diosccor2mr

In Praise of Coriander

As someone with a creative bent, I want to make sure I have access to the widest possible range of flavors to work with, just as an artist would want to have a lot of colored paints at hand. Some seasonings have very specialized uses and stay in the cabinet, but others are used so often I keep them on a rack right above the cooktop. Most herbs and spices are best suited either for savory foods or sweet ones. A few, like ginger, have shape-shifting characters that lets them do dual duty. Of these, coriander is the king in my kitchen.

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The Tightrope of Gose

Despite the slow, orderly evolution and subtle trends that beer styles often follow, there are many cases where something new—or obscure, or even dead—will suddenly catch fire and fit the moment perfectly. This is the case for gose, which disappeared in the 1960s from its home in Northeastern Germany after a couple of centuries or more. I’ve been writing about this fascinating style since the 1990s; for a while, gose got only sporadic love from craft breweries, mostly as an exercise in curiosity. At some point about ten years ago, this reclusive style bounded onto the American craft scene, ready to rock.