MaxH

Thank you, percival, both for this summation and for a trenchant concision in words that few of us achieve. And welcome to eGullet. (It recalls another penetrating appraisal I clipped from a 1990s music magazine. Pop media stars trying to out-do each other in affecting diversity of talents. Singers having literary books ghostwritten, that sort of thing. Article was laid out graphically, I recall something like a star chart. Title: "A galaxy of dilettantes.")

-- also presumably vegetable marrows (common general UK cooking term for what US and Italy call zucchini, and related summer squashes). Food has a lot of this international English inconsistency. Like the grain most of the English-speaking world calls maize, traditionally "corn" in North America only, outside which "corn" meant grain in general, though N. American sense is spreading. (Like the traditionally ambiguous "billion:" a million million outside US, but a thousand million inside, hence the phrase "thousand million" was long common in UK but not US; Europeans solved this with the unambiguous "milliard," rarely seen in US.) "Cornflour" is well established in British recipes (US "cornstarch"). "Porterhouse" steaks appear in both US and UK but are different, related, cuts. Beetroot (US "beet"), treacle, etc. Pudding (word with a glorious history evolving from sausages, lovingly detailed in Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food) in both US and UK denotes either certain cooked compositions or, in offshoot meanings, sweet dessert dishes, a more narrow custard type in US but a more general sense in UK. "French dressing" in UK still means what it does in most US cookbooks, until a few years ago (i.e. vinaigrette); creeping influence of sweet red commercial variants shifted US perception of that phrase, but not elsewhere. These are offhand examples of a big genre. (It's worse in German, by the way: One of my central-European cookbooks includes a valuable German to Austrian to Swiss food dictionary). Alas, I again noticed the ISBN limitation, cooking recently from three much-used cookbooks. The 1960s "Fannie Farmer" (one of the most widely used of all 20th-c. US cookbooks and bearing, like many pre-ISBN US titles, a standard Library of Congress Catalog, or LCC, number -- sometimes cited in bibliographies); an edition of the inspiring and sometimes clarifying American Regional Cook Book; and the best-selling original Gourmet Cookbook, for its tips on international pot-roast nuances.

Sounds reasonable to me -- essentially an improvised ultrahigh-temperature (UHT) sterilization. (Applied industrially for very short intervals to liquid foods piped through small tubes, if I recall, so the temperature can be raised and lowered fast, though I think it's aimed mainly at bacterial pathogens; sporeborne Claustridia might require longer heating as well as higher temps. -- I'm just speculating here.) A downside would be a factor that brings criticism to UHT foods even at lower temps.: Not just pathogens but flavors and aromas are vulnerable to heat. Water departs as the oil temp. rises above its boiling point, but the same also happens at various temperatures to the organic components that make up flavor and aroma, and they'll also tend to react more, and oil rancidity (oxidation) accelerates at higher temps. That's actually how they make the "drying" vegetable oils that are the basis of traditional oil paints and printer's inks. But as you indicated, bmdaniel, it's theoretical, because either fresh preparation or freezing addresses the spore hazard without throwing out the flavor.

It's appalling, though not too surprising. US commercial culture has a cherished tradition of Orwellian euphemisms: Labeling things not just appealingly, but perversely. US red wines from indifferent and variable grapes were long labeled "Burgundy," and even today some US sparkling wines have "Champagne" on the label. (That's considered outrageous, as well as illegal, in many countries, with good reason -- like labeling random oranges "Florida" oranges because it sells better. Valuable names of respected European wine-making regions are reserved for use within those regions.) Some US food product I bought boasted on its label of "Real Parmesan cheese;" no suggestion anywhere of ingredients from Italy (where real Parmesan comes from). Characteristically, this implies a glaring open question of what then might "unreal" Parmesan cheese possibly be. A corollary is thin-air euphemisms, generally disclaimers of something popularly perceived bad, but that no one ever associated with the product anyway. Like advertising fruit juices as fat-free. This venerable US practice was highlighted some years ago in an Atlantic Monthly article on cholesterol misconceptions ("The Cholesterol Myth"), illustrated by caricature cartoon advertisements for things like low-cholesterol light bulbs. An incisive parody because it exaggerated actual advertising practice only slightly.

Speaking as engineer rather than bartender, given that clear ice freezes most readily from the top down (for two separate reasons recently mentioned here -- also how it's done in past demonstrations and writings on the subject cited earlier); and further that normal heat flow direction is out of the top of things rather than the bottom, I continue to wonder why people suggest cooling from the bottom, other than convenience from some further factor. In convection cooling (i.e., freezers with fans, which is most freezers), even if the cold source is below, I believe that if you measure or simulate, you'll find that much of the heat comes out the top of the water.

Vodka drinks stuff recalls a quip of a generation ago: The Phillips Screwdriver. (Vodka and Milk of Magnesia.) A purported "End Times" sign, locally appalling many observers over 30, is the advent of sweet bagels containing things like blueberries, cinnamon, even -- I Am Not Making This Up -- chocolate chips. The (mainly) younger folks who buy these objects may not realize either how recent or how anomalous they are. These newfangled sweet bagels may even taste great. Just as blueberry risotto, or cheese with chovolate chips in it, might taste good too, God help us all. But how they taste is way off the point: They're just wrong, and if you're lucky, you'll understand. Pray.

Yes, water hits its maximum density before freezing. (Molecular cause of that is enlightening, by the way; despite intuition, for materials to expand when heated is not fundamental -- it just works out that way most of the time.) Many (38?) years ago I heard technical information that water's maximum-density temp. was related to chilled food preservation, consequently to the nominal setting of refrigerators (not freezers) to 3-4 C (37-39 °F). A problem with "bottom-up" freezing is that dissolved mineral impurities tend to be heavier than water, therefore to move downwards when they precipitate. The freezing process may still push them up, but gravity fights this, vs. the top-down freezing demonstrated in practice (upthread) where gravity inherently assists freeze purification. Also, though it's just the kind of ritual many folk-alchemists would latch onto and then eloquently rationalize, I'm skeptical of real benefit from putting still-warm water into a freezer, as follows. Any cooling system works better (even beyond Carnot-type efficiency limits) when the desired temperature change is smaller, i.e., the water goes into the freezer as cold as possible. Hot water also evaporates an unusual volume of moisture into the freezer, which doesn't help your objective (but does lean on the auto-defrost feature). Why not let it cool first to room, then refrigerator, temperature? This just bypasses the period during which the freezer itself would be cooling the water down to those temperatures, before freezing begins. (Although I resist the hubristic conceit, including among scientists, that not understanding something implies it can't be so, still I recall no evidence in this thread that putting hot liquid directly into a freezer gives any benefit, vs. those side effects.)

Thanks. It's my background and occupation. Unfortunately I could tell you much more about semiconductors than about ice, the issue here! (I was intrigued by SLK's original mention of hexagonal crystals, but he seems to've changed his mind.) One thing about dissolved impurities is that when they precipitate out (as they do at low temps. - solubilities tend to decrease radically as water temperature falls), they become solid particles within the ice. There may be further consequences then as the ice forms, like nucleating crystal flaws or even gas bubbles (just as a dust particle or a scratch catalyzes gas bubbles in a glass of Champagne). Whatever the details, when I used specially purified water to make ice cubes, they appeared consistently clearer. An easy "field improvised" test for certain impurities in water, by the way, is to brew tea with it. This only detects certain impurities, like heavy metals, which aren't the only ones relevant here. But if they're present, a glass of tea brewed with the water will be darker than a "control" glass made the same way but with purified or distilled water. The tannic acid in tea forms dark inert pigments with heavy metals. (That property has been variously exploited to make classic iron-based ink and to counteract heavy-metal poisonings.)

Sure, and since first getting it 30 years ago, I've generally kept some on hand but scarcely used any of it in drinks, but rather as a flavor intensifier in desserts made from fresh berries. It has a distinctive useful flavor and is among the "cassis" genre of berry liqueurs that Europeans have long used for timeless things like dessert flavorings or adding to white wine or the various light refreshing drinks made from combinations of wine, soda water, fresh fruit, bitters, etc.

dcarch, you may wish to look into freeze distillation, an application of fractional freezing (I mentioned it upthread). It explains how freezing of water is well established to concentrate dissolved impurities to one side of the liquid-solid boundary, a consequence of the impurities altering water's melting temperature. (I mentioned a very practical application, concentrating sugars in Riesling grape juice.) Zone refining of semiconductor ingots indeed entails both a melting and a re-freezing boundary, which move in unison through the material. Techniques here are simpler, with only one phase boundary, not two, moving through the water in what eje dubbed "directional freezing," a common feature of successful experiments reported here. Fractional freezing explains how, as a mass of water freezes along one direction, the moving boundary could "push" solute impurities along, leaving purified ice. Kohai's goal is basically identical to that of semiconductor ingot makers (albeit with different working material). Both are growing large pure single crystals. Strictly speaking, water is even a "semiconductor" (in purest form its electrical conductivity is very low; conductivity comes from ions contributed by impurities).

dougal, thanks for info on the Meat Inspector's Handbook and for clarifying the only partial obsolescence of Nitrates. FYI, other US gov't standards also specify current permitted curing procedures (including the food-additives section of Title 9, Code of Federal Regulations). In the other eG thread I mentioned, a University of Georgia paper reviewing curing methods summarizes: Nitrate is prohibited in bacon and the nitrite concentration is limited in other cured meats. In other cured foods, there is insufficient scientific evidence for N-nitrosamine formation. These publications often mention antioxidants as cure "accelerators" -- I gather it's among their effects. No argument here! As an occasional reader of US food regulations I've come to appreciate the gaffes. An utter classic concerns common Wormwood (Artemisia absinthium), component of absinthe liquors (banned in the US, as in some other countries, until recently). US regulations changed recently to allow absinthe manufacture, but left intact the larger, longstanding regulatory gaffe: The Wormwood plant itself was banned in 1915 as a US food ingredient, on the basis that it contains thujone (an herbal principle scapegoated in 19th-century France for absinthe's supposed toxicity). Not long after that absinthe ban, thujone was found to be in many herbs, including familiar cooking herbs never branded toxic, and bearing the highest safety classification in the very US regulations that banned Wormwood for containing this chemical. People have remarked online about this contradiction since the 1990s. The recent US change allows Wormwood use, yet still requires a thujone-free finished product. In contrast to (for example) common Sage, Salvia officinalis -- never banned, regulated, or labeled toxic, though its thujone content has been publicly known for 80 years or so to be about the same as Wormwood's.

Bear in mind that publication need only be before amazon.com's time (as this one was) for limited notice there, and amazon.com is relatively recent in the history of cookbooks. I was flipping through Victoria Wise's book when I posted about it earlier. Wise credits as an inspiration Jane Grigson's Art of Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, which Wise read in London soon after its publication. Wise's book is aimed at US home cooks although some recipes (with 20 pounds of this or that) seem scaled to available whole butcher cuts rather than typical household portions. Sections: Basic Ingredients and Techniques for Charcuterie; Terrines, Pâtés & Galantines; Sausages; Preserved Meats, Fish & Fowl; Main Dishes; Cold Compositions [long]; Savories; Sweets. She's not the only author to promote the idea of an old-world curing crock that might contain several different meats at once (later convenient for mixed-meat dishes like Alsatian choucroute or Burgundian potée). I got the book soon after publication and may have used it, but out of memory. It would own some US importance among books on this specialty, as it seems to've opened up the subject to some people (as for instance Julia Child opened up Guide-Culinaire repertoire to a generation of US home cooks). Apropos Grigson, discussion upthread mentioned her heavy nitrate use, but I didn't spot mention of how curing chemistry has evolved more generally, since that book's publication. In recent years, curing practice changed to prevent toxic nitrosamines, and I believe the protocol now (at least in US) entails not only avoiding excess curing agents but also anti-oxidants and nitrites only, avoiding nitrates. I mentioned this recently in current eG "Botulism concerns" thread after checking US food-safety regulations. Any cookbooks with curing recipes, unless recently published or updated, may be out of date about those details.

My past concern with ice clarity was limited to molded cubes, and all I noticed at the time was the importance of water impurities (dissolved minerals -- "hardness" being one form of this). Processing the water first with activated-charcoal water-purifier filters that reduced the local minerals made a noticeable difference. But for the big blocks I think eje caught it: That's consistent with some of the separate practical experiences reported here. Directional freezing may be a practical low-tech form of zone refining for ice crystals. Similar insight comes from a process called something like freeze distillation, which separates water from impurities by partially freezing; the ice tends to be purer water, and the impurities to remain in the part still liquid. In particular, this happens in some German Eiswein where ice crystals removed from frozen grapes concentrate the sugars and flavor elements left behind. (I happen to know from various experiences of the results that this works, as Clive Coates would say, very well, very well indeed.)

Kohai, this is enlightening, thanks for posting. (I can't help a side thought, wondering if the particular lack of fracture lines you are getting comes at least partly from the particular pan being well suited, thermomechanically, to freezing water.) But my main thought is that you are, essentially, experimenting with large pure crystal growth. That subject is comercially important with other kinds of crystals, and your experiments recalled something technical that might even be related to what you're seeing, FWIW. The machine you're reading this text on works via electronic logic created on small dice cut from a large, very thin slice of pure silicon crystal. That technology demands extremely low levels of impurities or crystal defects, but otherwise, the situation is the same: wanting a large clean crystal. A classic process to remove defects is annealing (heating, nearly hot enough to melt, lets atoms in crystals re-arrange themselves into a more stable, which tends to be a more regular, or defect-free, pattern). A clever variation is zone refining: a long cylindrical crystal is slowly moved past an induction heater that heats up a "zone," a short part of the crystal's length, to melting or near-melting. As the crystal moves, the locally melted part moves down the crystal's length. It not only anneals defects, but also gathers and "pushes" contaminents out, leaving a huge ultra-pure, defect-free crystal. Food for thought.

I haven't seen it mentioned at all in this thread, but Victoria Wise's American Charcuterie (ISBN 0670808431 in original hardcover, and readily available used) broke this ground in the modern US a quarter-century ago. (Wise, original chef at Alice Waters's Chez Panisse, early 1970s, opened a pioneering traditional French-style charcuterie shop nearby -- the "Pig by the Tail," aka to locals the "Charcuterie," one of the original "gourmet ghetto" businesses to open near Chez Panisse in Berkeley.) It actually was much like neighborhood charcuteries in France -- I'd had recent experience with them when Wise's shop opened, and I remember the resemblance. Although I don't have the other books to compare it to, a professional cook commenting ("customer review") on Amazon claimed to use this one the most, among several titles.

People mean various things by "blog" today: Some use the word in the narrower sense of diary-type entries on third-party hosted sites, others use it for any online source maintained by one or a few people (often called Web sites or home pages, before "blog" became a popular word a few years back). Those linked below are blogs in the wider sense (all predate the current form of "blogging") and are not exactly totally serious, but are among the most venerable and popular online food-related references for irony or humor. Worth knowing, for anyone who doesn't already. The Potted Meat Food Products Corpus (begun 1998). Initial photo of current canned products is eloquent enough (Armour Pork Brains in Milk Gravy, said to have 1200% the US gov't recommended cholesterol limit, crowds tin of Bronte Lamb Tongues) but it gets better. Flint River Ranch definition of "Meat by-products," exact industry meaning and regulatory history of Mechanically Separated Poultry. Very well written. One link listed there (the Potted Meat Food Product Tribute Page) includes a dialog with Armour Star [Potted Meat] Products and a bizarre misconception about erythorbates (harmless, naturally occurring food anti-oxidants, isomers of Vitamin C). J. Lilek's Gallery of Regrettable Food, a classic (begun 1990s); when I corresponded about it with James Lileks in 1999 he envisioned a book from it, which is now available and listed on the site. The Candyboots collection of (sometimes garish) 1974 Weight Watchers recipe cards, begun 2003, part of a larger site.

It's a peripheral point (in what does sound like a good hamburger!) but I had to chuckle. So much have things changed in a few decades that someone might indeed think mushroom ketchup was "new," unconscious of any irony. Apropos recent discussion in the EatYourBooks thread, if someone thought that, it'd imply they haven't read many cookbooks from before recent years. (I'm sure NathanM knows that traditionally, ketchups in the US were made in several flavors.) Even fairly late in 20th century I encountered recipes calling for mushroom ketchup. The Hesses in their late-20th-c. critique The Taste of America (with something of a Michael Pollan role, at a time when far fewer people wrote about these issues) took the dominance and insidious sweetening of tomato ketchup as symbolic of mass mediocrity in 20th-century US cooking. From that book (not from online), emphasis added: "... the great majority of ketchups that characterized early American cooking was gradually replaced by the ubiquitous tomato ketchup. [Eliza] Leslie, in 1837, published recipes for eight kinds: anchovy (two), lobster, oyster, walnut, mushroom, lemon -- and tomato. (Be it noted again, there was no sugar in any of them.) Anyone familiar with Chinese cooking will recognize the original source of ketchups, but they came to us from England. (The Oxford English Dictionary says the word apparently derives from the Amoy Chinese kétsiap, meaning brine of pickled fish. The Malay k­echap [bar over the e], often given as the source, may be from the Chinese as well.) Until about 1850, when an American recipe called for ketchup, it most likely meant mushroom, walnut, or oyster. These interesting condiments did continue for some decades, because [Leslie’s classic 19th-c. US cookbooks] continued to be best sellers."

Thanks for the info, Jane. The exotic Ye Olde Cookery Booke is a good angle (and lightly taken, as I think intended) -- in fact if you like cookbooks with titles like that, there's a delightful broad anthology (again not recent) and I'm currently learning things from its recipes. Just to be clear: As an avid practical cook, my interest isn't in narrow or "collector" stuff. I'm just thinking more of merit than age. Cookbooks of quality do actually tend to be popular, once people notice them. Being receptive to cookbooks before the current batch (just like reading general writers beyond the current batch) can also be eye-opening, imparting sense of perspective or history, less thrall for the fads and fatuities of the moment. I'm thinking more of things like the classic epic US sandwich book, or the best-selling US authors who popularized French cooking over the 150 years before Julia Child took her turn at it, or the books defining famous national cuisines of several countries with long histories, or the French home cook's classic counterpart to Escoffier, or the perspective that Cracknell and Kaufmann's translation of the Guide Culinaire (Escoffier's professional reference cookbook) is traditionally cited by English speakers as the Guide Culinaire just as they also call the famous encyclopedia Larousse Gastronomique. Important but pre-current cookbooks enabled me to answer many current food-related questions on eGullet and elsewhere. (You can decide for yourself if it's a benefit or curse to become conscious, also, of how much needless misinformation crowds Wikipedia food and drink entries.)

Haven't tried the site yet, and it sounds intriguing. I have a basic concern, which may not be an issue for everyone, but I'd better first explain where this comes from. I grew up cooking from and being tipped off about outstanding cookbooks from years past, and as an adult I continued to accumulate them (I have a lot of cookbooks now) based on quality and utility, rather than current publisher marketing. Consequently many of my cookbooks (including utter, indispensable classics) have no ISBNs (those books predate the 1970s when ISBNs came into general use; many predate 1950). Some (10%?) are in languages besides English, also sometimes pre-ISBN; again sometimes indispensable. The following probably won't make sense to anyone familiar just with recent cookbooks, but the ISBN era only captures a minority of noteworthy cookbooks published, even in the US; it's even worse than that, because (acc. to US cookbook-history statistics in DuSablon's book on the subject) the rate of US cookbook publication greatly accelerated, coincidentally with ISBNs' advent, and in my observation the acceleration reflected more a desire to publish or sell books than a proportionate increase in useful content, though there are important exceptions.* Therefore, short of indexing my hundreds of non-ISBN titles myself, it sounds like I'd be limited to recent decades. * Few people have the perspective of a friend who owns one of the largest US cookbook collections in the world. She has remarked, in published interviews, that very, very little in modern US cookbooks can't be found before 1935 or so, so she regards current US cookbooks as largely a repackaging or rediscovery business. (The Hesses, some years earlier, went further, documenting vast plagiarism.) With notable exceptions, especially from overseas cuisines coming into US nowadays.

Yes, that's the approach used conventionally in most cookbooks I've seen, it is the context of my remarks. Cooks Illus. in its collected Pasta book went further with the buttermilk point mentioned upthread. When I discovered that Spelt (a natural hybrid of wheat and wild rice, chosen by some people for its lack of wheat-allergy reaction, high fiber, etc.), used in leavened pancake batter, would let the pancakes maintain their height without the usual eggs, I tried it in meatballs instead of bread crumbs, and without eggs. The panade, so to speak, becomes spelt flour with buttermilk. This softens the meatballs like a conventional panade, but also adds a little binding power; moreover it has fiber and lacks some of the junk, such as sweeteners and hydrogenated fats, added to breads nowadays. Then Shalmanese mentioned the shredded zucchini as analternative and subtle meatball lightener. We are collecting some useful, tested meatball tricks here, beyond even Cooks Illustrated.

Thanks for what looks like a valuable tip, Shalmanese, I'll try it. This is the kind of direct information exchange I find so worthwhile on food discussion fora. Also as Dan testifies well, meatballs are ideal for making in quantity and freezing, and if you freeze them well wrapped and sealed from air, they can stay good a very long time. (Never fully tested in my household because they always disappear too soon.) Another meatball spinoff angle: I like to cook Pacific-Asian as well as European dishes. (My location has many very good Pacific-Asian restaurants of every nationality -- even Macanese, which fans love to cite online, because it's very distinctive, like the related Goanese; maybe also just because it's rare, and sends curious readers scurrying to look it up if they don't know the region.) An old entry in my combined freezer-cooking log (begun long ago in preference to opening and pawing through a full freezer just to see what's there) wonders about a "flexible" meatball good for East-Asian soups, as well as things like spaghetti. This rules out Italianoid green herbs that I sometimes season meatballs with, and such a meatball could also be made from meats like ground poultry, or poultry and pork. Conceivably, even flavored with the fresh ginger so common in Pacific-Asian cooking; it sometimes works also in European meat dishes.* One idea among many in the queue for cooking experiments. Shalmanese's suggestion might fit there too. (Grated squash is itself a prized ingredient in certain East-Asian specialties like the famous appetizer and main-course vegetable pancakes of Korea and Japan.) *Extreme food-history trivia: Besides its use elsewhere on the continent, ginger was a signature spice, among several favorite seasoning spices there, in Hungary before the rapid invasion of paprika around the 1850s -- from the East, actually -- overshadowed existing traditions and soon came to epitomize Hungarian cooking in foreign eyes.

Seems like fauxtarga did just get some defective welds. But with due respect for anecdotal experiences, welding and especially spot welding are widely industrially seen as cheapie manufacturing techniques with metal goods like these. That's with welds between very similar metals (like handles spot-welded to utensils of sheet steel -- I have a few). In WW2 some US naval ship production switched from riveting to welding to save time and money, and the welded ships proved structurally unreliable. It's trickier still with dissimilar metals, and the aluminum alloys are a world unto themselves. They can be welded but the techniques are special, and aluminum to other metals has still further complications including electrochemical effects. (Recall that "dry-cell" batteries are basically dissimilar metals connected by a conductive liquid sealed inside, and that US flirted with casual aluminum house wiring until interactions in, particularly, aluminum-copper junctions brought reliability and fire problems.)

I make, cook, and freeze meatballs pretty routinely. Learned a few things over the years (and a possible recipe innovation, described below). I normally roast them (as discussed in a previous meatball thread) until just cooked -- like pink inside; make far more than immediately needed; freeze the extras (tightly sealed and with all possible air squeezed out) for later very convenient use with pasta or meatball sandwiches. Why roasting vs frying: No fat added; cooking effort is almost the same for six meatballs or 60. All juices, caramelized exterior, etc., are still there (on or in the m'ball) and available for flavoring sauces etc. I'd certainly consider pan-frying on a hot day, to avoid running an oven, especially with a small batch. Why cook separately from sauce: Keep in mind one batch of my meatballs usually serves multiple meals. I noticed long ago that slowly cooking meatballs in a tomato sauce (like cooking any other meat in a sauce) leaches out flavor, gelatins, etc. This is fine if your objective (like mine, sometimes) is a more intense tomato sauce and less intensely flavored meatballs. But with the meatballs (barely) cooked separately, I can still slow-simmer them like that, or I can choose to more briefly heat them or use them for other things with all their flavor preserved. Recipe tricks: Like many people I often mix meats (lean ground pork, in moderation, certainly adds flavor to beef meatballs) and long ago noticed what some cook books point out (such as the Cook's Illustrated Complete Book of Pasta and Noodles), that meatballs of basically pure meat cook up comparatively hard and dense -- some sort of grain lightens nicely and controllably. One trick from the same Pasta cookbook: A little buttermilk or yogurt to moisten the added grain also perks up the meatball flavor subtly, inconspicuously, like a little cheese. I keep dried buttermilk powder handy. Another trick and recent discovery: First, eggs have never been fundamentally necessary (some authors add them by reflex to any ground-meat dish) because ground meats themselves already contain albuminous material that hardens on cooking -- eggs enhance this and are most helpful if the meat is greatly diluted with starches. But! Working with Spelt flour as described in "The fresh pasta topic" thread here, I noticed that it seems to include some different type of starch or vegetable gum with a similar property (might contribute to the supple texture Spelt noodles have) so in a recent meatball batch, I used a little whole Spelt flour where some recipes call for breadcrumbs etc. No eggs. Outstanding! The Spelt, absorbing moisture from the buttermilk, both lightened the meatballs (like breadcrumbs) and contributed to the binding power of the meats when cooked (like eggs) Both effects in one ingredient. Upshot: 3 parts lean beef, 1 part lean pork, buttermilk, Spelt flour, fresh parsley, fresh garlic, salt and pepper (about 3/4 teaspoon salt per pound of meat, slightly less than most recipes suggest, leaves them well but not excessively seasoned -- the buttermilk's acid may help this). Let the mixture sit a while for the flavors to develop before cooking. Result: Delicious, tender, coherent. Some of the best I've made.

Without a specific quotation, the "your" is slightly mysterious. But if it's of interest, the fairly recent thread I mentioned (see correction below) on fresh noodles discusses dough stiffness, I mention my technique of combined kneading and adding flour, which automatically brings the dough to the consistency you want. (Beware any recipes specifying fixed ratios of flour to eggs! even by weight! it doesn't work like that. Not only do "eggs" vary over considerable range in volume, but flour properties also vary, even different lots of the same brand.) Correction: Above I cited a "Recent thread" on fresh pasta variations ("Praising freshly made noodles"). The link above is wrong, and someone also evidently merged and re-named my thread later, which I didn't know, so my archived links to it are bad too; but a little archeology surfaced the late-2009 postings in question, especially This One (I'm referring to Post #98 in that thread's current numbering, 20-Nov-2009), now part of a general fresh-pasta thread. Further discussion of making pasta (maybe even of books) belongs on that thread, joining existing eG contributions on the subject. Also, newcomers to this specialty may want to review that whole thread before repeating ground already covered there.

Other local roasters (all with their passionate partisans) also contend for such a label. But even deeper, to the OP's mission, numerous independent coffee houses (some of which do their own roasting) are a deep tradition in places like SF and Berkeley (where espresso has been the leading drug of choice for university students literally for generations, certainly I've seen it in that role nearly 50 years, having been taken to favorite espresso bars by parents when quite young). By the time Kenneth Davids (who owned one of those cafés) wrote his classic book Coffee in the 1970s, this was an old established tradition locally. (That was around the time, too, that Mr Peet sold his notably dark-roasting neighborhood coffee bean business, and it went corporate.) Such history underlies the horror (and occasional misunderstanding) by locals at the Starbuck's chain success (which seemed, to SF and Berlekey coffee fans, like a step downward in quality, with no corresponding drop in price) -- misunderstood in the sense that most of the US lacked a local espresso tradition and consequently Starbuck's was a big improvement in many places.