Category: Food

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This morning we learned that Amazon has bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in cash. What’s up? Information on Amazon’s plans for Whole Foods is in short supply at present, except that it’s known that Amazon wants to get into the grocery business, that Amazon was interested in a brick-and-mortar presence, and that Whole Foods was hurting, chiefly because of cheaper competition.

I feel a very strong interest in this, because it happens that Whole Foods and Amazon are the two organizations that get most of the money I spend. Until we learn more, I’m forced to speculate about what’s going to change.

First of all, Whole Foods was starting to show (at least in the Winston-Salem store where I shop) alarming signs of money problems. Staff seemed increasingly spread thin. The coffee bins and bulk bins were sometimes empty and neglected, with no bags. The produce wasn’t as fresh and beautiful as it used to be. Basic perishables such as cream would be out of stock. The decline troubled me so much that I shopped one week at a competitor, Fresh Market, to investigate whether I should switch stores. I decided to stick with Whole Foods and hope for the best.

One of the sad things about Whole Foods is that much of the new competition has been coming from grossly inferior stores — Publix, Aldi, and a new one, Lidl. Aldi, as far as I could tell having only been in one once without buying anything, is what grocery stores would be like in hell. You had to deposit a quarter to get a grocery cart! The produce looked more like compost prewrapped in plastic. How such dreadful stores could give Whole Foods a hard time puzzles me, but apparently that was the case.

So then, Amazon could have seen its grocery future in an Aldi-like store, or even a Publix-like store, stores with a mass-market and warehouse feel to them. Certainly that’s what Amazon Pantry implied. Amazon Pantry sells only mass-market stuff that I would never buy. But instead Amazon chose Whole Foods, with its high-end, high-priced reputation, a chain that everybody knew was starting to get into trouble and that needs some repair to its reputation. Surely this tells us something about Amazon’s intentions for Whole Foods. Until I find out otherwise, I’m going to take the optimistic view: That Amazon will spend heavily to spiff up Whole Foods stores that were starting to show signs of hardship, and that Amazon is aiming at the high end and leaving the low end to a now crowded low-end market. Also, there is bound to be some kind of integration between online grocery shopping and going to the local Whole Foods.

This could be great! For a while, it looked as though bottom-feeder stores like Aldi were going to make life harder for high-end shoppers like me by driving high-end stores like Whole Foods into poverty. Now suddenly the prospects have turned. With Amazon aligned with Whole Foods, we may soon see the bottom-feeder stores starting to look shabby.

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Update:

Grocery stocks tank on news that Amazon is buying Whole Foods

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Supper

If I had ever really understood how much effort (and defeat) is involved in defending a garden, an orchard, and some chickens against all the hungry mouths that want to eat everything, I might never have had the heart to start. The hungry mouths come from everywhere — out of the woods, down from the sky, and up from the ground. Hawks and raccoons want to eat your chickens. Snakes want to eat your eggs. Squirrels and raccoons will raid the orchard and carry off peaches, apples, and figs just before you were going to pick them. Raccoons and rabbits and voles raid the garden. And we haven’t even started to talk about insects and blights. The abbey, to be sure, is in a worst-case situation — up against the woods in some very fine animal habitat.

No one understands your grief, of course, better than your local agricultural agents. I’ve written in the past about how important it is to befriend them. One of the abbey’s friends is a horticulturist whose help and advice during the past eight years have been invaluable. He’s a very busy guy, and you can’t get him to dinner very often. But this evening he’s coming to dinner, so this afternoon I got my shears and a sack and went out to see what the critters had left me for a home-grown supper.

The squirrels took every last one of the peaches from one of the trees, the tree that bore first. They’ll be after the other trees soon enough. They’ve already stolen some green apples as well. I see the trees shaking and go up to the orchard to ask the squirrels what the heck they think they’re doing. They just glance at me and go on chewing. If I shake a stick at them they’ll run back into the woods with a peach in their mouths. Every now and then I see a chicken peck a squirrel, because the chickens like the fallen peaches. Good work, chickens.

OK, then. I can make chutney from green apples, and maybe I can even get away with putting some unripe peaches in it. A nice red onion would do nicely in the chutney. So far, the snakes seem not to have found a way into Ken’s new chicken house, so there are plenty of eggs. That means omelets with a filling including onions, green tomatoes, day lily buds, and basil. I’m covered up with squash. The squash will get roasted on the grill. There was enough late lettuce for small salads. The first two cucumbers of the season were ready to pick. And there will be a loaf of fresh-baked sourdough bread.

So it promises to be a decent supper for a horticulturist (or a hobbit), though it’s not the sort of supper that can happen every day.

Ken, by the way, is in Alaska, again in a summer job with the Park Service as a backcountry ranger deep in grizzly bear territory where he’s assigned a shotgun. Maybe the squirrels aren’t so bad after all.

When I bring stuff in from the garden, I like to wash it immediately in cold water, wrap it in a muslin towel, and put it in the refrigerator to chill. The lettuce is in a vase of cold water. I’ll pick the lettuce leaves off the stalk right before they go into the salad. When stuff is fresh, a little extra care will keep it that way.

Soon to be chutney

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As I have gotten more and more experienced with sourdough bread, two factors have converged to pull me into breadmaking even deeper. Watch out. It could happen to you, too.

For one, the sourdough baker becomes so obsessed with the quality of the bread and takes such pride in each loaf that the amount of time and work involved is no longer an issue.

For two, it’s difficult to find stone-ground whole wheat flour these days. Partly, I suspect, this is because of the demonization of gluten (and therefore wheat) by so many “gluten free” people. Whole Foods now carries all sorts of exotic (and, in my opinion, useless) flours, and that’s crowding out good wheat flour. Organic wheat berries, however, are easy to buy in bulk, and they’re cheap.

My Champion juicer, fitted with Champion’s grinder attachment, makes a somewhat slow but entirely workable wheat grinder. The flour is excellent. Later this week I hope to have a portrait of my first home-ground loaf.

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Update: The bread rose poorly and did not make a portrait-worthy loaf, probably because the weather was so cold. However, it was delicious.

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Up until recently, my philosophy on sourdough bread was influenced chiefly by Peter Reinhart (The Bread Baker’s Apprentice) and Michael Pollan (Cooked). While looking at reviews of cookbooks on Amazon, I came across this book by Lisa Rayner, Wild Bread: Handbaked Sourdough Artisan Breads in Your Own Kitchen. The book has definitely changed my philosophy of sourdough.

Technically, the main difference in Rayner’s approach is that she uses more starter. She builds up her starter with three successive feedings before mixing her dough. The starter provides nearly half of the total weight of the loaf.

But there is another difference in her philosophy of bread that is more subtle but very important. Pollan and Reinhart are city folk. Their references for bread are the sophisticated professional bakers that you find in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York. Whereas Rayner is much more rustic, more provincial, in her approach to bread. Provincial is good.

When good cooks ask me what my chief influences as a cook are, I name three: traditional Southern cooking as practiced by my mother’s mother, whose kitchen was supplied by a good-size farm; my eighteen years in California and my love for California cuisine as exemplified by Alice Waters; and hippy cuisine.

What’s hippy cuisine? Remember The Tassajara Bread Book? It was originally published in 1970. All through the 1970s, hippies were developing a new, healthier, more vegetarian cuisine. Think of Moosewood Cookbook (1977), or The Findhorn Family Cookbook (1976). In my opinion, these three very different approaches to cooking fuse very well. Wild Bread was published in 2009, but there is something very 1970s hippy-esque about it.

The first loaf of bread I made after reading Rayner’s method was just what I aim for — inherently and un-obviously sophisticated yet extremely countrified and rustic. As I said to Ken, the bread that Frodo and Bilbo ate in the shire was probably like that. In my imagination, at least, it’s what a loaf of bread might have been like a thousand years ago. Bread with that ancient quality just cannot be done with yeast. Only sourdough will do it. And, paradoxically, such a rustic bread can be achieved only with some hard-to-learn techniques and things that many kitchens don’t have — a baker’s peel, a baking stone, durum flour for dusting, and so on. One of those tools, unfortunately, is a steam oven.