative status quo.

Read on for a highlight from the audio.

Anna: We're telling sort of two stories that I think we've all seen headlines about how the dairy industry has been in crisis for years. The small scale farmers are going out of business and then there's exploitative conditions for cows and for workers. And honestly, I think the workers sometimes get fewer headlines actually than the cows.

So the origin point is this new fair trade dairy label that's been launched by Fair Trade USA and Chobani, and it's being opposed by the very workers it's supposed to benefit. I think then you have to pause for a minute and consider what that means like, "Well then who is this program actually for?" So I talk with worker organizers, people who have actually milked cows, farmer advocates, and all these people with front row seats to the food system and, in this case, the dairy industry.

Melissa: I think a lot of people look at a company like Chobani as, "Oh, they’re doing something good." Can you talk a little bit more about the specifics of what's happening that workers and human rights organizations are opposed in terms of Chobani?

Anna: Yeah, certainly. And you know, I think there's really important context here that when Fair Trade USA and Chobani announced that they'd be piloting fair trade dairy, it was after workers on farms selling to Chobani had been calling on Chobani to negotiate and support their calls for better working conditions for years. The group Workers’ Center of Central New York, who we talked to in the first couple of episodes, came out with a report several years ago documenting how bad the conditions on those farms were, that people were, and still are, getting injured. They're not getting paid fairly — or they do work and they aren't getting paid for the work they've done. It's a super dangerous job where you work like 12 to 14 hours a day and often don't get days off.

So they brought all of these demands to Chobani's door [as far back as 2017] and then Chobani stopped negotiating with them. And they're still waiting for Chobani to negotiate with them. So instead then, Chobani brought in Fair Trade USA and that program really got launched against the demands of those workers, which is how organizations like mine and 35-ish human rights and labor and food justice groups ended up coming out against this program.

But the label came out in April and it's been more marketing than substance from the start. Like yogurt was on the shelves with a Fair Trade Certified dairy label on starting in April, but the final standard didn't actually even come out until July. And even a few weeks ago, I was talking with worker organizers: There's workers on farms that are participating in the program — that we know are participating in the program because they're in ads from saying they're participating in the program — and those workers don't know anything about what fair trade means and they're continuing to work in dangerous conditions with substandard housing.

So, I think we all know that to make change takes time, but this program is all in, like talking about how it's fair, and meanwhile, the people who are supposed to benefit, they're not getting benefits, nor do they even know that they're supposed to be. And I think that's the crucial bit that has so many organizations opposing it. If you don't know that you have certain rights, how can you even exercise those rights?

Listen in for more.

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We are a superfan of Holly Haines: Her recipes, her cooking videos, her writing, and, everything about her. You can find her on The Bittman Project and really explore her recipes on Instagram and her home page. Here’s a little get-to-know-her audio, plus her spin on tiramisu we’re excited to make. Enjoy. — Melissa

My preferred genre of dessert is “creamy.” Give me a panna cotta, a creme brulee, leche flan, I love it all. Naturally, I have quite a few variations of tiramisu. For this version, I’m swapping out the espresso for strongly-brewed Earl Grey tea. The mascarpone is flavored with orange zest and ground cardamom, and sweetened with honey. And, instead of cocoa powder on top, a light dusting of chai masala powder for a hit of warm spices — I like the blend from Diaspora Co.

The Bittman Project is a reader-supported publication. For members-only recipes and content, discussion, giveaways, and more, consider joining our community. Thank you for your support.

Orange Cardamom Tiramisu

Makes: 9 servingsTime: 25 minutes, plus chilling

Ingredients

3 cups water

6 Earl Grey tea bags

5 large egg yolks, room temperature

2 tablespoons honey

1/3 cup sugar

1 1/2 cups heavy cream

16 ounces (2 cups) mascarpone cheese

1 tablespoon orange zest, from 1 orange

1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom

24 lady fingers

1 tsp chai masala powder, for dusting (optional)

Instructions

1.Bring 3 cups of water to a boil in a saucepan. Add in 6 Earl Grey tea bags and turn off the heat. Let steep for 8 minutes, then remove and discard the tea bags and let tea cool completely.

In a large bowl, use an electric hand mixer to beat together 5 egg yolks, 2 tablespoons honey and 1/3 cup sugar at high speed for about 3 minutes, until almost doubled in volume, thickened, creamy and pale yellow. Add in 1 1/2 cups heavy cream, 2 cups mascarpone, 1 tablespoon orange zest and 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom; beat on medium-high until the mixture reaches almost stiff peaks; it should look like a very thick whipped cream.
Quickly dip a ladyfinger in the cooled Earl Grey tea and place them side-by-side in an 8x8 dish until you have one single layer, breaking up ladyfingers as needed to fit, about 12 ladyfingers per layer. Top with half of the mascarpone mixture. Repeat with remaining ladyfingers and the mascarpone mixture. Loosely cover with plastic film and chill for at least 6 hours.

Just before serving, place 1 teaspoon ground chai masala, if using, in a small sieve and lightly dust the top of the tiramisu.

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“It’s not that it’s difficult to bake bread with whole grain, but there are some keys, and they’re far from obvious; it took us a long time to crack the code. Once you get it, though, it really feels like a minor miracle, and you feel like you’ve been let into some kind of secret society: The bread is just so much better, and it makes you feel better. You know you’re using the whole grain, the stuff is absolutely delicious, and you’re tied to the entire pre-industrial history of baking real bread. And it’s so much fun.” — Mark Bittman

Why don’t we eat more whole wheat? How did Mark go from no-knead bread with Jim Lahey to whole grain baking? What should you look for in whole grain flour? Why bake with a starter when it comes to whole grain baking? And how hard is it, really?

Mark and Kerri answer these questions and more in today’s audio featured in conjunction with the release of their upcoming book, Bittman Bread: No-Knead Whole Grain Baking for Every Day, coming out next week.

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Listen now | Plus, a free collection of veggie burger recipes

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We’ve got Farmer Lee Jones of The Chef’s Garden in Huron, Ohio, here with us today, who, pre-pandemic, had been growing ingredients for chefs like Thomas Keller, Charlie Trotter, and Daniel Boulud. Like many food suppliers, he also pivoted during the pandemic to offer vegetables for home delivery.

Fast forward a year, and Chef’s Garden is selling vegetables to both restaurants and home cooks. It’s a boon for everyone, since, in addition to tasting the wares when we dine out, we can sample vegetables from the farm — where the soil is as healthy as it gets, it’s less than the price of a fancy dinner out, and the produce lasts longer.

For more about why chefs have been buying vegetables from this Ohio farm, Jones explains that and more in his new book — The Chef's Garden: A Modern Guide to Common and Unusual Vegetables — with Recipes — an exploration of the farm and those vegetables, with recipes from on-site chef, Jamie Simpson. Read on and listen in on what makes vegetables taste good and better for us.

How Chef’s Garden began:

“We’re in a microclimate that keeps us from getting extremely cold in the spring and… provides extended warmth in the fall,” he says. “At one point, there were over 330 vegetable growers in the region, the largest concentration of vegetable growers in the world.”

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, then-Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz conveyed the message to farmers, “Get big or get out.” So, Jones says, “Of course we were trying to get big, but ultimately, with 22 percent interest rates at the time…. and a devastating hailstorm, we ended up losing the farm.”

They started over, eventually meeting Cleveland chef Iris Balin at the farmers market, who kept encouraging Jones and his father to “consider growing for flavor, growing without chemicals, growing for the integrity of the product,” he says.

As a European-trained chef, “She really believed there would be enough chefs in the country to support us,” he says. Of all things, she wanted squash blossoms…. “We really couldn’t comprehend it. But we brought them in and she went crazy for it.”

From the day of the squash blossom, she introduced Jones to chefs like Jean-Louis Paladin, who introduced him to Daniel Boulud, Alain Ducasse, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Charlie Trotter, and Thomas Keller. "For the last 37 years,” he says, “we had been focused on growing for chefs.”

Then Covid hit:

… “My dad had really been pushing nutrient/nutrient density because we had a suspicion that as we were focused on improving the balance in soil — which we think is fundamentally the answer to everything in agriculture — he felt that as we were working on flavor, the nutrient/nutrient density was coming along with that,” he says.

With the pandemic, like many wholesale businesses catering to restaurants, “we pivoted.. overnight to do nationwide home delivery.” The farm found that with people not wanting to go to grocery stores, retail sales picked up — “and a lot were buying multiple boxes and shipping to those in need of a box,” he says.

On the size and philosophy behind the farm:

“We’re 350 acres and we’re surrounded by farms that are 3000, 5000 acres. There’s one near us that’s 7500 acres and they’re even bigger the further west you go,” says Jones.

“If you were to look at a graph of the nutritional levels in food from 1930 to 2021, they have gone down and continue to go down at an increasing rate… There’s a direct correlation with the way we’re farming, chemically and synthetically, with genetic modification… It’s kind of like drinking heavy doses of cappuccino to try to keep going. Eventually, you crash.” He also cites the massive uptick of diseases, obesity, and more in the past several decades. “So you’ve got nutritional levels tanking and health issues skyrocketing. It’s not sustainable,” he says.

“So what we’re doing on 350 acres is getting a par on the soil — the lab helps us test what the deficiencies are. Then based on that, we can plant crops specific to what the soil needs. Different types of plants will harvest different types of energy from the sun: clover, alfalfa, buckwheat, rye…” He says two-thirds of 350 acres is in rotation with cover crops as opposed to it being used for planting vegetables to sell.

“What we’re seeing,” he says, “is nutrient and nutrient/density levels testing 300 to 500 percent above USDA averages,” he says. [The farm also has a third-party auditor to verify results.] “It really works: It’s about working in harmony with nature rather than trying to outsmart it.”

On why consumers should care about soil:

“We’ve had a lab of sorts for about 15 years, but three years ago, we made a commitment to put a full-fledged laboratory right in the middle of the farm. We have three scientists on staff testing the soil, testing the nutritional levels of the vegetables, testing the nutritional levels of vegetables in grocery stores. And what we’re finding is the larger the product is, the lower the nutrient levels,” he says….“Look. We don’t have this whole thing figured out, but we know we’re on the right track.”

On his new book, The Chef's Garden: A Modern Guide to Common and Unusual Vegetables — with Recipes, and advice he has for people who plant their own gardens:

During the pandemic, “we have started a whole new generation of gardeners,” he says. And as far as how to approach gardening, he says to, “recognize you’re going to make some mistakes and that’s part of the fun of it.”

Gardening, he says, “is like a relationship — if it’s all take-take-take, you can imagine where that relationship goes.” Plant a third of a garden with crops like rye, to replenish the soil, he says. And always rotate your plantings.

Learn More About Chef’s Garden Vegetables

The folks at Chef’s Garden have an array of home delivery options, including Best of the Season, High Nitrate Fresh Greens, Gourmet Vegetables, Powerhouse Vegetables, and others. Check them out here.

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Before we get into today’s issue, a quick reminder to fill out our survey, if you haven’t already. It will help us make The Bittman Project as relevant, engaging, and worthwhile to you as possible, and it only takes five minutes.

As a small token of our appreciation, two people who complete this survey will be randomly selected to win a $100 gift card to Burlap & Barrel, my favorite spice supplier on the planet. Thank you!

Here’s Melissa facilitating a conversation on refrigeration with my friend (and her partner) Rick Easton, owner-baker at Bread and Salt in Jersey City, New Jersey. Now, if you don’t know Rick, one thing you should know about him aside from the fact that he makes great pizza: He truly does not hold back when he has an opinion on something, from inequality in the U.S. to whether we should be refrigerating our vegetables. Read on and or listen in.

And members — join us on Thursday from 3 to 5 p.m. EST to weigh in on questions and comments about what goes in the fridge. Bread? Cake? Tomatoes? Strawberries? Onions?

Here’s a bit from the audio:

Melissa: I have three categories I want to talk about. Let’s first talk about vegetables. Mark, remember a few years ago when we went to [Camino] in Oakland? They had all these little plates of vegetables out on the counter at room temp and it was super beautiful. And Rick, when we’re at home, you’ll go ahead and serve stuff at room temperature. Talk to us first about whole vegetables and ...when do you need to put them in the refrigerator? Then let’s talk about vegetable dishes — and when you should you put them in the refrigerator.

Rick: I think the answer to that is a nonanswer: It depends. How long are you trying to keep the vegetable, and what is the vegetable? I would never put a tomato in the refrigerator. Not in a million years.

Mark: NEVER.

Rick: There are a lot of fruits I would not put in the refrigerator. While other fruits will be great on the counter for a couple of days, if you’re going to buy a bushel of apples and you don’t have a root cellar, you’re going to have to refrigerate those…But then that also begs the question: How are you shopping? How much stuff are you buying at one time? Maybe you should look at that…

[Other things that shouldn’t go in the fridge:] Onions should never go in the refrigerator. Garlic should never go in the refrigerator. Potatoes.

Melissa: Let’s talk about once you prepare something. I made one of Mark’s cabbage salads, for example, and I have extras. So, do I leave that at room temp? Do I put it in the fridge and bring it to room temperature before I eat it?

Rick: I personally would not want to have extra cabbage salad anyway because it’s going to get soggy. Use the rest of the cabbage for something else! Don’t use the whole head of cabbage for two people.

Mark: You’re right, but there is this attitude that if you’re cooking, you might as well cook a bunch because you are going to eat it eventually. Or you should eat it eventually…. I wouldn’t refrigerate the salad the day I’m going to eat it. And I want to be clear this is health and safety considerations aside. I’m just saying what I would do is make it as close to when I’m going to eat it as I could. But I certainly wouldn’t compulsively cover it with Saran Wrap and put it in the refrigerator and then take it out again and eat it cold. And yeah, I’d refrigerate it overnight but if I made it at 10 in the morning and didn’t plan on eating it until dinner, I probably wouldn’t refrigerate that. Same thing if I had made a broccoli dish… or anything that tastes good at room temperature. I would just leave it at room temperature. Roasted peppers….

Rick: I actually would argue that roasted peppers would be a thing that should not ever be refrigerated. So there’s a method I learned about marinated roasted peppers where you want to kind of let them sit overnight at room temperature because they’re going to taste different than if you put them in the refrigerator.

Mark: There’s probably a scientific way to have this conversation that maybe none of us is capable of having. But I think we’d agree that some flavors develop if you leave the food out and some of that is called fermentation.

…..

Melissa: Let’s move on to eggs. You go to, say, Taiwan, to a breakfast stall, and there are stacks and stacks of eggs just sitting out that are being used. And, Mark, you have chickens, so...

Mark: Yeah, I haven’t refrigerated eggs in years.

Rick: I don’t have hard data on this, but what I have heard is, if the eggs have been washed, they have to be refrigerated because there is a protective membrane that has been removed. But because of the hyper-sanitary rules of the USDA, that membrane has been scrubbed off …

[Editor’s note: “The coating is like a little safety vest for the egg, keeping water and oxygen in and bad bacteria out,” NPR reported in “Why The U.S. Chills Its Eggs And Most Of The World Doesn't.” “Washing can damage that layer and ‘increase the chances for bacterial invasion’ into pores or hairline cracks in the shell, according to Yi Chen, a food scientist at Purdue University.” In writing about buying grocery store eggs in the States in On Food and Cooking, food scientist Harold McGee says, "Egg quality deteriorates as much in a day at room temperature as in four days under refrigeration, and salmonella bacteria multiply much faster at room temperature.”]

…...

Melissa: What about cakes and bread?

Mark: Let’s keep the freezer out this, but putting that stuff in the refrigerator: I wouldn’t go so far as to say you might as well throw it out, but it’s really is a mistake.

Rick: I think, never. Never, never, never, never, never... That touches on one of my biggest issues with refrigerators. You have this thing that happens of starch retrogration — any product with starch: beans, potatoes, bread, rice, all of these things — it basically accelerates the staling process and does funny things with the moisture. It also reverses the gelatinization of starch that happens in cooking all of those products. Why would you ever want that? Why would you do that to your bread? Keep it out of plastic and keep it out of the refrigerator.

Listen in for more.

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Listen now (31 min) | Read this book.

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A quick note to let you know that for the summer, we’re moving our conversations from Fridays to Thursdays starting at 3 p.m. EST. Tomorrow’s conversation is all about grilling: What are you grilling this weekend?

Please consider becoming a member of The Bittman Project and joining us. Thank you for your support. — Melissa

If you're like us, you can't wait to have cookouts this summer. Lots of them. Now imagine you're outside with friends and family on a balmy evening, tossing plant-based burgers on the grill. Not the kind concocted in a high-tech lab — yours came from a regular kitchen, made with supermarket ingredients, probably well in advance and definitely by hand. And the burger is so good, even meat-eaters want to know where you got it.

We at The Bittman Project seem pretty close to realizing this summer dream cookout. But we need your help. Let's all gather in our online community to put our heads together, work on the recipe, and finally figure out this whole plant-based patty thing. And we'll call that place Burgerville.

Burgerville Goals

Our burger should be satisfying and savory but not too beany, sweet, or grassy.

The texture inside should have some chew and resistance when you bite; exterior crust is a must.

The mixture needs to hold together well enough to grill over a gas or charcoal flame, turning at least once.

Appearance should be burger-like in a relatively traditionally meat-based way.

Our burger is real food: nothing more processed than milled grains, roasted nuts, or tofu. Additions may include whole grains; fresh, dried, roasted, or fermented vegetables and fruit; and plant-based fats and oils.

The ingredients should be available in any well-stocked supermarket.

Let's say refined starches aren't out of the bounds, though a solution based on treating simple ingredients with an interesting technique is preferable. (So instead of potato starch, for example, think mashed sweet potato or brown rice.)

Ideally, no special equipment — not even a food processor — would be required. Again, not a deal-breaker.

The ability to prepare the burgers in advance and refrigerate or freeze them is a huge plus — bonus points for burgers that reheat well after cooking.

The Burgerville Process

Mark and the rest of The Bittman Project team have made a lot of vegetarian burgers over the years. I spent several weeks last fall working on all sorts of crazy formulas before lighting on the relatively simple baseline recipe that appears below. When we got together last winter for our last in-person team meeting before lockdown, we pan-cooked some to critique together.

Let's start with that recipe. I'm also including Mark's Best Black Bean Burger as an additional reference. It's a terrific bean burger — ask the couple thousand fans at NYT Cooking who give it five stars. But one thing we’d like to try is holding back some of the beans to mash into the mix by hand at the end — a technique we often like for a more varied texture. The only downside is its upside: The results are tender inside and crisp outside, but the burger mixture is relatively loose and requires cooking in a pan, not on the grill.

Feel free to talk about Burgerville in this week’s grilling chat — which will be on Thursdays now through the summer. After that, feel free to try the baseline recipe or work on something totally new. We'll try to keep pace all month with updates, questions, and ideas via email or in the comment thread that lives with this post.

Then everyone tests and develops in Burgerville through June. You can email us photos and recipes at bittmanproject@gmail.com. We'll review and post some finalists for the community to try by the July 4th weekend.

Whatever we share, please be sure to note sources. We want to be able to research and credit everyone involved. If the idea appears in or was inspired by a cookbook or other media, please keep track of the author and source; links are especially helpful. If it's your genius at play, by all means, say so!

The Burgerville Recipes

Here are two recipes to get our brainstorming started — and we’d love it if you share your early finds in the comments, the Thursday discussion, and/or in an email to us.

The Bittman Burger — Baseline Recipe

Makes: 6 servingsTime: 45 minutes

Ingredients

1 can (about 14-ounces) unsweetened coconut cream

2 small cans (14-ounce) or 1 large can (28-ounce) pinto beans, rinsed and well-drained (or about 3 cups drained homemade beans)

1/2 cup rolled oats (not instant)

1/3 cup chia seeds

1/4 cup red miso

1 tablespoon smoked paprika

1/2 teaspoon dry mustard

1/2 teaspoon pepper

Good-quality vegetable oil, for brushing

Instructions

Put the can of coconut cream in the freezer while you prepare the burgers. Heat the oven to 425 degrees. Spread the beans into a large rimmed baking sheet and roast, shaking once or twice until the skins of the beans dry, crack, and darken slightly, 15 to 20 minutes.
Working over a large bowl with a palm-full of oats at a time, rub them between your hands to crumble them a little; repeat with the remaining oats. (It’s okay if they don’t know all break apart.) Add the chia, miso, smoked paprika, mustard, and pepper and stir, mashing with a fork to combine. Remove 1/4 cup of the thick fat from the top of the coconut cream and refrigerate the rest of the fat and liquid for another use. Stir the fat into the bowl until a thick paste forms; let sit until the beans are ready.
Add the warm beans to the oat mixture and mash with a fork, a potato masher, or your hands until the beans are broken up but still in uneven pieces. The mixture should hold together when you squeeze some in your palm. To shape the burgers, divide the mixture into 6 balls, and working one at a time, press them into patties onto a large rimmed baking sheet until they’re about 1/2 inch thick. If the edges crack or they become uneven, simply press them back into a circle.
Cover loosely with parchment and refrigerate for at least 1 hour (or cover tightly and refrigerate for up to a day. Or wrap the burgers individually and freeze for up to several months.) Prepare a charcoal or gas grill for medium direct-heat cooking. (Or if you're going to cook the burgers on the stove, heat the oven to 200° and get a baking sheet handy.)
To grill the burgers, brush the tops with some of the oil. Put them all on the grates directly over the prepared fire, oiled side down, brush the tops with more oil, and cover the grill.

To cook on the stove, put a thin film of oil in a large skillet over medium heat. When the pan is hot, add three of the burgers to the pan.

Either way, cook until the burgers are firm, a crust forms, and they release easily 5 to 10 minutes. Turn and cook the other side the same way, another 5 or so minutes. If cooking in a pan, transfer the finished patties to a baking sheet in the oven and repeat with the remaining three burgers. Serve right away on buns or rolls if you’d like with all the trimmings.

— Baseline recipe developed by Kerri Conan

Mark's Best Black Bean Burgers

Makes: About 8 small burgers or 4 regular-sized burgersTime: About 40 minutes with canned (or homemade cooked) beans

Ingredients

1/4 cup dried, stemless porcini mushrooms

2 cups cooked or drained canned black beans

1 teaspoon roughly chopped garlic

3/4 cup rolled oats, or more if needed

2 teaspoons smoked paprika or chili powder

1 teaspoon cumin

1 tablespoon soy sauce

Salt and black pepper

Bean-cooking liquid, porcini soaking liquid, or water

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

2 tablespoons olive oil

Instructions

Soak the mushrooms in hot water until pliable, 5 to 10 minutes. Lift them from the soaking water and chop; reserve the soaking liquid for the burgers or another use (like a soup, sauce, or stir-fry).
Put the mushrooms, beans, garlic, oats, spices, and soy sauce in a food processor with a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Pulse until the mixture is combined, not puréed, about 30 seconds. (Or use a potato masher.) When you pinch some in your fingers, the mixture should hold together without sticking to your hands. Add more oats to thicken it or a few drops of liquid to thin it, as needed. Stir in the cilantro with a fork, and let sit for 5 minutes.
Shape into 4 large or 8 small patties; let them sit for 5 minutes. Put the oil in a large skillet over medium-low heat. Cook until crisp on one side, about 5 minutes. Flip and cook until the burgers are crisp on the other side, another 5 minutes or so. Serve with the usual fixings.

— Adapted from New York Times Cooking

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I’m fascinated by cooking journeys: Everyone’s is so different; everyone comes to cooking in their own unique way. Maybe you learned with a parent — or maybe you learned because your parents weren’t around much and you had to fend for yourself. Maybe you learned in order to impress a potential partner. Maybe you’re just an overachiever. So, in an effort to quench my curiosity, we’ve decided to start a new series. Each person in the series will answer the same five questions and in the process tell a little about themselves.

We’re doing it a little differently today, starting with the audio above: Mark interviews Laurie David, and Heather Reisman, coauthors of Imagine It! A Handbook for a Happier Planet, which seeks to answer the question on many people’s minds: What can I do personally to help our changing planet?

Following the audio, we’ve got 5 questions for Laurie, who, often in conjunction with Heather, has executive-produced some of the best-known and arguably most important films about the environment, food, and climate, notably Al Gore’s Academy-Award winning An Inconvenient Truth, Fed Up, as well as The Biggest Little Farm and The Social Dilemma. Here she is, Laurie David — Kate

How did you eat growing up?

We had family dinner five nights a week but I don’t ever remember fresh veggies. I do remember canned vegetables, meat, and a salad. I also have strong memories of being forced to eat certain things (peas) and perfecting the pretend chew, then putting it in my napkin as I wiped my face, for disposal in the bathroom. Both my sister and I were geniuses at that!

How old were you when you learned how to cook? Why’d you start?

After college. That is when I had my first small garden, and started making proper meals.

What's something you really love to make?

I love whipping up dinner from just what is in my fridge and pantry. So that is almost always a stir fry or veggie soup. I grow a lot of kale so you can bet that there’s kale tossed in at the end in almost everything I make.

Is there something you can never seem to get right?

Yes ... following a recipe! I always screw it up, accidentally leave out an ingredient or a step. It happens every time!

What advice can you offer to your fellow cooks?

Grow your own herbs! They taste better and last longer than anything store-bought.

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All Things Considered called a few days ago; you can listen to the interview above. What, Michel Martin wanted to know, did I think of the latest brouhaha about meat? Joe Biden taking away your burgers, Eleven Madison Park going meatless, Epicurious not publishing new recipes for beef?

In reality, little has changed, though it seems people are beginning to pay attention. Is beef bad for the environment? (I’m tempted to answer, “Do bears st in the woods? Is the Pope Catholic?”) Yes, it is — when we consider how the U.S. produces 95 percent of it. Pork too, and even chicken. Waste management, or lack of it — really, no one knows what to do with all that st — is a big problem. Animal production facilities causing cancer in their neighbors is a tragic offshoot of that.

There’s more: You have to grow grain for all those animals, who number in excess of 10 billion per year in this country alone. And how do you grow it? With great damage, to land, to resources, to the climate, the change of which is largely due to industrial agriculture.

Do you want to talk about food waste? How about devoting tens of millions of acres of the world’s best soil to produce food for animal production that devastates the climate and deprives people of better quality food? (I’m not detailing this at the moment; we’ve been down this road twenty times, and I’ve fact-checked this stuff to death; there is no fake news here.)

And while it’s probably true that most meat is not as bad for your internal functioning as was once thought, it’s still not as good as the better alternatives. (By “alternatives,” as I wrote last week, I don’t mean overpriced and hyper-processed veggie burgers, but legumes and vegetables and whole grains.)

Furthermore, if you consider “internal functioning” to include our souls, or whatever you want to call our inner beings, the parts that we don’t have direct access to but we all feel exist … it can’t be good for us to be part of a system (and most of us are) that literally tortures billions of animals a year before killing them “efficiently,” that is, with no thought to their experience -- at which point underpaid and abused workers take over and “process” them so that we don’t have to pay “too much” for them.

The system stinks, and people with money are opting out left and right, choosing better-raised meats that cost three and five and sometimes ten times as much money — which, for the most part, is the appropriate price. But not everyone can do that. So, as usual, the people with less money are forced to participate in a system that they didn’t ask for or design, which harms them disproportionately.

This argument goes on; if you find it intriguing, you might look at Animal, Vegetable, Junk. But this didn’t start as a pitch for my book, and it’s not going to end that way. The original questions are pertinent.

Joe Biden can’t take away your burgers. It doesn’t appear he knows where to start, although if he’s serious about dealing with climate change, he’s going to have to figure out some way to mitigate the damage done by industrial agriculture. Could you manage with 10 percent less meat per year? Yes, and probably without noticing. Twenty percent? Perhaps that would cause you a minor inconvenience. That’s an excellent place to start. And our great- or great-great-grandchildren will be fine with that because the change will have beneficial and, if we (or they) are lucky, it will have been gradual.

But Joe Biden doesn’t appear to be even able to put an FDA commissioner in place. So we’re still — 12 years after the Obama administration could have put a dent in industrial animal production by outlawing the routine use of antibiotics — waiting on that relatively minor change that would have an immediate and positive impact. If he can’t move in that direction, I think you can be about as “frightened” about Joe Biden taking away your meat as you should be about him taking away your guns. This “fear” is as credible as election fraud.

How about Eleven Madison Park? Raise your hand if you’ve ever eaten there or plan to. Right: probably two percent of the people reading this. If you have, or will, enjoy yourself. Rest assured, it will be just as wonderful (or not, depending on your patience for fine dining and your worry about affording it) as it was when it served meat. It’s a fine idea for one of America’s most expensive restaurants to go meatless; it’ll give a great chef room to become even more inventive and create more intriguing dishes. It’s good PR for them, and it’s good that they’re spotlighting the issue.

Same with Epicurious. They’re taking a position that costs them nothing. They’re not taking down existing beef recipes, of which they have hundreds or thousands. (To be clear, neither are we, though we’ve thought about it.) They’re just making a statement, and it’s a meaningful one. We don’t need to produce more beef. We don’t need to promote beef. We’ve got plenty of beef. The question is, how do we produce and make do with less?

Joe Biden, Eleven Madison, Epicurious: These are small gestures in the big picture. In the long run, how we produce and make do with less beef can only be answered by a society that prioritizes the health of humans, the environment, other species, the whole planet. We’re not doing that yet, and we have a way to go — but that is the job.

So is curbing junk food. So is prioritizing restorative agriculture. So is getting land into the hands of people who will farm it well, people who’ve had land stolen from them, or never had it in the first place. So is respectfully treating the people who bring us food. So is teaching our children what good eating is. It’s all part of the picture, and though it’s nice to have an excuse to rant a little bit, this beef about beef will be old news by next week. A shame.

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Here’s Mark interviewing Paul Greenberg about his newest book, The Climate Diet: 50 Simple Ways to Trim Your Carbon Footprint. Learn about stuff you can actually do today that, if we all commit to it, could dial back the effects of climate change. They include how to cut down on packaging, why we should stick to tap water, and why we should cut down on eating cheese (!) along with:

Why frozen food can be a better choice for the environment

“I recommend choosing frozen food because the shipping of fresh food is really super carbon-intensive. We spend a lot of time over which we’re going to choose, and before you know it, we’ve chosen something that has to get to us from very far, very quickly….Frozen, however, it seems counterintuitive because it takes energy to freeze stuff. But actually, you can blast something pretty darn quickly. And once you’ve brought it down to temperature, you can seal it up in a cargo ship and then ship it. And shipping is one-50th or more of the carbon cost of flying something.”

The climate costs of local food

This is kind of counter-message. . . . [and I’m all for local food at the farmers market], but there is kind of a false virtue-signaling that goes on with farmers market shopping. Like the person who drives 20 miles to the farmers market and buys a head of lettuce and then drives 20 miles home. . . that’s really silly….Over and above that, the big thing about local is seasonality. I do feel for farmers. I do feel they’re in a pinch: like it or not, they’re always competing with the grocery store. So if they can offer something that’s pushing the season that you might take a detour to the supermarket to get, they may do that. So a hothouse-grown salad, for example, that’s grown in the Northeast, that’s pretty climate intensive. And it’s probably better to get that from California, where there are economies of scale and where there is a better climate. If you want wintertime greens in the winter or in the shoulder season, look at something like cabbage. Let’s learn to love things like the cabbage a little more.

What it means to change our personal energy grids

...What’s cool now... you can choose an energy service company...you can go online, and you can actually choose who is providing electricity to you. So you can choose renewable over fossil fuels....even if you live in an apartment...This is a situation where consumer action can lead to a shift in the market, and more demand for renewables…. Most of the time, there isn’t any added cost to doing that.

Fighting for racial justice while fighting for climate justice

Ayana Johnson had a column about this: She quoted….’The more that you make oppressed people deal with their oppression, the less they will be free to address … very dire issues… of climate and sustainability for the planet.’

People often talk about this time as an all-hands-on-deck-moment, and I think that if we’re leaving large swaths of the population off the deck because they’re too busy dealing with just basically getting recognition as equal partners in the human struggle against climate change and all these kinds of things...then I think we’re just... putting a weight around our necks and not letting all hands come on deck.

[While the economically advantaged drive their electric cars to Whole Foods and buy their organic produce]… until we decarbonize the grid, a lot of that electricity is still coming from fossil fuels. And where are those coal and gas plants located? They tend to be in poor neighborhoods….There are a lot of lower-income people, people of color, who are literally bearing our pollution from our clean-seeming, green automobiles.

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We’ve got some terrific alt-milk and cheese recipes — but we know this is an evolving world, so we want to hear from you. How do you make nondairy milk? And what do you do with it? How do you make cashew milk yogurt, coconut milk ice cream, and so on?

In the audio above, learn more of the details as to why Mark has nondairy milk on his mind — and how he makes his own.

Nut or Seed Milk

Makes: About 2 1/2 cupsTime: 15 to 20 minutes, plus 8 to 12 hours soaking time

With this recipe and its Grain Milk and Soy Milk variations that follow — and of course some coconut milk — you’ve got your vegan dairy replacement needs covered. You’ll need cheesecloth to strain the milk, or use a nut bag, which is made for this purpose. This recipe will work with any kind of nut as well as seeds like hemp and hulled (green) pumpkin. Flax seeds are the one exception, since they need to be ground first, which makes them difficult to strain out. If you like, you can add a touch of sweetness and flavor by including a bit of vanilla extract or agave nectar before puréeing; or dissolve sugar to taste after straining. This recipe can be doubled, tripled, or more.

Ingredients

1 cup unsalted raw nuts or seeds

1/4 teaspoon salt

Instructions

Soak the nuts in generous water to cover for 8 to 12 hours until swollen and soft.
Drain and put in a blender with 4 cups fresh water. Process on high until smooth.
Line a fine-meshed strainer with 2 layers of dampened cheesecloth so the sides overhang by several inches; set it over a large bowl. Pour in the purée, gather up the ends, and squeeze as much liquid as possible out of the purée. The milk will keep in an airtight container, refrigerated, for 3 to 4 days.

GRAIN MILK You can make this with white or brown rice, rolled or steel-cut oats, buckwheat, or millet; white rice and oats produce milks with the mildest flavor: Substitute the nuts with the grain of your choice and decrease the water in Step 2 to 3 cups.

SOY MILK The results are thicker and richer than commercially made soy milk — more like half-and-half. I like it but if you want something lighter, thin the finished milk with a little cold water. Substitute dried soybeans for the nuts, rinsing first and picking them over for any debris before soaking them. Drain the beans, put them in a pot with enough water to cover, and bring to a boil. Adjust the heat so the liquid bubbles steadily, cover, and cook, stirring once in a while, until just tender, about 1 hour. Drain and add to a blender with 4 cups water; purée. Let sit for a few minutes to cool, then strain as directed in Step 3.

— Recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Tenth Anniversary Edition

Cashew Cream

Makes: 2 cupsTime: At least 4 hours, mostly unattended

Turn to cashew cream when you want to add smooth richness to a dish but no dairy (and to the variation below for Cashew Cheese) as a savory alternative to fresh cow and goat cheeses and spreads. Cashews are a great alternative to coconuts because of their more neutral flavor. By adjusting the amount of water you add, you can make cashew cream as thin or thick as you prefer. This can be doubled, tripled, or more, and will keep for a few days in the fridge.

Ingredients

1 cup unsalted raw cashews

Instructions

Soak the cashews in 2 cups water for at least 4 hours, until swollen and soft. Drain; reserve the liquid.
Put the cashews in a blender and process on high, adding the soaking liquid a few tablespoons at a time until it reaches the desired consistency.

FAST CASHEW CREAM Ready in 10 minutes: Boil 2 cups water and put 1/2 cup cashew butter in a small bowl. Turn off the heat, pour 1/4 cup of the boiling water into the bowl, and whisk until smooth; whisk in another 1/4 cup boiling water, then pour the cashew mixture into the pot and whisk to combine. Return the cream to medium heat and adjust as necessary so the mixture bubbles gently but steadily. Cook, whisking, until the mixture thickens and coats the back of a spoon, 1 to 3 minutes.

CASHEW CHEESE Same principle, only spreadable like cream cheese. Increase the quantity of cashews to 1 1/2 cups. Increase the water in Step 1 to 3 cups. After draining, put them in the blender with 1 tablespoon each lemon juice and nutritional yeast and a pinch of salt; purée until smooth, adding reserved soaking water 1 tablespoon at a time until you reach the consistency you want. Eat as is, or at this point, you can add flavors from the list below and pulse until incorporated.

10 Directions to Take Cashew Cheese

Feel free to adjust any of these amounts up or down to suit your own personal taste. And if you can let the cheese sit for a couple of hours after seasoning, all the better.

Herbed Cheese: Add 1/2 cup chopped fresh herbs, like chives, parsley, basil, dill, or mint (alone or in combination).
Garlic-Mustard Cheese: Add 4 teaspoons Dijon mustard and 1 teaspoon chopped garlic.
Chipotle Cheese: Add 1 or 2 minced canned chipotle chiles, plus some of their adobo.
Lime-Cilantro Cheese: Add up to 1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro and 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice.
Sesame-Soy Cheese: Add 1 tablespoon each soy sauce and toasted sesame seeds and 1 teaspoon sesame oil.
Lemon-Dill Cheese: Add another tablespoon lemon juice and 1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill. (This is even better the next day.)
Ginger-Mint Cheese: Add 1 heaping tablespoon minced fresh ginger and 2 tablespoons chopped fresh mint. (This is even better the next day.)
Vanilla-Orange Cheese: Use orange juice instead of lemon juice and add 2 tablespoons grated orange zest and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract.
Berry Cheese: Skip the nutritional yeast and add 1 cup mashed berries and 2 tablespoons turbinado sugar.
Tangy Cheese: Add 4 teaspoons cider vinegar and 1 1/2 teaspoons white or yellow miso.

— Recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Tenth Anniversary Edition

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Thanks for visiting The Bittman Project, a place where food is everything (or pretty close).

The most significant change in our coffee habits through the pandemic is that more of us are drinking coffee at home, the National Coffee Association reported. Six in 10 Americans drink coffee every day, and unlike soft drinks and juice which have seen a drop, consumption has been steady; online coffee purchases, including apps and delivery, have spiked 63 percent.

Actually making coffee at home (as opposed to getting it delivered), has an upside beyond saving a few bucks. “Making coffee for others is one of life’s great pleasures,” Mark says. “not that it’s ‘important,’ but it’s so easy, such a joy, … and people love it.”

What’s the best way to brew coffee at home? Despite that each person on today’s audio is pretty into coffee, between Mark, Kerri, Kayla, Kate, and me, no one brews coffee the same way.

Mark admits he “may be a little obsessive” about coffee. At home in the Hudson Valley, he has a fancy espresso machine, but he’s not brewing that way all the time “because it is a sort of production.” He also does pour-overs. He says the two things that matter most to him when it comes to coffee are freshly roasted beans and an adequate amount of coffee: about 20 grams for a 10-ounce cup of coffee. “Less tastes watery to me,” he says. “And if it’s more than 20 grams, my hair catches fire.”

Since he moved back East from the West Coast, Mark has been ordering Mr. Espresso from Oakland, and it tends to be dark; he uses the same coffee for espresso and drip.

Over in the Pacific Northwest, Kerri’s husband, Sean, is in charge of the coffee; he’s devised “a huge morning pour-over ritual and is very fastidious about it,” Kerri says. It involves a cone-within-a-cone situation and Melitta filters. And yes, a superb selection of local coffees.

Back in Harlem, Kayla says she’s been using her trusted, $25 French press for eight years or so; a couple of years in, she switched to Cafe Bustelo and never turned back. Whether she drinks it with or without almond milk, her coffee delivers enough caffeine to keep her moving (and she drinks it fast enough she doesn’t notice if it cools). When she’s out on the weekend, she wants to order something she wouldn’t make at home: Most recently, it was a matcha latte (even if Kate gives her grief about it in the audio).

I used to be an only-buy-coffee-out person (from bodegas and Dunkin or Blue Bottle and wherever). Now I mostly use a Bialetti at home in Jersey City. When I first met the guy I’ve been with for close to a decade now, he had a whole ritual that started with grinding beans in an antique grinder while heating water in the teapot; brewing with the Bialetti on the stove; warming mugs, and whisking warmed milk for my latte. Today, we switch off.

Not far from Kayla in Harlem, Kate says she’s still working on her coffee routine. “I just feel like we can’t get it right,” she says. She and her husband, Nick, use a Chemex, which she says doesn’t stay hot. “The Chemex people say you can put it over a low flame. But then it boils…so basically, we drink tepid coffee now.” Kate said they enjoy it anyway. But Nick has more than once said, “Our coffee never tastes as good as Mark’s.”

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Thanks for visiting The Bittman Project, a place where food is everything (or pretty close).

Above, you’ll hear Mark and me talk a bit about how to buy fish: It’s quite helpful and a good listen. Below, I’ve outlined some best practices when you’re not quite ready to commit to fish-by-mail. Read on.

This week’s “Know Your Fishmonger” offers options for buying fish harvested in ways that are best for our health, the fishers, local businesses, and the environment. While it would be ideal to always buy fish so responsibly, many of us don’t have the foresight, the relationship with trusted purveyors, or the funds to shop like this all the time.

We’re here to help navigate the good, better, and best options when you’re buying fish.

The basics

First, a disclaimer: This level offers the least transparency in terms of where fish comes from and how it’s procured. But these tips do empower you as a shopper to buy better fish that’s harvested more responsibly.

Here’s the bad news. When we’re buying inexpensive fish, it’s fraught with problems. “We're low-grading our seafood supply. In effect, what we're doing is we're sending the really great, wild stuff that we harvest here on our shores abroad,” fish expert and author of Four Fish and American Catch, Paul Greenberg tells us on NPR’s Fresh Air. "And in exchange, we're importing farm stuff that, frankly, is of an increasingly dubious nature.”

Because American consumers don’t want to see or smell fish, seafood has “really … been banished from the center of our cities and sequestered to a corner of our supermarkets,” Greenberg said. “Seafood has been taken out of the hands of the experts and put into the hands of the traders, so people really cannot identify the specificity of fish anymore.”

So we’re starting with the least ideal scenario and the most likely one: You’re shopping at the grocery store, wondering how to buy some decent quality seafood.

“The four things I will always buy at a supermarket without worry on both sustainability and health [are] frozen wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, farmed domestic mussels and clams, canned sardines and anchovies, and canned wild pink or sockeye salmon,” Greenberg wrote in a recent email. “Everything else is a judgment call.”

Here’s where it gets tricky. Frozen fish isn’t necessarily bad. “‘Frozen’ likely isn’t the first word that comes to mind when you think gourmet seafood,” Bridget Shirvell reported for us on Heated. In the case of one Connecticut shore town, “The only way you’d get a fresher, better-tasting scallop is if you ate it right off the shell on the boat,” said Joe Bomster, whose family developed a freezing technique for seafood in the 1970s.

Giants in the seafood industry maintain that with freezing seafood, flavor and nutrients can be preserved. “Our fish is caught, processed into fillets, and flash-frozen all within hours; the natural flavor and moisture are locked in,” Trident CEO Joe Bundrant said of his company’s Alaskan pollock. Trident Seafoods is one of the biggest seafood companies in the country (And pollock is the stuff in McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish).

As far as the nutritional value of frozen seafood, since it’s often frozen so quickly after being caught, “ ... all the nutrients that you would find in a freshly caught fish are there,” Mónica Ruiz-Noriega told Shirvell. Ruiz-Noriega is a functional nutrition expert with a Ph.D. in biological sciences and founder of Vigeo Nutrition.

When you head over to the fish counter, you should be aware of labels like “previously frozen,” since once it’s thawed, seafood starts to lose its integrity — nutrients and flavor.

It also never hurts to ask the folks behind the counter what they know about the fish: whether it has been previously frozen, when the fish came to market, and where it’s from.

That last bit of data is important: Ideally, you want to see that fish is harvested domestically, which may be a challenge at this tier. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that well over 80 percent of the seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported, and over half of the fish consumed worldwide comes from aquaculture.

When you do decide to stick with fish harvested from U.S. waters, you’re trusting fishing practices that are among the most highly regulated in the world. “Among fishing nations, Iceland, Norway, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand have all in the last 20 years implemented fishing policies that have caused a stabilization and rebuilding of many stocks of fish,” Greenberg reported in 2014 in his “Covering the Seas” issue guide.

Committing to buying fish that’s wild-caught in U.S. waters is something we shouldn’t take lightly. In his review of Four Fish, in which Greenberg reports on our relationship with tuna, cod, sea bass, and salmon, Sam Sifton pointed out that Greenberg “posits the sense of privilege we should feel in consuming wild fish, along with the necessity of aquaculture.”

(An aside: If you haven’t read Ian Urbina’s Outlaw Ocean or The Associated Press series that won a Pulitzer for reporting on slavery in the international fishing industry, you should. You’d likely never buy fish from an unknown provenance again. )

I’m not even going to go into fish fraud, which is a huge problem, but I’m trying to keep this a service-y piece and a readable length. I will state the obvious here: When in doubt, perhaps the best solution is to choose something other than fish for dinner.

Another suggestion: Trust your senses. Look for a spotless case stocked and restocked with ice. Look for whole fish, clear-eyed fish, those with gills that look clean, and skin that looks shiny if it’s a skin-on fish. But when it comes to how fish looks, it’s still a challenge since we know that fish is manipulated to look fresher.

Better options

In talking fresh seafood, consider the season — and ask the fishmonger if you don’t know. Another aside: When my father was alive, he was super into fishing, and in his retirement, worked at a fish counter in the Carolinas. A woman came to his counter and asked which shrimp she should buy. “None,” he said. “It’s out of season.”

Carolina’s shrimp season usually runs from late May to December and sometimes January. Like many Americans, she didn’t want to hear it: She wanted what she wanted when she wanted it — and at a good price. Of course she did: Shrimp is the most popular seafood in the U.S., according to the National Fisheries Institute, and since 2016, its consumption continues to rise.

It’s why Greenberg goes back to frozen fish, telling NPR Fresh Air listeners to buy seafood such as “wild salmon frozen, not fresh, if it's out of season” (The salmon season is also, roughly, May to September).

Another resource: Monterey Bay provides the green-yellow-red stoplight approach in their national and regional guides. They include the most sustainable seafood options for residents of the West Coast, Southwest, Central, Northeast, Southeast, and a sushi-specific list. U.S.-farmed bass is among the best choices for the Northeast, for example, along with Maryland blue crab, farmed mussels, swordfish caught through hand lines or harpoons in U.S. or Canadian waters, as well as farmed oysters and scallops.

But here’s where it gets complicated: Striped bass falls among the do-not-buy fish when it comes to U.S. gillnet- and pound-net fishing. And while New Zealand salmon gets the greenlight, salmon gets the redlight when it comes to fish from the Canadian Atlantic, Scotland, Norway, and Chile. These details make it super confusing to the average consumer in that it requires a literacy most of us don’t have.

Shop at places that go beyond listing whether seafood is caught, in say, North America. Look for the state it’s from or even that of the farm, fishery, or fishing outfit, like Rappahannock Oyster Co. or Taku River Reds. The more you know, the more you can trust that you’re shopping responsibly.

Best practices

This tier offers the most transparency, which brings us back to our fishmongers. They can make recommendations about what to buy — and you should listen to them. Once you’ve decided you can trust them, you should build that relationship. They can tell you when fish came into the shop, where it’s from, and in an ideal world, the fishers. They understand the supply chain. They know the fishing seasons. In short, they know fish. And we're going to pay more for it, as we should.

Back in 2015, when Oceana asked Greenberg for tips on how to eat local, sustainable seafood, he pointed to the Greenpeace supermarket seafood ratings (which incidentally haven’t been updated since 2018, perhaps pointing to more pervasive industrialization of fish and decreasing transparency in the supply chain).

Greenberg also said this: “If you can, join a community-supported fishery (CSF). There are not that many yet, but the movement is growing.” As this week’s reporting on The Bittman Project displays, the movement has arrived.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bittmanproject.com/subscribe

The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

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Thanks for visiting The Bittman Project, a place where food is everything (or pretty close).

Before getting to today’s recipes, two things:

1) When we launched The Bittman Project we said that everything we published was going to be available to everyone (members and not) for free for the first two weeks. We lied. We’re making it three weeks. That means this is the last week that everyone gets full access. Starting in March, many of our recipes, videos, podcasts, and posts (and all of our Friday discussion threads) will be for members only. So, if you want to be a part of the community that gets everything we publish and helps us steer this ship, sign up for a membership. (There’s currently a special offer for $20 off, but it’s only good through the end of this week.)

2) I wanted to let you know that this Wednesday the 24th is the last day to order the Bi-Rite x Bittman California Citrus Experience Box. Sorry to everyone who’s heard this before, but for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s the gist:

Last year, I called my friend Sam Mogannam, who owns Bi-Rite Market, the fabulous grocery store in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, and asked — really, this was a big favor — if we could try to figure out a way to fill a pre-paid USPS shipping box with the best California citrus and send it to my house. (We started with FedEx, which was prohibitively expensive and, incredibly, not as efficient.)

It worked, so well, in fact, that they made the box available to everyone and brought it back again this year. It’s about 10 to 12 pounds of fresh California citrus (think mandarins, lemons, limes, oranges, quats, grapefruit) hand-picked and hand-packed by Bi-Rite’s produce team and shipped to your door. People have been going crazy for it, and it’ll only be around for two more days before the citrus season ends.

If you’re interested, you can order here, or by clicking the button below. Either way, this is the time to be cooking with citrus, so if you need some inspiration, check out the audio clip above and the recipes below.

It’s inevitable: Some days you haven’t planned anything to cook, the afternoon sneaks up on you, and all you can do is throw your hands up and say, “Gahhhh! What’s for dinner?” For those times when you just need something fast, easy, and tasty, we’ve got you covered. Here are a few (citrus-centric) recipes to help you navigate this week.

Chard With Oranges and Shallots

Makes: 4 servingsTime: 25 minutes

A perfect winter dish with vibrant color and tangy sweet-sour flavor. The skin of the orange or tangerine becomes almost candied and provides a nice chew, but if you’d rather not eat it, simply peel before chopping. To make this dinner, serve with some crusty bread, or toss with a little pasta (if you’ve never had pasta with citrus before, you’re in for a treat; some grated Parmesan wouldn’t be a terrible idea, either).

Other vegetables you can use: any chard, bok choy, kale, or cabbage. For the citrus, use kumquats (quartered) if available.

Ingredients

1 pound chard, trimmed

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 shallots, halved and sliced

2 tablespoons sugar

1 small orange or tangerine, seeded and coarsely chopped

2 tablespoons sherry vinegar

Salt and pepper

Instructions

Cut the stems out of the chard leaves. Cut the leaves into wide ribbons and slice the stems, on the diagonal if you like. Keep the leaves and stems separate.
Put the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. When it is hot, add the shallots and sugar and cook for a minute, then stir in the orange or tangerine and adjust the heat so the vegetables sizzle gently. Cook, stirring frequently, until everything is caramelized, about 10 minutes. Stir in the vinegar.
Return the heat to medium and stir in the chard stems. Cook, stirring occasionally, until they soften a bit, a minute or 2. Add the chard leaves, cover, and turn off the heat. Let the chard steam for 2 to 3 minutes. Uncover, stir, and re-cover the pan for another couple of minutes. Sprinkle with salt and lots of pepper. Serve hot, or within an hour or two at room temperature.

— Recipe from How to Cook Everything: Completely Revised 20th Anniversary Edition

Chicken With Citrus Sauce

Makes: 4 servingsTime: 20 minutes

Here’s a pan-cooked version of this delicious sweet-and-sour dish, which is prepared (often grilled) at roadside stands and restaurants on many Caribbean islands. Serve this with rice. (The rice pictured above is just long-grain white rice cooked with half coconut milk, half water; really a treat.)

Ingredients

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into 1/2-inch cubes

Salt and black pepper to taste

2 garlic cloves, sliced

1 red onion, sliced

1/2 cup fresh orange juice

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons fresh lime juice

2 tablespoons honey

2 tablespoons drained capers for garnish

Instructions

Heat the oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. Add the chicken pieces and cook, stirring occasionally, until lightly browned and cooked through, seasoning to taste with salt and pepper, about 10 minutes. Remove and place in your serving dish.

2.Add the garlic and onion to the skillet and cook, stirring occasionally until the onion is slightly softened, about 3 minutes. Stir in the orange juice, lemon juice, lime juice, and honey. Cook only until the honey has completely dissolved, about 30 seconds.

3.Pour the onion-citrus mixture over the chicken, garnish with capers, and serve.

—Recipe from The Best Recipes In The World

Grapefruit Salad

Makes: 2 servingsTime: About 15 minutes

My partner Rick is a baker and also a true minimalist: Like Mark, he believes when it comes to cooking, less is more. When he first made me this grapefruit side salad during citrus season, I was kind of taken aback at how simple it is. But especially with beautiful fruit and good olive oil, it’s revelatory. — Melissa

Ingredients

Two large grapefruits (the red ones are nice, but this recipe will work with any variety)

Salt

Olive oil

Freshly ground (coarse) black pepper or dried hot red pepper

Instructions

Peel and cut the grapefruit into supremes. If you know how to do this, skip this next part.
Peel the grapefruits by cutting off the tops and bottoms, set flat on a cutting board, and cut away all of the peel and pith without removing any flesh with a knife following the contours of the fruit. With practice and a sharp knife, you should be able to have a perfectly round, peeled grapefruit with a slightly flat top and bottom with no traces of white pith. Cut off any white pith that may remain.
Hold the grapefruit in your non-dominant hand over a bowl to collect any juice that will run out in the process. Using the same knife, cut supremes from the grapefruit by cutting in between the membranes. You should be able to get relatively even half-moon segments of fruit with no pith and no membrane.
Place the segments into a dry bowl. Squeeze the fleshy grapefruit mass in your hand into another bowl to extract all of the juice that’s left into the original bowl. Drink the juice or save it for another use.
Place your mostly dry grapefruit segments on a plate and dress with the best olive oil you can get. Season with salt and either black or red pepper.

— Recipe from Rick Easton of Bread and Salt Bakery

Bonus Recipe: Orange Confit

Makes: 16 servingsTime: 9 to 16 hours

Ok, so this is the exact opposite of a quick dinner recipe (it’s a slow dessert recipe), but it’s honest-to-goodness alchemy; plus, I talked about how amazing it is in the audio clip above, so how can I not share it here? You're taking pretty much everything in the orange except its form and replacing it with sugar, making even the peel edible. You can use this technique on all kinds of citrus. Blanching the fruit helps to remove the bitterness of the pith. Think of this as fresh orange candy or sugar in orange form.

Ingredients

4 big navel oranges

2 1/2 pounds sugar

Instructions

Fill a saucepan large enough to hold oranges with water; bring to a boil. Blanch oranges for 30 seconds, then remove, change water and repeat. Carefully quarter oranges through their poles. Return them to saucepan with half the sugar and water to cover. Bring to a boil, then cook over lowest possible heat, adding water as necessary to keep them covered. Cook for 8 hours, then remove from heat and let sit overnight.
Drain oranges and repeat process with remaining sugar and water to cover. Oranges are done when very tender but not falling apart, from 1 to 8 hours. Remove pot from heat and let cool, then refrigerate oranges with their syrup. Oranges will keep, refrigerated, for several weeks.
Serve an orange segment with a dollop of whipped cream (or a scoop of chocolate caramel mousse).

—Recipe adapted from Scott Carsberg

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Listen now | This audio opener features me asking Mark and cookbook guru, Kerri Conan, how often they make stock, what they use it for, and advice for people who have never made it. I learned so much; I hope you do too. Read on for a few highlights. — Melissa Mark:

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Listen now | A bunch of us hopped on a Zoom to talk/gush about our own favorite secret ingredients, why we love them, and what we do with them. I’m not exactly sure what to call the group of people on this podcast: Our team? Our contributors? Our friends? No clue, but all awesome people that we’re hoping will be involved with The Bittman Project for a long time.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bittmanproject.com/subscribe

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February has been a big month so far: Not only did we launch The Bittman Project yesterday, but last week I published a book. It’s called Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal, and it’s honestly some of the best work I’ve done in my entire life. My goals for writing this book (plus one of my favorite sections from it) are mostly where I wanted to focus today’s newsletter. But before I get there, let me tee up that audio clip above.

As you can probably guess from the “suicidal” in my book title, the U.S. food system is not in a great place; it hasn’t been for a long time, and let’s just say that the Trump administration didn’t make things better. But because I want the community we’re building here to be a hopeful and forward-looking one, I thought we might talk a bit about what policies or food initiatives we can expect (or hope) to see from the new administration to help get things on track. So, I called my friend Ricardo Salvador to ask him. He’s the director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, very smart and very nice. We tried to keep it short (10 minutes) while still laying out a few of the key changes to look for in the coming term.

Below, you’ll find a brief explanation about why this book is so tremendously meaningful to me, plus the first of three excerpts that we’ll run here on The Bittman Project. It’s about how the burger came to dominate our food culture — and what that means for us. I hope you like it (and if you have any thoughts or reactions, feel free to drop them in the comments).

I have always been drawn to the big picture, to large, general topics; I did, after all, write How to Cook Everything. So it’s not surprising the idea of linking food and its history in relation to humans has been kicking around in my head since the early ‘70s when I started thinking about food as something other than “what’s for dinner.”

That’s the central theme of my new book: the relationship between food and people, one that I believe has not been considered thoroughly enough.

In Animal, Vegetable, Junk, I try to provide an understanding of these three things:

Human history can be viewed through the lens of food. Nothing is more important than food, and nothing you can think of — including war, the economy, even money — has had more influence. And yet, food has gotten short shrift from historians and the press. (In 2010, when I proposed a weekly column that took food seriously to The New York Times’ opinion editor, he wondered whether it was “interesting” enough.)

The history of food has shaped where we are today. U.S. inequality, for example, would be less extreme if farmland had not been first stolen from Indigenous people and then given away by the federal government to white males almost exclusively. Food — access to and/or lack of it — has had historic and deadly effects on public health, the environment, resource use, and the economy.

It is essential that we create a kind of road map that will lead us to a just food system: one that ensures that everyone has access to nourishing food, that good food is universally affordable, that food is grown in a way that’s sustainable and protects the land, and that the industries that involve food provide more dignified and well-paying jobs in food and farming.

With these three themes as guideposts, I’ve tried to integrate what I’ve learned to be true about food into a single narrative, one that’s manageable to most readers of general nonfiction and that is, in its way, complete without being overwhelming.

I can tell you that I was nearly overwhelmed by it and had nightmares of never finishing, of it becoming one of those old fashioned multi-volume history books. This was not out of arrogance or a sense of grandeur, but of the sheer volume of information I had to consider when looking at our ongoing and changing relationship to food and agriculture.

Since my goal was something more along the lines of Sapiens—a grand, interesting story, guided by a moral compass—I, like most authors, had to make many decisions about whether certain sections were worthy of being included, or whether they were to be sacrificed for the overall narrative. Like most authors, if I were to do another round of rewriting (there were probably 10 from the time I had a solid draft until I was told to keep my hands off the manuscript), the book would look somewhat different.

Nevertheless: I recently read Animal, Vegetable, Junk for the audiobook, a reading that allows for no skimming at all. And I can say I’m as happy as can be about how it came out: It is, of course, imperfect, but I think the goals have largely been met, and I hope what you’ll find if you choose to read it is an important, interesting, compelling, even novel story that you’ll think about and discuss.

— Mark

How American Burgers Dominated Food Culture

Using yield as the only metric, American agriculture was a roaring, overflowing success. The American farmer was growing a superabundance of wheat, corn, sugar, rice, cotton, and, later, soybeans. And yet, despite producing this surplus, farmers still continued to bear tremendous risk.

Then there was the question of what to do with this bounty. Such levels of surplus all but guaranteed cheap food. But more increasingly, the surplus was used to invent new versions of foods: Industry learned to process and manufacture almost everything, from butter and cheese and ketchup to breakfast cereal and bread and burgers. It was a new, revolutionary way to make money, and one that fundamentally changed the dinner table and how we eat.

For eaters, the results were a mixed bag. The new foods were time-savers in the short run — in this new era, almost no one was a farmer, and few had time to make pickles or milk a cow, but store-bought foods were affordable and convenient. In the long run, however, they caused ill health and brought with them hidden costs, like pollution and resource exhaustion, that negated the evident savings. As usual, the system most benefited the middlemen: traders, millers, equipment and chemical dealers, processors, wholesalers, and retailers.

Nevertheless, the surplus, and the production techniques that came with it, resulted in a wondrous slew of new offerings. Take the symbol of 20th-century American eating: Topped with a flap of reduced and dyed milk paste (“American” cheese) and a generous drizzle of over-sweetened tomato jam (ketchup), then sandwiched in a sad simulacrum of bread, replete with painted-on “crust” (the bun), the all-beef patty became the cheeseburger.

We have all said — or at least heard — “There is nothing like a burger.” In my pre-adolescence, I ate 25-cent burgers. Better still, two burgers — fresh patties, juicy, crisped on a grill — fries, and a Coke for 55-cents. I remember sacks from White Castle in that same period. Several years later, in high school, I drove 90 miles with some friends in an old Ford to my first McDonald’s, listening to the Beach Boys on AM radio.

It’s likely that you have similar stories — the best, the local, the most memorable, and so on. Burgers replaced “Mom and apple pie” as central to American life.

And yet, there is nothing intrinsically fabulous about a burger. Many are, in fact, disgusting. But that doesn’t reduce their significance: The burger is fundamental to our national consciousness, the embodiment of that huge area of beautiful, well-watered, nearly virgin land that allowed for ever-increasing production, discovery, invention, cunning, and a ruthless, ignorant exploitation of resources. Those resources yield 50 billion burgers a year in America alone, around 150 per person.

The story of how that all happened is the story of American beef itself.

The mid-19th century cattle drives were slow and risky. Drought and winter were deadly obstacles. By the 1880s, rail expansion and barbed wire fencing began to reduce the number of drives as cattle were shipped in railroad “stock” cars.

These shipments made the railroads a fortune, but the process was inefficient. The yield from a live cow was about 40 percent, which means that for every hundred pounds of cattle that were crowded into a car and shipped, only 40 pounds of meat could be sold after the cow was slaughtered and butchered. What’s more, each cow had to be tended to, fed, and kept alive — not always an easy task, as disease spreads quickly in crowded cattle cars.

At first, there was no way around it. A slaughtered carcass didn’t keep well during shipping, a constraint that was handcuffing the entire beef packing business, keeping it local and small, and limiting profit. Fresh pork kept a little better, and many of its popular finished products, like ham and bacon, were already preserved. Thus, beef accounted for only 3 percent of the meatpacking industry as a whole.

These challenges were profound, but demand and the potential for profit were nearly unlimited. There had to be a solution. The breakthrough came in 1880 when Gustavus Swift built a fleet of refrigerated railcars that could reliably transport freshly butchered (“dressed”) beef from Chicago to New York. What had once been many discrete, local, and decentralized beef industries became a unified national business with no limits on growth.

Swift quickly built his own stockyard and slaughter facilities in Chicago, St. Louis, and other critical rail junctures in the Midwest and a new network of distribution centers all across the country. By 1900, the dressed-meat business, controlled by just a few farms, was the second-largest industry in the country, after steel. The leaders formed a trust, fixing both prices and freight rates, while the railroads gave the monopoly preferential pricing.

Teddy Roosevelt famously attempted to bust the trusts, but the industry was so heavily capitalized and infrastructure-based that there was no hope for a new competitor. As a result, though their names have changed since 1900, there are still only four major meatpackers in the United States.

At the time — the early 20th century — the boom doubled the country’s cattle in 20 years, to the point where there were almost nine cattle for every 10 people in this country, a proportion as high as we’ve ever seen. (The ratio is about a third of that today.) Some of this meat — maybe 10 percent, but not more — was exported, which left a lot of beef for domestic consumption, about a pound per person per week. And about 40 percent of the yield from a typical cow is ground beef.

That meant there were a lot of burgers.

Guessing when and where the hamburger was invented is a fool’s game since it’s likely that spiced ground meat on bread was eaten wherever bread and meat first intersected, thousands of years ago. (It certainly wasn’t in Hamburg.) Although there’s some evidence that the first dedicated burger joint in the United States was Louis’ Lunch, in New Haven, Connecticut, founded in 1895 and still there, the burger became popular in late-19th-century New York and elsewhere. The zeitgeist really caught on just after World War I.

The White Castle System of Eating Houses was founded in 1921, and its first hurdle was convincing consumers that ground beef was safe. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was published in 1906, and its tales of poisoned rats being tossed in the meat grinder were, er, unsettling.

But ground meat was suspect even before The Jungle. No one knew what was actually being ground, and people generally believed that ground meat was about-to-spoil meat. White Castle’s founder, Edgar “Billy” Ingram, addressed that by grinding fresh beef directly in front of customers. He also made his buildings out of stainless steel and white enamel, and even his choice of name was a tactic since the color white symbolized purity and cleanliness in a society tainted by racism.

Ingram created a standard of architecture, menu, and quality, as well as a standardized form of takeout: the sack. These strategies, combined with a 5-cents-per-burger price, made his first restaurant an instant success. White Castle saturated the Wichita market in less than two years, and by the end of the decade, it was national. And profitable: Managers used company biplanes to cover their massive territories.

Hundreds of copycat entrepreneurs followed, building small, white buildings in which burgers were cooked and sold and coining names like White Tower, Red Castle, and White Palace. Meanwhile, Ingram continued to innovate: He created a proto-Betty Crocker, hiring a woman he renamed Julia Joyce and sending her out to promote White Castle to groups of women. He also foreshadowed the movie Super Size Me, by funding an experiment in which a medical student named Bernard Flesche ate nothing but hamburgers — an average of more than 20 a day — for 13 weeks. Flesche was pronounced in good health at the experiment’s conclusion, but he reportedly tired of the diet and never ate a burger willingly again. He died of heart issues at the age of 54.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bittmanproject.com/subscribe

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