ABCDs at Brooklyn Magazine Launch Party

The L Magazine is launching Brooklyn Magazine, a new quarterly print magazine all about Brooklyn and its people and ABCD's was asked to provide some foods for the launch party tomorrow! I will be posting the recipes after the event. I'm collaborating with my friend Ben for a new Mexican taco - corn tortilla filled with potato curry (basically the potato filling in a masala dosa), topped with mole chutney and homemade yogurt crema. So excited because I had a blast at the last L Magazine event.

SXSW Food & Tech Session Wrap-Up

Photo by Christian Payne of Documentally

Last week, Jas and I moderated a core conversation at SXSW entitled How Technology is Revolutionizing the Way We Eat. In this forum, the audience was encouraged to participate and share. We had a great turnout from individuals at the Food Network, Martha Stewart to IDEO and developers of new technologies and apps in the food space and of course a grip of food bloggers (yay!).

Photo by Jodi Bart of Tasty Touring

Since writing the original proposal back in July, the concept kind of morphed into a discussion that covered not only the effect existing technologies, bloggers, online cooking shows, etc. are having, but also about the myriad of new technologies and apps that have been developed in the food space. It was a great opportunity for those that are creating new food apps and technologies and those with existing food brands that are looking to expand in the area of technology to get a better sense of consumption habits among the audience members.

The discussion flew by and we did not get a chance to delve deeply into all of the areas that technology and food are hitting right now, but there were definitely some great insights about how technology has affected the realm of food not only in how we eat, cook and dine, but also how we form communities and run food businesses. For instance, we discussed Food Sprout, a data-driven website that is mapping the food supply chain to improve transparency about where our food comes from and helping companies become more sustainable by connecting consumers, restaurants, food manufactures and suppliers. We talked about how sites like Yummly are now making it easier for people that have strict dietary restrictions to find recipes online and how new companies like Gojee can provide us with personalized recipe recommendations based on what we have purchased on our loyalty cards at grocery stores.

During the course of preparing for the session and getting to know new innovations in the space and the people behind them, there were certain trends I was drawn to that I want to share. One area we touched upon that I feel passionate about is how technology is allowing locally grown foods to be more accessible to the masses. I grew up in a household where my mother was constantly on a quest for finding farmstands with the freshest produce. I think in some ways she was attempting to attain the freshness in the vegetables and fruits she grew up eating in India. Her obsession has become mine so I am thrilled when I find out about sites like Real Time Farms.com, Greenling and Relay.

Another area that I am involved in is food education for children. I volunteer for The Children's Storefront, Slow Food, Just Food and Added Value Farms - organizations that support programs that teach children about healthful cooking, gardening and general food knowledge. There is much opportunity in this space for technology to help further this message and several initiatives have been put forth.

Foodista, a crowdsourced resource for recipes, encourages its users to submit their favorite kid-friendly and family cooking videos to be featured on The Kids Cook Monday!, a program that provides resources such as recipes and videos to help families cook together at least once a week. A children's cooking video game was released for Nintendo by America's Test Kitchen called Let's Get Cooking and has been getting positive reviews. One of the most vocal and active advocates of this cause is Jamie Oliver who won last year's TED Prize for his Food Revolution project, a movement with a strong focus on teaching children healthful eating and cooking. His speech from last year was inspiring and he has gone on to partner with IDEO to form Cooking & Company, a program that extends the Food Revolution from schools to the workplace with a goal of teaching 350,000 adults basic cooking skills.

One other area I find fascinating is how technology is reviving food traditions and craft. It is kind of like old world meeting new, where through blogs and videos, a larger audience can now learn how to brew beer, make cheese, jar & pickle, bake bread and also access cooking traditions and techniques from all over the world - making kimchi for instance! David Chang released Lucky Peach, a quarterly iPad app and print journal that introduces one dish or ingredient at a time (first one was on ramen) through several facets with a host of videos, recipes, graphics, etc. In addition we now have more access to finding artisanal and small batch goods with sites like Lovefre.sh which allows you to upload voice recorded interviews and photos about local artisanal shops and owners in your area that you love so that others can find them too.

Michael Rulhman wrote Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking which is about how many traditional recipes originated based on ratios of the weights of ingredients. For instance, the pound cake earned its name from its ingredient measures - 1 pound each of flour, butter, eggs and sugar with a ratio of 1:1:1:1. Along with his book, Rulhman released the Ratio application that calculates the amount of ingredients you need based on what you have or how much you want to make. Rulhman worked with Will Turnage who developed the application and the two have just launched a new (and amazing) iPad application in a similar vein called Bread Baking Basics. Now, there is even an application called Cookulus where a customized recipe will be provided after you select your preference in cookies using three scales: crispy-soft, chewy-crunchy and thin-thick!

While at SXSW, I also attended a really interesting talk actually given by Will Turnage and his colleague Chloe Gottlieb entitled The Refrigerator Speaks: The Secret Language of Things that covered new smart products and the ability for embedded sensors in these devices to make an impact on our lives. Some of their talk touched on innovations in the food industry such as the iGrill, the first grilling/cooking thermometer and application which transmits temperature measures to your smartphone through a Bluetooth connection, but also addressed where trends will take us in the future, which we did not have time to discuss at our session.

Many of the new consumer facing technologies in the food space that I have come across are focusing on customized recommendations based on previous choices, diet preferences, etc (Food On the Table, Fourquare Explore Tab), transparency between the seller and buyer (Food Sprout, QR codes on vegetables), tighter relationships between merchants and consumers (Social Grub on Facebook, Specials on Foursquare), forming social communities (Super Marmite, Grubwithus), sales/specials aggregators (AnyLeaf, Seven Lunches), education (Snooth wine app), improving economies of scale for buyers (Wholeshare) and closer to a time where our smartphones are telling us we're out of milk in the fridge and need to pick up more:)

There is so much more and I could go on for hours on this topic but I will spare you. You can find a great recap on the additional apps and technologies mentioned at this session at Tasty Touring. I also wanted to call out a couple resources if you are interested in learning more. Food+Tech Connect, which is run by Danielle Gould, provides a wealth of information on this topic and was a great resource for preparing for this session. You can find in-depth interviews with many of the innovators in the space mentioned above at Danielle's site. I am a member of the related meetup group in New York that is organized by Lizzy Greene that has been a really amazing way to learn about new developments in the space. It's where I found out about and met the creators of Real Time Farms.com. Food+Tech Connect also helped to put on ideaCOMM at SXSW, an event with foods prepared by chefs that locally sourced their materials using some of the newest food applications and technologies. Also during SXSW this year, TechMunch, a food bloggers conference that features experts in the digital field, was held. You can view their site for upcoming conference dates.

Thanks to all that attended and special thanks to Danielle Gould of Food+Tech Connect and Will Turnage of Bread Baking Basics for providing some great information and resources on the topic. Please comment below if you'd like to add more to this discussion!

Pairing Wines With Indian Food

For this post, I am going to have my very first guest blogger, Lizzy Esqueda of the Brooklyn Winery, discuss how she went about pairing wines with the Indian supper I prepared. There is not a lot of information out there on this pairing so I am very excited to share Lizzy's insight on the topic. Here's what she had to say:

As you know, Indian food is notorious for being too difficult to pair with wines. When pairing food with wine, the goal is to balance both the flavors of the food with the flavors of the wine, so that neither the food nor the wine overpowers the other. In doing so, there are a few things to consider when pairing, and these points will help you find the best match for this cuisine.

One important key is to always match the weight of the food to the weight of the wine. A food with a creamy sauce, or creamy like texture will need a wine with a little bit more body. For example, your raita needed a wine with a little body, so we chose the Finger Lakes Riesling which is a medium bodied wine.

Also, matching the intensity of food to the intensity of the wine is very important. Delicate flavored wines and strong flavored foods do not match. Therefore, it was important that in order to match your Indian dishes that are full of intense flavors, whether it be spicy or sweet, it was necessary to choose wines that were not delicate but had intense, robust flavors to accompany the cuisine in the best way possible.

When dealing with spicy foods, which some of your dishes had a bit of, it is important not to choose wines with alot of tannin or spice to enhance it even more. In order to balance the heat in food, it is important to choose a wine with juicy, ripe fruit and/or with residual sugar to mellow out the spice a bit, rather than making it overpowering. This is why we chose both the Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon, which had really nice ripe black raspberry, cherry flavors and also the Moscato d' Asti, which had both rich, ripe apricot and peach flavors, and was also a semi-sweet wine.

Although red wines are very difficult to pair with Indian cuisine, I think the Cabernet Sauvignon and it's ripe, rich fruits were able to work really well. The Moscato d' Asti wine seemed to pair very well with many of your dishes and I was really happy with how it really balanced out and complemented almost every dish, especially the shahi paneer, which had a great amount of flavor and spice. The wine was able to balance out both the heat from the spice and the intensity of flavors in the sauce.

Lastly, another tip is to try and pair sweet foods with sweet wines. Dry wines can seem tart or too acidic when paired with food with a degree of sweetness. The sweeter the food, the sweeter the wine needs to be. Although not many of your foods were sweet, the carrot salad - kosambri, had a bit of a sweetness to it from the coconut. Not enough for the Moscato d' Asti to hold up, but just enough for the slight residual sugar in the Riesling to pair nicely.

The Prosecco was used more of an aperitif to clean the palate, but worked really well with the papri chaat, with a slight bit of residual sugar and flavor to be able to balance out all the different flavors and slight spice that were occurring within the food.

I hope this helps and it was really great working with you!

Thanks for contributing to this post Lizzy!

Photos by Alana, except kosambri:)

An ABCDs Supper @ Brooklyn Winery

This past Sunday, I held an Indian supper for 30 paired with wines at the Brooklyn Winery. It was a really great experience to work with Jenesy and Lizzy at the winery to understand which wines complement the flavors of Indian cooking as there is not many resources out there with regards to this sort of pairing. Lizzy will actually be a guest on my next post about the topic.

The Brooklyn Winery opened up recently and has a really unique concept behind it - you can actually make your own wine there and bottle it yourself.

The space is absolutely gorgeous - all wooded and my dinner was held in their parlor room:

I dedicated this dinner to my parents, who have taught me most everything I know about Indian cooking. I named it Uttar Dakshina, uttar meaning North in my father's language of Hindi and dakshina meaning South in my mother's language of Kannada. I wanted to serve a meal to my guests that resembled the ones I ate growing up, which were a mix of North and South Indian foods. This is the menu with a picture of them on their wedding day:

I would not have been able to pull it off without the help of my dearest friends - Ben, Dan, Alana and Paul. Ben stayed with me for 2 days cooking, Dan came to help me chop and also made an incredible mix (lots of music from Satyajit Ray films - one of my all time favorite directors) for the night which you can grab here and with Paul and Alana we all made up the kitchen crew that night. Alana took all of these amazing photos too!

This is kitchen crew messing around before the dinner.

Me and Ben

Me and Paul

Dan mid sentence;)

No pics of Alana because she is behind the cammy:(

This is me, Jenesy and Lizzy kicking off the dinner:

We started off with papri chaat - my favorite!

During the meal, Jenesy and Lizzy talked to the guests about which wines would bring out flavors in which foods. The guests were served four glasses - one sparkling, two whites and a red (I will share more detail of the wines in the next post with Lizzy).

The main was served family style - vangi bath (spicy eggplant rice), thove (yellow dal with green chilis and ginger), potato and green peppers curry, shahi paneer, raita, kosambri (carrot salad with coconut, soaked lentil and fried spices), coriander and tamarind chutney, Indian pickles, and roti:

After serving a dessert of lapsi - cracked wheat porridge topped with honey, almonds and chocolate, I gave each guest a tiny little katori, a small stainless steel bowl to remember the night:

Thank you Brooklyn Winery for collaborating and providing an amazing space for the supper! It was a really memorable night for me and my guests.

photos & collage by Alana Lowe

ABCDs is going to SXSW!

This week, I'll be heading to SXSW in Austin (first time!) with my buddy Jas from Plato Putas to co-chair a session on Food & Technology - How Technology Is Revolutionizing the Way We Eat. This session is a core conversation which means that everyone in the audience is invited to contribute and participate in the discussion.

Should be interesting as there is a lot going on in this space right now - from sites like RealTimeFarms.com that show you the farm from where each menu item at a restaurant was sourced to applications like Ratio that calculate the amount of ingredients you need based on what you have or how much you want to make (genius!).

We welcome people that work in both food, technology, or both or people that are just interested in the intersection of the two. If you are going to be in town please come out or send to friends that are attending and would be interested. Here are the details on our session and you can read more about it in the SXSW schedule:

How Technology Is Revolutionizing the Way We Eat
Tuesday, March 15
11:00AM

Marriot Courtyard
Rio Grande B
300 East 4th Street