Five Spicy Opinions

A piece of unforgivable clickbait? Click through and find out!

Today’s newsletter is just a collection of hot takes. Enjoy!

Locals: I’ll be slinging slices at Bar Pomona again this week on Thursday, August 10th between 6 and 8pm. Click here to reserve a mystery box of all the flavors of slices I’ll be selling (limited numbers, available only to newsletter subscribers!). A note - one of the slices this week will contain booze, and there may be nuts involved somewhere.

Let’s begin!

Note: this first section touches on fatphobia, so if you’d like to avoid that, skip it. 

Image credit: thesnaxshot on Instagram

Graza olive oil pisses me off

I recently posted the above meme to my stories and folks had a lot of opinions! So here’s mine:

I don’t think a founder needs to be perfect in order for you to enjoy their product. Everyone fucks up sometimes, and it grinds my gears when folks hold small businesses more accountable for their failings than larger corporations (typically because smaller founders are more visible to the public). I didn’t love the founder of Graza’s approach to “calling out” fellow olive oil maker Brightland for “copying” their squeeze bottle design, but that alone wouldn’t have turned me off the product forever - he apologized quickly. What I do find unforgivable, however, is the following messaging on their website (shout out to Emily Schultz for initially pointing this out in her stories):

“Warning: Please never use canola oil. It’s very unhealthy for you and is just tons of empty calories.” - Graza

I keep waiting for them to remove this from their site - I even check back occasionally to see if it's still there and get steamed all over again. First off: canola oil isn’t toxic. The current rhetoric against seed oils is not based in good science. And many smarter folks than I have pointed out how, over and over again, inexpensive and widely available ingredients are demonized in the name of “clean eating”. (I will never get back the half hour of my life I lost to a Reddit thread that claimed eliminating seed oils will keep you from ever getting a sunburn again??). 

Months of listening to the podcast Maintenance Phase in a depressive fugue state have brought me here: I have to push back against the notion that we must constantly work to optimize every element of our lives, including our diet. The idea that any calorie could be “empty” leaves no room for eating purely for pleasure - a practice that I’ve built my entire professional life around. As if by eating “clean”, we could possibly prevent ourselves from ever feeling pain, or growing old, or experiencing discomfort, all just parts of living in imperfect human bodies. 

So: feel free to use canola oil (for high heat cooking it’s a great option!). Drizzle with Graza if you like the flavor I guess? But personally I’m going to avoid purchasing anything from a food founder who demonizes another ingredient in such an alienating way. It’s intellectually lazy fearmongering. 

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I’m going to now demonize buttercream in an alienating way

I’m nervous writing this one but it needs to be said: buttercream is the worst part of a cake. That doesn’t mean it can’t be tasty, and I work hard to make sure that mine are! But buttercream is mostly a structural element that allows me to deliver the good parts of the cake (tender crumbed cake, creamy fillings, bright fresh fruit compotes) to you in a neat package. Without a sturdy swiss meringue buttercream, I’d have nothing to stack layers with. It’s also a pretty canvas for fresh flowers. But I’m so goddamn over it. Trifles are objectively better: nothing but the good stuff (but harder to stick a candle in). 

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The algorithm probably isn’t the reason your posts are tanking

Small business owners: sometimes our content is just mid and that’s ok? If my posts aren’t doing well it's usually a sign that I’m in a rut and need to shake things up. I don’t think people love being advertised to 24/7, and since that’s what my business instagram is unfortunately for (yes, even “artists” are advertising to you), I have to take the occasional bout of poor performance with a grain of salt and move on. There’s only so many posts of cakes with pretty flowers that people actually have an appetite for. If all else fails: make something really weird, put it in the loveliest natural light you can find, and post it with a cryptic caption. Also, my dudes: publicly complaining about the algo does us no favors with our audience.

Nothing like a demonic lamb to shake up the relentless parade of self promotion.

For social media advice from an actual expert : subscribe to Rachel Karten’s Link in Bio. It’s the only newsletter I read end to end every single week. A lot of it doesn’t even apply to my own work, but Karten’s approach and interviews are so cleverly presented and readable that I enjoy them anyway. 

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Food can be interesting and food can be craveable- but very rarely both

Lately when I’ve been recipe developing, I ask myself one question: is it interesting just for the sake of it, or is it actually good? And if it’s good, can we take it a step further, and make it craveable? 

I think a lot of younger cooks fall into this trap - you get really excited about a new ingredient or process and you want to play with it. A line cook discovers a vacuum seal machine and begins to compress everything. Their feed fills with macro photographs of fruit and veg, transparent, suspended in plastic. 

An archived photo from my own instagram, circa 2017

Next thing you know, the diner is being served crudo with compressed watermelon. But is the watermelon actually served by being compressed? What could have been a thick slab of crunchy melon is now reduced to limp, thin slivers. It’s unclear if the innovative process has translated to anything meaningful, much less transcendent. 

I think food becomes craveable not when it is unusual, but when it accesses nostalgia, and you can’t really get there with something novel - the whole point is that the craveable food is unlocking a memory:  of comfort, or satiety, or just being really fucking delicious. 

I want to share unusual ingredients in my baking, but I’m trying to be more mindful about it. Now, when exploring something that may be unfamiliar to a diner, I always try and balance it with a known quantity - such as pairing fig leaf custard with a simple, rich chocolate mousse. I don’t think you can really build repeat clients on novelty alone, and particularly with celebration sweets, I think people want the unusual to be balanced by the comforting repetition of the familiar. 

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And on that note

I’m perpetually bummed by folk’s aversion to fennel/anise flavors. I’ve got these gorgeous Diaspora fennel seeds I’m dying to use, and I know for a fact my zucchini cake is fantastic with a sprinkling of fennel pollen. Anise hyssop rivals lemon verbena for being my all time favorite herb and NO ONE WILL LET ME USE IT. It’s so good! Just trust me on this one!