food sites

Two food travel related links

maki — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:33:00 +0200

People email me about their food sites and blogs all the time. I don’t mention those that I don’t find interesting or think would interest any Just Hungry readers, but here are a couple that came in recently that did catch my eye.

Foodtripper is a new site that reviews restaurants and food shops. What makes it stand out in this very crowded category is that they seem to have a European outlook on things, that aren’t limited to the usual places. I found several unusual and intriguing places listed, such as a restaurant in Pompeii that takes its inspiration from ancient Roman cuisine (though hopefully they don’t have authentic garum) and a chestnut factory in southwestern France.
If you’re visiting a major food-obsessed city where you don’t know anyone, finding your way around can be a bit daunting. A culinary tour may be one way to get your bearings. Zerve.com offers walking and noshing tours of New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and New Orleans. If anyone’s gone on one of their tours I’d be interested to hear your impressions.

Pig Pig Pig

maki — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 06:02:44 +0100

Apparently, yesterday (March 1) was National Pig Day in the U.S. Who knew that such a day existed? In any case, Serious Eats outdid themselves with a whole slew of fun posts of a porcine nature. My favorite out of all the bacon homages and so on was actually the one about Paul Gauguin’s ham painting. Now, that’s a good looking piece of pig.

One of my favorite literary mention of the humble pig in its edible form appears in Little House In The Big Woods, the first book in the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. It describes how the family carefully used every bit of the pig that they had kept over the year. They made big hams, bacon and sausages from the scraps (stored in a barrel of snow). The tail was roasted as a treat, and the bladder was blown up like a balloon for the children to play with. There’s probably no animal that is as useful as the pig.

Video in the kitchen: a critique of video food sites

maki — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 13:56:53 +0100

Recently I’ve been getting several P.R. type emails from new sites that feature videos that they think appeal to food lovers. I do take a look at them, and with very few exceptions I must say that most of them are not worth my time.

I think the people who run all-video sites need to really understand two things before anything else. First is the difference between passive video viewing, i.e. on TV the way many of us still watch TV, and voluntary video viewing. Voluntary viewing means stuff that I must make a conscious effort to choose to view. DVDs fall into this category, as does online video. When I go to YouTube for instance, I need to search, click and then wait a bit to download the video. If the video is crap then I will never view it again, and chances are I’ll try to avoid anything uploaded by that user if I remember to.

The other thing is that video is not always the best medium for delivering information. Video takes time to watch. Morever, online video is at the moment very linear. For instance, if I’m watching a video about how to make an apple pie, and I need to go back to watch the part about how to roll out the pastry, it’s really not that easy. (A well-made DVD on the other hand would have the right bookmarks.)

At the moment, all-video simply doesn’t work well online. A combination of text, still pictures and short, to-the-point videos would seem to be the ideal combination. For instance New York Times food section has been offering a few short video clips recently. It really works, in my opinion. But on the other hand…personally I only watch these clips once, or maybe twice. The accompanying article/recipe is read over and over.

Don’t insult my intellience.

Now let’s get to the content of some of those new food-oriented video sites. If the site is predominantly offering fluff pieces about some new restaurant or bar or whatever, I am not interested. Video always takes more time than text or text + pictures to consume, and I don’t have the patience or time or inclination to view what are basically long commercials.

So are there any good ones?

Not counting food blogs with video content, there is one new and rather intriguing all-video site (and they didn’t even send me a P.R. email). Rouxbe offers paid membership options to their video-only instructional food site. The site is gorgeous, and the videos seem to be of very high quality, shot in that high key, soft-limited-focus way. (The intro video with the fake-ish bantering is supremely annoying, but maybe that’s just me.) However, it is a pay service, and the question is whether people will pay a subscription to download and watch these videos, with so many free alternatives out there. I’m not sure. I wouldn’t pay for it myself, to be honest. The videos on the site look very expensively produced, which makes me wonder what kind of funding they have to sustain themselves.

I also question the whole concept of whether video is superior at ‘improving your cooking skills’, over good old cookbooks. I think the only way to become a better cook is to do it over and over and over again. Ideally you would do this with instruction from a live teacher, who could be an actual teacher/chef or your cooking-savvy mom/brother/friend, but it’s the doing it over and over part that’s most important…like a lot of things in life I suppose. And cookbooks, really great ones, are proven vehicles of good information.

It does remind me of a scene in the movie Desperately Seeking Susan, where the Rosanna Arquette character, a bored housewife who can’t cook, puts a Julia Child video on the TV in her beautiful kitchen to see how to make dinner. Maybe it will work for those people who have a computer in their kitchen or can untangle their laptop enough to bring it there, who can’t cook from books or memory. (I wouldn’t let my laptop anywhere near my cooking myself…)

Entertain me

Any regular readers of this site would know that I do really like food shows on TV. I’ve written reams of paragraphs about Top Chef, MasterChef, and other food television here. There are whole channels dedicated to food in many countries (there was an announcement recently that there’s one starting up on Swiss TV too). I own DVDs by Julia Child, Nigella Lawson, and several from Japan. So I think I could be an ideal audience for food video sites. But, so far nothing appeals to me enough to make me want to return to any of them…and I think I know why. I don’t really watch Julia or Nigella etc. just to get the recipes, though that’s part of it. It’s also to enjoy them as pure entertainment. Nothing offered by food video sites so far is entertaining enough.

A site about molecular gastronomy, and a video about sake

maki — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 13:32:59 +0100

Here are a couple of links that I wanted to get into a bit more detail than I can in the del.icio.us hosted daily links.

Travelistic is a relatively new site that already has a lot of fun and mostly very professionally done travel related videos. They have a new video by ThirstyTraveler, aka Kevin Brauch from the Discovery Travel Channel program The Thirsty Traveler, about sake. He travels to Kyoto by Shinkansen, samples some sake, and visits a sake distillery. Worth checking out if you're interested in Japan, sake or both.

Khymos.org is a site about "molecular gastronomy and the science of cooking". The author is Martin Lersch, a PhD student in organometallic chemistry in Oslo, Norway. He has a blog where he tracks the latest news on molecular gastronomy, as well as recipes, a supplier list, book lists and more.

Watching the video and reading the site made me think how similar food manufacturing processes in 'factory' type situations, as with the distillery, are to haute cuisine "molecular gastronomy". Both are approaching food creation from a scientific, specifically a chemistry, point of view. As Martin says on his site, "food is chemistry". It's an approach I never really considered much until recently. Maybe I'll become a molecular gastronomist in part after all. Let me get my Dyson vacuum cleaner out... :P

Yahoo! Food launches

maki — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 20:46:33 +0100

I am on ten gazillion mailing lists about food, and one of those that drifted in this past week was about the launch of Yahoo! Food. My first impression is that it looks great - clean design, not cluttered with moving bits like the Food TV site. It's similar to BBC Food, my current favorite non-blog food site. I particularly like the huge search box on the Yahoo! page, as well as the food related quotes.

I do sincerely hope that Yahoo! will keep it uncluttered and free of those godawful interstital ads that plague so many portal-type sites. (Interstital ads are those annoying 'windows' seem to open by mistake when you move your mouse pointer anywhere near an ad that float above the web page, blocking your view and more of than not making loud noises in the process.)

Review: ThisNext

maki — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 18:39:14 +0200

ThisNext is a brand new social shopping site that just officially opened last week. I have been using it for a little while now - it powers the Japanese Snacks feature you see on the sidebar of this site.

While I have never used other social shopping sites before except to browse around them a bit, I find ThisNext very easy to use. The interface also encourages users to leave meaningful comments on their items, which really makes the listings far more useful than a simple picture and a short 'i luv this' type of comment. You can also put cute little stickers on your item pictures if you wish, and subscribe to the RSS feeds of individual members or lists. It's not perfect - there can be duplicate entries of the same item under different names for example, and there is no negativity allowed (if you comment on an item, you're automatically listed as recommending it). It's very early days though. There's no fancy Flash badge to put on your site yet, though for me that's not a minus - their Javascript badge can be styled with CSS, so you can mash it up to fit the design of your site.

The reason I'm posting about it here on my food blog (besides the fact that my personal blog is in a state of dormancy at the moment) is that it has a number of interesting food related lists up there already. One is from Nate Appleman, the executive chef and co-owner of A16 restaurant in San Francisco. His list of Kitchen Essentials has several knife recommendations among other things. There's also a list from Regan Burns, editor of Chow magazine. There's my Japanese snack list too! On the non-food side there are lots of new and unusual design oriented items listed, which I love, and lots else. Browsing around by tag can lead you to discover new sites to visit as well as products to check out. From the blogger perspective, making a good list on ThisNext could lead to new traffic to your site.

Sean at ThisNext has posted a short Q and A with me up on their blog...if you are interested in my esoteric shopping habits.

Shelteriffic has a nice review of ThisNext also.