Date: Monday, May 9th, 7pm-9pm
Location: Habitat Suites, 500 East Highland Mall Boulevard, Austin, Texas 78752
RSVP: anneh@slowfoodaustin.org
Slow Food Presents…The Science of Bread Making
Bread comes in thousands of forms, from fluffy brioche to dense Armenian lavash. They all begin the same way – a mixture of milled grains and liquids. But it is how we combine these basic ingredients that results in a bread with big airy crumbs or a heavy compact consistency. In this Slow Session we will explore the science of bread making with CIA trained baker and Slow Food board member Hannah Casparian. This is an excellent opportunity to perfect your bread making skills and expand your knowledge of the basics such as bread leaveners, gluten development, and rising times. You also get to sample some of the breads discussed and we will end with a Q&A.
This event is free and open to everyone in the community. Please send an RSVP to anneh@slowfoodaustin.org.
Slow Food Presents…Bee Keeping 101
In “A Brief History of Tamales,” Claudia Alarcón will speak about the central role that tamales have played in Mexican cooking and culture, from their origins among the ancient Mesoamerican cultures that existed in what is today Mexico, to its present-day use as an essential food at celebrations and their persistence as a traditional food for the holidays in the U.S., including a step-by-step visual guide to the process of making them.
This month part two of our three part series on the culinary history of Texas will focus on how the African American culture has influenced Texas cuisine. Culinary history has been cruel to African American cooks.For more than 200 years, the Aunt Jemima image has been powerful shorthand, used to minimize the role of black women in the creation of southern cuisine. But cookbooks are recognized as one important way women assert their individuality, develop their minds and structure their lives. With that in mind, Toni Tipton-Martin as a modern, food professional, puts on the aprons of great black cooks by peeking into their recipe collections. She looks beyond ingredient lists and instructions to see the talents and skills that have been ignored by historians. Her presentation explores slave narratives and rare black cookbooks from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to crack the Jemima code and to tell a remarkable history that destroys a myth and reconstructs a new role model for today. Through Toni’s discoveries, audiences see that there is a lot more wisdom to learn from Aunt Jemima than just her recipe for great pancakes. She helps us all restore a little warmth to our kitchens of granite and steel.
We kick off our series at the beautiful Rain Lily Farm with Chef Wolfgang, the Mozart of Eastern European foods, and owner of the famous Fabi + Rosi. Chef Wolfgang Murber will tell the tale of how Eastern European foods made their way to Texas and found a home in the kitchens and stomachs of early Texans. To further illustrate the ways German and other Eastern European foods have influenced our cuisine, Chef Murber and Chef Elizabeth Winslow of Rain Lily Farms will do a live cooking demonstration of schnitzel and fried chicken.
Fall brings many changes – not just in the trees and the cooler weather but in the selection of edible plants all around us, just waiting to be harvested. Join us for a very special Slow Session with Amy Crowell, owner of Edible Yards and writer for Edible Austin on wild foods. Amy will lecture on how to identify, harvest and prepare some of the most delicious and nutritious wild foods Central Texas has to offer. Amy has been eating foods from the wilds of Texas since she was a kid. She looks forward to sharing some of her experiences and knowledge with you! Think of this educational session as a wild edible plant walk but instead of heading outside, in the heat, you can learn about edible plants while you relax inside and enjoy some wine.
Date: Wednesday, August 11th