I try to avoid blanket condemnations of American eating habits, because he who is without sin should live in glass houses and stuff. But sometimes it’s just too easy.

A while back I posted about hot dogs. In summary: buy Boar’s Head brand all-beef dogs and cook them by rolling them around in a hot skillet for fifteen minutes. Easy.

I didn’t think this was a controversial idea, and it’s not like I was deluged with letters. But on Wednesday I was reading the New York Times food section, and the lead story was about hot dogs. I was reading along and nodding until I got to this:

> Although serious hot dog fans prefer the snap of a natural casing, Mr. McDonnell’s dogs–like most–are formed with a cellulose casing, which is removed before packaging. “We don’t do skin at this point because we are after the mainstream shopper,” he said. “You can’t take America’s favorite food and change it to that degree and expect widespread acceptance.”

(Note: I corrected the attribution of the quote.)

This made me drop my tubesteak. Sure, I had bought some Hebrew National dogs on sale and noticed the lack of casing, but I figured (this seems silly in retrospect) this was somehow related to the kosher designation. I don’t think of myself as a serious hot dog fan, since I buy them maybe six times a year.

No casing? I said to Laurie, “This is like if I read that most people preferred boiled steaks to grilled steaks.”

“That’s just it,” she said, then clued me in. Of course! Most people boil or microwave their dogs. The casing doesn’t become an essential part of the experience until it’s a little browned. Given a hot dog heated by one of these inferior methods, I might choose a jacketless one, too.

On the other hand, maybe the Times got this information from Ahmad Chalabi. and Americans love snappy dogs.

Next week we’re taking a vacation on the Oregon Coast, and a biologist friend brought over some specimen books so we can identify any unusual organisms that attack us.

Iris’s favorite of the books is one called Whelks to Whales, a highly illustrated guide to everything from…well, you know. Iris can flip through the book and name half the things in it now. I think she’s going to be disappointed when we get to the beach and it’s basically all anemones and kelp.

I found the book amusing too, because there are plenty of organisms with funny names. Like a sea star called the Cookie Star, because it looks exactly like a cookie. If we find one, I think Iris and I are equally likely to try to eat it. But the best thing in the whole book is a slimy, lumpy ascidian colony called:

Sea Pork

I thought I liked every kind of pork, but I am prepared to make an exception.

I’m back from Idaho, where I was interviewing a chef. Because the chef’s restaurant is under construction, he made me dinner at his house. See, kids, food writing isn’t easy. Sometimes you have to work evenings and weekends.

There are a couple of things that chefs do differently than the rest of us that are obvious even when the chef is cooking at home.

1. By the time dinner was over, the dishes were all washed except for our plates and wineglasses. How do they do that?

2. The chef sauteed a sliced bulb of fennel in some butter. One stick of butter. Then he drained the excess butter off in a colander when the fennel was done. This is not how civilians use a colander, in my experience.

More information about the chef after the article runs, of course.

I’m currently on an unlikely assignment in Sandpoint, Idaho. Right now I’m at the Starbucks on the shores of Lake Pend Oreille. They sell Top Pot doughnuts, so I feel right at home.

Huckleberries are a big thing on the Idaho panhandle. Every diner and fast food place has a sign advertising huckleberry milkshakes. So it was only a little surprising when I went past a sign that said

> HUCKLEBERRY RIBS

And you thought baby back ribs were small.

I was planning to sleep in this morning, but my hotel room had about twelve windows and thin blinds, and it turns out that when you travel to the easternmost part of your time zone at the beginning of summer, the sun rises at 4:30am. We should do something about that. In about half an hour I’m heading to the Sandpoint Farmers Market. I promised Iris I would bring her something back from Idaho.

Good thing she likes huckleberries.

My friend Sara Dickerman wrote a great series for [The Stranger](http://www.thestranger.com/) last year called [Pastry Police](http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=22142). In it she called out local coffeeshops for serving crappy croissants, mushy muffins, and, uh, bad bearclaws. She named names. It was consumer reporting of the best and most buttery kind:

> Online Coffee Company (1111 First Ave), an inviting internet cafe, sells scones that look like cow patties. Hungry Mind Cafe (717 Fourth Ave) is a groovy place with a fab newsstand and yummy Indian fried snack mixes, but its pastry case is filled with bloated, stale-tasting croissants and assembly line muffins.

I’m late to the party, but I’d like to pile on with this corollary: many bad pastries–bagels even more so–could be magically converted into okay pastries by just baking them longer.

Most arguments in cooking boil down to personal taste. You can tell me all the reasons why real maple syrup is better than high fructose corn syrup with artificial flavors, but I still like the fake stuff better.

But when it comes to underbaked goods, I’m going to maintain that this is a matter of human physiology and pale pastry can eat me. Baked stuff gets brown due to the Maillard reaction. This is a complicated chemical process that can be reduced to:

carbohydrates + protein + heat = brown color + **SUPER-DELICIOUSNESS**

A nearly white bagel (which is what they are selling today at the University Bookstore Cafe) will never taste as good as a golden brown bagel. For croissants, because the delectable proteins in butter are involved, the case for browning is even stronger. Pale croissants taste like buttered Wonder bread.

Do not miss out on **SUPER-DELICIOUSNESS**! Bake it brown, clown.