Jon Kung & Zingerman's Collaboration Gift Box

Take two tins of tuna: one from Ortiz, one typical of the supermarket. They came from the same animal living in the same ocean. One costs twice as much as the other. One smells like the sweet sea, peels off in thick blond chunks and tastes like a fancy dinner out. The other smells like harbor at low tide, spoons out in pulpy shreds and tastes like saltwater. What happened? Here’s the abbreviated tale in five acts.

1. Ortiz tuna is line-caught, not netted

Bonito tuna, a common species for tinning, are not big fish. Most are two feet long and weigh about ten pounds. They’re warm-blooded. Taken together that means any bruising or bleeding affects a large portion of each fish and muddies its flavor. That’s rare with Ortiz’s tuna since they are entirely line caught, classic fisherman style, one at a time on a rod. Bruising is much more common with netted fish—the most common way to catch tuna, where hundred-foot-long nets drag the tuna in a thrashing bundle up from the sea.

2. The fresh-caught tuna is stored in the boat’s hold on ice

A more conscientious captain will freight a lot of ice, enough to surround each fish so they don’t touch one another and cool down quickly. After all, no one knows how long they’ll be at sea or how much they’ll catch and the fish starts to deteriorate the moment it’s caught.

3. Ortiz tuna is cooled and chilled after cooking

Cooking canned tuna is more or less standardized: the fish is boiled in salted water for a couple hours. But what happens next is not at all the same from factory to factory. At Ortiz the just-cooked fish sits out to cool in the kitchen, then gets time to chill in cold storage. The two steps take hours and hog up space on the floor and in the refrigerators. Not all tuna makers choose to take them. Like most food makers who worry about price more than flavor, they cut time out of the equation. But what the extra time and care does is critical – it stops the fish from fermenting. Fermenting can be ruinous as a carbonation that makes the tins unsalable or it can be mild. Even mild fermentation has a flavor that, to my taste, is a sour tang that runs throughout most tins of cheap tuna and mars its sea-sweet origins.

4. Ortiz tuna is cleaned by hand

This is as labor-intensive as it sounds (if you’ve ever deboned and skinned cooked fish you know what I mean). It’s not at all standard practice in the tuna world. The women—and I can say from my experience visiting that 100% of the cleaners are women—work meticulously with paring knives, scraping and cleaning every bruise, every discoloration, every chance for the flavor to head south, leaving only pristine fish to find their way into the tin.

5. Only whole chunks of tuna and olive oil go into the Ortiz tin

That’s it. No flakes, no water. That’s the way you get great tinned tuna. Shredded smaller pieces deteriorate faster and that will show in the flavor. As for olive oil, well, the American tuna industry has pawned off water-packed tuna as healthier but what they failed to mention was that in losing 20% of the calories we lost 98% of the taste. Water leaches flavor from the fish. Ortiz only packs in olive oil, which amplifies the tuna’s flavor and gives it a silky, rich mouthfeel.

All these steps represent an added expense, in better ingredients, extra time, or additional effort. But the impact they make in the tuna’s appearance, aroma, flavor, and texture is unmissable. You really can taste the difference.

All chunks of Parmigiano Reggiano aren’t created equal—but you wouldn’t know that by looking at them. One 80-pound wheel of Parmesan looks pretty much like another. But there can be a world of difference in flavor between Parmesans made by different dairies. They’re all going to be good—but only a few are fantastic.

This wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano is not the same as that one.

Today, there are 339 dairies that make Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. Parmigiano Reggiano is protected by a DOP, which translates in English to Protected Designation of Origin. That means that legally, to be called Parmigiano Reggiano, all wheels must meet certain standards. The 339 dairies are all located in northern Italy in and around the districts of Parma, Reggio-Emilia, Modena and parts of Mantua and Bologna. The milk they use must all come from cows that live in those areas. They all use the same basic recipe, right down to all making their cheese in giant copper kettles.

However, the DOP only defines so much. Between those 339 dairies, there can be a lot of variation. The milk can come from different breeds of cows that can live at different elevations. Those cows can be fed different grasses and grains that were grown with different methods. The cheesemaker can choose to tweak the levels of butterfat or salt or cultures they add to the milk. The wheels can be aged at warmer or cooler temperatures. They can be sold as young as 13 months or aged for half a decade or more. Each of those variations will impact the final quality and flavor of the cheese. But the label may not list any of these differences: they’re all just called Parmigiano Reggiano.

So then how do you know the difference between them?

I wish I had a clean, simple rule I could give you to easily distinguish between good Parmesan and great Parmesan, but there’s not a quick reference that makes everything clear. The best advice I can offer is to taste a lot, and when possible, to learn more about the story behind a particular wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano: where exactly it comes from, who makes it, and what’s unique about what they’re doing.

A good example is Giorgio Cravero’s selection of Parmigiano Reggiano. Giorgio isn’t a cheesemaker. His family has been selecting and aging cheeses in the town of Bra for five generations, since 1855. While Giorgio isn’t the one producing the cheese, he has very close relationships with the cheesemakers.

For the cheese we sell, he selects his wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano from a dairy called San Pietro. They’re located in a village called Benedello di Pavullo, situated over 700 meters (or 2,300 feet) above sea level. At that high elevation, there’s a lot more diversity in the grasses, including plenty of wildflowers and herbs. Compared to the lowland valleys with the lush but uniform grasses that most of the Parmesan cows eat, the greater variation in the forage makes for more interesting, more flavorful milk. The San Pietro cheesemakers use their milk to make a total of six wheels each day, for a grand total of just about 2,200 wheels of cheese per year.

When the wheels are 12 months old, Giorgio collects them from the dairy and brings them to his aging cave in Bra. There, the cheeses age at cool, ambient temperatures. That allows the cheese to mature slowly. Giorgio and his team also flip the wheels over more frequently than at most cheese caves. The low temperatures and frequent flipping help to keep the cheeses moist. While some Parmigiano Reggianos can be quite hard, Cravero Parmesan tends to have a slightly softer, more creamy texture (though it’s still a hard cheese). The slow aging also helps develop a sweet, delicate flavor. And unlike most Parmesan makers and agers who only taste the cheese if they suspect there’s a problem, Giorgio regularly tastes his Parmigiano Reggiano to ensure it has those soft, sweet notes he prefers.

Sun drying is the oldest food technology still in use today. (I believe it predates fire, but hey, I could be wrong.) It’s not too common these days, since cheap electricity allows us to dry things much more quickly than the sun does. But sun drying can produce some incredibly flavorful foods including some of our favorites like sun dried tomatoes, couscous, peppers, and salt. And it can do so in an incredibly environmentally friendly way.

The first sun dried foods were a product of necessity.

Removing moisture helps to preserve food, and also made it lighter to carry, two reasons why the nomadic Berber peoples of North Africa started sun drying foods thousands of years ago. By processing wheat into sun-dried couscous they were better able to have a ready food supply, even if they had a year or two of bad crops. The fact that slow sun drying can also produce a lot more flavor must have been a bonus; the sun dried couscous made by the Mahjoub family in Tunisia is toasty, wheaty, and way more flavorful than any other couscous I’ve tried. The sun dried garlic spread that the Mahjoubs make is likewise deeply flavorful. The time it takes for the garlic to dry in the sun concentrates its flavor, enhancing its natural sweetness—the same sort of effect you get from roasting a head of garlic in the oven.

That intensity of flavor is a common theme amongst sun dried foods. Marash pepper from Turkey is a prime example. After being harvested in August, shiny red peppers are laid on white muslin sheets to dry in the sun for a week. The type of pepper used is prized because its thin flesh can dry fairly quickly; thicker peppers end up with a tougher texture. After drying, the stems, seeds, and white interior flesh of the peppers are removed, which reduces the heat level but maintains the flavor. The result is a burgundy pepper flake with a deep, roasted chile flavor that lasts and lasts without ever getting too hot.

This ancient technology is up-to-the-minute environmentally friendly.

The counterintuitive thing about sun dried foods is that, even when they’re shipped to us from the other side of the world, they can be more environmentally friendly than local foods that rely on more energy-intensive methods to create. Take salt, for example. To make salt here in Michigan we have to mine it with heavy machinery (that’s how the Kosher brand salt you see at grocery stores is made—it’s mined just north of Ann Arbor). To make it in foggy coastal places like Wales you have to boil it out of the sea water, which takes a tremendous amount of fossil fuel. But on the sunny Southern coast of Portugal or along France’s Brittany coast, salt can be harvested from shallow pools of sea water that evaporate in the sun. The salt is raked by hand and the only machine you’ll spot is a conveyor that piles it high for storage until it’s shipped to us.

Almost always folks assume fresh pasta is better.

They assume if you had the time you should use fresh pasta over dried 100% of the time. Maybe that’s because it’s more work to make (if you make the pasta at home). Maybe it’s because fresh pasta is more fragile, more perishable. Maybe it’s because dried seems more industrial, more like a commodity, and it can sell for so much less.

Fresh pasta is not better than dried. It’s just different.

There are many times when dried pasta is preferable. Probably the most concise way to think of the tradeoff is this: use dried pasta when you want to enjoy noodles with a lot of texture and flavor; use fresh when you want a softer, subtler dish.

Dried and fresh pasta are made very differently.

Hence the different results and different uses in the kitchen. Traditional dried pasta is made by extruding durum semolina dough through bronze dies. It’s dried at relatively low temperatures for a couple days. The bronze die extrusion leaves the pasta with a rough hewn texture. You can feel it in your mouth and the sauce really grips to it. The slow drying ferments the flour a bit. It transforms the dough from tasting like raw flour to something more like bread.

In contrast, fresh pasta is usually rolled and cut and there is no fermentation. The texture is much softer, smoother, and the flavor is much less intense, much more like flour.

Not all dried pasta is equal.

It’s important to note when I talk about dried pasta I’m not talking about any old dried pastas. Most dried pasta is industrially made with exasperating shortcuts that leave it tasting unexceptional. In particular, they employ hot, short drying times so there is no transformation of the dough’s flavor. It tastes like flour. Worse, it’s flour with a burnt edge to the flavor. The extra hot ovens singe the surface in a way the slow, low drying methods do not.

To see what I mean, taste a piece of uncooked commercially made DeCecco pasta (one of the better industrial companies, dried at 80° Celsius for 10 hours) and a piece of Rustichella pasta (one of our favorites, dried at 45° Celsius for about 40 hours) next to each other. The flavor is remarkably different.

Americans love our salmon and shrimp. But our appetite for them has enormous ecological and social implications worldwide. To feed our salmon and shrimp habits, seafood companies have increasingly turned to aquaculture: farms that raise fish in small pools or giant open nets. Holding vast numbers of fish in tight quarters has many of the same inherent problems as raising chickens or pigs in confinement on land, including rampant disease spread (often combatted with sub-therapeutic antibiotics fed to the fish), enormous amounts of waste, and poor conditions for workers.

But perhaps the biggest problem is what they’re fed. Most fish are pescatarians. They eat other fish. On a farm they’re typically fed fishmeal – pellets made by grinding up small fish called “forage fish.” Forage fish are wild caught in giant nets called trawls, often off the coast of developing nations where regulations are more lax. This can decimate local fish stocks and make life terrible for the subsistence fishermen that rely on them.

So if farmed fish cause so many problems, does that mean we’re better off eating wild-caught fish? Not necessarily. In the case of our beloved salmon, virtually all Atlantic salmon are farmed, so there isn’t a wild-caught option. Even when there are wild fish to catch, how they’re caught makes a big difference. Those trawlers don’t just go for forage fish. They’ve also nearly wiped out fish populations ranging from cod off of the coast of eastern Canada to tuna off the coast of Somalia and Tanzania. And even though trawlers may intend to fish just one species, they often scoop up lots of other fish, too – and sometimes other marine life, like turtles. This is called bycatch. There can be tons of it, and it’s usually thrown away.

What’s a seafood easter to do? Here are a few recommendations:

Ask how wild caught fish were caught.

Seek out commercial fishermen catching with hooks, rather than nets like trawls. The bonito tuna that we get in tins from Ortiz is all line caught, one at a time. This allows the fisherman to be more selective with their catch.

Eat the little fish.

By choosing smaller fishes, like anchovies, sardines, or mackerel, we can encourage fishermen to harvest fish directly for people to eat, rather than grinding them up into fishmeal for farmed fish.

Try the unknowns.

Eating a wider variety of fishes can reduce the impact of bycatch by giving fishermen a market for everything they bring in. Try less familiar species like hake, wreckfish, or scup. There are many, many more. Get to know your local fisherman or fishmonger to learn what’s coming in locally to you.

Go for bivalves.

Oysters, scallops, clams, and mussels are ocean filterers. They get their nutrients from water currents with no added feed, even on farms.

Join a CSF.

Community Supported Fisheries (CSFs) are the fish version of CSAs, the farm shares for produce. CSFs get fish directly from fishermen to fish eaters. There are CSFs in many cities across the US. Some even ship nationwide, or have landlocked pick up locations. Start your search for a local CSF at finder.localcatch.org.