Blog #7

This week I had a vegetarian lasagna at a restaurant in Testaccio. It was so good. The middle layer was so creamy. It was made with a type of ricotta cheese and spinach and it had tomatoes, carrots, artichoke and cheese on top. I am usually not a lasagna fan because I prefer regular pasta and it is pretty hard to find vegetarian lasagna. Also to switch things up, I tried Italian Mexican food. I am from Southern California so I take my Mexican food very seriously. I went to Picos in Trastevere and it was actually not terrible. The nachos were really good. The queso tasted like it does at home and they put sour cream, jalapenos, guacamole, beans, and tomatoes on top. It was not fully authentic but it did quench my craving.

This week in class we watched a movie called ” Cooked: Earth” by Micheal Pollan. I actually really enjoyed this movie. It talked all about fermentation and how different foods such as cheese, chocolate, and beer are made. I was especially interested to learn about how chocolate was made. Chocolate is made by taking cacao beans and cutting them open and taking out the beans and the gel inside and then putting it inside a wooden container and covering it and letting it ferment.  Putting the beans into the box turns up the temperature which is necessary to ferment. More bacteria is formed with acetic acid and on the 7th day, it gets the chocolate color. The beans are then are dried out and chopped up and turned into what we know as chocolate.

When I was little my dad used to make beer in my garage. I remember him explaining that he had to heat up the beer to a certain temperature and he was checking the temperature every couple of hours. I did not know that the beer was fermenting or basically anything about fermentation but it is really cool to know that my dad was able to do that in our tiny garage.