College Kid's Cooking

KFC(Korean Fried Chicken): The new fad food?

2010-08-08T16:58:00.001-07:00

First, the College Kid has graduated and now lives in Stamford, CT and working for a hedge fund. He is very pleased to have found a townhouse with a full kitchen, stainless steel appliances, and roommates that don't cook. He is also pleased to have a nice salary so he can splurge on fancy restaurants. Who needs cars, clothes, and vacations, give me food!

Second, after a long hiatus, I think its time restart posting my culinary adventures. I went into New York City last night to visit a friend and party hard on my last weekend of last summer vacation. EVER. You know its a good night when you eat fried chicken twice while under the spell of drunk munchies. The first time was unremarkable, 11pm chicken fingers at an Irish pub, but after a bit more revelry, it was time for a late night snack, or breakfast for some more conservative folk. We hopped in a cab to Little Korea in NYC and found three Korean chicken chains. BonChan, KyoChan, and Mad For Chicken. Mad for Chicken, on the second floor at 32nd and 5th was the only one open. Cupcakes, move over, a new fad food has taken New York and Colonel Sanders by storm.

We ordered a plate of drumsticks and a plate of wings and were treated to what I believe the most elegant and refined preparation of fried chicken. Elegant? Refined? Fried? No, I am not still feeling the effects of a long night of partying, the Koreans have created a type of fried chicken that belongs in a class apart from "Regular" and "Extra Crispy." The skin was crackly, with all the fat rendered out, like a potato chip. The skin was so thin that it was nearly indistinguishable from the light batter that encased the entire drumstick or wing in a smooth and golden brown crust. There were no stray bits or nibs of batter clinging to the shell, a departure from the KFC we know. Inside the chicken was tender and juicy; these wings and drums were not frozen and not prepared ahead of time. The pieces we lightly sauced with a soy-garlic blend. Not too sweet or sticky, well balanced with the garlic playing the lead with a muted saltiness of the soy sauce behind it. The sauce is mostly absorbed by the translucent skin and batter, bringing the flavor inside of the chicken itself.
Not prepared ahead of time - that means there is a wait for each order, but the resulting golden nugget of fried chicken goodness is well worth it. What is the method to the goodness? Twice frying the chicken. This serves two purposes. First, the skin and batter doesn't burn before the center of the drum or wing is cooked. Second, a rest period and shakedown lets all the fat render out of the skin before the pieces are finished in the fryer. The restaurant was nice enough to keep the libations coming during the wait with complementary shots of apple and red bull flavored sojou.

Ciabatta Bread

2010-01-01T12:51:00.000-08:00

"Ciabatta" aka "slipper bread" is one of the more well-known, if not the most well-known form of Italian bread in the states. It is made from a semi-sour dough, care of a preferment known either as a "biga" or "poolish." Ciabatta seems to have taken this country by storm in the past few years, finding its way onto most cafe menus, bookending panini and entering the lexicon of this country's increasing food awareness. Due to the serious metabolic activity and CO2 generation of the yeast during the preferment, the bread has a large, open crumb - perfect for dipping in oils. Although the ingredients or simple, achieving adequate fermentation, gluten development, working and shaping dough are sticky, pun intended. The dough is very wet, reaching as high as 80% hydration (water content is 80% of the flour weight.) I've made a few attempts, but this cook-at-heart is no baker. Luckily, I know a Culinary Institute-trained baker who is willing to share his secret from the inner sanctums of the food world. I left all proportions in their original form - by weight percentage of flour. Professional bakers measure in a different universe than the rest of us, and for good reason: baking is much more precise than cooking. Namely, you can't fix your mistakes. Once the dough is together, its game over. For the best, authentic results, I recommend getting a scale.

Ingredients:
Ciabatta recipe - or rather, formula
100% bread flour - King Arthur is recommended by the professional
75% water
2% yeast
2% salt
5% olive oil

We used 20oz of flour and got two loaves.

Yes, the percentages add to a logical 184%, but this in notation in the professional world. Flour is always given at 100% and each non-flour ingredient is given a percentage of the flour weight. Due to settling, weight is much more accurate than volume.

Method:

Preferment theory:
Why does bakery bread taste so good and our amateur attempts taste so, well, amateur. There is a complexity to bakery bread, call it "bread umami." While the ingredients are simple, real artisan bread has a slight sweetness, despite the absence of sugar. It has earthiness, and something that just grabs you by the tongue and screams "goodness." Time to let the secret out - it comes from a preferment or a starter. Yeast, water, flour go in and then the yeast feast. Flour is a starch, a long complex chain of carbohydrates. Once the yeast start their work, the starch is broken into a variety of smaller molecules, sugars being one of them. A proven starter can feed a bakery's production for eternity, provided the baker keeps adding flour and water. Legend has it that the CIA's sourdough starter is over 100 years old. As a semi-sourdough, Ciabatta needs a good preferment.

The Ciabatta starter is called either a biga or poolish. After measuring your ingredients for the dough as a whole. Take an amount equal to 30% of the flour weight from the dough recipe, and add it to the same amount of water, by weight, again, take from the dough recipe. (eg. if using 20oz of flour for dough, use 6oz of flour for starter and 6oz of water, leaving you with 14oz of flour and 9oz of water to add later to make the dough.) Add a pinch of yeast, mix, and set aside to get bubbly at room temperature for 16-20 hours.

After 18 hours, its ready.

Bringing the dough together:
Place preferment in a large mixing bowl. Add remaining water (room temperature). Mix well. Add remaining flour and yeast. Start mixing, either with a stand mixer on low or wooden spoon. This is not a dough that requires much kneading. After a few mixes, add salt and oil. Mix for about 5 minutes. This dough is very wet! Gluten does not need to develop too much. When you lift the spoon out the dough it shouldn't be very elastic or resilient. Still a bit stringy is fine. See picture.

Set dough aside, covered loosely with plastic wrap to rise for 2 hours, folding at 1 hour mark. To fold the dough, turn it out onto a floured counter. Bring the right side a little past the middle. Bring the left side over the right side. Bring the bottom to the top. Put back in bowl for 1 more hour.

Shaping and Baking:

Oven Setup. 6 unglazed ceramic tiles, about $1 at a home improvement store

Place a pizza stone or baking tiles on an oven rack in the lowest position of the oven. Preheat to 525 F. The oven needs to get HOT. Generously flour a counter or work bench and turn the dough out. If you made dough for more than 1 loaf, cut into pieces. A loaf should be about 12 inches long and 6 inches wide. Shape into these wide loaves handling as little as possible. The dough is soft and should form up easily. Be careful not to pop too many bubbles. Once the dough is shaped, pick up and place gently on a well-floured cookie sheet (no rim on cookie sheet since you'll use this to slide your loaves into the oven.) You can check the consistency of the dough by gently placing your fingertip in the dough. If it quickly springs back 3/4 of the way, you are all set. Dust top of loaves with flour. Cover loaves lightly with plastic wrap and let sit for 10 minutes.

2 Loaves shaped and resting. Dr. Pepper used for scale

Give your cookie sheet a shake to make sure the loaves slide easily. Fill a spray bottle with water. Open your very hot oven, aim for the back of the tile or pizza stone, give your cookie sheet a shake and slide the loaves onto the stones. Immediately, use the spray bottle to spray down the sides and bottom of the oven as well as give the loaves a quick mist. I even unscrew the top and shake a little bit more on the floor of the oven. It's going to steam a ton so watch out. Close the door quickly. You want the steam to remain in the oven. A moist environment is critical to develop crust. Drop oven temperature down to 475 F once you close the door. Bake for 20 minutes. Open the oven after 20 minutes for 30 seconds to let any remaining steam out. Close door and bake for another 10 minutes. To check for doneness, tap the loaves. A finished loaf should sound hollow. Edges should be a rustic brown, top a little lighter. For a thicker, deeper crust, turn off oven, wedge open door with a towel, and let loaves sit for 5 more minutes. Remove loaves carefully and place on a cooling rack for at least 10 minutes. This recipe is labor intensive but its worth it. The steaming, temperature adjustments, and venting are all part of the baking process. A professional oven does it automatically, but for homemade bread, we need to improvise.

While the loaves are cooling, enjoy the beautiful smell of fresh baked bread. Seriously. This is an important step. You just labored for 24 hours and as your reward, produced a loaf or two that looks, smells, and will taste like you picked it up from a bakery.

Insert using cookie sheet. Steam immediately

After 20 minutes, open oven to vent steam. Looking good.

Remove from oven after 10 more minutes. Cool on rack

Bottom got a bit "rustic." Gap in the tiles. No sweat, tastes fine.

Master baker got a little feisty with the tongs getting these loaves out. Crust is crisp, should separate from the inside a little bit due to expansion during baking then contraction during cooling. This is a good thing.

For examination, we sliced open the bread horizontally and opened it like a book. Note bubbles. I should have had a coin in the picture to scale them. Largest ones are about a quarter in diameter.

Check out definition and contrast between crust and inside. A product of the steam and high heat.

There you have them, our Ciabatta. The crust should be rustic, crunchy, something you'll need to work to rip apart. Inside is soft and chewy with huge holes. Outer crust is slightly bitter in the darkest places. Inside is slightly sweet, yeasty, and most certainly real bread.

Studies in Presentation - Gingerbread Pumpkin Mousse Trifle

2009-11-26T18:58:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving - the pagan festival of gluttony followed by an onset of sloth. I love it. It's been a long time since I've put an entry in here...far too long. I need to get myself fired up so I turned to food writing. Today I have a good one, a Gingerbread Pumpkin Mousse Trifle that took first place at the Easton Farmers' Market Pumpkin Bake-Off, co-judged by yours truly. Yet, I was the dissenting opinion out of 5. The trifle is layered pumpkin-spiked, moist, gingerbread, rich pumpkin mousse, and freshly whipped cream. A squash-lover's dessert dream and absoutely delicious. I gave it the highest marks for utilization of pumpkin and overall taste BUT, the woman who made this botched the presentation. I docked her major points and on my scorecard, and a pumpkin pie came out on top. Maybe my expectations were too high for trifles. My Grandma makes a mean one with ladyfingers, vanilla custard, and strawberry preserves. A trifle is a dessert layered in a high-sided glass bowl. Done right, the dessert looks as good as it tastes. However this woman comes in with a simple serving platter filled with one layer of gingerbread, then mousse, then whipped cream. The whipped cream on top was ghastly white, screaming to be topped with pumpkin-friendly items such as cinnamon or toasted walnuts. I was actually angry that it tasted so good, yet looked so bad. Alas, The mousse went on to win because my co-judges were not as particular to presentation as I was. After my anger subsided, I knew I had to get my hands on that recipe so I could do it right for my family on Thanksgiving.

Recipe as follows:
Gingerbread-Pumpkin Mousse Trifle

Gingerbread:

1 cup sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup pumpkin
1 cup molasses
2 tsp baking soda
1 cup boiling water
2 1/2 cups flour
2 eggs, beaten
Combine sugar, salt & spices in a large
bowl. Add oil and molasses and mix until
well combined.
Add baking soda to boiling water then
immediately to sugar/oil/spice mix. Whisk
well to combine.
Add flour in batches, whisking well after
each addition.
Whisk in eggs until combined.
Pour into a greased 13x9 pan and bake at
350 degrees for 40 minutes or until a
knife inserted in the center comes out clean.
Cool for 10 minutes in the pan then invert onto
cooling rack. Allow to cool completely then
cut into 1/2 inch thick slices, around 3-4 inches long.

Pumpkin Mousse:

2 cups heavy cream, well chilled
2 tbsp sugar (optional in whipped cream)
a few drops vanilla extract
20oz pumpkin puree (a little more than one small can)
1 small box instant vanilla pudding
1 1/2 cups (1 can) Evaporated Milk
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cloves
(can substitue 1 Tbsp Pumpkin Pie Spice for
above spices)

Mix pudding mix and spices in a medium bowl.
Whisk in evaporated milk until mix is well dissolved.
Whisk in pumpkin puree.
Whip heavy cream with sugar (optional) and vanilla extract in a clean bowl
until stiff peaks form. Reserve half of the
whipped cream mixture and set aside.
Fold remaining whipped cream into pumpkin
pudding mixture til just combined being careful not to overmix.

I recommended assembling at least 2 hours before you serve it. It sets nicely in the fridge.
Layering guidelines- Layer as you see fit, just PLEASE make it look nice!!
In a high-sided glass bowl, layer bottom with gingerbread slices. Cover with a layer of mousse. Place some gingerbread slices around the circumference of the bowl, standing upright against the sides, sinking them in the mousse layer slightly. Fill middle with mousse. Top with more gingerbread, lying flat. Top that layer with mousse, then reserved whipped cream. Top whipped cream with cinnamon and toasted walnuts. Refrigerate 2 hours and serve.

First your guests will be in awe at your towering, magnificent tribute to the complementary flavors of pumpkin and spices. Then they'll eat it and shower you with complements on how it tastes even better than it looks (and it looks pretty damn good as a layered dessert.) Mild squash is amplified by the heat of the cinnamon, nutmeg, and gingerbread. Pumpkin pie, move over. Trifle is in town.

Onsen Tamago, Defined in the Kitchen

2009-07-30T07:45:00.001-07:00

1.5 weeks after my return from Japan, the recipe for the world's greatest egg, the onsen tamago has been discovered without the use of an immersion circulator. Onsen tamago actually comes in two varieties, distinguised by the texture of the yolk. Variety one, lets call it the "topper" in codespeak, is what you would use to top off a pasta dish, a burger, anything you want a thickened, runny yolk on top of. The egg holds its shape out of shell, and when the yolk is broken, a thick, molten wave of goodness oozes out of it. Number two, lets call it the "spreader." Nicknamed spreader, not because it spreads out, but rather should you want to, you could cut the yolk much like a stick of butter and spread it on your bread. The yolk holds it shape when broken, but is not solid. It's quite amazing. Both of these preparations can be reached pretty easily from the same point. And that point is.

25 mins in a 63-67 degree celcius water bath. How do you get this water bath? Using an electric probe thermometer of course, I heated up a good quantity of water in my cast iron dutch oven. Both water and thick cast iron are excellent for maintaining an even temperature throughout the cooking process. At the same time I turned my oven to the lowest setting (200F) Once it hit 68 degrees, I put the ROOM TEMP LARGE eggs in and waited for the temperature to stabilize once again at around 66/67. At this point I covered the dutch oven and stuck it in the oven. The water temp dropped slowly to 64 degrees, held, then climbed up to 68 right around the 25 minute mark. No adjustments to the oven or eggs were necessary. At this point, all the eggs are "toppers." Place all eggs in an ice bath immediately to get the temperature down. For "spreaders" remove after 1 minute and place in the fridge. The point of the ice bath is to stop the whites from cooking anymore because both the whites of toppers and spreaders are the same consistancy, you just want the yolks of the spreaders to get a little more solid...

Gonpachi - And soba, could this be the best preparation?

2009-05-05T17:14:00.000-07:00

A gimmicky but damn good restaurant has stolen my heart - Gonpachi in Roppongi. It was a place Bush senior once ate, a setting for Kill Bill's bloodiest scene, intensely popular with the foreigner population, but its simple, expertly prepared soba, yakitori, tofu, and fish dishes are second to none. After a late concert (Koji had a band performance that went until 9:30) we ran over for some quick soba and appetizers.

Here is my order of Kamo Seiro, cold soba with a soup of sliced duck breast. Duck in Japan is the same cut. A very lean inch and a half wide strip of meat capped with a thin rim of rich duck fat. Whether in soup or salad, always cut the same way. In the back is a dish of sansho - a peppery, tounge-numbing spice to add to the soup.
A good look at the soup. It was rich, but not salty. More flavored by duck and meat than soy sauce. I've had some that were way too soy saucy. The duch had given off its richness and fat. I'm regretting not taking a piece out of the soup and photographing it seperately. What set this heads and shoulders - and duck breast - above other chicken or duck soup preparations with soba was this duck was undeniably roasted and browned and the soup was made from the drippings. Clearly a western influence, but the flavor and umami of true browned meat can't quite be replicated by fermentation of soybeans and the natural MSG found in kelp. This was the bone sucking, finger-licking gravy good of a brown sauce, and everyone at the table, except host father, thought it was the best soup theyve had. Last, but not least, the hand made- although machine cut soba. When you are cranking trhough probably about 300+ guests a night the handcut thing is hard, but they do make their own soba dough in Gonpachi and make it very well. I'd call it a medium bodied soba, not inaka, but not too fine either.

Really an appitizer but I put it after the soba. Zaru, homemade tofu. Soft, creamy as any custard, with a sutble but not overpowering flavor of the beans from which it was made from. You eat this with a little sea salt and wasabi. I wouldn't go a meal without it at gonpachi. Supposedly Matsugen in NYC also has one that rocks.
A gi

Eating my way through Hokkaido

2009-05-05T07:36:00.000-07:00

Hokkaido is the wonderful northern island in Japan and I don't think there are many Japanese that will argue against the fact that it is a breadbasket and has some of the best food in the country. Typical Hokkaido food is hearty; quite a bit of meat, butter, and milk from the farmland. Milk...hands down the best and creamiest I've had. From milk you get ice cream. And also from milk you get Nama (Raw) Caramel, a fad food in Japan that seems to have originated in Hokkaido. Can't forget about the crab and seafood too. This is the same water as "Dangerous Catch" and crabs are brought in fresh, not flash frozen, into the ports of this island.
First foodie stop was at the restaurant attached to one of Kirin's beer factories. The beer was unimpressive, but the main dish, lamb, called Ghengis Khan, is a Hokkaido specialty and worth a space on the blog. We order and the lamb comes out like this, in some sort of sweet sauce. Sweetened meat is part of the Japanese palate, and although sometimes gets unbearable, it was tolerable on the lamb. There was also a plate of vegetables that came with the order.

Lamb is cooked at the table, on this special type of plate/ burner. It's grooved and domed, moving the juices from cooking off the center and out to the sides. The shape makes sense...you can load stuff on and not worry about it steaming all that much. What you see in this picture is a piece of lamb fat being used to grease the pan. Fat is fat, no point in discriminating against lard as an ingredient as either software or hardware (this is a hardware application). Now what did bother me about the preparation was the veggies down first then the meat. It contradicted the purpose of the pan. There was hardly any meat-metal contact, hence no browning of the outside. As you can see by the bottom pic, this does not appear to be a really browned or sauteed piece of meat. Even in Hokkaido, the concept of browning really has no place. As for the results, the meat was delicious, very lean. It had a mild lamb flavor and very tender, but I think the lambiness was abated by is freshness or special breed rather than the sauce that it was in. Now because the veggies were on the bottom, and so were the drippings from the sweet sauce, there was a chance for caramelization and deliciousness. But the nearly burnt, bottom portions of the pan had no appeal to the host family, and it was just me scraping off every last scrap as the waitress was going in to change the pan for the next round of lamb...

Hokkaido is famous for ice cream, espcially soft serve. Big flavors are Milk, Vanilla, Lavender, and Melon. I am not sure how the melon got in there, thinking it was a tropical fruit, but Hokkaido grows a variety of canteloupe melon that fetches a pretty high price when brought to Tokyo. I had two flavors at different time, lavender and milk. I had my eye set on the milk flavor for a while, ever since my past ice cream post from Costco (which was vanilla but I looked up the Hokkaido style afterwards) But first we have lavender. It sounded like a brilliant concept, especially since this past summer I ran into a few amazing lavender-scented panna cotta during NY's restaurant week. Other than the purple color, this was week. The lavender just barely came through; you had to try hard to taste it. Lavender honey or any dessert, for example, carried this wonderful purfume, close to rosemary but sweeter and more flowery. Even worse, there was not much richness in this ice cream to back it up. My first experience with "Hokkaido" ice was an incredibly rich, custard-like vanilla that poured out of the dispenser in a firm circle spiraling up the peak, so rich and thick that the center of the ice cream (pour, swirl, not sure of hte name) was hollow becaue the cream had such body. This was nothing like that. So it was kind of disappointing as far as mouthfeel, richness, body (spine of the ice cream perhaps) and flavor (the decorations)
Now this next example is a natural milk flavored soft serve from Otaru. There was also a caramel swirl but I had to go pure for my first taste. Now this was more of what ice cream is about. Still not as incredibly rich as the one sold in Costco (although that may not be a bad thing) this pulled all the richness and flavor of natural milk, added minimal sugar, and came out a the custard-like, almost chewy consitency that make Carvel's career and soft serve so pleasurable to eat. But Carvel can't hand a candle to this. Carvel's vanilla is fun and delicious, but it's got more sugar, probably some stabilizers, and because mass produced from mass produced cows, you lose the association with the milk and cream, and in a sense the ice cream becomes something apart from the dairy that it was born from. Not the case here. I believe drank some of the sweetest, richest, milk in the world at a hotel in Sapporo before coming to Otaru, and this ice cream was clearly made from natural ingredients of that same quality. So what did it taste like? It tasted like milk, and butterfat; flavors in their own that really do not need to be vanillized to sell. If you look at it logically, you shouldnt have to flavor milk/cream. Taking things back, and then wayyy back, the first flavors/foods that we are exposed to in this world milk, milk sugar, and butterfat. Now wayy back - raw milk was one of the basic foods of the first civilizations with the domestication of animals. We are hardwired to love this stuff, and like the Cro-Magnon I am, I loved this.

Next up, Otaru sushi. Otaru is hyped up as one of the best places for sushi in Japan. This above poster is for a type of white, rare salmon, 1 in 10,000 taken from salmon breeding grounds, which is why one piece costs more than a sushi lunch around Waseda university (panic sets in when I realize I haven't blogged about that yet.) No, I did not eat this salmon. So lets see how we compare to Yasuda.
There are sushi restaurants eveywhere, but we are brought to this one, by a horsecab driver that Koji wanted to ride. I'm sceptical because usually there are kickbacks for those things but no use arguing. I would have rather wandered to the place with a line in the front. Can't complain though because I got a free sushi lunch and the guys behind the counter were friendly. Where Yasuda and his accomplices worked with a friendly but mechanical accuracy, these guys seemed to have a little more fun.
Sushi being assmbled. Two guys making it by hand. Counter looked promising (remember I am comparing everything to Yasuda in NYC) Same serving style, on the big leaves. Sushi fish was displayed but not pre-cut. Yasuda does no show his goods.
Here is my sushi plate, later a piece of uni and salmon roe sushi came out. The roe on the far left was disappointing, kind of low quality sushi, but the one next to it is awabi, abalone, one of hte most expensive shells. I'm not going to go piece by piece becaue I dont have pics piece by piece but the fish was extremely fresh. Couldn't argue with that. But it did open my eyes to why some sushi bars are better than others, and why Yasuda is king. It is not about the freshness of the fish because if you live near the water or a big city with a market its easily obtainable for eht right price. It is about much small things, which Yasuda does and no one else can. How you cut the fish, thin, thick, small, hashed, wrapped around the rice ball, etc. It is about how you prepare the rice, and form the ball. How the fish is balanced with the rice and wasabi/other seasonings like soy sauce and sea salt. Because I think I ate at the best sushi restaurant in the world, I'm going to be pretty harsh to say that even these guys in Otaru couldn't match Yasuda. They cut the fish and made the rice balls to big, hard to fit in your mouth. Although fresh, Yasuda's fish just gleamed and sparked the way he cut it. Wasabi was balanced. The definition of zen in food. There to enhance flavor based on the weight of the fish. Here, there were times where the wasabi placed between teh fish and rice overwhelmed the fish. And then finally, the rice balls were a little sloppily made. Irregular, some grains poking out. Guess Yasuda turned me into a snob and I'm waiting for someone to step up in this country at beat him or for me to get back to NY.
Final specialty of Hokkaido was beer, ji-beer to be exact, or microbrew. Sapporo and kirin factories aside, wherever we went there were beer bars and special cans/bottles of the local stuff. This can is one I bought in the Tomamu hotel, the towers. It was a black porter, sweeter than a stout. Sweetness from carmel and toffee notes rather than chocolate as in stouts. Mouthfeel was kind of light, but sticky as carbonation was low. Here are some more examples, ranging from German trippels, American Lager, Pislners, cans, bottles, double fermented liters. Great selection. Too bad I couldn't carry all that much on the plane.

Lots of beer came in 3 can sets. See upper left.

Inaka Soba

2009-04-24T14:48:00.000-07:00

As I've been learning more about soba (eating my way through the text book), I came across this odd set of kanji that I didn't realize was the writing of "Inaka" or "country." Now ordinarily this would have no meaning but I read a few months ago that a famous soba restaurant in Tokyo called Matsugen opened up in New York City and their Inaka soba are drawing incredible reviews. Never got the chance to go in NYC, but nothing stopping me from getting Inaka soba in Japan. Turns out the closest soba-ya to my house (30 second walk) is one of the places that has the hand made, hand cut, inaka soba that I've been looking for. (Matsugen in Tokyo isn't as easy to get to but I will be there just for the sake of a NYC comparison)
First time I went, it was 1pm and the hand cut soba was sold out. ANother things I realized is that the hand cut places usually only have the handcut on special order and limited quantity, at least in Tokyo. This place only makes 10 orders a day, after that you get a machine made or god forbid purchased noodles. The places I ate at in Nagano had at least 50 orders of the hand cut stuff, but Nagano seems to be the expert on these things.
So I went back the next week, early. The difference between handcut and not was apparent, as well as inaka and not inaka. Inaka uses a courser milled whole soba flour so the noodles were very dark, with flecks of soba kernels. These were hearty, hearty, noodles. When you bit down there was almost a crunch as you hit the larger pieces. I personally prefer heartier noodles no matter what the culture - I'll take fettucine over spaghetti anyday and I only eat angel hair once a year. There was a sweetness and complexity that machine made or purchased noodles did not have and the big, thick noodles were much more fun to slurp.
Now that I have a little income coming, I can be on the lookout for some more soba places to drop into in addition to Matsugen. I'd love to try the opposite of the Inaka, called Sarashina, which is a very finely milled noodle, as well as various flavors like macha, mugwort, and ume. As they come up I'll post them.
Here's the "special" back page of the menu with the info on the Inaka soba with the picture of the old soba man rolling out the dough in a pain of a process (no gluten in buckwheat). That means like trying to build something without screws or nails - nothing to hold the dough together chemically.
Translation: Inaka soba is stone ground with its with its hull intact, made from 80 percent buckwheat and 20 percent wheat flour. It is a healthy soba made with the hand-cutting technique.

Waseda's Number One Ramen

2009-04-11T22:03:00.000-07:00

Two ramen posts separated by two months, and only two ramen posts in two months. That's pretty sad. I was back in America for a bit with a busted camera so didn't post for way too long. But now that I am back in Japan I can start up again.

This above specimen is from the #1 ranked Ramen shop in the Waseda/Takadanobaba area, one that my dining partner told me that caters to the student tastes. Waseda publishes a yearly review of classes, ramen, and other eateries, and this one took the top spot. Big, Heavy, lots of calories for hte money plus an all you can eat rice bowl. Minoru and I are going to be meeting every Monday for our language exchange, starting with a lunch, so I think there will be more ramen and never ending rice bowls. Although not healthy, its part of Waseda's culture and I may be able to get into it.

Tsukemen aside, there are 4 main styles of ramen, grouped by soup style. There is shio (salt), shouyu (soy sauce+pork/chicken broth) which is the most common in Tokyo, Tonkotsu (literally translated "Pork Bone" but has much more pork than that), and miso (soybean paste with some other heaviness in it, occasionally butter as well.) I have eaten all but miso, and like the lighter ones better, but I did have an awesome tonkotsu in the Ramen museum in Yokohama.

So on to this prized tonkotsu. First, we waited about 20 minutes to get in the shop. Second, what I liked, was you could specifiy the stregth of the broth, the texture (hard/soft) of the noodles, and how much oil is added. I chose normal broth, noodles on the hard side, and no extra oil (not needed). Made sure I got an extra ni tamago too.

Let's get to the main part of this bowl: the soup. Minoru admitted that this was an especially heavy, rich broth. Most tonkotsu is white, this one was brown taking flavors from the pork and soy sauce. Remember, this was the normal preparation, there is an even thicker one. The soup tasted like drinking pork gravy, or liquid pork. Flavor was drawn from boiling bones, fat, skin, meat, everything, for a very very long time to produce a thick and creamy pork sauce. It's rich, tounge-covering sensation was part from the collogen in the bones, a normal occurance in western stocks, but the fat had perfectly emulsified in the broth as well, going back to the gravy sensation, except there was no roux base. It was salty, heavy, and packed a wallup. Many glasses of water were needed while eating this bowl, not that it was bad, it was beautiful, but it was work as well.

From now on I will be sure to order noodles "katame" or on the hard side. Other than texture and firmness, taste didn't offer much. Or maybe that was because the soup was everywhere and stuck to the noodles like a cream sauce.

Moving from there, the the chashu (pork) set on top of the bowl was the best I have had. It was not one of those silly looking pinwheels of belly. It was plenty fatty, but thick and retained the texture of meat rather than the flimsier and thinner chashu, something I want when biting into a piece of meat. The nori/broth combination was wonderful, absorbing the fat and richness of the broth but not becoming soggy. A wetter, thinner soup sinks right in. Green spinach on the top added a nice textural change from the richness, but wouldn't call it a palate-cleanser.

This stall is a master of pork. Chashu is the best so far and if I have to measure a bowl on pure porky richness they win hands down. But I was not in the mood for a BBQ and still wanted to function the rest of the day, and I have to admit that this bowl and that soup kicked my ass. To a Japanese student, who is used to this type of stuff since childhood, I can see how the shop takes number one and I give them a ton of credit for inventing a roux-less gravy and the worlds first pork drink, but I liked the previous tsukemen better because not only was the soup good, but it didn't over power everything else. I like to taste my noodles and the egg always steals my heart. One downside to the thickness is you don't get the contrast of the creamy egg to the savory, flavorful, but not thinner soup, which I find so appealing in shio and shouyu ramens. I will absolutely give tonkotsu another chance, but just not here, and not in the middle of the day. Tonkotsu heaviness is a dinner thing.

Tsukemen

2009-02-14T02:40:00.001-08:00

Waseda students love ramen. Actually, lots of people love ramen but because its cheap and pretty well varied, and usually comes with unlimited rice, its a big hit with the college students. (Yes, you get a big bowl of noodles AND unlimited white rice. I think Dr. Atkins just rolled over in his grave and I want to make hte point again that there is no reason why Tokyo-ites should be so thin because this is how most people eat here.) I digress. Waseda and Baba area is packed with ramen places. I think last count was somewhere around 40 but I'll leave that up to someone who knows more about ramen than I do. Check that blog for some really gritty details and history of ramen and ramen varities.

Basics are ramen is a bowl of curly noodles, typically egg based. Rather rich tasting. Toppings, broth and way of serving varies shop to shop, but typically the broth is in the bowl with the noodles, there is a wonderful thing called a "ni-tamago" involved, and slices of fatty pork. In the world of Japanese noodles, there are three big players. You have ramen, soba, udon. Soba is my favorite. Udon is hte most hit and miss. I've had some good ones and some that go down with the excitement of thick worms. Ramen is fun, hard to screw up, and just about every likes it, but I don't think its anything special, but it has a tremendous cult following because there are so many varities and places around. For me, the regular soy sauce or shio ramen is a middle of the road go to, then I was introduced to tsukemen, that takes the fun of dunking and your noodles of soba and combines it with the delicious greasiness of ramen (and the ni-tamago). In tsukemen, the noodles and toppings are seperate from your bowl of...well...whatever you dunk in. Options at this ramen-ya were spicy miso and wa-fu, which was basically soy sauce and sesame oil based. I opted for the wa-fu

Here we have the "tsuke" part of the tsukemen. Its a warm bath of menma (tender portion of bamboo, common ingredient in ramen, negi (scallions) soy sauce, pork broth, sugar, sesame oil, and probably some pork fat from the broth. You can see some lemon peel in the picture and I think it the broth was thickened by some grated daikon. More concentrated than the normal broth of a typical bowl of ramen. It was thick enough and had enough in it so when you dipped the ramen, the soup adhered very well. Some of hte first bites were pretty greasy actually very greasy, could feel the grease all over when I swallowed. Grease is part of the ramen experience...this is not exactly health food or clean eating like soba is. Flavors when the ramen is in the broth are much more diluted...less grease, spice, etc. This stuff had body to it, perfect for clinging to the noodles. And it was a lot more fun eating the ramen this way and fishing out all the pieces of menma and dropped goodness from the bowl. You could also combine ingredients the way you wanted, like wrapping some nori around the noodles then dunking, trying a little nori on its own. This nori was a nice texture, not paper thin like most yakinori. A bit thicker and held its own against dunking in the broth without collapsing into a limp mess.
So on to a little about the ramen and toppings. Ramen was cool, not chilled, but definitely not right out of the hot water. Noodles, with the exception of udon, because it is so thick, definitely beloing outside of hot broth. The soften too much in a hot broth and lose al dente rather quickly. To Japanese, al dente may not be a good thing, given how much more like like soft food than Americans but to me, and my italian blood, its al-dente or nothing. This held al dente very well and alone you could taste the flavors in the noodles better. The egg, flour, little butter maybe. Ramen isnt usually hand-made, but the good noodles absolutely carry a flavor. Pork was a bit too thick and fatty for my liking. This is the one ingredient best sitting in a pot of broth to soften it up a bit. For tsukemen, pork shavings rather than slices would be better. If I make it, I'll try this way. The dip in the broth wasnt enough to soften up this log of fat and meat, and the dish would have been better without it. But a leaner cut of roasted pork, close to shaved thin, dunked into the soup would be magical.

Speaking of Magic: Ni-Tamago in Action
Just when I thought I was getting close to replicating a ni-tamago, this ramen shop throws a new twist in. This was the best ni-tamago I've eaten so far. And not because of that jelly-like yolk, but the white this time stole the show. To clarify, a ni-tamago is essentially an onsen tamago in reverse. Solid white (hard boiled) and jelly-like, not runny yolk. Onsen tamago has a barely coagulated white and a sold, but not chalky yolk. This egg though nailed the yolk perfectly white keeping the white from becoming rubbery like a hard-boiled. Only way to pull this off is to cook the egg under boiling. Probably around 90 degrees C or maybe lower. This will give the yolk time to turn to jelly while not turing the outermost portion of the egg into a white tire. The egg was taken out of some sort of warm bath immediately before serving, which had to be under 60 degrees so the yolk does not solidify. Bath was something more on the sweet than salty. The outside of the egg is stained very lightly, not a tan or brown from soy sauce. Above pick is the egg simply split by my chopsticks and the bottom is with the yolk inverted. Slight chalking of the yolk on the very outside, but nothing to complain about. Just goes to show how delicate the preperation is, that a few degrees or seconds too long will blow the perfect ni-tamago. These ramen shops must have this down to a science.

Egg-speriments 1 and 2

2009-02-06T06:49:00.000-08:00

Corny title, but fitting.

I've written about the wonders of Japanese egg preparations before. Got the chance to try 2 today. One complete failure, one semi success.

Egg-speriment 1: Quicky Onsen Tamago
Got this method from the sobaya-san at asakusa. Crack an egg in a small bowl or cup. Add boiling water. Microwave for 1 minute to get a quick and easy onsen tamago without the need for a temperature-controlling device or patience. I was skeptical. At best I thought this will turn out somewhere between poached and onsen.

Results: Meltdown/slight explosion. What soba-ya san left out was what power to use. High is not it. Egg was poorly poached at best. Whites and yolk were too hard for anything enjoyable. Plus, around the 55 sec mark a hole ruptured in the white casuing eggy water to spray in the microwave. Not cool. Medium setting next time.

Egg-speriment 2: Ni-tamago
Bit more success. Cooked 5 eggs in boiling water for 6 minutes and 20 seconds. Removed them to an ice bath for about a minute, peeled them, and ate them on top of curry after about 10 miuntes. What the ni-tamago is about is a hard boiled white with a yolk that is oozy and soft but not runny and definitely not chalky. We are going for a yolk texture that will hold itself when the egg is split in half using a fishing line or cheese cutter and can be stuck on top of a bowl of ramen or other partially soup-like food. This was very close. Yolk was probably a bit too runny for these eggs to be cut in half for a ramen-like dressing. I would go to 7 minutes in a boil before hitting the icebath. If 7 minutes results in any chalkiness of the outer portion of the yolk, I'd go 6 minutes on boil, remove from heat for 1 minute, then ice bath.

Taste of the Old Country

2009-01-30T23:20:00.000-08:00

Some notes on my Japanese biscotti making experience...

Family loved them. Biscotti appealed more to the family than the chocolate chip cookies or pumpkin pie that was made in the past. Explanation was that they were not sweet, or very sweet. Still don't understand the way Japanese people measure sweetness. There is plenty of cake out their that they pay crazy prices for and the japanese sweets are the sweetest things on earth. As far as cookies go, sweet is bad.

Tasting notes. I did a few things differently because I was not in my kitchen. First, I used almond extract because there is no anise in Japan and I thought almond would go better with Japanese people. Not the original taste, definitely more suited for tea or milk than coffee or red wine.

Second, the walnuts in the house were store-bought chopped. Not hand-chopped. Size of the walnuts were smaller overall than my typical preparation. I think they tasted better this way. The oils from the walnuts were better able to get into the cookie. But I also like enormous pieces of nuts in my biscotti. Solution: Use whole or halved nuts plus some pulverized dust in a food processor. Note the size of the pieces as well as texture of the crumb. Light, uniform (see item 4 below after reading item 3)

Third, I had no access to a broiler and instead of using the Grandpa method of 1 minute toasting under the broiler, both sides I did 20 mins in a 300 degree oven after cutting and standing the biscotti up. Much easier, less burns on hands and cookies. Don't know how much this affected the 4th and most important tasting note...

Fluffy? Light? Flaky? Where did this come from? Biscotti are typically pretty tough customers. They are hard, and supposed to be hard. Not rock solid, but a heavy hitting cookie. These were the lightest biscotti I ever ate. Light on the tounge and in the hand. As they were baking, they puffed up more than I have ever seen. Wish I had taken a picture because I was thinking there was no way I was cutting these buggers without them breaking at this height. They looked like bread loaves in the oven. I have to say, these have to be the best I've made. And I'm in Japan. When I go back to the states, I'll have try again. Using a combination of Grandpa toasting style and the conventional. Possible causes of the delightful lightness

FRESH BAKING POWDER. This is obvious but maybe not the entire explaination. I bought baking powder and used it. Was not sitting around and not past expiration.

Usage of shortening rather than butter. Grandpa's recpie has both ways but have only used butter up till today. I don't know enough about baking science to make a call on this one but according to Ochef.com, shortening's higher melting point allows flour and eggs to set and you get less spread and more fluff to your cookie. But this is in the context of chocolate chip cookies, not biscotti, which are formed into loaves, not dropped on a pan, hence spread should not be much of an issue. There is only expansion. Another difference is shortening does not impart a creamy texture, but biscotti are not creamy so on that account, butter is the loser, I should continue with shortening for any non-spreading effect it has.

Final bake at 20 mins in 300 degree oven. This is a wild guess, but maybe the remaining water was able to evaporate in a more orderly fashion this way instead of the Grandpa broil method, leaving a more uniformly dried cookie.

Recipe:
3.5 cups flour plus more for dusting
1/2 cup shortening
3 eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2-3 (depending on taste) TBSP extract
3 tsp baking powder FRESH
1 cup stuff you want in the biscotti (nuts/fruit)

Whip shortening and sugar until creamy. Add eggs 1 by 1 and continue mixing. Add extract. In separate bowl sift flour, baking powder, salt. Form well and add wet into dry. Add nuts and/or fruit Mix to a workable dough. May need to add more flour.
Flour a cutting board and hands, preheat oven to 350. Grease pan or use parchment paper (my new love) Form dough into 3 or 4 loaves of uniform thickness. Bake 25 mins until outside is golden brown.
Remove from oven and cut into desired length, slightly on diagonal is nice. Stand biscotti on baking tray at least 1cm apart. (using metric now in Japan). Bake for 20 more minutes at 300 degrees. Remove, let cool, store outside of fridge in metal tin.

五色納豆そば　(Five flavored Natto Soba)

2009-01-19T02:01:00.000-08:00

Natto and Soba are pretty common together. I've seen recipes online written for a neba-neba creation with natto, okra, and an egg yolk. Mostly written by people longing for a taste of Japan. Until now, never saw such a creation in a soba restaurant but there was one under my feet everyday at Sangenjaya station...my first and last subway stop everyday. It was an excellent soba-ya at that, offering handcut noodles and fresh wasabi. Not the powdered or artificial stuff. They had various soba dishes both hot and cold, including some of my winter favorites...soba served along side a hot broth of tempura a shrimp, chicken, or duck. Soba is too good immerse completely in hot soup and this strikes a good balance between delicious cold soba and a warm soup for winter. But enough of that...I'll be back at this restaurant since I pass it so often. So on to my neba-neba.

So here it is. 5 flavor (but really was 6) natto soba. It was all about cool, slippery, slimy foods that are often eaten in the summer to stay cool. Starting from 11 o clock: mushrooms. Probably honshimeshi. Most disappointing part of the dish. Seems like they were either boiled and steamed beyond flavor retention. It was cool having mushrooms because they are delicious, but they really weren't needed. Peeking out at around 12:15 is okra, sliced. Japanese use it in a lot of things here and it is one of the well known neba-neba foods. There was just enough to be noticable, but not overwealming. Usually its not one of my favorite vegetables but it was there for the theme.On to the good parts. Located at center and 6 is a soft-boiled egg and grated nagaimo (tororo). Yolk was not raw, slightly thickened. Japanese sure can do eggs well. They know how to change the time and temperature to get the yolk and white proteins to react in the correct way for different textures and flavors. Nagaimo is a potato that when grated, produces a cool, white, slime. This may be tough to get in the states...both the potato and proper grater. Flavor pretty neutral, slightly earthy. Close ups of both below.

Ah..natto, and a beautiful little okra in the corner. Well, natto is natto, king of neba-neba. I tasted each bit seperately than mixed together. Easier said than done because every ingredient was sticky and the soba was pretty long. The mixture was not homogenous by any means. So I got many different ratios of flavors as I was eating. The tororo sort of globbed with the shredded nori which wasn't cool but I think unavoidable. This is not a pretty dish at all. Natto was hardest to eat because it didnt stick to the soba too well as I picked it up and dipped it in the tsuyu that was provided in the style of cold soba. What set the restaurant apart in my mind was the quality of hte tsuyu and the wasabi provided with the soba. Tsuyu was complex, not to sweet or salty. What came out was smoky. Lots of dashi and katsuobushi were used. Fresh wasabi does not kill you like the powdered stuff does and is not a very bright green. The color was what first led me to think it was fresh instead of powedered. It's spicy and tastes like wasabi, but doesnt leave you dying. After the lunch, I got a pot of soba yu or hot soba water to mix with the remainder of the tsuyu and any neba neba items that dropped in the pot. Didn't need all that much because the tsuyu itself was not overpowering.
All mixed together
When you put some of my favorite Japanese things together, soba, egg, natto, tororo together in one dish it has to be good. This is a must do at home and I can't wait to see my friends and parents squrim. Soba is such a fun and delicious food...healthy too. Probably hte best carb you can get easily in Japan. It's sweet and early and as long as you dont have it sit warm in soup the texture is amazing. Udon is so so, but I have found some good spots. Ramen...well, everyone likes ramen. But soba is king. Simple, delicious, versatile.

Mar-De Napoli

2009-01-04T01:08:00.000-08:00

It took me more than 3 months to get to one, but I finally hit one of the 3 Vera Pizza Napolitana pizzarias in my area. This one was Mar-De Napoli in the Yoga section of Setagaya-ku. It is the 239th certified Vera Pizza Napolitana Pizzaria in the wor ld and the first one that I've gone to...period. Never looked for one in the States and the ones in Italy are all wonderful so don't count.

Website its got a few branches, but this Yoga branch is the cerified one.

Went the the family and two family friends so that made us 8 people which called for a lot of food. By car, took about 10 mins. By train I would guess 15-20. There was more than pizza, but I'm just going to focus on that. Most of the pizza menu consisted of Italian-style pizzas but a few Japanese-style toppings snuck in. Host mother was all over one of them and ordered two unfortunetately. There were some salads and pastas ordered as well. The spaghetti carbonara was excellent, but a little lacking in eggs. They used a different type of bacon that was not pancetta that gave the dish a very smoky, but not a bad flavor.

So now the pizza. This sign was in front of the pizzaria. Rough translation "The main branch of Pizzaria Mar-de Napoli in Setagaya has been chosen as the 239th Vera Pizza Napolitana in the World." Let's see how many more of these seals I can take pictures of before returning to America. Needless to say, I am very excited at this point.
Here's the front of the store. Looks legit to me.....

This is a lunch deal if I've ever seen one. 5 courses in including a pizza course for 1600 yen. Next time I would go for one but I was after pizza and host mother gladly ordered 5 on a bunch of pasta and salad. It really tasted like being back in America as far as the pizza, pasta, and salad went. There were also two gratins that were rice based and japanese influenced. Kind of a cheesy seafood mess baked on rice. Tasted good, but not what I was after.

The oven. Wood buring, lots of capacity. Most pizza I saw in it were two pies (individual size) but could handle more. Love the tile on the outside. I really doubt this beauty was Made in Japan.
While we were waiting for about 20 mins to get a table (Good sign) there was one little Japanese guy occasionally assisted by a woman making pizzas. At bit strange to see a Japanese guy doing this. They had a nice set up. Everything laid out, organized on a marble table. Flour bucket on the side and rack after rack of resting dough. Menu

The technique was incredible. THey had the marble counter to shape the pizzas properly on the table top, but also did a crazy mid-air sideways roll at the end. Incredibly fast, making the roundest pizzas I've ever seen. Now there is no rule against slightly oblong pizzas in Vera Pizza like there is as far as oven temperature and ingredients, but seeing perfect circle after perfect circle was amazing. Take a look at the videos. The crust was very very thin. Also, they left about an inch and a half of uncovered crust on the edges.
It's dark, but you can see the wood and saw dust occasionally added. Yes, sawdust. Little smoky flavor in there.
Fire was a bit low I think. It got the pizzas cooked quick enough, but if you see the firing video, the pizza had to be moved and rotated by hand very close to the fire. You must turn it, but the manhandling was a bit odd and took time away from making new ones. Had the fire been big enough, only one pizziaolo would have been necessary.
Results...odd firing technique aside this is Vera Pizza. Sauce was naturally sweet and definitely san marzano. Flavored simply. Bit of garlic, oregano. Just a bright red sauce. Mozzarella and basil were fresh. Pizza was incredibly light. Second only to Bafetto in Rome as far as lightness. Definitely need a fork to eat this one. Because the crust was so light an floppy. Texture and flavor were excellent. Tasted like yeast, wheat, smoke, a little heavy on salt in the crust. One thing that was out of balance.
Bubbly goodness.
Thin
This one had gorgonzola, smoked mozzarella, spinach, prosciutto sausage. Everything light. Best part of all the pizzas, as it should be, was the crust.

Wa-fuu (japanese style.) Seafood, mozzarella, green onions touch of cream, some odd mayo/fish egg mix on the bottom. My least favorite, host mother ordered two. She loves the mayo stuff. The toppings arent pretty but check out those bubbles. Now thats pretty. Apparentlt VPN does not certify based on what else the pizzaria makes outside of hte 4 standard VPN pizzas.

Okinawan Food

2008-12-30T14:22:00.000-08:00

Beach scenes plus lots of food in one place...not good for your spring breaking sorority girl, but for a hungry traveler, absolutely perfect.

Okinawa received a ton of influence from other cultures that are not Japanese. It was separate from Japan for many years. Most of its history has it associated as a semi-province of China under the Ryuukyuu kingdom. Japan then came in, then the United States during WWII and the American army still maintains a huge presence on Naha, Okinawa's main city. Throw in the fact that it is a tropical island, the food is very different from mainland Japan. I ate, alot. Not shown here was a 30 dish breakfast that I just gave up on as far as pictures go. Just too many. It was good.

Okinawan sweets. Any restaurant had some form after the meal. The ones on the left are a dark, almost burnt sugar confection. Sugar grows everyone on Okinawa and you can but and taste test these blocks of raw, dark sugar everywhere. Sugar ice pops, raw sugar cane...lots of it around. Right hand side are Chinsukou, a type of biscut made with a ton of butter, some times the dark sugar, but milk, slightly salty and chocolate varieties were also available. Very flaky, beautiful coffee time cracker. Would definitely look for these in America. Surprising elegant for Okinawa's cruder style of food.

Okinawan pork...the Aguu Pig. Host mother went nuts over this stuff. Like most famed Japanese meat, incredibly fatty. I believe this is n uncured, undried bacon portion so mabye comparing fat content isn't fair. What struck me was how white even the lean parts were, not because of fat, just very light flesh. Despite the fat, had a very fresh taste. Tried a bit raw and was probably the best pork I've had. Flavor certainly different than American or other Japanese pork. This went into a nabe with shaved negi (green onions)
Also at the negi nabe place, we got Koimo tempura with green matcha salt. They are fried sweet potatoes on steriods essentially. Can't go wrong with fried sweet potato but I wanted to point out the contrast between the green salt and purple potato. This is what Japanese food is about...color, presentation. The food looks like a painting, art, and also tastes good.
American influence. Taco rice is a staple on most menus and you can buy the stuff as a mix. Spam also came over in the war and the Okinawans have a hawaii-like fascination with it.
Okinawa grows many varieties of beans, not soybeans. As a result, their tofu is from sesame or peanuts. This one is peanuts. Peanut tofu tastes somewhat sweet, like peanut butter but not as overwhelmingly oily or strong. The texture is not like soy tofu. It is a bit stretchy, falling close to mochi for elasticity. It is not easily divided with chopsticks like its soy cousin.
After a long price negotiation, host mother bought this bad boy at the market. Like my own mother, kind hearted by a vicious shopper. Market had some of the strangest seafood I've seen. Reds, blues, orange colors. Most still moving since Okinawa is a major fishing port. I think this market was like the Tsukiji of Okinawa. A feeder for all the restaurants. Now what to do with raw fish when you have no fridge. ..
Bring it upstairs to the restaurant that you know (more host mother connections) and turn half into a soup and half into a grilled dish. This "Ebi" (pacific lobster) is all tail meat with the miso (brain and stuff). From the standpoint of a Japanese person, the best you can get. Most americans wont argue with te tail portion either. For claw people...better stick with the atlantic. Meat was incredibly firm. Freshest lobster/shrip I've eaten.
This is my new favorite vegetable...gouya. A bitter, lumpy, green squash that looks sort of like a misshapen cucumber. The preparation is called Gouya Champaru and is Goya sliced thin sauteed with egg, pork, tofu. Sometimes fish is substituted for pork. I had it about 4 different times and if done right, all the bitterness goes from the gouya and you are left with a delicous, although somewhat sloppy dish. It stays firm when you cook it, a little crunchy. Hope to find it in the states, this would be a fun and easy dish to make.
Okinawa is tropical and has its share of tropical fruit. Pinapple, passion fruit, mango, papaya were all available, although at extravagant prices (not in season...it is winter after all).
Dragonfruit. Most expensive fruit avaiblable. 1500 yen each. Wnated to try but couldnt justify 1500 yen for a piece of fruit.
Not the first time I saw snake alcohol. Saw about 4 throught the trip. A snake is put in okinawan whiskey until it dies. Then every day you are supposed to drink a little bit. No samples were available.

COSTCO

2008-12-26T06:32:00.000-08:00

Yeah, its here. I've heard it blows away BJs. Actually never been to one in the States but had a good time in the one in Japan. This place was BIG and WIDE, things that you dont see in Tokyo. Everything was efficient of course. To enter the building from the parking deck there is a system of conveyor belts for you and your cart. There were items from all over the world, mostly american and Japanese. It had the feel of BJs and I felt like I was back at home in yorktown heights. They do TVs, tires, the usual. Because its Japan they sold tremendous amounts of booze at cheap prices. Beer, wine, as well as hard stuff. The seafood section was also tremendous. One of the big hits in Japan are rotissere chickens. They cost twice as much as in America but are so good. I was happy that host mother agreed and grabbed two for dinner.

You don't see these bad boys in American Costco. If you think about it, Japan is a heck of a lot closer to King Crab territory than NY.
Christmas Cakes
HUGE wine selection

Bakery section looking the same
Imported booze. Hope prices are visable. The bottom row holds my favorite gin and vodka to date. The gin is recognizable, vodka is a polish import that Max brought back from his time in Poland. It's all over Japan for some reason and dirt cheap.
Welcome to a wholesaler. Same look.
Conveyor belt
At the end of the line there was an ice cream that came with a strong recommendation: hokkaido cream. Hokkaido is the far north island of Japan and is known for its food, especially milk products. There is a special raw milk caramel that comes from hokkaido, as well as butter. This ice cream fell into the same category. It was just vanilla flavored, no other choices but probably didn't need the vanilla flavor to be the best soft, custard style ice cream I've had. I don't know the butterfat content and don't want to but it was worth whatever it was. Ice CREAM. Sugar was kept pretty low and you could taste and feel the raw cream and butterfat that makes this so good. I would love to just a plain, milk flavored ice cream in this style. The cup I had cost 200 yen, putting it as probably the cheapest calorie per yen food in the world. Anyone who gets the 300 yen cup has a death wish. It's that good. Japanese have a word for such food...yabai.

Christmas Cruise

2008-12-26T02:53:00.001-08:00

So we boarded a boat. 4 courses, red and white wine options. The meal called for both. First two courses went white, main course went red. Intersting combination of stuff. The first and last dishes were very spring, light, fruity dishes. The second dish was somewhere inbetween, a seafood cake, heavy on the seafood, light on the cake, and sauteed mushrooms. The third dish was definitely wintery, with roasted and stewed items in red wine sauce. The whole meal seemed to have a french influence, the chef probably trained there.

Place settings...they made the napkins look like boots. Pretty sweet. Don't know how they did that but they were wrapped tight and looked like it took a while. We used all the utensils on the table so we did lots of eating. My kind of meal.
Course 1: Cold Plate
Shrimp, scallops, asparagus, prosciutto (parma). The whitish sauce on the top and bottom is a yuzu mayonaise. I don't go for mayo but I loved this one. I don't know if they made it completely in house or not, but the yuzu flavor did not come from a jar. Tasted they used just the skin of the yuzu, no juice in there. Yuzu tastes somewhere between a lemon and grapefruit, tart, definitely not sweet, but also definately not overpowering. Having that in the mayo tempered the nasty, mouth and gut covering flavor subsititue and made a very nice sauce. The yuzu worked with everything but the Prosciutto, that was best left alone. Scallop was raw, a little ginger, and very sweet. Scallops have become my favorite shellfish at this point. Can't wait for hte spring...supposedly they are best then. The dish was light, not wintery at all, but niether was the weather.
Second Course: A seafood cake with sauteed mushrooms, lemony sauce. Seafood cake sounds creepy and probably doesn't do the dish justice but I am translating from Japanese. It was some type of white fish, not caked, more assembled than anything else. There was something holding the chunks of meat together but it was not very bready at all. As for the mushrooms, they were not sauteed in butter which was odd, probably just oil, garlic, lemon. Fish and shrooms aren't a common combination but because both parts of the dish were done well, the dish worked. The menu was clear to point out that these were champagnon mushrooms, which is just your ordinary mushroom so I dont know why they did that. They must have gotten some special ones or used the name to cover up a Japanese variety. Probably sounded great to Japanese to get some french 'shrooms but just about everything is more excitiing than a champagnon.

Main Course: Roasted water fowl, deer meat and potato stuffed onion, some kind of seaweed that was fun to eat.
Second time I ran into this type of bird that I don't know. First time was as an appetizer with the fugu meal. It goes down like steak, all red meat. I would say osterich but they don't have that here. It is very lean all the way through but has about an 8th of an inch uniform fat cap on it. The meat is great, wish I knew what this was. It is not goose, duck, or pheasant...looked all those up.
This was a winner. An onion stuffed with deer meat and potato. Really solid winter dish and I love the idea. I would change up the onion a bit though. Seems like it was boiled or steamed first to get the onion flexible, then wrapped around a seperately cooked meat mixture, then served. I'd find a way to bring the ingredients together more and get some color on that onion. Inside was finely shreaded meat, braised for a while, and a mashed potato mixture. Potato was light on butter and milk, may have just been plain when it was cooked with the deer meat.
Seaweed I think...only way to get those bubbles. I don't think there is an earth plant that grows naturally or that can be prepared in that way. It was bubbly. Flavor was light and clear. Just interesting food item.
Dessert: Vanilla and berry ice cream with a tart cherry sauce. I'm not big on desserts so I don't have much to say. Tart sauce and creamy vanilla worked well. Japanese know balance in their food. I was talking to host sister about different desserts and how the Japanese react to sweet things differently than Americans. Pretty interesting that we have different conceptions of sweet that I don't understand yet. For example, I had my little bro try banana and peanut butter together. He thought it was horrible, too sweet. But this is the same kid that sucks down mochi covered in Sugary syrup and azuki sweet beans. Host sister is the same way, loves anko which is probably the sweetest thing I've ever tasted. Can't stomach it. They also werent big on the pumpkin pie I made with the other host student which wasnt sweet at all. Other than aquired tastes and all that, she explained it in terms of balance. When you eat sweet mochi or anko, you drink a green tea that is slightly bitter. American sweet does not have that balance...like cookies, cake, etc. I still don't get the banana peanut butter aversion since that is the best combination in the world but balance makes sense. Back to dessert, this was balanced.

Kaiseki Ryouri (会席料理）

2008-12-14T23:56:00.000-08:00

Some meals are special. There is a lot of delicious food out there that fit in countless categories. I've eaten many many good things but there are a few meals that stand out. There was a meal I ate in Rome off Piazza Novona that I won't forget. The night I ate at Morimoto's in NYC was another one. Kaiseki Ryouri in Atami falls into that category. It embodied all that I've learned about Japanese cuisine so far. This is one of note and I hope there are many more ahead.

So a little background about Kaiseki...It is a very traditional and elegant way of Japanese cooking and eating. A variety (typically 7 or more) small courses are prepared and presented one by one. Fresh, local, seasonal ingredients are used. Preparation varies from course to course. There are grilled items, steamed items, stewed items, raw items, warm, cold, hot, all presented to look beautiful and give the eater a variety of tastes and textures so their palate doesn't get stale eating a big plate of the same thing. Dishes are typically decorated to resemble nature. So we begin.

First course: Kabocha (Pumpkin/Butternut Squash-type) chawanmushi.
Chawanmushi is a steamed egg custard. It's not a solid custard because it has some other kind of liquid with it. The regular version just has dashi broth and eggs, so it tends to run after you start eating it. This one was squashed based and probably just had egg yolks so it was sweet and rich. The liquid did not separate as easily which was a bit nicer. On top is a sweet Chinese fruit and there were also pieces of squash in the bottom of the dish. This was an appetizer in every sense of the world. Just big enough to get an appetite going for the next dish ahead...

Second course: Sashimi, 3 ways. From here on, all the courses came with keigo-laced instructions and descriptions from the server. After picking out the nouns and verbs from "Would you please allow me to introduce to you...I think" mess that is keigo, I figured this out...

3 types of sashimi here: Maguro (lean tuna) Hamachi (Yellowtail tuna) Agi (under the carrot, small fish) Flavors incredibly clean and fresh. I wish there was some more contrast presented in types of fish, the one fault in the whole meal. The Aji contrasted but the Hamachi and Maguro were much to similar to eachother...lean meat from the tuna family. The Agi was a bit different and sprinkled with some green onion. I enjoyed that one alot. Also look at the flowers and leaves carved from vegetables, totally edible.

Also on the sashimi plate was this salad of white tuna wrapped around a thin slice of cucumber. We were actually instructed to eat this first. Then finish with the Above sashimi.This one was interesting, the second sashimi portion on the palte. It was a cooked shrimp in two halves in a connsome and fish egg jelly. The bottom of the cup was filled with a type of white soy product. Not firm like tofu, not a jelly, a bit more stretchy than a pudding. The tail half of the shrimp was shrimp, but the carpace portion, legs, head, and all were deep fried and lightly sweetened by the bath it was sitting in. It was cruncy, briny, and sweet at the same time.

Clockwise from top is Aji, Hamachi, Maguro
Clockwise from top: Gaijin, sashimi plate, beer, chopsticks. Where's waldo?

Third Course: Soup (not miso) Citrus flavored broth. The Japanese use lemon or yuzu rind often in soup that is not miso based. Soup is a major part of Japanese cusine and is eaten with all dinners, sometimes twice as in this case. White miso is the staple accompanyment with the maincourse. This is a course on its own. In the soup was a piece of Tamago-dofu, tofu made with an egg base, a Japanese bitter green, and chicken meatball. The soup was citrusy and salty but balanced. It seemed like the chicken meatball was cooked by steam right in the bowl. These bowls come covered and the guest opens it up. Not sure if its just to keep it warm or the actual preparation. Course four: This is Aji, a very local ingredient. It was just salted and grilled, served with lemon. Fish was not served right off the grill, it cooled a bit before it was served. It's a white, slightly oily, not that flaky fish. Much more interesting than flounder, we took this one apart ourselves. We were also reminded that the best meat is the cheeks and inside the head. I don't disagree. This was the oiliest, most tender part.

Course five: Nimono (stewed preparation) This was like a mini sukiyaki, no meat. Inside the pot were hoshimeiji mushrooms , green onions, and cabbage. You remove the veggies and dunk them in the soy sauce, chive, spiced daikon mixture at right. Out of all the courses, this was the least delicous, but still the best sukiyaki I've had. Vegetables were tender and the broth was flavored with dashi and a bit of soy sauce and sake.
Sixth (and best) Seafood stewed/grilled course. Three small portions. This one, a conch concoction, was grilled in its own shell. The base had rocks and a sterno and was flaming when it was brought to the table. The top was capped when it came out and we were instructed to leave it for a bit. It was worth the wait. It tasted like the ocean. Inside were pieces of tender conch, a piece of mushroom (shiitake) and some greens. The broth picked up the flavor of the ocean, salty and slightly mineral. After scouring out all the pieces I drank every last drop. There was also a little esgargot inside along with the bigger pieces of conch. Completely different flavor, first time I had anything like it.
Yaki-enoki. Grilled mushrooms with some of the same bitter green. Grilled mushrooms are always excellent. They tasted like steak they were so well cooked.
Here is the set of three of the grilled items. The conch still has the cap on when I took this one. The long plate has a piece of grilled fish called カレー。Don't know the name in English. It was just an accompanyment to the first two. This grilled fish was served chilled in a ponzu sauce.
７: A grilled (at the table) set. This is a metal plate with a big sterno underneath and some type of leaf. On top of the leaf are mushrooms, tofu, rice, thin slices of beef, and a miso mixture. This was all cooked together for a few minutes on the plate, then we mixed it all and ate it from a separate plate. Whatever was in the miso mixture was some of the best seasoning I've ever tasted. The beef was not overwealmingly marbled so it actually suited my American tastes a little better. As opposed to the 6th plate, this was very much a land course. Rice, mushrooms, beef, soy.

Shiro Miso soup. A must with every main course, Japanese custom. This one was very elegant for miso soup. The white object was a very light soy biscut. Iniside the soup were green onions and a type of stringy green seaweed.
Tsukemono with the main plate.
Dessert was a mango cream (more like a blended fruit compote) and fresh fruit. This was chilled, very simple. The mango cream tasted like mangos, not cream or butterfat so after a pretty long dinner went down easily and didn't leave me feeling like I had to go for a jog. This was really a fresh fruit dessert in disguise. Just to show how good the chef was in planning the meal, take a look at the color of the mango cream and the red fruit on top. Same design and texture as the first course. I really liked that.

This was so Japanese and wonderful. Everything was fresh and clean. Nothing was overly seasoned, sweeted salty, greasy, fried, all of the things that make food taste good. It was a clean delicious. Balanced. Looking at the food was almost as satisfying as eating it. There was a range of textures and temperatures so that you could look forward to each course. American/French high cuisine could learn something from this. Cream, foie gras, caviar is not needed to hit the top of the food world.

Okay, now they have everything

2008-12-08T05:29:00.001-08:00

My one food gripe in Japan is that they don't have enough cheese. I got corrected today. The ICC was doing a french week and today was a french cheese tasting. They brought in a Japanese authority on French cheese who owned her own food import company. I figured it would be alright, get a few shavings of cheese and leave. What I didn't realize was that they were going to go all out. It was incredibly well done and professional. There was a presentation on cheese making and tasting, then 7 types of cheese were portioned out for 6 people. Our "Cheese Sensei" was fluent in both French and cheese and guided us as we progressed through the 7 item cheese plate. Everyone got very sizable portions, probably an ounce or more per type which is more than anyone could expect for 300 yen. In addition to the cheese, there was crusty bread, delicious dried fruit (including a very natural raisin..still on the stem), walnuts, and and water crackers to use with the cheeses and to cleanse palate between them. The cheeses progressed in the logical order or mildest to strongest then finished with a 70% butterfat monster of a dessert cheese.

Two plates of cheese, later to be divided up. There was Roquefort, Toma(!), Comte, 70% Australian soft sweet cheese with apricots and mango.

Camembert, Epoisee, and an amazing goat cheese that didn't come out right in the katakano so I coudln't recognize the name the name.
TOMA!! After searching for it all through the summer I found the Piedmont cheese that is Italy's answer to brie. Not as soft and runny, not ammonia-tasting at all. Just a deep, creamy flavor. Slightly mushroomy. For some surprising reason it went best with dried mango slices. According to everyone at my table this was the winner. Comte!! Similar to Gruyere but with higher production standards. It was very nutty and the flavor got more intense as you got closer to the rind. It actually tasted like walnuts at some points. Wish I had an apple to eat this with. Or a fondue.
Part of our groups cheese plate. There was another half to this. Our group was 6 people. I was very full. From top: Toma, Comte, Goat, Roquefort
Camembert (Raw milk) Japan doesn't have the same pasteurization laws as America and consequently this was the real stuff. No unpasteurized milk product aged under 60 days can be imported into the US, ruling out AOC Brie and Camembert. This cheese was creamy as ever with no hint of ammonia. You could taste the milk that it came from because it was raw.
Amazing goat cheese. Usually goat cheese has a distinctive tartness but this was more sweet than anything. Like most aged cheeses, the middle was hard and chalky with the outer portion softer and more ripened. Excellent spread on bread.
My camera has a nasty habit of lying to be about how full the battery is. No more pics from here. The Roquefort was very stong and smelled just like a mushroom...thats how ripe it was. By then the fruit and bread were gone. It could have used something to balance its flavor. The Eppoise was an experience in its own, calling for a spoon rather than knife. Another cheese that when alone, isn't going to show its best flavors. I've heard that it is amazing with grapes and I got some commentary from the Cheese Sensei that it is commonly eaten with potatoes.

Thanksgiving (Sort of)

2008-11-28T03:53:00.001-08:00

By coincidence, on Thanksgiving the family had a huge meal with about 6 guests over. We were 14 people...perfect Thanksgiving size. No turkey or mashed potatoes, but instead we had a major nabe meal. Nabe is great. I want to buy one in America. It's a big hot pot of lightly flavored broth that you use to cooking anything you want, right at the table. Plates full of shrimp, oysters, scallops, fish, chicken, beef, veggies, and tofu went in bit by bit until we were all stuffed. Each bit of food was dunked into a variety of dressings. Soy sauce, a creamy sesame dressing, and raw egg was provided. Afterwards we used the broth in the nabe to make a soup. It's such a great community feeling to eat out of this giant hotpot. The family has done the same thing with beef and veggies on a hot plate in the middle of the table. I love the idea and will be bringing back to America.

Thanksgiving Spread

"Carving the Turkey"

Thanks Mom! For some reason the cakes mailed across the Pacific tasted the best.

"Doumo Arigatou!" From the guests

Assault of the Shellfish

2008-11-14T06:40:00.000-08:00

I have to repeat the fact that my host family is ridiculous. I think I had the fortune of getting placed with the most eccentric family possible and I'm loving every minute of it. It's such a nice surprise when you get home at 5:30 and at 6:00 you get the surprise "Yuugohan...saki ni ikkou!" an hour before you expect to eat. That usually means there is some ridiculous meal in store for you at some restaurant. The best part is the amusement the family gets when the gaijin downs some strange type of animal part, smiles, and says "oishii" (delicious). In the twenty years they have been hosting internationals, I'm the only one that likes raw eggs, uni, and natto. Host father cant believe the only thing I don't like is Mayo.

We went to a sushi restaurant that is famous for its crab and shellfish. Crabs are brought in live everyday and cooked on the spot...whole. King Crab legs...no way, we get the whole sucker. All of the crab was caught off the coast of Hokkaido, which makes sense because thats relatively close to Alaska for all you "Dangerous Catch" watchers. On top of a King Crab and some other smaller crab, we also got shrimp, uni, and a sashimi platter. The sashimi platter was kind of dull, this looked like a sushi-ya on the outside but really was a shellfish restaurant. The shrimp were the best I ever had. They were melt in your mouth good and since they had the heads on I was instructed to make sure to suck out all the brains and organs which I gladly did. They tasted briny, different, but delicious. Japanese people love shellfish organs. THe "miso" or brain of the crab was divided up. THe second to last picture is my portion of the crab brain. It had the same flavor as the shrimp. For an American, it was definitely an odd flavor, but I can see how the Japanese love it. I'll probably grow used to it in time. The shellfish was served with a mixture of rice wine vinegar, mirin, and sugar. (see background of first picture) Uni was probably the only thing that did not come into the restaurant still kicking but everything else absoultely was. Tremendous seafood meal that proves that you don't need to serve everything with butter to taste good.

Random Food for Thought

2008-10-22T03:28:00.000-07:00

None of this is from a particular day or event. Just some cool stuff I've run into.

This beauty is a grated white yam that was part of breakfast at Yamanako-ko. It is grated raw and used more for its texture and temperature than flavor. Host father suggested putting your rice/barley mixture in here. Because its semi-liquid, its hard to eat alone. The texture is described as "neba-neba." Anything that leaves strings when you lift it up qualifies as "neba-neba." Natto, konbu, raw egg, and this yam are all neba-neba.
Also at Yamanako-ko, we stopped for afternoon tea in the music box museum. This is the most interesting way I've seen tea served. It was a good, very good, black tea served inside a glass teapot with fruit. The fruit was steeping as long as tea and sweetened it, but not too much. After the tea, you got plates of fresh whipped cream for the warmed fruit.
Tomato booze at Yokohama. Souchou is the distilled spirit of choice in Japan, ranging from 20-40% ABV. Usually its made from grain or potatoes. Sweet potato is also popular. This is the first time I saw tomato.
Black tsukemono beans purchased at Yamanako-ko. They are about an inch long. Never saw anything like it.

The family doesn't have an oven. It's more of a giant microwave. Very few families have ovens as we know it. What they do have, however, located under the gas range, is a mini-salamander. This is what they use to grill fish, chicken wings, you name it. The thing kicks too. Its not much different than the ones in restaurants, just smaller. I wish they would design this for American ranges. You can see the sanma in this one from a few weeks ago.

Eggs

2008-10-18T05:11:00.000-07:00

The eggs in Japan are magical. I don't think it is the product itself, but how the Japanese cook them. Judging by how a raw egg comes out of its shell (and into my waiting rice bowl) I don't think they are any better or fresher than a supermarket egg in the USA. A farmstand egg if given a chance probably will blow a Japanese egg away. I wrote about the hanjuku preparation before of the onsen-tamago and even the cafeteria egg, with a slightly cooked white and reasonably firm yolk. These are the eggs they put on hamburgers and serve as a side with a little yuzu and soy sauce. I think today I realized there is an even better way to cook an egg.

This preparation is called ni-tamago. It's the egg you saw in my ramen bowl in a previous post. I didn't realize it then, maybe because I was too exited about eating my first bowl of noodles in Japan, but the ni-tamago is king in that bowl of ramen, or bowl of anything. A ni-tamago has a fully cooked white but a barely cooked yolk. The yolk is mushy and even runny, kind of the opposite of onsen-tamago. Also, the egg is cool, probably a few degrees below room temperature but the time the bowl gets to you. The outside is slightly brown and tastes like a sweet soy sauce marinade was applied. Taste and texture (again, Japanese and texture) together, cool, sweet, tongue-covering egg in a bowl of hot, steaming ramen was new sensation that was unbelieveably good. Too bad you only get two halves of egg. I tried to solve the problem by cutting the egg in quarters to double my fun. A few nights ago I had a ni-tamago in a bowl of eggplant, pumpkin, and mushroom curry soup. The cool egg with the hot and spicy curry was even better than with the ramen. This curry was outstanding, halves of japanese eggplant roasted very tender with the skins scored. This served two purposes; make the eggplant easier to eat and helped catch the curried broth. There where two hunks, yes, hunks, of mushrooms. Like still on the stalk. Maiitake and Honshimeiji. They were so strongly flavored that they were able to hold up to the spiciness of the curry. Here is a recipe I found for ni-tamago.

Subway

2008-10-13T23:32:00.001-07:00

Woah...Never would see this choice in the USA. Unfortunately there are no 500yen 30cm subs.
Yes, there is a Mushroom and Meatball sub. Yes, you do get real honshimeiji mushrooms with your sub.
Can I have a 15cm shrimp and avocado on honey oat please? Don't forget the mayo.

I don't know what Cheese-Roasted Chicken is but it sounds a bit like Chicken-Fried Steak and just as scary.

Also the Herb Dog is questionable

Food for Thought

2008-10-13T23:17:00.000-07:00

I go to a college. There are cafeterias. So how does a Japanese university cafeteria compare...

As a note, I eat here when I have a 40 minute lunch break, otherwise its always out because the cafeteria is good, but not goooood.

There are two floors, each with about 10 main offerings and 5 side dishes. Food is Japanese, or japanese take on American stuff. There are various udon bowls, chazuke (rice with green tea and some other stuff), a certain type of fish, sanma, is seasonal right now and you can get your chazuke with sanma meatballs or even a whole broiled sanma for yourself. There is terryaki chicken with mayo (the japanese thing to do). Fried pork cutlet curry (very japanese). Hamburgers are popular but don't come with buns. Hamburgers in Japan come with spaghetti and a soft-boiled egg and soy sauce. I gotta try the egg on an american style burger. Eggs are so awesome here. Side dishes range from western salad, to a half-boiled egg, roasted squash or sweet potato, various tofu preparations, etc. You can feed yourself pretty well for around five dollars. Tea is self serve in the dining area. This tea out of a vending machine is better than any green tea I've had in America outsie of a Japanese restuarant. Quite amazing. I've said it before, but want to reinforce that GREEN tea here is GREEN. It's not supposed to be oxidized like English teas. It should taste green and vegatative. Everything I've had blew Lafayette's cafeteria away. So long as you stay away from the curry rice and fried pork cutlet, it doesn't leave you feeling gross when you walk away. Here are some picks of sweet potato, chilled half-boiled egg, and the soup with sanma meatballs.

Few items of note

2008-10-05T04:44:00.000-07:00

1. Grapes-My host family loves grapes. They buy them by the case and we eat them with every meal. 2 kinds, big red globe grapes and ordinary looking green ones. Semi-seedless. Both kinds blow our grapes away. Our grapes taste like water. These taste like grapes and if you are lucky, wine. The skin is a bit thicker and my family sucks the grapes out of the skin but I munch on the whole thing because the skin has good flavor on the red ones. The middles slide out of the skin like jelly. They are clear and cool and taste like fruit.

2. Mushrooms (shitake) Best ever found in ordinary supermarket. Everything a mushroom should be. Japanese came up with "umami" and no surprise what are ordinary cooking mushrooms embody the umami goodness that should be in every mushroom.

3. Tako (octopus). Host mother bought an octupus leg for sashimi. (I got to slice it!) It was so delicious that I think it came off of the octupus right there in the market. It was slightly salty on its own and just needed a dab of soy sauce and wasabi. Octopus in america is more a textural affair, for better or for worse, unless it is seasoned, but it had actual flavor on its own tonight. It tasted eerily like a roasted pork chop. Meaty, tender, little salty, but had a slight crunch at the end since it is a mollusk.

A funny thing happened on the way to Akihabara...

2008-10-04T14:56:00.000-07:00

I wanted to go to Akihabara today and had to take a subway to Shibuya (major station) and then transfer to a train. While transferring, I ran into food. It seems like every major station has a major department store built into it, and in Japan major department stores mean that the basement has a grocery store and tons of brilliant pre-prepared food. I haven't been in a Japanese grocery store yet that has not been impeccably clean and magnificently laid out, offering the Asian version of a Wegman's selction. There are no monotonous aisles that stretch on forever, but sections of the store that specialize in this and that. The attendants are knowledagble and friendly. I saw more varities of fish today in that store than ever before. There as a whole fish section and a sashimi section, with the fish monger taking care of costumers himself and slicing the fish on the spot for sashimi. Vegetables, mushrooms, fruit, all that blew away American offerings. The Japanese do food better. And that was just the first half.

The prepared section was something out of a movie. The offerings, quality, and prices were just unreal. There were two bakeries, real bakeries making real bread. Cassa loves, baguettes, big poofy loaves, sweet little pastries, challah, you name it. The ovens were visable behind glass worked by sharply dressed professional bakers in chef garbs. It smelled amazing. I didn't buy any but no doubt this bread would be as good as any in America. There were rows and rows of beautiful cakes, tarts, and pastries. There was a varietal honey stand carring 20 different types, sold prepacked and in bulk. Honey from europe and asia separated by different bee and plant species. The area withe beer, wine, sake, and spirits was just as impressive. A whole row of refridgerators selling imported and domestic beer, stuff you never see in the United States. The wine cellar was in a temperature controlled space and had wines from all over. Prices comparable to US because of no tax. The was a section of sake and japanese spirits as well. Other sections of prepared food were tonkatsu...fried cutlets of pork and chicken, sushi, grilled eel, mochi balls, it went on forever. Pics don't do it justice but here they are.

One thing I did eat was gelato, yes they have gelato too. It's something that needs improvement. Flavor selection was ridicuous. Green tea, azuki bean, pumpkin pudding, black seasame, sweet potato, cream cheese caramel, mint...probably about 20. Pumpkin pudding was disappointing. Really no flavor. The gelato wasnt dense like Italy, it was kind of dry and tasted like it had a cream cheese base. But it sure looked pretty.

Hakone Food

2008-10-02T02:21:00.000-07:00

Late on the post but I have to give the rundown of Hankone's food. Gotta start with the onsen-tamago. Eggs are one of my favorite foods and I eat them close to every day in every way but never this way...cooked in the water of a volcanic spring. I had them two ways. One way, hanjuku, or half-boiled seems to be the more authentic, tastier way. These eggs are cooked at around 70 degrees C for 15 mintues. The result is a soft white, tofu-like, and a semi-hardened yolk. I gotta say they were a spectacular way to cook an egg. I would love to make a dish out of them, cold, with a little ponzu and chopped scallion. I think the soft boiled eggs can be replicated by using an electric skillet set to the appropriate temperature. After 15 minutes, you'll have an onsen-substitute tamago.The key to getting a cooked yolk and soft white, according to internet sources, is cooking at a low temperature. Only one little corner of the hot springs had these, a nice little secret. I was surpised because according to the internet, halfboiled is the true way for onsen tamago. The massive operation that was going on live were hard boiled eggs, cooked around 80 degrees. They came in packs of 5 and the shells were completely black. Still warm too. It was a delicious hard boiled egg but nothing special. The pics I have are of the hard boiled ones only.

One downside to Japanese food is they like sickeningly sweet things (except tea?) We stopped at an old rest stop and got a rice porredge and mochi...rice cakes made from pounded rice flour. They are sticky and sweetened, steamed or grilled. They have the stickyness and elasticity of bubble gum but are edible and dissolve after a few good chews. Japanese love these things. Everyone in the family is nuts about them. The three you see here are soy sauce, sweetened sesame seeds, and some kind of sweet bean flavored. They are edible, but the amount of sugar in them and on them gave me a sugar crash and nasty night. I just can't take that much sugar.

Kamakura

2008-09-26T07:44:00.000-07:00

to the Wegman's cheese aisle, but I don't think I've ever been bombarded like this before. Japan just has so much food. Different kinds of food that has different tastes, textures, flavors that I've There have been times where I have been overwhelmed by food, such as the time I walked in never experienced before. For example, last night I tried natto for the first time. This is a fermented soybean product that is sticky, really sticky. It oozes, stinks, and strings all over the place. Japanese either love it or hate it. I don't really know what to think of it because its so different. It's quite fermented, there is a spicyness to it that isn't from pepper. It's whatever fermented chemical happens when soybeans sit for a while. Straight miso has the same flavor and the Japanese love it. On this trip to Kamakura, we walked down a magnificent street with all kinds of shops selling their specialties. Shishoku---Taste tasteSweet potato ice cream. It was wonderful and tasted like a very sweet, roasted sweet potato minus the roast. Japanese sweet potatoes have purple skin and a yellow interior. They were selling this stuff everywhere

Mame-bean/legume products. This store had 300 types. All dried in snack bags. Plum flavored, wasabi flavored, seasame and wakame balls, I bought black soybeans called kuromame. I don't think they were roasted or sweetened but they had a nice deep sweetness to them, relly natural tasting.
Tempura as part of lunch. Best I've had ever. Batter was light and you could taste what was fried. I really never liked it all that much but if its this good all over japan I'm in trouble. 4 pieces-hot pepper, shrimp, lotus root (renkon...great veggie), and sweet potato.
Local specialty-shirasudon. Shirasu are baby sardines. They are on top of rice. Odd, but not all that bad. Probably wouldn't get it again though. Usually I don't run into mind over matter issues but this was one of them. Some soy sauce made me forget most of it though.
Hijikinori. Thick, black, picked seaweed. Probably the best tsukemono I've had. Bought a big bag. Next to it is picked, sweetened, garlic. Also a big bag.

Pickled sardine parts. No way. Who the hell pickles sardine parts?

Onaka ga ipai desu (I am full)

2008-09-24T06:37:00.000-07:00

Today was a good food day...got to eat lunch and dinner out.

But first, salmon jerky that I found at the 7-11. Imagine finding salmon jerky in one of our convenience stores. I love smoked salmon but this stuff was pretty horrible. Guess I should have opted for the dehydrated sardines.

Then lunch with host mother and sister at a local ramen shop. We got the mixed bowl that had ramen, sliced pork, an egg, and delicious bamboo pickles. The japanese pickle everything. I love it. Their pickles are more than just vinegared though, some are done in alcohol, sugar, rotting rice bran, or combination of methods. They can be sour, bitter, sweet, and spicy all at the same time. I'm looking forward to my trip to Kamakura. Supposedly there is a shop that sells 50,000 kinds of pickles and gives samples. The setup of the shop was a bar around the open cooking area. Ramen was constantly going in and out of the water and being topped by whatever you wanted. It was a clean, efficient process. The place was jammed too.

We stopped for coffee and an amazing cafe. The Japanese do cafes the right way, European style. I got a wonderfully rich cappucino, but the best and most surprising part was the stirrer was an authentic stick of Ceylon Cinnamon, true cinnamon different from what is commonly available in America. It had a sweeter taste, not the big bold spicyness we are used to.

Went to a kaitenzushi place in Shinjuku with some friends for dinner. I ate myself silly. I only took a picture of one sushi in particular, a seaweed sushi that was sour and spicy. Not quite sure what it was called but I liked it and had never seen anything like it. Total bill came to 2300 yen for 20 pieces of nigri sushi and a beer. Among the night's victims were scallop, tuna, king salmon, uni, yellowtail, and spanish mackerel. I had wanted to find this place, had read about it only. I looked up some directions from a certain exit in Shinjuku, but there were about 4 South Exits an I just happened to wander in the right direction after making a loop around the station. I was very proud of myself.

I had a nice little espresso with a shot of amaretto after the sushi at the italian cafe next door. (?) I don't think that even New York could match that one.

Food at Miraikan and Onsen

2008-09-23T18:07:00.000-07:00

More on Japanese textures. Two items of note...Tamagodofu (egg tofu) and kohizeri (make coffee)

Tamagodofu was squishy, very squishy, like a very soft jello. Japanese typically use silken tofu of this texture as opposed to the dryer, pressed curd thats used in Chinese cooking. I like the Chinese type better but with the egg in it, Tamagodofu had a pretty good flavor, if you could get over the feeling of eating slugs.

For dessert I got something called kohizeri. It was coffee flavored jello with tapioca balls floating in a vanilla cream. Delicious. It really tasted like a light, sweet, coffee. The cream was pretty thick. You can see one of the little tapioca balls that are used alot in Chinese bubble tea. Again, very odd texture. Firmer than the jello and slightly sticky. I didn't like these as much. We should have coffee jello in the USA. Imagine the jello shots.

Foodie Walk

2008-09-22T01:29:00.000-07:00

I am in love with the street food and I haven't even eaten it yet! Everywhere I look there are bento shops, sushi-ya, udon and soba joints, curry and beer. I made the mistake of eating on campus today and had another run in with Konnyaku pieces in my salad. It wasn't that bad, but I missed out.

Food for the day:
Sakana "set" Bowl of rice topped with fish (snapper?) with salad of eggplant, white beans, konnyaku. Also came with tea, soup, seaweed salad.

Konnyaku-please click to zoom in. I got a good high-res pic of this strange substance. Lunch was alright, but the best part was that I saw on the menu that Waseda has its own brew of beer and they sell it on campus. Our country is screwed up.

On my food walk of shame from Waseda to my station, I saw a sushi place that had great deals under 1000 yen (10 dollars) of sushi and udon. Maybe get a little japanese beer too.
There was an udon shop that smelled heavenly. Udon bowl goes for around 300-400 yen. Next I stopped at a vending machine and got Asahi Fire Black. A little shot of black coffee. The also had Asahi African Black Coffee but thats just not nice. I am getting addicted to vending machines and convience stores. They are just so shiny and tempting with all kinds of new things to try. In the winter I need to get Oden at a convienence store. It's assorted stewed seafood, eggs, and rice balls.

Moral of the story is don't eat on campus, but around it. Next time I'll have a more exciting story but at least I captured the elusive konnyaku on camera.

4 meals today

2008-09-20T17:21:00.000-07:00

Went shopping today with my host mother. I had told her that I liked food and wanted to learn about Japanese cuisine. All she told me was "tabemeno, ikimashou" (Food, lets go). I guess she understands the way I think because in no time we were heading to their supermall, an 8 floor behemoth with 2 grocery stores, a drug store, electronics store, homegoods store, and Starbucks. Yeah, they made it over here.

First grocery store:
Dry goods and bottled drinks. Japanese love dry goods. They had everything pre-packaged, dehydrated, canned, and ready to go. Toast spreads, chocolate, fish crackers, tofu bites, you name it they have it. Of course, everything was in Japanese so I could only decipher a few. Like everything else in this place, the supermarket is spotless, the workers will bend over backwards for you, and is disgustingly efficient. As a side note, for all the rubber stamps, red tape, certifications and departments in the government and education system, it all works. You don't wait on line for everything and everyone you deal with knows what they are doing, which is good since if they didn't the entire city would stop. There are police on every street corner in their little boxes waiting to help you. Wherever there may be extra traffic (enterence to parking deck) they station 2 traffic cops to make sure everything goes smoothly. Back to food. You walk through the grocery store and every aisle has samples. I got some corn on the cob, shabu-shabu, tea candy a gyoza, and spaghetti. The gyoza was the best I ever tasted, the shabu-shabu was spectacular, the corn was corn, the spaghetti sauce almost made me puke. Good thing I'm here to show this country how to do sauce. One of hte many things I like about Japan are the beverages. Everyone has bottled iced green tea and iced coffee, unsweetened. No snapple or frappucino garbage in bottles. O yes! The tea! Holy crap is it good. Hot, cold, green, roasted. I love this stuff and can't get enough of it. The green tea is green and so clean tasting. Even better is the roasted green that tastes a little like coffee.

I hadn't written about food in a while so there was alot to get through. Back on track.
Store 2:
Meat, fruit, dairy, etc. The meat in Japan, the wagyu beef, is ridiculously fatty and marbled. I am not talking about Kobe per say, just ordinary supermarket meat. It looks nothing like the beef in America. It makes American beef look like a celery stick as far as fat content goes. The first night when we ate at the steakhouse I could definitely taste the difference. Very fatty, sometimes not desirably fatty. All the fruit was enormous, figs, apples, and oranges especially. Best thing though were the mushrooms. Japan has mushrooms like you wouldn't believe. There was half an aisle of fresh mushrooms at cheap prices.

My extra meal came from the coveyor belt sushi restaurant set up in this enormous mall. I saw it and couldn't resist plopping myself down and eating myself silly on all the sushi I wanted. Prices ranged from 110 yen to 350 yen for two pieces. AMAZING. Some of the highlights were giant clam (geoduck), salmon, broiled salmon belly, and octopus. The sushi was very generous. Huge hunks and slices of fish. Everything was on the conveyor belt. Sushi on top, wasabi, gari, soy sauce on the bottom along with the tea cups and soy sauce dishes. Tea was in a powdered form on the table and you had your own hot water spigot. So cool.

Dinner was at an okonomiyaki restaurant. It means "cook what you like" and gets its name from the egg-based omelet, but the meal had a lot more. Japanese like many courses at dinner. Started with a seaweed salad that I'm addicted to and soup with some strange substance called "konyaku." Best way to describe it is a firm, gelatin substance with flecks, tasteless. Really don't want to go near it again. From then on, everything was grilled at our own little grill in the table.Then there were potatoes, some strange pouch of stuff. There was "monjayaki," a vegetable mixture in a milk or yogurt base with some pork, flavored with fish roe. It was salty but delicious, especially the burnt bottom. Little burnt pieces are good eats in any cuisine. It was served with a tamarind sauce, similar to Worcestershire. The okonomiyaki had shrimp, squid, eggs, pork, beef, garlic, and peppers in it. After cooking, we put dried, smoked fish flakes, a sweet soy sauce, and nori flakes. Mayo was offered but I refused.

Japanese food tastes different, but whats most apparent is the different textures. Textures range from the sticky natto and konbe (seaweed pickles), to a soft and mushy mochi ball (rice), to that strange, compacted gelatin texture of "konyaku" and "anko" bars. Anko is a sweetened red bean paste. Japanese can take a lot of textures that Westerners would balk at. I have to admit I think some of the textures are pretty nasty and I like everything.

The Queen's Pie

2008-09-12T19:07:00.000-07:00

Oh Margherita!

I did another sesame pie and a Margherita for dinner. Both wowed our dinner guests. The "San Marzano" sauce got quite a few compliments. Other comments were "the crust is so light" "look at those bubbles," etc. There is a definite difference in the extra heat and San Marzano tomatoes. The tomatoes have a milder, earthier taste. The sesame pizza took 3 minutes, the Margherita, 4 minutes. I am sitting here jumping out of my skin the night of my last pizza making for about a year. It's been two years in the making.

Victory is Mine

2008-09-12T08:20:00.000-07:00

My at the buzzer shot, my swan song of pizza, two years in the making, I did it. Real. Good. Authentic. Neapolitan. Pizza. And here are the goods to prove it.

I didn't have the camera right when it came out. I had to eat it hot and fresh, hence the missing pieces.
Bottom, nice irregular char
Check out that bubble
Salute!

You may ask "Where's the sauce?" It's coming later today, I was just to excited about this first true success that I had to post. But first of all, saucy, pizza began as a piece of dough fired at incredible temperatures, topped with olive oil, sesame seeds, salt, and a trace of garlic, which is exactly what this is. Consider this day one in my pizza history because this is how pizza was meant to be.

Here are the specifics:
Dough
3 cups high gluten flour
1 cup and 3 Tbsp cold water
2 Tbsp olive oil (not extra virgin)
1.5 tsp sugar
1 tsp yeast
1/2 tsp salt

Combine in bread machine, set on dough cycle (about 25 minutes kneading in mine)
Remove dough, shape into ball. Spray a large bowl with oil and place dough in bowl to rise. Spray with more oil, cover with plastic, stash in fridge overnight.

2 hours before you make the pizza, punch down dough, form balls according to the size pizza you want. Let them proof covered loosely in plastic outside of the fridge in a warm place.

Shape dough after 2 hours, etc, etc.

Topping consisted of a heavy brushing of very good extra virgin olive oil, light sprinkle of garlic powder, and sesame seeds.

The pizza was baked on a Big Green Egg kamado cooker, loaded with a ton of lump charcoal. The egg was heated to 750 degrees to light the charcoal, then cooled down a bit. I put in the plate setter upright then the grill, then grill extender, then 14 inch pizza stone. I opened up the egg all the way until the walls read 350 degrees and the stone read 600. At this point the egg was belching and smoking. Very hot. The pizza was in for about 3.5 minutes. With an average air temperature reading around 650-700 degrees. The top and bottom cooked evenly and got excellent bubbles and char. When it came out, I spinkled some gray french sea salt on the top.

The pizza was nothing short of exceptional. The crust was bubbly and crispy on the outside and soft on the inside and had a nice chew from the high gluten flour. It held its shape when I have it the salute! (see above). No flop. The flavor of the dough was like wheat and yeast in the best sense. The topings were simple and pure and I couldn't stop eating it. Pizza is about balance and this one was balance. The sesame seeds brought a nice mediterranean flavor (think hummus/tahini) and I can see how that is authentic to the pizza. They are a little nutty, but mostly carry an earthy flavor. Tasting it out of the tin, French Gray salt tasted like...salt. But as a finishing salt it was a much clearer saltiness, not oppressive or overpowering. From the bottom up, this was a pizza. Nothing else I've made came close.

Arthur Avenue, Antonios Trattoria Review

2008-09-11T19:22:00.000-07:00

If I'm in the Bronx, I need pizza. The brick oven place I wanted to try, Zero Otto Nove, was closed so I found a new place called Antonios on Crescent Ave, just behind Arthur Avenue.

The place was nice, only open a year. The ideas were good, menu was great, but execution was poor.

We got two pizzas, Vesuviana (smoked mozzarella and roasted peppers) and Arugulata (Fresh mozzarella, no tomato sauce, topped with arugula, prosciutto di parma, and grated locatelli romano.) The arugula, prosciuto, and locatelli were put on after the pizza was fired in the oven.

Let's start with the good. The pizzas were piping hot. You could see the steam pouring out of the crust when they emerged from the oven. The combinations on the pizza were outstanding. All the pizzas, not just the ones we ordered, matched flavors very well. Our waiter was knowledgeable, a major plus in any restaurant. He gave us some good advice on our pizzas. The tomato sauce on the Vesuviana was nothing short of beautiful. Definitely a San Marzano sauce that I am trying to replicate. It was naturally sweet, not a hint of added sugar or residual acidity. Truely beautiful in its simplicity.

As for the arugulata, the flavors could have come together so much better if the toppings were cooked with the pizza! So frustrating because the concept of the pizza was so damn good. Argh! I don't want a salad on top of pizza bread! I wanted a pizza! I love arugula, my favorite green, but if I wanted the arugula salad I would have ordered it. The toppings were loose, disjointed, out of place. Just imagine the arugula cooking and wilting down into the cheese with some of the bitterness cooking away. The prosciutto would have crisped slightly and rendered some of its fat out into the greens and the dough and it would have all been held together by the melted locatelli. As a salad green I love the bite of arugula, but it is not the center of attention on a pizza. Pizza is about balance and this one was not balanced as it was. The waiter did give me the good tip to top it with some extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. This improved the flavor overall, cooked toppings or uncooked toppings, and no doubt should have been done right out of the oven.

Finally, I've seen it in a few "brick oven" places, but what gives with the crispy crust? (Unless of course it is a grilled pizza but thats a different animal) These places brag about thin and crispy crust. Thin is good, yes, under a light arrangement of toppings, but crust should be puffy, yeasty, chewy, alive with the goodness that comes with well made, freshly baked bread. This crust had no bounce. It was thin, dense and crispy. Not bad at all, but not what I want in my pizza. I don't even understand how crust like that is possible if you use a decent amount of yeast and let the dough proof and I don't plan to find out. I like my poofy, soft, and delicious crust.

Arthur Ave. Pizza Musings

2008-09-11T19:04:00.000-07:00

I took my last hurrah to NYC and the Bronx today. I went with my grandparents, always a good time since they are both Bronx-born. It was odd not coming back home with a huge haul of cheese, meat, olives, oil, etc. I knew I wouldn't have the time to eat it before I leave so I left light, but not quite empty-handed.

My main pickup were two cans of "Bella San Marzano" tomatoes. Here's a nice little discussion about the brand. Here's one can.
Now this was a complete impulse buy for my pizza swan song tomorrow. I saw the words "San Marzano" and jumped on it. I didn't even realize they were cherry tomatoes grown in the area around Mt. Vesuvius where true San Marzanos (plum shaped) grow. Interesting discussion on DOP, non-DOP, and fake San Marzanos on the link above.

I had no gripes about quality. The can was packed with ripe little tomatoes and a thick puree. They made a great, simple pizza sauce. They are more acidic than true San Marzanos but much better than an American brand. Their flavor overall was exceptional. It was earthy, rich, can eat them out of the can.
Pizza sauce for tomorrow:
1 15oz can of tomatoes, blended pretty well
1/2 tsp salt
pinch sugar
1/2 tsp oregano
1 clove minced garlic
a little black pepper.

I didn't cook for too long. True San Marzano sauce is not cooked at all before being put on the pizza and has no garlic.

Tomorrow we shall see how this sauce turns out on the pizza, but I think its quite tasty.

Venison Steaks and Polenta Cakes

2008-09-11T18:49:00.000-07:00

This summer, as with any break, I've done a whole bunch of cooking with Stefan, one of my best friends since elementary school. He's got his eye on the Culinary and I wish him the best of luck. Sometimes I wish I had the guts to drop college and go to the Culinary. It's not conventional, but it is a passion we both share; he chose to follow it.

His neighbor hunts deer, giving us a constant supply of venison. Yes, I do like eating Bambi, especially if he's on the grill. Haven't cooked Thumper yet, but I bet I can find him at Arthur Ave in the Bronx (next post) Unfortunately I forgot the camera so there are no pictures of this one.

We grilled the venison steaks very simply. The meat is incredibly lean and needs a good high flame to get it seared while leaving it rare or medium rare. Any point beyond that and its going to get tough. Stefan took care of the venison, while I worked on the polenta and broccoli rabe, our vegetable that isn't unconventional enough to mention further.

I wanted to emulate a grilled polenta that I had in Italy, soft on the inside, nicely crisped and charred on the outside. In Florence, it was topped with fresh porcini sauteed with butter and herbs. Tonight we opted for some fresh mozzarella from the deli Stefan works in. It's just as good as in the Bronx at Casa di Mozzarella, a place I contend to be the America mozzarella champion. Ideally, we would have had the time to make our own polenta, cool it down in a tray, then cut it to squares for the grill. We didn't have that kind of time so I bought a polenta log (creepy) in the store. That way we could just slice and grill. A few things went wrong here.
1. Polenta log. A mixture of cornmeal and water, maybe some salt, should not be shelf-stable, but thats how its sold. There was some sort of preservative that was definitely tasteable. The polenta was a bit acidic.
2. Stefan's grill crapped out after the venison was done. I couldn't get enough heat for crispy outside, soft inside. Instead the polenta was just warm.
Despite those setbacks, I warmed it on the grill and topped it with a slice of fresh mozzarella and a piece of fresh basil. These things will make everything taste good. The mozzarella still melted nicely and the polenta was more than willing to soak up the cream the melting mozzarella released.

I doubt I will have time before my trip to Japan to use real polenta on a real grill but its something I can keep in mind for next summer.

Vindaloo Lentils

2008-09-08T16:44:00.000-07:00

This is my third curry. The first was a venison vindaloo, second was a eggplant and pumpkin masala. The spice blends from Penzey's Spices are excellent. The vindaloo has a a nice kick, and the garam masala is very warm. Quite a bit of tellicherry peppercorns, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, etc.

Here's the lentils. I added some cabbage too.

Step 1, Lentils
1.5 cups black beluga lentils (dal), rinsed.
Water to cover
1 Bayleaf
1 clove garlic
Pinch salt

Bring to simmer, cook until lentils are al dente. You still want them a little firm. The beauty of the dal is that they are very meaty and hold up well after cooking. A great salad lentil, not for soup.

While thats going...
1 large onion, chopped
2 Tbsp Oil (I used a chili pepper infused macadamia nut oil. Any veggie oil works fine)
1 Cup shredded cabbage
Little bit of tomato (3 plum tomatoes from garden)
Curry paste (2 Tbsp vindaloo curry combined with 2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar)
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tsp grated fresh ginger
Water
Other spices if desired (hot peppers, cinnamon, cumin, black pepper all are in the vindaloo, you can add extra if you like. I went with a little salt, cumin, and cinnamon on top of the curry paste)
1/2 cup strained greek yogurt, room temperature and >5% fat

Saute the onion in a pot with 1 Tbsp of the oil. When slightly browned, add the other Tbsp, paste, garlic, and ginger. Fry until they become aromatic. Add the cabbage and tomato, and about an inch of water on the bottom of the pot. Cook on med-high until cabbage is soft. The lentils should be done around now (40 mins approx). Throw those in with a little of the lentil water if you need it. Remember to discard the garlic and bay leaf. Remove from heat. Stir in the yogurt to make it a little creamy. There should be very little residual liquid at this point. Serve. Should be spicy. Drink water/beer.

Avocado Ice Cream

2008-09-07T19:45:00.001-07:00

Care of Alton Brown

Here you can see it out of the ice cream machine. It took a good while to set...about 20 mins. I was surprised on how much "cold" it needed. Gotta love the green color!

I had avocados in the fridge. They are similar to eggs as far as protein and fat content, making them well suited for ice cream.

1.5 cups whole mik
1 cup light cream
2 avocados, peeled and seeded
1 Tbsp lemon juice
Finely chopped lemon basil (last minute addition to blender)

Blend, chill in fridge, freeze in ice cream machine.

Serve right out of the ice cream machine for soft texture. Put in airtight container and leave in freezer for 2 or 3 hours for a firmer texture. I sprinkled a little coarse sea salt on top after I dished out the ice cream. It was a nice sweet/salty contrast and plays to the flavor of the avocado (think guacamole...sort of). Yes, the ice cream does taste like avocados and it's wonderful :)

Roasted Garlic and Zucchini Ravioli

2008-09-07T19:32:00.000-07:00

I've had some great success with my new pasta machine, a Ferrara PastaQueen.

These zucchini came very spicy (garlic) and flavorful. I would have liked the dough to be a bit denser and chewier. I've been rolling it to the second thinnest setting on the pasta machine but think the third (out of 8) settings would be best for the texture. It will also give me a little more resilience as the pasta cooks...less breakage. I like the half-moon, agnolotti shapes. More filling that way. They turn out like little pillows.

I did these oven-baked because the filling was definitely hardy enough to hold up to a tomato sauce and melted mozzarella.

Pasta (1/2 pound approx)
1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 eggs
1/2 tsp salt
1Tbsp olive oil
1/4 cup cold water

Mix the flour and salt, whisk eggs and olive oil and combine. Add water until the dough comes together. Knead for about 10 minutes on countertop, using extra flour to prevent sticking. Rest for 30 mins, then roll out pasta sheets for ravioli.

Filling:
2 zucchini, roasted at 400 degrees for 1 hour with a little olive oil, salt, pepper.
1/4 cup ricotta (dry)
1 Tbsp butter
1 head garlic, roasted
3 Tbsp grated romano cheese
1/2 cup chopped sundried tomatoes

Blend zucchini and ricotta. Place in cotton dishtowel and squeeze out excess water. THIS WILL REDUCE BY HALF. Its important to squeeze so the pasta dough does not soak through. Mix in the rest of ingredients and fill ravioli in shape you desire. Again, I do half moons.

Review: Excellent. They worked very well oven-baked. The whole wheat added a nice nuttiness and the sundried tomatoes gave the filling a complex texture. I would have liked a little more chew to the dough.

Summer Food

2008-09-07T19:31:00.001-07:00

So I've been negligent...
I cooked a ton this summer but since my camera was still broken after dropping it while photographing spanikopita I haven't kept track of much. My loss because I should have kept a record. I got a new camera so here are two late posts.

Cleaning out the Fridge

2008-05-17T04:47:00.000-07:00

Moving out of the house tomorrow so I had some stuff to get rid of:

Broccoli Rabe (blanched)
1 vidalia onion, sliced thin
fresh chorizo sausage (crappy PA style)
1/2 cup light cream
chicken broth
Sundried tomatoes
1 clove garlic, chopped
Pasta
Parmesan cheese
Spices (Parsley, Thyme, Paprika)

Take the sausage out of the casing and brown with the onions. When just about there add the garlic and sundried tomotoes (drain and rinse). Let that cook for a few more minutes then dump the contents of pan into a collander and let all the excess oil drain out. You really dont want oil when building a sauce. At this point I hope your pasta water is boiling. Throw in your pasta. I threw the brocolli rabe in the pan at this point to warm it up and soak up any fat and flavor. Deglaze the pan with about a cup of chicken broth and a cup of pasta water once the water begins to get starchy. (Pasta water is one of the best ways to add some flavor and thickness to your sauces...especially those to be served with...pasta...) Once the pan is deglazed, its time to add the cream. The best way is take the pan off the heat and let the boil come down. Add the cream slowly and whisk to prevent curdling. It helps if you put the cream in a small pot on top of the stove and keep it below a simmer...warm is perfect. Once the cream sauce is together, add the spices to taste and put the sausage/onion/brocolli rabe mixture back in to cook together for about 2 minutes. While this is cooking, drain the pasta and throw the sauce on top. I used tri-color rotini. Seemed to catch the sauce nicely. If I wasn't cooking for a crowd I would have made this pretty spicy.

Marinara Sauce

2008-03-05T16:08:00.000-08:00

I'm a good italian-american in every sense of the word...except my marinara sauce sucks.
Maybe sucks is too strong, its passable, but sucks in comparison to my dad's, my mom's and my grandpa's and no matter how much I try and watch them I still can't get it right. Their sauce has a spicy, finger-licking, eat-it-with a spoon quality that I can't match. It's the kind of thing you can use to top pasta and call it a night, nothing else needed. The amazing thing is it cooks for very little time. In order for mine to get that same "bite" to it I need to cook it to a gravy with meat for hours, but anything tastes good when cooked with meat for hours.

Made a breakthrough today. I tweaked the recipe a bit and although it has a few more ingredients, I got it to what I want so there.

My quick and tasty marinara sauce:
2 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 large onion
1 large clove garlic
1/4 tsp celery seed (my addition to original recipe)
1 large can whole, peeled tomatoes (imported from italy preferably)
5, count them, 5 no frills, cheap, green olives from a jar (my addition to original)
Basil, pepper, oregano to taste
milk-optional

Chop onion and brown in olive oil. Add celery seed when onion browns on edges, cook for 5 minutes. Slice garlic and add to olive oil for a few more minutes. While all this is cooking slice your green olives. When the onion is brown and garlic is cooked, add the canned tomatoes and olives. Blend using stick blender until slightly chunky. Its okay if there are pieces of tomato and olive floating around, they make nice conversation starters. Simmer for 1/2 hour, add basil, oregano, pepper to taste. In 1/2 I had a sauce that could stand on its own. If your tomatoes were slightly acidic, or you just want to round out the flavor for a bit, add a drop of milk. I use 1% but it really doesn't matter.

This sauce on al dente fettucine makes me smile.

La Campagna-Morristown, NJ

2008-03-04T21:08:00.000-08:00

I met my parents for dinner at an Italian restaurant in Morristown, NJ called La Campagna. It was very nice, a few notches above casual. Prices were high and portions were small, but they tried very hard on quality. I don't think it came through quite enough though.
The bread was delicious, two types of focaccia and then a rustic, hearth baked one that stole the show. Big air bubbles and a crispy crust left no doubt that it was made either at the restaurant or by a local baker who knew what he was doing.
We ordered two appetizers for the three of us and the waiter brought out a small antipasto of Parimiggiano Reggiano, thinly sliced fried zucchini, and bruschetta. The fried zucchini were think little coins, thinner than potato chips. Very lightly breaded and fried to a crisp. They would make a great garnish on anything and were delicious.
Other appetizers were grilled shrimp and asparagus over a baked polenta and a portobello mushroom cap, marinated in something tangy with a nut crush. The shrimp were cooked perfectly, lightly charred, crunchy, and sweet. The polenta was not seasoned much and it allowed the flavor of the cornmeal to come through. Great texture. I need to try making some polenta. The mushroom was very tiny and the two bites of it were nice, but when I think of a portobello I want something substanial.
Three entrees were a cappellini with seafood (lobster, crab, scallops) chicken scarpiello, and my dish, a grilled chicken over warm spinach salad with gorgonzola, shitake mushrooms, and sundried tomatoes. Mine came out a bit odd. I don't care for gorgonzola much and I though it would be crumbled on and I could take it off. Instead, the whole dish was dressed in this gorgonzola and balsamic puree. All in all the dressing did not add anything because the gorgonzola and acidy was overpowering to the more delicate spinach and shitakes. All I tasted was gorgonzola and vinegar. THe seafood dish was the best. Generous lobster claws and tails, a spicy marinara sauce, and perfectly cooked, al dente capellini. I'd stick with the pasta anyday.
I had an espresso to finish out the meal and my dad had a giant slab of ricotta cheesecake. He said it was some of the best he ever had.
I would have preferred a more rustic place, but at least they tried. My dish was by far the worst. For the price, I would not go back.

Flavored Vodka Results

2008-03-01T20:14:00.000-08:00

I made two vodkas so far: ginger and black pepper.
Both recipes infused quickly, within a week.
750ml vodka + either 1Tbsp ginger or 2Tbsp coarsely ground black peppercorns. Give them a shake every day. After a week, strain through a coffee filter.
The ginger made an excellent mixer with pinapple and mango juice plus a few cubes of candied ginger in the bottom.
Black pepper vodka can be a shooter for the bravest souls (although not nearly as bad as a chili pepper infusion I once had. The chemical that makes black pepper hot is less "sticky" than capsaicin so the burn doesn't linger and doesn't travel all the way down.) It also works very well in a bloody mary.

White Bean and Pesto Soup

2008-03-01T19:56:00.000-08:00

Over the winter I was at Alice's Tea Cup in New York City. Excellent little place. Highly recommend the walnut and stilton scone. I got a bowl of this white bean and pesto soup that was very creamy and warming on a cold day. It was a basic, rustic tuscan white bean, blended and served with a dollop of pesto on top. It was great, don't get me wrong, but I wanted more pesto so I came up with this:
56oz White Beans (1 40oz can, 1 16oz)
3c water
2 bay leaves
1 large onion
5 cloves garlic
1c basil leaves
1/3c pine nuts
3 Tbsp olive oil
1/4c grated parmesan cheese
1 Tbsp crushed red pepper flakes
pepper to taste

Roughly chop the onion and brown in olive oil. While this is going, spread pine nuts on your toaster tray and put them in at 350. Give them a few shakes throughout so they get golden brown on all sides. When the onion is almost brown add 4 of the 5 cloves. Cook all together for a few minutes and remove from heat. Drain excess oil into a cup--you'll need this. Add beans, water, bayleaves and get it to a simmer.
Now for the pesto. This pesto recipe is very heavy on the pine nuts because they create like a "pine nut butter" that thickens the soup very nicely. Put the roasted nuts in the food processor and blend till they can't be blended anymore. Gradually add the olive oil in that you saved from the onions and garlic. Add the basil and cheese and pulse until everything is together. This whole mixture goes into your pot of beans along with the black pepper, red pepper, and last clove of garlic. Simmer for 30 mins stirring occasionally. Remove bayleaves. Blend the soup using a stick blender until homogeneous and creamy.

The resulting soup was delicious with a slightly nutty taste to it from the pine nuts. They add a good amount of body. I can't wait to make this over the summer with fresh basil from my garden. I have to say the packaged stuff at Giant was a little disappointing. Serve this hearty soup up with some garlicky, toasted peasant bread and you have a meal that will stick for a while.

I think this is the funniest thing I've read online.

2008-02-13T16:33:00.000-08:00

I was searching for some vodka infusion techniques. I am in college after all. I came up with some good ones that I will post once I give them a try, but I came across these two sites. I laughed my ass off. No skipping lines! Read the whole thing!
Weenie-tini
Pork fat rules?

Panini with Chocolate and Brie

2008-02-13T16:15:00.001-08:00

I need to credit food network, my mom, and the lovely Giada de Laurentiis for this one. Not only can Giada cook, but she is absolutely gorgeous! If I had to pick one chef to be in a foxhole with it would be a tossup between her and Alton Brown.

A few nights ago my mom tells me about this panini Giada is making. Brie, semisweet chocolate chips, and basil (not sweet basil but it may be worth trying). I love all of those things, but together?!? I was skeptical. Brie is great, one of my favorite cheeses, but not so easy on a college budget, especially if its for a more experimental purpose. Luckily, there was a ton left over from a reception I was working after a concert. There was snow and a lot of cancellations, hence lots of cheese left over for us scavengers in the houses close to the PAC. I grabbed some and stashed it in my fridge until I got some good bread and fresh basil.

The recipe (Panini) calls for a panini grill but I don't have such appliance in my kitchen. Instead I used a heavy skillet under medium high heat and applied pressure with a pot filled with cereal bowls. Necessity is the mother of invention. I didn't get grill marks but the bread did brown nicely and everything was all squished together.

The verdict: WOW! Unique taste. Just when you thought brie and chocolate were rich and creamy enough, putting them together gave such a velvety texture. The crunchy bread was a nice contrast. Definitely a repeat. I would use a little less chocolate chips. I never saw Giada make them so perhaps I couldn't eyeball it properly. I figure for each ounce of cheese, use 3 or 4 chocolate chips. I think there was a little too much chocolate for some more subtle and complex flavors to come through. It definitely masked the basil, but here and there through the panini where there was less chocolate per bite, there was a really nice balance. Could try it next with sweet basil as well.
Wish I had my own pictures for this one. Damn camera.

Let the Games Begin

2008-02-13T16:03:00.000-08:00

I really wish I had started this earlier...
I've been wanting to journal my food adventures for some time now, just because I love it so much. It doesn't make any sense to go back the past year and recount what I've done over the past year or so when I started to get serious about food, so I'll start from scratch. Whenever I make/read/eat something of interest, I'll post it here. My camera is broken but once I get a new one expect pictures as well.
I grew up around food and cooking. My Dad owned a plain and simple Italian Steakhouse and everyone I was related to cooked. We are a big Italian family. I guess it spread to me through osmosis. I can proudly say my first solid food after the bottle was one of my Grandma's meatballs. I messed around with cooking and loved doing it, watched the food network, and made some very nice things for a kid my age, but it was really more playing than anything else. Over the past two years I'd say, I got more serious about food and cooking. I started appreciating and creating, rather than just messing around. Currently, I am in an off campus house and have my own kitchen. That gives me two benefits: lots of hungry college friends to try your stuff, and freedom to cook whenever and whatever I want. Plus if the stovetop isnt immaculate I don't need to worry about Mom ripping me a new one. It's a good situation. So while most college kids survive on pizza, peanut butter, and beer, I'll be impulsively putting something crazy together with brie...which leads me to...