Food news antipasto

We learned the sad news that Raghavan Iyer passed away Friday while on a visit to San Francisco. “Raghavan was a dear friend to many around the globe,” said Anne Spaeth, owner of the Lynhall restaurants in Minneapolis [where Iyer lived with his partner Terry Erickson] and Edina. “The world lost a beautiful soul and consummate educator of his beloved India and Indian cuisine. His legacy will live on through his many contributions to the culinary world.”

The James Beard Foundation recently announced the nominees for its 2023 Restaurant and Chef Awards. There are regional divisions for the awards, and legendary cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey CBE is 2023’s Lifetime Achievement Award honoree. The winners will be announced during a live awards ceremony held in Chicago, Illinois on June 5.

It’s all but impossible to go to a food website these days without seeing articles and recipes for various types of pizza. Once considered mainly cheap take out, pizza has been glammed up in recent years. Food & Wine’s Laura Itzkowitz thinks that the current wave of pizzaioli might be trying too hard. She asks that with “the emergence of pizza tasting menus, has the gourmet-ification of this humble food gone too far?”

In a bit of good news for UK consumers, Asda and Morrisons have eliminated the limits for select fresh fruits and produce items. Shoppers can now buy as many cucumbers, salad bags, broccoli, cauliflower and raspberries as they want, although quantities of tomatoes and peppers are still capped. The restrictions had been imposed in late February due to supply issues.

Swinging from promising news to a dismaying report, a Farmers Weekly investigation has revealed that at least one major pork producer has engaged in massive food fraud over the last decade. The as-yet-unnamed company “was passing off huge quantities of foreign pork – sometimes tens of thousands of tonnes a week – as British,” according to Farmers Weekly. In addition, workers told Farmers Weekly that sometimes the company would have them wash off pork that had gone off or mix it with fresher product. The report alleges that numerous UK retailers, schools, hospitals, and care homes had all been victims of the deceit.

Our cooking tip for this week is actually two tips that use the same technique: crumpling paper or foil. Epicurious tells us that wadding up parchment before using it to line your baking pans will keep it from curling and allow it to remain perfectly flat. Americas Test Kitchen says that crumpling aluminum foil before placing it in a roasting pan will reduce splatters and smokiness. According to ATK, doing this creates “tiny air pockets which increase circulation beneath the wire rack,” cooling down the pan and thereby preventing drips of hot grease from splattering.