Se siete visitatori abituali da queste parti, avrete sicuramente già visto le nostre forchette di pane e i più fortunati le avranno anche provate durante il salone o al nostro evento a febbraio. Bhè ecco svelato il segreto…o quasi.

Seguite il tutorial per entrare nella Fork Factory !!!

Per prima cosa, l’impasto: morbido ed elastico, una pasta brisé particolare, fatta apposta per l’occasione.

Lasciare riposare l’impasto ben compattato in frigo per un’oretta.
Poi passare alla seconda fase:

Adesso la fase critica: non titubare con lo stampino alla mano, premere energicamente e in modo uniforme.

Posizionare le forchettine su una teglia con carta da forno. Infornare a preriscaldato 180°C per 15 minuti.
Quando si sente il profumo sono pronte.

Avete seguito attentamente?

Bene, se volete dilettarvi anche voi con il vostro stampino per forchette, non disperate: sono aperte le iscrizioni al  workshop FORK FACTORY !

Accorrete numerosi: Mandate una mail a info[at]tourdefork.net

Gathered in a rare and beautiful oasis in the midst of Cihangir, İstanbul with a view of the Bosphorous and the minarets of the Blue Mosque, a table laden with fresh pumpkin cake and homemade breads, cold potato and lentil salads, cumin spiced humus and copious amounts of grilled, smoky chicken and cold beer – the weather could not have been more perfect, the location more ideal, the company more charming for a bit of April apple bashing!

Cider, made from fermented apple juice, can be made from a variety of apples. The Pilgrims drank cider as they sailed to America aboard the Mayflower. John Adams had a glass of cider every morning with breakfast. After a long day in the bush, Ernest Hemingway liked to kick back beside the campfire with a glass of cider. And Robert Frost saluted his favourite beverage with a poem titled “In A Glass of Cider”. Neck and neck with turning water into wine, is the resurgence of turning fruit into hard core alcohol! Armed with a few hundred organic apples, a couple of plastic buckets of various colours and depths, two logs for pestles, a wooden press and an army of hands and knives, the process began. Ah, I forgot to mention – and an English and an Irishman at the helm! A recipe for disaster?
Most likely…

Once the apples are washed and cut into pieces, they are, to use laymen terms ‘bashed’ into what the professionals would call a pommage, but what we affectionately called “mung”. This used to be done by horse-drawn cider mills. We opted for two heavy logs (probably zapped from the massive fig tree overhead) and a lot of man-power! The “mung” is then transferred to the cider press – in our case, a rather small and unsteady looking wooden barrel flown over as hand luggage via Stratford upon Avon.

Traditionally the method for extracting the apple juice is made from a complex structure of ten or twelve layers of blocks known as cheeses and strained into a coarse hair (probably horse) sieve. Our method was not that much  different. After a lot of screwing and turning and f***ing , the “mung” spurting out the sides left, right and centre, a brown, formidable juice finally started to drip into a plastic Tupperware, apple bits and all ( “sieve, what sieve?”) and finally funnelled into large 5 litre bottles waiting patiently on the grass.

With regards to fermentation… well, that remains to be seen. We’ve given it three months but whether that respects temperature, acetic bacteria, carbonation and the rest of it, is still a waiting time bomb… if all else fails, there will be enough apple vinegar to go round!

Words and Photos by Daniela Citi

While preparing the CMYK Dinner we thought it would be interesting to experiment a bit with natural food colours. It’s nothing new, here in Italy it’s a tradition to colour eggs for Easter by boiling them in food colour. We thought it could be interesting to try and colour some fabric, in this case cotton and for our Fork n’Flowers event we coloured Jute.  What follows is a graphic and somewhat simple overview of the process. We hope to soon post more detailed and useful information on colouring with natural dyes.

The quantity of ingredients necessary varies allot depending on the ammount of water used and the ammount of fabric you need to colour.

Once you’ve boiled the ingredients for half an hour use a sieve to remove the solid parts, careful not to throw away all that precious dye you’ve extracted.

Turmeric is an extremely strong dye, and once you’ve boiled your cotton for twenty minutes it won’t fade much. Cabbage on the other hand, although initially being very bright has problems bonding  to the material. This means that if you rinse it under cold water it will loose colour and fade. An interesting effect is that the more it fades the more the colour goes from a bold purple to a light blue. And in case you were wondering, YES it does stink of boiled cabbage.

Curiosi di sapere come è andata a finire la fantomatica Cena Mensile di TourDeFork ?

Bene, ecco qualche indizio…

Il colore è tra i primi approcci sensoriale che abbiamo con un alimento. L’alterazione del colore è un aspetto fondamentale per nostra comprensione degli stadi di lavorazione o invecchiamento di un alimento.

Il colore ci mostra lo stato di maturazione di un frutto o il grado di freschezza della carne e ci indica se è edibile o meno .  Le variazioni del marrone ci possono indicare i gradi di cottura del pane o quelle della carne e ci possono perfino indicare il livello di amaro di un caffè. Il mutamento dal traslucido all’opaco è sintomatico del livello di cottura della carne e l’incresparsi e l’inscurirsi della pelle dei frutti è un evidente segno di cottura delle medesime. 

L’apparenza dei cibi ci mostra i livelli di maturazione, freschezza e il loro stadio di cottura.

Di conseguenza, inizialmente giudichiamo ciò che vediamo, la forma, la texture, il colore e solo dopo procediamo con l’esplorazione degli altri sensi come l’olfatto, il tatto ed ovviamente il gusto. Il colore nel cibo ricopre un ruolo fondamentale nell’apprezzamento e la scelta dell’alimentazione.

L’apparenza dei cibi è in grado di suscitare interesse ed attrazione, l’aspetto di un alimento provoca emozioni a livello neurale, crea aspettative, può stimolare l’appetito o sopprimerlo. Da quando mangiamo per piacere, più che per sola necessità l’apparenza è diventato sempre più importante anche per la scelta e per il commercio degli alimenti.

L’utilizzo della colorazione artificiale del cibo è ormai cosa nota a tutti, l’industria ne fa abbondante uso da molti anni. Si colorano i cibi per venire incontro alle aspettative dei consumatori, come per esempio il giallo artificiale del burro o per renderli più appetibili o per prevenire metamorfosi cromatiche durante lo stoccaggio, come per esempio il verde dei piselli in scatola. Lo stesso vale anche per la decolorazione dei cibi, molto tempo e denaro è investito nella rimozione del colore da certi alimenti, come per esempio il riso, lo zucchero, il sale e la farina, tutti questi prodotti subiscono un processo di sbiancamento per venire incontro alle nostre aspettative di freschezza e purezza.

Anche se raramente i cibi vengo scelti soltanto per il loro aspetto estetico quelli che sono identificati attraverso un particolare colore rischiano di venire accettati o rigettati soltanto su questa base.

Ma il colore non agisce solo a livello sensoriale, i colori sono anche segno di proprietà nutritive importanti per il nostro organismo ecco una tabella che ho trovato sul sito di Buonalombardia:

Il rosso del licopene
Il rosso vivo dei pomodori è legato al loro contenuto di licopene, un pigmento dal forte potere antiossidante, cioè utile per difenderci dai danni causati dai radicali liberi e capace di ridurre il rischio di alcuni tipi di tumore (in particolare quello alla prostata).

L’arancio del beta-carotene
Le carote, il melone, la zucca, le albicocche… devono tutti il loro colore giallo-arancio alla ricchezza di betacarotene, che il nostro organismo trasforma poi in vitamina A. Questa sostanza, insieme alle vitamine C ed E, svolge un ruolo molto importante nel preservare l’organismo dall’invecchiamento dei tessuti. Inoltre, protegge la pelle dai danni dei raggi ultravioletti e aiuta a migliorare la vista.

Il verde della clorofilla
Responsabile del bel colore verde delle verdure a foglia, anche la clorofilla è essenziale per il nostro benessere: non solo ha un certo potere antiossidante, ma esercita anche un’importante funzione antianemica e tonifica il cuore. Inoltre, favorisce la sintesi delle  vitamine all’interno dei vegetali ed è significativo, a questo proposito, che proprio alcuni vegetali verdi (cavolo verde, insalate…) siano tra gli alimenti più ricchi di vitamina C.

Il viola degli antociani
Mirtilli, uva e prugne sono ricchi di antociani, pigmenti violacei che hanno la proprietà di rinforzare e rendere più elastiche le pareti dei capillari, provocando un miglioramento nella circolazione sanguigna e favorendo la prevenzione delle malattie cardiocircolatorie.

Il giallo della zeaxantina
In alcuni vegetali, come il mais dolce, le zucchine e i mandarini, il colore giallo indica la presenza di luteina e zeaxantina, sostanze ad azione antiossidante che sembrano essere utili anche per proteggere l’occhio da alcune malattie degenerative.

]]> http://www.tourdefork.net/2010/03/31/colori-cibo/feed/ 1 http://www.tourdefork.net/2010/01/24/the-making-of/ http://www.tourdefork.net/2010/01/24/the-making-of/#comments Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:22:19 +0000 StefCiti http://www.tourdefork.net/?p=513

“A food designer is somebody working with food, with no idea of cooking”. Inga Knölke, 1999

Lately I found myself sort of lost in a limbo, trying to conjugate my work and passion, which would be design, with that of food. I’ve never really believed in the figure of Food Designers. I really don’t think the world can benefit from the birth of another design category. But I do believe that we need to question and discover the unknown environment that surrounds us and what better way to learn something we know nothing about, then playing around with it and getting our hands dirty.

So that’s what I tried to do for this dinner, I thought it would be fun to try something a little different. The idea came from my recent work with porcelain. I’ve been working on making kitchenware products such a plates and bowls in the studio for the last couple of months. We know that plates and bowls come in different shapes and sizes, depending on what we intend using them for. We have oval plates for fish, deep bowls for soup, small plates for fruit. Handles, lids and non-drip spouts are all ergonomically thought out in regards to how people will interact with each particular object and depending on the functions they need to full-fill. The same goes for the materials which are used: Steel, aluminium porcelain, ceramics, plastic and glass, every material is specifically used in order for it’s fundamental properties to be most useful and adapt to the situation. Heat conductive or insulation, imperceptibility, rigidity, transparency .

The bowls and plates we eat from are conditioned by the shape and physical state of the food we intend to eat or prepare in them. But what if it were different, what if we had no porcelain or plastic? What if we had to make our own plates and bowls out of ready available materials. How would we make them? What would we make them out of? And most interestingly how would we use them?

Excluding most “normal” materials didn’t really leave me with much choice. Especially since cost of production had to be close to zero and the manufacturing would be done in my home. I looked around the kitchen and quite quickly decided that using flour would be the smartest and easiest choice. The interesting fact is that under many aspects working with bread is very similar to working with ceramics. They both come in a pulverized form, they both need water in order to make them mouldable and both need moulds for forming and heat for stabilizing.

So maybe making containers out of bread isn’t the most original of ideas, on the other hand we have plenty of examples where bread is already used as a food container, just think about a pizza or a kebab (or kebap) and in such case it’s not only a container, but a fundamental part of the meal. We decided to use this idea and expand on it. We would make edible containers, which were functional to use and pleasant to look at, strong enough to cut on and impermeable enough to hold soup.

If you would like to learn the secrets behind making these wonderful bread plates and bowls, drop us  a line. We are soon going to organize a little workshop where we can experiment, play and eat together from these super cool TourDeFork bread bowls. Hope to see you soon.

Thanks to Luca Intorrella for his photos.

I was at work the other day, where among other things we’re developing some eggcups, and the question came up and stuck in my head: How big is an egg?
We all know that you can buy eggs in various sizes, a bit like t-shirts: small, medium and large, depending on your needs for frying, scrambling or boiling.
But who decides how big an egg should be? Do chickens lay all their eggs the same size? Can one chicken lay both large and medium size eggs or are jumbo eggs only laid by jumbo chickens? Slightly intrigued by my dilemma I started researching.
Here in Europe you can buy four different sizes although I couldn’t find any small ones:

• Small, weight must be less than 53grams
• Medium, weight must be equal or larger than 53grams but less than 63 grams
• Large, weight must be equal or larger than 63grams but less than 73 grams
• Extra, large weight must be equal or larger than 73grams

I didn’t really find much information about diameter and height, which is what you are interested in if you intend making an eggcup, so I had to measure them myself.

Another factor concerning the quality selection of eggs is the “grade”, those letters you find on the box like AA or A. These letters do not identify the nutritional quality of an egg or the freshness as one could initially believe. The letters rank the exterior and interior aesthetic of the egg, factors which influence a customer’s choice. Eggs are graded on cleanliness, shape, texture and soundness. B and C grade eggs also exist, these are the really ugly ones that don’t make it to the supermarkets and are instead used in processed foods and shampoos.

The size of an egg depends on many factors some regard the bird itself other regarding its environment and its nutrition. The breed, age and weight of a chicken are probably the most influential factors that determine egg size.
Hens will start laying eggs around 4 or 5 months of age, eggs will initially be small and sometime the shell will be soft and not properly developed, as months go by the eggs get bigger and stronger.

The coming and going of seasons naturally influence egg sizes, but in industrial egg farms all variables such as temperature, humidity and light are artificially controlled to maximise production and control size.

Apparently we know more about the nutritional requirements of the chicken than of any other domestic animal. Maybe in the olden days people would feed their chickens corn and a bit of grass, crushed oyster shells for added calcium, the kitchen scraps would usually end up in the pen too. But nowadays egg farms prepare their rations scientifically balancing amino acids and protein to ensure optimal cost effectiveness in breeding. It is also possible to quickly control the size of the eggs by altering the dietary balance of amino-acids.

The food industry is well… an industry and industrial methods are applied to the growth, maintenance, packaging and transport of its product: our food. Eggs are certainly no exception from this process. Europe alone produces more than 10 million tonnes of eggs a year that’s about 113 billion eggs, which is equal to… I have no idea how many football fields, but it’s a lot of egg. To reach such high production rates industrial egg farms have adopted many controversial breeding methods such as battery cages, which have recently come under fire by national legislators in Europe and the US and are being banned in favour of cage-free systems where the animals are able to live a more natural and pleasant life. You can easily find disturbing material about battery cage breeding on youtube.

Caged-hen eggs

Battery hens are kept in small cages, with each hen having less space than an A4 sheet of paper. Most farms have 4 or 5 birds per cage (20in x 20in) and cages are stacked six high. The hens are unable to perch, scratch or preen and their beaks are cut. They enter the cages as chicks and stay there until slaughtered about a year later.

Barn eggs

Hens are housed in single or multi-tier buildings. They have room to move, litter to bathe in and nest boxes to lay eggs. Hens are able to use perches, with at least 15cm per bird and no more than nine birds per square metre.

Free-range eggs

Similar to the barn system, allowing them to behave naturally and move freely. In addition, the chickens have outside access and no more than 1,000 birds can be kept per acre.

Organic free-range eggs

Usually kept in small units, in small flocks and spend more time outside. Under EU regulations, as many as 9,000 hens can be kept in one shed. But the Soil Association allows flock sizes of no more than 500 birds. All organic chickens must have access to grass. Their diet consists of organic cereals.

Most of my reference have been taken from: Commercial chicken meat and egg production. By Donald D. Bell,William Daniel Weaver,Mack O. North