We’re sorry we’ve been quiet.
We tried to spend more time cooking and less time writing, and perhaps swung a bit too far in that direction.
We’re waking up again. There will probably be fewer pictures, but that’s not a promise.
We hope you’ll keep reading.
0 comments so far
Filed in General
There is one block on one street in the city whence all the carpets in the city come.
One block west the k-boys slouch in their buzz cuts and high collars and burble away on cell phones that only they know how to use, and women sit in noodle shops waiting for their manicures.
One block south is the soft edge of the park, where you can’t see the trees anymore, but catch the whispers of white men in shirts and slacks as they talk about advertising and code.
One block east you smell the spices that make people long for home, their aromas sung into the street by warm air and chanting exhaust fans.
But on this block, the wind speaks in Aramaic and Kurdish and Pashto and Farsi, and doorways are wrapped in the scent of rosewater and flower of orange. Down the length of the block, trucks are parked six polite feet apart, their doors rolled up to reveal piles and piles of woven silk, glimmering in shades of peach and lapis. Each driver smokes his own particular blend of pot, so as you walk down the street you get a lesson in the nuances of cannabis.
In any office building on this block, the names in the directory read like a geography of the orient. Symoush, Manouhkian, Falzooli. Going in, you share your elevator with a porter, a middleman, and three carpets, and if you time it right, you will catch him carting them from floor to floor, and smell the coffee on his breath from the bargaining.
In the midst of all this colour and smoke, the JB Prince company conducts its business in a quiet room filled with silicon and stainless steel. There is little to write about the company itself, save that you should leave your credit cards behind when you visit them, and that there’s a gentle crackle in the room as everyone there studies everyone else, wondering where they work, looking at what they buy and how they hold it in their hands.
1 comments so far
Filed in General
So TW and I finally broke down and bought this very expensive tofu in our local Japanese grocery. It cost five bucks for three smallish boat-shaped sections and had a typically Japanese name: “Johnny the tofu maker, blowin’ in the wind.”
Well, I don’t know why they killed poor Johnny. He made damn fine tofu. You put it into your mouth and you taste edamame, only sweeter, nuttier, deeper and very, very creamy. Best tofu either of us has ever had, and while I am a tofu philistine Tse Wei has had his share of the stuff.
Actually, I know why they killed Johnny. First, through brutal torture - or shameless guile - they forced him to reveal his tofu recipe. Then they split the recipe into five parts, and had five men learn one part each. They were then put to work in the otokamae tofu factory, forever isolated from each other and the outside world. In fact, they probably had their tongues cut out, lest they divulge their knowledge to competition. The fate of poor Johnny was, of course, sealed.
Do check out the otokamae website. It is a worthy tribute to Johnny’s sacrifice. In Flash.
1 comments so far
Filed in General
Here’s a picture of a jar of Golden Syrup warming over gently simmering potatoes (I think they were potatoes…).
If you are curious, the treacle tart came out great. It had a complex, multilayered sweetness, lovely caramel notes, and a lemony perk. Thing is, we’d never had golden syrup before. So we have no way of telling how much of the flavor was due to improvised aging. I guess we need to make another treacle tart.
0 comments so far
Filed in General
Mr. Blumenthal, apparently, has a recipe for treacle tart that involves two cans of Lyle’s Golden Syrup. To make the best tart in the world, Mr. Blumenthal says, one should use 80-year-old cans of Golden Syrup from the dustiest corners of the Lyle factory - or age the syrup at home, for 48 hours, in a warm oven.
At least that’s what TW seems to remember the book says. Until we can check for certain, he is carrying around the cans of Lyle’s, sticking them in every warm place he can find. Near the oven exhaust when the oven is on. On top of the pot of cooking chicken rice. In the simmering water of a bain-marie for melting chocolate. On the radiator cover, if all else fails. I fully expect to find them under our dog tomorrow morning.
Do either of our two remaining readers have Blumenthal’s In Search of Perfection and wish to make our life a little less ridiculous?
2 comments so far
Filed in General
This is what we thought of Ratatouille.
Given they used Mr. Keller as a culinary consultant, we were surprised that there wasn’t a great deal more straining of liquids in the kitchen.
The image is from Michel Gagne’s official website and is subject to all kinds of copyright. It’s used here for review purposes. Please don’t sue us.
1 comments so far
Filed in General
In Minnesota, there’s a long and dusty road that runs, straight east west, from Minneapolis to St. Paul. It used to be the main road between the two cities, but no one uses it much anymore, because I-94 moves people faster, just a few blocks south. Now the road is an old riverbed, cracked and dry, and pretty much the only traffic on it are the buses coughing their way down the road like tumbleweeds. All the businesses are Hmong, the roadside is forested with signs on which strange consonant clusters grow. Hmong kids in fashions hip-hop left behind 10 years ago scream across the road on their BMXs. North and south spread the sort of grid which corsets American cities, block after rectilinear block of flat topped buildings that started to rise from the landscape and gave up the effort.
Little Szechuan was marked by a humble red and white sign on a block as drab and cracked as every other. Inside was paint red as the leather on a diner banquette, looking so fresh you almost smell it, and décor nondescript except for how it glowed with the pride of effort and ownership. Canto-pop was playing, and they gave us two menus. One featured head cheese in spicy oil, the other General Tso’s chicken and Hunan beef. Our waitress was Valkyrie blond, and we had a Hmong waiter who was still learning the Chinese names for all the dishes. A Minneapolis moment.
The difference between tables was startling – the inevitable, rambunctious Chinese family with the carcass from a steamed fish. The group of sweating young men, led by their one Chinese friend, who’d come to test their mettle against one of the world’s spiciest cuisines, a half-dozen cauldrons of fiery red before them. And the other diners, corn-fed, with their wan chicken fingers and luminous duck sauce. I don’t think I’ve ever walked into a Chinese restaurant in the Northeast where the difference was quite so stark.
We ate beef tripe in spicy oil, and red-cooked pork, and eggplant in brown sauce, and black bean lamb, and mountains of white rice to offset the heat. The tripe was an inspiration, and the pork tasted completely, satisfyingly authentic, a clean, rich broth slicked with extravagantly hot oil, on which floated an armada of szechuan peppercorns. Food from a cuisine confident in its boldness and rusticity, presented by a restaurant that took pride in its food for all the right reasons. I have faith that the staff meals there taste quite like what we ate.
Grand Szechuan in New York maybe, has better food, if the kitchen is having a good day, but it never tastes quite as exciting as this. You don’t get the sense that this came, unadulterated, from far away. Here, it’s obvious that this, for someone, is home.
3 comments so far
Filed in General, Eating / Seeing
The Zombie Food Pyramid from Serious Eats.
Don’t forget, it’s been illegal to serve brains in the English speaking world since the mid 90s.
2 comments so far
Filed in General
The NYT just reported on a lawsuit filed by Rebecca Charles, chef-owner of the Pearl Oyster Bar in New York, for unspecified financial damages against Ed McFarland, chef and co-owner of Ed’s Lobster Bar, a recently opened restaurant in NYC. She alleges that Mr. McFarland, her former sous chef, copied numerous elements of her successful restaurant, from concept to design elements to the Caesar salad recipe, when he opened Ed’s Lobster Bar, located literally blocks away from Pearl.
Could we all just reflect for a moment on the irony of suing someone for stealing your Caesar salad recipe, which you in fact got from your mom, who in fact got it from a restaurant in California. Or the look and feel of your restaurant, which is based in general on a sort of ur-New England seafood shack and in particular on a place in San Francisco.
Shame on you, Mr. McFarland, for not having the smarts and confidence to do something that has more of you and less of your previous employer in it. Or, failing that, the good sense, never mind grace, to at least do it a little further away. But at the same time, Ms. Charles, shame on you for not trusting your public to tell the difference between the original and the mock.
What I find most dismaying, obnoxious and tawdry about this is the idea that a successful restaurant can be reduced to a replicable sum of recipe plus supplier plus interior decorator, and can be diminished by a mere attempt at imitation. Imitators cannot replicate your servers’ smiles, your customers’ memories, or your inventiveness, craft and integrity.
In Singapore, hawker stalls skip copyright infringement and go straight to identity theft. There have to be at least 4 stalls claiming to be that Katong laksa stall, at least two of which go one further, and claim to be the original Katong laksa stall. Ditto Lavender Fatty Char Kway Teow, Satay Club Satay, Newton Hokkien Mee, Golden Shoe Teochew Economy Rice, so on and so forth. Some of these are at least quasi-legitimate claims – hawker stalls used to be a family business, and, like all dynasties, erupt into feuds and sprout rebel branches from time to time, resulting in at two or three interpretations of the same original recipe in different corners of the island (the further apart the better). Others are just your garden variety counterfeit, facilitated by the demolition of old hawker centers and the scattering of their vendors. No one calls the lawyers, being content to bad mouth each other and keep their money for themselves. The rest of us just eat our way through the fakes and feuds and argue about which one is best.
0 comments so far
Filed in General
Diana likes to tell a story about how Nigel Slater helped her overcome her fear of mayonnaise. If you read the Joy of Cooking on mayonnaise, you get a page of 10 point text explaining mayo at a molecular level, along with a couple of mild food safety warnings about not letting the egg rise above 40F and what to do in the likely event that the mayo starts to break. Diana claims to be terrified by this.
If you read Nigel Slater on mayo, he basically lists some ingredients and tells you to start whisking, while chatting about the pleasures of homemade mayo.
The Joy and Mr. Slater give you fundamentally the same recipe – egg yolks, oil, and a certain amount of elbow grease, but many people seem to be intimidated by recipes that gives you precise directions and such a complete explanation of how they work. I’m often told the same thing about pastry recipes – if something involves grams, it’s got to be terrifying and incredibly hard to get right. Some cookbooks, admittedly, play up this tendency, taking a tone which suggests that deviating from their instructions by so much as a letter will lead to certain disaster. Will Goldfarb puts it particularly well.
The other thing about pastry recipes – the cookbook authors are never quite convincing when they assure you that if you follow their instructions, everything will turn out just fine. It’s hard to be reassuring after spending 3 pages explaining why your word is absolute gospel.
So I’m going to let you in on a little secret. With most pastry, even if you fuck up, it still tastes pretty good.
Those macarons I was so excited about? Perfection (which I did not achieve, because they weren’t perfectly round) is purely cosmetic. Every single batch of macs I’ve made – with cracked tops, no feet, disintegrating feet, no tops, rough tops – every single one was far too scarfable for my or anyone else’s good. I’ve made at least a dozen over the last couple years, and these, while the best looking ones, were only marginally tastier than most of the visual disasters.
So this is a recipe that I promise will work – if you weigh your ingredients and if you wait as long as I tell you, and if you trust your oven thermometer and not the oven dial. If you don’t wait as long as I say, or don’t feel like messing around with boiling water and parchment paper, your macs might not look as good as they could – but they’ll still taste fabulous. Cross my heart.
3 comments so far
Filed in General, Techniques / Recipes