We’re expanding our inventory and have a ton of new samples to try (we mean it; there must be at least 50 items on our shelves waiting to be tasted!) We have everything from chocolate to pickles to hot sauce to walnut oil…but we’re going to need some help tasting it all.

We’d like to invite a blogger or two to taste some samples and help us choose which new products we should carry…and we’ll also pour you some tasty cocktails while we’re at it. We’ll shut down the office early on a Friday afternoon – we’re aiming for June 1 – and we’ll have our tasting party. Are you game?

Here’s how to play:

1. Bloggers need to be in the Seattle area to be considered.

2. If you’ve got step 1 down: articulate a flavor profile for an ingredient of your choice from the list provided below and post your thoughts in a comment on this blog post by Friday, 5/25 (my birthday) .  You are free to choose more than one ingredient if you’re inspired to do so.

3. We’ll pick a couple local bloggers with the best flavor profiles to join our tasting party.

4. Come join the Marx Foods staff at our office on Friday, June 1 to sample the goods.

Choose at least 1 ingredient from the list below for your flavor profile:

Eggplant
Asparagus
Mango
Roasted Chicken
Tomatoes
Parmigiano Reggiano Cheese
Almonds
Fresh Thyme
Saffron
Brown Sugar
Shiitake Mushrooms
Peanut Butter
Soy Sauce

If you live in the Seattle area and you’re free on Friday, 6/1, hurry up & leave us your flavor profile comment to throw your hat in the tasting party ring.

Dan May, author of the Red Hot Chile Cookbook and his publisher, Sandra Ng, graciously sent us a copy of this cookbook and we really liked what we read, so Katie wrote up a book review.

Dan May’s Red Hot Chile Cookbook is a collection of recipes sure to please any chile-lover. The recipes hail from international cuisines so there is quite an interesting mix of choices. You’ll find Caribbean, Thai, Asian, Spanish, Moroccan, American and European (even a few Scandinavian) recipes in this cookbook.

The difficulty level of the recipes ranges from intermediate to incredibly simple & easy, and his writing style is straightforward and easy to follow for anyone from a culinary novice to an expert. As a native Englishman, May uses traditional British spelling and offers both metric and imperial measurements in his recipes.

The recipes in this cookbook run the full culinary gamut – you’ll find everything you need to throw a spice-filled dinner party. There are recipes for soups & salads, mains, sides, sauces, marinades, drinks and desserts. A few recipes in particular that piqued our interest were: Jerk Chicken with Caramelized Pineapple; Whole Roast Salmon Stuffed with Salsa Verde Piccante; Habanero Marmalade, and Deliciously Boozy Truffles with Ginger & Chili Praline.

May’s cookbook is primarily focused on fresh chiles, so if you are using dried chiles, you may have to adapt the recipes a bit. A few of May’s recipes call for very hot chiles like Scotch Bonnet, Habanero and Aji Limo, but there are also many medium and mild chile recipes, and of course you can always substitute a more mild chile in any recipe.

Each recipe has a heat rating shown in a pictogram ranging from one to four chilies. This is an easy tool you can use to decide whether or not to ramp up or tone down the heat in a recipe, depending on your taste. May also supplies a few alternate chile suggestions for each recipe if you’re having a hard time finding the specific chile variety mentioned in a recipe.

Another nice feature of this cookbook is the photography. The photos are full page images of finished dishes and the presentation is simple, yet enticing. The food is front and center in each photo and the background tends to be neutral, letting the food be the star. Each recipe has an accompanying photo and the recipes are all one page or less – no hassling with flipping back and forth between pages. The recipe layout for the instructions can be a bit text heavy and there isn’t any bulleting to break up large paragraphs; however, the instructions themselves are very well explained.

We think anyone with a love for chiles and the willingness to try something new will enjoy this cookbook. Finally, we’d like to thank Dan May for listing us as a resource for chiles, and thank his publisher for sending us a copy of the Red Hot Chile Cookbook.

It is important that people ask questions about their food. Period. End of Story. If more people made a habit of asking questions about what they eat, then our country would be a whole lot healthier. In that vein, it is important that people know that “Kobe Beef” is a term used to denote eating qualities, not a geographical origination.

I’ve always regarded the term “kobe beef” to be similar in usage to brussel sprouts, Swiss cheese and Dijon mustard. It is a categorical designation, not a geographical one. We strive to accurately list the country or region of origin on our products. Our Kobe Beef has always been from Australia or the US and it has always been identified as such on each and every item page.

My personal opinion is that there is not a broad conspiracy among producers and chefs to defraud high-end diners, as accused in the story. Rather, this is the case of consumers, chefs and ranchers settling on a particular nomenclature over a period of decades for a term used to describe a category of product. The term “Kobe Beef” is surely not a brand that is owned or controlled by anyone. And, what is sold as “Kobe Beef” most certainly is different than the other products on the market – beef that has higher levels of marbling and fat (and therefore flavor) due to its genetics.

I do not think that users of the term are implying that it is “Beef from Kobe”. I still assume that most Americans don’t even know that Kobe is a city in Japan. Among those that do know, I am having a hard time imagining that they think their beef comes from a metropolis.

Reading this story on actual salmon fraud makes me think that there are probably a few restaurants out there who advertise Kobe Beef but use commodity beef instead. There are always a few bad apples just as there is an abundance of restaurateurs out there that are buying higher quality Kobe Beef at a higher cost and therefore passing that higher cost on to their customers while serving them better quality beef.

We need more consumers and journalists asking questions about food. Regardless of the author’s intentions or motivations, I commend him for igniting dialogue around this issue. However, I take strong issue with the author’s claim that this is “food’s biggest scam.” That statement may draw attention, but it is highly sensationalistic. Every food issue is important, but in the scheme of things, I personally find this nomenclature issue to be a non-issue. In fact, I wish that the author had used the significant journalistic power that he wields in order to uncover whatever actually is “food’s biggest scam” …because surely Kobe is not it.

I think that everyone’s attention is better served by focusing on issues that not only affect far more people, but that also affect people in more than a semantic way, like the 29 million pounds of antibiotics a year in livestock feed or the FDA’s acceptable levels of things like maggots, mold & rodent hairs in your food (hint: it’s not zero).

I am very curious to see where this dialogue leads us. Specifically, I ask that commenters share their opinions below. For the time being we are going to continue calling the product “kobe beef” and list the country of origin, just as we have for years. But, I am open to change.

Frankly, for my money, I’ll take New Zealand Grass-fed Beef any day over Kobe Beef.

I am obviously biased because we sell this grass-fed beef. Having gotten that disclaimer out of the way, I was so impressed by how humane, hygienic and efficient the New Zealand Grass-fed Beef production is. If you are conscious about your consumption, I am authoritatively and unequivocally telling you that New Zealand Grass-fed product is the best product by just about any measure.

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Getting Geared Up:  New Zealand is well known for the cleanliness of their slaughterhouses and the extended shelf-life that their meat has as a result of their ability to control bacteria and such.  You can expect a post about hygiene over on the grass-fed beef blog.  For now, I’ll just describe what I had to go through to gain entry.  First, I had to fill out an affidavit that I did not have any gastrointestinal ailments (and there were 6 or 7 other checkboxes that I don’t remember).  Then I had to put on a hair net, beard net, smock, pants and rubber boots.  Think: surgeon’s outfit.  And, just like a surgeon, I had to wash my hands extensively.  Then I had to scrub my boots with soap and scrub brush,  walk through a car-wash-for-boots and finally stepped in a solution of some kind.  Whew.  Not a germ on me.

The Sounds:  The safety briefing is short.  The only thing I remember being said was that when the buzzer goes off, the production line moves.  Imagine sides of beef hanging from rails.  When the buzzer sounds, the entire line shifts about 6 feet as the sides of beef move to the next station.  We follow the production manager in and just a few seconds later I hear the buzzer and realize that I am standing in the path of the line.  Adrenaline pumps. I jump forward to avoid being slammed by a side of beef. Our guide, the plant manager, turn around with an approving look.   I am very agile person and I felt as if I had dodged a bullet.  Not hard to imagine that people have been slammed before.  I later learn that a Japanese guy once got smashed by a side of beef.

In addition to the buzzer, most of what I hear is saws, clips, hydraulics, high-pressure hoses and knives being sharpened.  This place is more notable for what you don’t hear.

The Sights:  Imagine a factory that is designed to disassemble instead of assemble.  And, then imagine a FedEx sort facility with boxes and bags and chutes and conveyors moving in every direction.

What you see is an army of butchers.  What you don’t see is the team of engineers and technicians that must be required to run this technologically sophisticated place.  People don’t move product.  They mostly stay in their station and work on their very specific job.  Conveyors and chutes move product this way and that.  There are conveyors overhead, at knee level, chutes that take product from one conveyor to the next, even a conveyor that moves the final boxed products through a hole in the ceiling and to another place.

Chutes, chutes, chutes.  Tongues go in this one.  Hides disappear through that one.  Brains in this one.  Guts down this one.  Trim meat in that one.  Nothing goes to waste.  Everything has a use, right down to the aorta, which I think I heard is a Chinese delicacy or something.

The butchers themselves wear metal chainmail gloves.  Some just wield knives, while others multitask between a knife they quickly pull out of their scabbard to cut a muscle, then deftly drop it back in their scabbard and to grab a giant handheld saw that is hanging from the ceiling by a wire and it looks like a giant chainsaw except that it is a bandsaw like your local butcher shop.  Whew.  More men than women, all dressed in whites and there is hardly any blood on their whites.  They are wearing white rubber boots and white hats.  Their noise cancelling headphones have antennas.  I forgot to ask whether that is for music or if they are broadcasting information or the beeps of the moving production line.

The butchers each have their own specific job and appeared to all be working expeditiously.  On a break, I observed a few butchers at a knife sharpening station and they were sharpening their knives with the attentiveness of an artist making a sculpture.  It seemed strangely meditative.

The machines are epic.  Imagine giant hydraulic scissors that lop off leg bones, giant hand-held bone saws that cut right down the spine to split the carcass.  Imagine a 5 foot diameter roller that the hide is attached to.  Then the roller spins and pulls the hide right off the animal as workers on either side stand on a platform that lowers with the hide as the pair of workers use a rotary saw to help shave the hide away from the carcass.

White walls and conveyor belts.  Concrete Floors.  Stainless steel machines and tables.

The sanitation is impressive.  There’s hardly any blood.  The floor is clean.  The conveyors are clean.  The butchers are clean.

The technology is impressive.  Not like the old days where the packing line could only handle one cut at a time, this facility handled every single cut at once.  On top of that, they appeared to be handling multiple breeds, multiple brands and were labeling product for multiple destination countries and the specific requirements that go with each export country.  The technical complexity is mind bending.

Even though I have been there and done that … visiting a meatpacking plant for the first time in 20 years was an epic experience.  More than anything, I was blown away by how much things have changed and by how impressively advanced New Zealand facilities are.

We’re constantly evaluating new products to see whether they’re worth sharing with our customers.  We value your trust, and we try to repay that by: A) only carrying the best foods possible and B) being up front with ingredient lists on the product pages so you can always make an informed choice.

As I’ve discussed before in my post about dried fruit,  we try to hold the line against certain ingredients making their way onto the Marx Foods store. When in doubt, natural is good…and not natural is bad.  We’re planning on adding some new chorizos to the store soon to round out our cured meats and sausage sections, but have rejected several offerings because of what’s in them.

MSG is out for sure and we decided to cut one product due to Yellow 5…but then we hit several other items that appear to be less clear-cut: BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene), TBHQ (tertiary butylhydroquinone), Propylene Glycol and Glyceryl Monooleate.  Ultimately we decided to cut them because we’ve gotten this far without crossing that line, and because that isn’t really the sort of food I want to sell on the Marx Foods store.

That said, if you’ve got an argument that we’re being over-paranoid and should bring them into the fold, I’d love to hear it.  We’re not food scientists and we definitely make it a point to err on the side of purity, quality and sustainability whenever possible…maybe sometimes we’re cutting off our proverbial nose to spite our faces?

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The Missing Smells
My strongest memory of slaughterhouses in the 80s was the hot, steamy, smelly kill floor.  In my youth, the act of cleaning cattle in the back pens with a hose was almost pointless.  The holding pens were dingy, dirty, shit- and ammonia-smelling, closed-air affairs.  The calves came to the kill floor with shit all over their hooves, tails and rumps regardless of how much we sprayed a hose at them.

Here in New Zealand, the holding pens are clean, free of shit and they are very well ventilated open-air environments.  And, this cleanliness is before the cattle are cleaned one by one in a giant shower as they make their way up the chute.

In the 80s, our kill floor was hot and steamy.  In this New Zealand facility, the smell was almost benign.  The strongest odor was a subtle smell of bleach.  Sure, this New Zealand kill floor was warm and many of the workers had only shorts and a t-shirt on behind their smocks, but the humidity was fine and the temperature was moderate.

Hygenically, I can recall a dirty environment from my youth.  I remember barrels of organs being dragged around and lots of product held in racks on the slaughterhouse floor itself.  In this New Zealand facility, the different non-meat parts almost immediately leave the kill floor via a panoply of chutes and conveyors.  The hooves are lopped off by giant scissors and down a chute they go.  The hide is pulled off and drops right through a hole in the floor.  The guts drop to a giant conveyor where they are separated and down various chutes they go.  Aside from the exact spot where throats are slit, there’s hardly any blood at all on the kill floor.  I was surprised by the absence of blood on the kill floor and blown away by the lack of odor.

The Missing Sounds
Notably absent in the New Zealand facility was mooing and the sound of kicking.  In the old days, our slaughterhouse was full of bovine crying.  It is sad to think about.  Back then, the veal calves were shackled, stunned and hoisted upside down by a chain wrapped around a hind leg.   The panicked cries of the calves must have spread fear among the rest of the animals because it was a cacophony of bawling.  Once upside-down their throat was cut and I can remember the sound of them trying to breathe for some time and the sound of them kicking the wall for awhile after that.

Today, slaughter facilities are designed to minimize stress on that animal and this New Zealand facility was the most progressive I have ever seen.  In this New Zealand facility, the animals walk through a chute single file and at the end, they are stunned electrically to make them pass out.  They fall over through a hole in the wall onto their backs.  Their throat is slit while they are passed out and THEN they are hoisted.  They don’t know what hit them and they are out of view from the live animals.  Here there is no mooing, no struggled breathing, no kicking.

The Missing Buckets and Barrels of Stuff
Certainly the lack of odor has something to do with the fact that product simply does not stay in one place.  In the old days as the animals were disassembled, the hide went in this lug.  The stomach drops in that one.  The heart goes in this bucket, the spleen in this one, the liver in the other one, etc.  The lugs on racks ultimately got wheeled off the kill floor and into a cooler or outside, where they waited for the gut truck.  All of the non-muscle meats, hides, testicles, etc. would be held in racks on the slaughterhouse floor.

In this New Zealand facility, all of those parts completely left the room as soon as they were cut from the carcass.  I don’t know where all of them went, but they certainly left the meat area immediately.  In one room that I did see, was a completely separate packing area that received the items that came down the various chutes.  Brains immediately dropped into a box, the entire box still pulsing, before it was labeled and moved to the freezer.  The tongues were individually saran wrapped and placed neatly in a slotted box.  That box was immediately labeled and moved to the freezer.  And on and on.  In this New Zealand facility, cuts and parts did not sit anywhere.  They were immediately cleaned, processed, packed, frozen.

As for the meat cuts, I remember lug after lug of meat cuts on racks in the old days.  A major innovation that I saw in New Zealand is that the facility was so sophisticated that it didn’t have to process one cut at a time before moving to the next cut.  As the carcass got cut up, all of the products went on the same production line.  In the past, the parts would have waited in open-air lugs in the cooler before each individual cut was bagged, labeled and boxed.  Here in New Zealand, the cuts just moved down the line together.  When they got to the place where they were to be bagged, an operator punched in a code that corresponded to the cut.  The automated labeling system did the rest.  So, instead of the cuts having to sit around and collect bacteria, they were immediately vacuum sealed, boxed and chilled.

Related Posts:
I Grew Up In a Slaughterhouse
A Disassembly Factory

We’ve got game birds looking for a hot and smoky home. Want to adopt devour them? You’ll have to open your kitchen up for 3 pheasants, 3 Guinea Fowl and 3 Poulet Rouge … a little menagerie of fowl.

We want to send these birds home with a blogger who will put them to good use, have fun with them, add some recipes to the blogosphere. Maybe you could have a cook off with a few blogger co-conspirators, do a recipe contest with some fellow bloggers (who knows, we might even throw a prize in there)…you could even have your own mini cooking series for those who are poultry-curious. Help us develop some more recipes for our customers to use.

What would you do with these birds? Tell us your best ideas and we’ll decide which blogger(s) will take some or all home. The catch, besides having to reside in Seattle, is that these birds are pick-up only, no deliveries. We’re holding these birds in our office in Lower Queen Anne and they need to be picked up on Friday, 2/24 (or Monday at the latest). Email your best ideas to Justin at justin(at)marxfoods(dot)com.

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Before joining Marx Foods I worked for one of Washington State’s largest privately owned companies. One of those places that is run by a strict set of rules and guidelines, where your job is set in stone, and there are no variations allowed. With that background in mind I’ve come to fully appreciate the perks of working at Marx Foods. One of those perks is that everyone, no matter their specialty, gets to learn a fair amount of knowledge of how every bit of the business works which is how I managed to get into the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco a couple weekends back.

I’m an artist, first and foremost. I’m part of the team who takes the photos, who designs and codes the webstore and blogs. Color options, check, I can help with that. But thanks to some handy unofficial office policies I’ve also gotten a decent taste, so to say, of what makes a good product for our store. For the most part, everyone here has good taste when it comes to our products because it’s important to believe in the products we carry. So, when a few months back, Justin asked if I’d be up for joining him at the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco I jumped at a “work” weekend. It’s a pretty good office perk I have to admit. As a dad of a 4yr old any vacation/trip that didn’t include the words “kid friendly” is welcome. But as things got closer Justin got called to a weeklong trip to New Zealand for our great new grass-fed beef line during the same week of the show, and of course who was he to turn down New Zealand in their summer when our weather report was calling for record amounts of snow. I got a quick crash course on the business end of things by daily pop quizzes and sent on my way.

The first day of the trip was for me to get down there early and to explore what the town had to offer to the food scene, as part of our research as we develop our retail store. Seattle is pretty respectable on the food front but it never hurts to check out new locations, see what’s going on in other places. After 10+ miles on foot across town from small food retailers to the Ferry Terminal, I retired to dinner at the Chef’s table at SPQR and took notes for plating techniques for our next photo shoot followed by early to bed. Not a bad first day. Oh, and what a first day as my fair skinned Norwegian heritage came out as a minor sunburn, in January…

The next day the show began. I knew that this was one of the biggest places for likeminded food industry people but I was overwhelmed. “80,000 specialty foods and beverages from 1,300 exhibitors spanning 35+ countries” spread out over both the north and south halls of the Moscone Center.

Now again, I’m a designer/photographer, all day behind three computer monitors or out in the field with a camera, which made the first day that much more overwhelming. Olive oils, vinegars, crackers, chocolates, cheese, teas, and just about any other specialty food item you can name. Major food producing countries had their own mini cities. Rows and rows built up with towering displays, and sectioned off rooms for business dealings. Just about every food brand you find in your local big box grocer had a presence as well. My job was to find that rare quality product, among the 80,000, that was both as exceptional in quality and a good fit for our very curated store. I had a small mental list of categories that we needed to expand, as well as an open mind for the occasional product that just looked too delicious to pass up. It took almost the entire day to take it all in, take notes and find my way to The Slanted Door where I sat and had a lively discussion with a chef over something more substantial. Almost forgetting I was half way through the show and had yet to actually find a specific product or three to take home. Oh my, a little bit of butterflies that night. I had to produce if I hoped to be offered the job again.

But the second day was a lot less stressful. I had seen it all, I had a plan. I knew what I wanted to bring back to the office. And it was a lot more fun. The pressure was definitely off once it became known I wasn’t in charge of buying the product, only recommending them. I could really just pursue and enjoy the many fine foods without needing to deal with sales pitches. My attention could be on what I was tasting, not what I was hearing. Cheeses after cheeses, oils and vinegars, chocolate, sauces, occasionally the bite of something that was just needed to cleanse the palate between cups of straight olive oil. Occasionally there was a product that just tasted horrible, and once in a while there was a product I’d be happy to serve my guests. Then a quick BART ride back to the airport for a late night flight home, trading the sunburns of California to the freezing snow/rain of Seattle in January.

So, thanks to Marx Foods’s great policies, this designer got to travel to a sunny climate in the middle of winter and eat better than I will again for quite a while, and got paid to do it. Now I just have to figure out how to convince Justin that its essential that I get to New Zealand.