Bread and Chocolate

In addition to the pizza lunch below, over the weekend I tried my hand at Michael Laiskonis's "Chocolate Olive Oil". This was my first foray into even the fringes of so-called "molecular cuisine". I am firmly ensconsed in the homey side of the world, and what Wylie Dufresne is doing at WD-50 has little superficial appeal to me.

At the threshold, I've decided that I need to not do food photography with my iphone. It's a wonderful tool, but it really sells my food a little short, compared to all the other pictures floating around on the internet. But moving on to the chocolate olive oil, the finished product was delicious, but I think I made two mistakes.

1. There were small pockets of gummy something in the middle of the individual chocolate packages. I believe they must have been undisolved agar agar, but I'd like to know for sure.

2. I omitted the glucose syrup, which I think is responsible for the relatively matte finish.

Also note, of course, that I hadn't made bread, so I used a crostini instead, and I think that fleur de sel would be better on the chocolate than the sea salt I used. Nonetheless, it was a delightful experiment.

Saturday Lunch, wishing for July

Lunch yesterday was a sort of desperate yearning for July - tomatoes, cold italian style dishes, pizza. Really none of which was at its prime right now. But my pizza is good, the bean dip tasty, and the company, as always, magnificent. Now, when exactly am I going to be able to build a wood fired stove outside, so my pizza hits the next, splinteringly hot, level? Alas for Astoria.

Valomilk! Valomilk! Valomilk!

I've been looking for Sifer's Valomilks (a famous but regional candy) ever since I read Candy Freak two years ago. Today, finally, victory! While I was looking for Agar Agar at Wholefoods Columbus Circle, I ran into a whole display of Valomilks, piled six foot high. I set aside my plans to buy sea salt, grabbed four packages, and ran at a half waddle, half sprint back to my office to crunch into the dribbly, marshmallowy deliciousness. In the first picture, you can see the characteristic leakage of marshmallow filling from the hand filled valomilks, which never achieve the perfect, antiseptic seal of a Reese's peanut butter cup. And in the second, well, you can see why they say, When it runs down your chin, you know it’s a VALOMILK.” .

Ah, Pectin

So, I realize I'm being a smart-ass, but something tickled me about the quote below from an article today in the Wall Street Journal about famed baseball manager Joe Torre:


"There's something in jelly that makes it jelly", says Mr. James, senior baseball operations adviser with the Boston Red Sox. "Without that, it's runny grape juice with a lot of sugar in it".

Umm, well, there is something in jelly, he's right. Joe Torre as the pectin in the Dodgers jelly?

Petits Fours

It turns out that petits fours are extremely difficult to make, at least when you're a) incompetent and b) tired. Or, so I discovered when I made them as part of my fancy-pants valentine's day meal. Also, it is extremely difficult to pipe straight lines of chocolate icing onto a napoleon when your piping bag has ripped, and you're forced to use paper cones instead. Just for reference, since it's not obvious what I made, these are two kinds of truffles (Valrhona chocolate, covered in cocoa and in roasted almonds), and mini-napoleons, the making of which counts as one of the grand debacles of my cooking career to date.




To make up for these, I present some sweets I had on my last visit to Paris, a few weeks ago.

Olive Oil Madeleines

Cannelle & Vanille has made beautiful olive oil madeleines, which she proposes to give away. I don't have much more to say, other than to encourage any readers to compete for them.

Croissants made by Robots

The New York Times reports a croissant made by robots in New York, which supposedly helps make the croissants more tender. Color me unimpressed, but I'll go try them.

Amuses Bouches - Branzino Fumet, chanterelle, and Shrimp

I recently made this amuses bouches for my girlfriend on Valentine's Day. I'm working on a much longer post about the meal, but the idea was to attempt super fancy restaurant food as an experiment. This dish was based on a fumet made of branzino bones, flavored with chanterelle mushrooms (from Oregon) and garnished with a steamed jumbo shrimp.

Should you give your kids alcohol?

Eric Asimov, the New York Times wine columnist, asks whether parents should give their children alcohol at an early age to stave off potential abuse later on.

I don't have much to add to this, other than to say that wine, beer, etc, should obviously be introduced as early as possible just as a matter of common sense, because they're not big deals, and are part (for many people) of civilized life. Why we insist on fetishizing the whole issue is quite beyond me.

UPDATE: Read Michael Ruhlman's post on this, as he struggles with what to do with his 12 year old daughter.

How far would you go

My comment on going out of one's way for a special meal or food at Bitten had been posted as one of the "Comments of the Moment", so I'll just link here.


Being a city person, the question for me is “how far am I willing to walk?” for a particular food. I think there’s a certain charm in allowing oneself to eat anything, no matter how off diet, so long as one walks to get it. So far, my record is 3 miles for a particularly wonderful eclair made in the old way in Paris, but I’m always looking for excuses to beat that effort.

Bread with Chocolate

Michael Laiskonis, pastry chef at the wonderful Le Bernardin (where my girlfriend and I recently had a terrific meal, asks why we Americans don't have a native born combination of bread (and bread defined narrowly, as yeast, and flour and water, rather than a muffin or quickbread) and chocolate. France, he says, has the pain au chocolat, but what is our equivalent?

I would have thought that the obvious answer was the chocolate glazed donut. It is, of course, a bread. A somewhat sweet bread, though made properly no more sweet than a croissant. And, of course, it includes chocolate, and, as far as I know, is basically indigenous in this form to the United States. I realize it is fried, and the focus is on fat, in some sense, rather than bread, but on the other hand, I can think of nothing more primal than fried dough and chocolate.

UPDATE: Incidentally, Michael's recipe for chocolate ganache thickened with agar agar and served with bread looks astonishing. I will try it (and probably fail!).

The ivory tower

Ezra Klein says that meat ought to be more expensive. By which he means, presumably, that the country should move toward more humane husbandry. When pushed on the obvious problem (well, what are people who don't have a ton of money supposed to eat?), his answer is that they ought to eat more vegetables.

Obviously, everyone should eat more vegetables. But for one thing, the post entirely ignores the fact that the wide availability of (admittedly) inferior meat is one of the great advances of the last century. Meat used to all be organic, and free range, and humane, and so on. And it was available to a sliver of mankind, who were physically bigger, stronger, and better developed than the rest. Providing meat to the masses was actually a terrific equalizing accomplishment, and it is surprising that a self-described "progressive" would miss this point in an effort to be au courant with currently trendy food localism.

But let's say Klein and people who agree succeed, and somehow, humane husbandry is imposed across the board, and meat prices soar. Klein says that "other things would be cheaper". How does he know this? And how does he know that the newly deprived will make the choices he'd like them to make about food? While Klein may know that tofu is cheaper than chicken (depends on the tofu, and on the chicken, actually, as with most things, and in any case, is it really obvious that cheap genetically modified, pesticidey, tofu is better than cheap chicken?), chips are cheaper than both. As George Orwell observed in his wonderful "Road to Wigan Pier",

"Would it not be better if they [the poor] spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and whole-meal bread . . . ? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. . . .When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. You want something a little bit tasty. . . . White bread and margarine and sugared tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread and dripping and cold water."

And in any case, while humane beef is all well and good, that movement is all part and parcel with establishing proper agriculture. For someone posturing from Klein's position, all food is too cheap. So under a proper food regime, stripped of subsidies, not only would the grains the poor people are supposed to eat be more expensive (assuming they even knew how to cook them in a tasty way, which I understand from friends who work with food charities in poorer areas is actually a ludicrous supposition) but everything else would too. Milk, cheese, butter, all manner of leaves (Would Klein be cooking "asian asparagus" in February in DC if people ate properly? Umm, no) vegetables, cooking oil.

Now, it might be that the simpler world of less, expensive, food is a better one. We might well be healthier from a fat perspective. Our animals would be happier, and we'd all ingest less pesticides. But it is a much different world than the one we inhabit today, and I suspect it is one people like Klein would not like very much at all.

Morning Flight Scones

I am flying to Washington D.C. in about two hours, and decided to make some scones for the morning's fun. For someone who is so good at bread, I have a surprising amount of trouble with pie crust and its brothers, scones and biscuits. Where is the lift of other scones here? On the other hand, these taste and feel like scones as I've had them in England, so maybe it's everyone else who is screwing them up. I can't shake the feeling, though, that they should have risen higher and more evenly.

Still delicious. The recipe is from the King Arthur book.

Real Fast Food

Here is my comment over at Bittman's place recommending Nigel Slater's "Real Fast Food" (one of the great, underappreciated cookbooks of the last twenty years, in my view):

I think of Nigel Slater’s “Real Fast Food” as a sort of a minimalist for the British taste. Mustardy sardines and kippers on toast, rarebit, potatoes baked and scooped out, and then stuffed again with cream and cheese, pages of sauces for simple, poached, salmon. It’s the food that helped me learn to cook, that fed me in college, and that I turned to as a graduate student. “Real Fast Food” is what I would take with me into a nuclear shelter, faced with cooking tuna forever, but my copy is also dog eared and circled and wrinkled with stray splashes of soy here in the real world too. Slater’s other books are good, but other people take nice pictures too. “Real Fast Food” is a lifesaver.

Starbucks Sandwiches

I said more than a year ago now that "Starbucks' effort to corner some of the breakfast market [through warmed breakfast sandwiches] will fail utterly".

I realize I'm bragging, but it has proceeded to fail utterly.

Schultz already has said he's killing the ballyhooed breakfast sandwiches and says he hasn't ruled out dropping more foods.

UPDATE: I now realize there is a "Save the Starbucks Breakfast Sandwich" website. I should say, amid all this gloating, that they were actually very good sandwiches. Just completely inconsistent with the chain, with no connection to the market, etc, etc.

UPDATE 2: And here is the discussion I had with PG on the comments at Crescat Sententia. Pretty good stuff, I think. We should be hired.

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I had the impression that the pastries at Starbucks were reasonably popular, actually -- at least I've had them several times, whereas I think I've ventured upon a sandwich once and never again. Pastries go with a Starbucks drink, or can be an alternative when you're meeting a coffee addict there and feeding your own sugar jones. I'm not sure whether meatier breakfast food goes with Starbucks coffee; eggs and bacon seem vaguely downmarket. I wouldn't bother making coffee at home, and pastries really are a lot of trouble, but I can fry eggs and bacon with little effort.

Posted by PG at January 11, 2007 04:31 AM
PG - I think the pastries are indeed reasonably popular, but not at breakfast, perhaps. Or not popular enough. As a matter of taste, I think they vary wildly from decent to bad.

As to the second point, I agree with you, but clearly there is a market out there for egg frying with coffee. i.e, Mcdonald's. Where I think Starbucks is going wrong is that they're fiddling with the "do one clean, simple , high margin thing well" model. (let's leave for another day the debate over whether they do that thing well or not). Now they have 5,000 super speed cooking machines eating into their margins. I think that way live starbucks frozen pizzas, and trouble.

Posted by Raffi at January 11, 2007 08:32 AM
Yes, I think the egg/bacon/cheese frying with coffee market is essentially a low margin one, and it doesn't sound like McD's is raising the price of coffee even as it raises the level of quality. So people who are shopping based on price will continue to go to McD's for breakfast. Starbucks essentially is just trying to get the customers it already has for coffee to buy more. The main problem I see is trying to train staff to do more than one thing well. My friends who like coffee claim that at Dunkin Donuts is actually very good, but that it's more trouble than Starbucks because DD doesn't train its staff to focus on coffee, but on serving up donuts.

Posted by PG at January 12, 2007 01:48 AM

Sticky Toffee Pudding

Just a (honest) question about Mark Bittman's "Sticky Toffee Pudding". Aren't most puddings, in the British sense, a) steamed and b) made with suet? I realize that the answer may be that people don't eat suet anymore, and steaming is a waste of time, but I'm just wondering whether we aren't losing something. Or, perhaps, sticky toffee pudding is just named that, and was always baked like a cake.

Yogurt Cake

Meg of Too Many Chefs makes a chocolatey yogurt cake, based on a yogurt cake which both she and I got from Clotilde of Chocolate & Zucchini. It is a delicate, simple cake, and to the overstimulated American palate is really almost a quickbread. But it is delicious nonetheless.

And the best part is that it is especially easy, and fast - just the thing to whip up for colleagues on Friday afternoon. Contrary to Clotilde, I like it especially after a day in foil, when it gets less crusty (which I normally crave), and the moisture from the yogurt distributes, leaving what I would almost describe as the texture of the syrup soaked semolina desserts that so characterize lebanese (and Greek, and Turkish, and Syrian) cooking. Delightful.

Pet Peeves

Frank Bruni asks about our restaurant pet peeves. I agree with many of those already mentioned, and especially with waiters who take away one person's food without waiting for everyone at the table to finish. When I'm paying so much money, I don't expect to be treated as if I'm in a cafeteria.

Having said that, why do waiters ever ask if everything is ok? What exactly, is this supposed to accomplish? If the food is good, then I'd like to be left alone to enjoy it. If the food is bad, but not bad enough to send back, I'll tell everyone I can about the bad food. but there's nothing you can do. And, of course, if the food is so bad I need to send it back, you'll know. So what does asking me accomplish? In reality, the waiter's question is more of an ultimatum than anything else - speak now, or forever hold your peace. I disagree.

Naples 45

Naples 45

An excellent pizzeria for slices on Park Avenue and 45th. But forget all the flavored pizzas - the only thing worth eating is the margherita. Dough made with flour, water and salt, and good fresh cheese and tomatoes. $2.50, but $1.50 after 2 p.m.

A great lunch.

Some notes on Hawaii I posted on Chowhound

Tokkuri-tei - For us, this was a highlight of the trip. A cozy, eclectic Japanese restaurant with startling sushi, a wide and challenging menu of sochu and sake, and great service. On our two visits, I tried most of the sushi on the menu, and found it all of extremely high quality, with wonderful rice and fresh fish tasting of not much more than the ocean. I was especially pleased with the uni (sea urchin), which I normally find a little difficult to eat, and was blown away by the Mu, a great sweetish sake suggested by the attentive staff. The place is cool too - tiles signed by various semi-prominent visitors are posted up all over the walls, and the crowd is clearly local, regular, and enthusiastic.

Leonard's Bakery - Warm, crispy, malasadas (doughnuts) filled with banana, coconut, and chocolate. One of the best fried doughs I've ever had, and the fact that the staff runs around in a panic at the idea that you might get your malasadas cold makes the whole experience even more fun. Also, I got a cool t-shirt, with smiling malasadas trying to get out of a box.

Side Street Inn - Well, the back alley location isn't all that promising. Nor is the bleak sports bar you find when you go inside. But then you notice that a lot of tables are reserved, and the menu includes some surprising stuff, and people are eating hungrily. After gobbling two kinds of ahi and smoked organic salmon, I'm a convert. I would have liked to explore more of the menu, but we ran out of time.

The Surf Room at the Royal Hawaiian - So, this is were we were staying, and it's just a hotel restaurant, but the view is spectacular, and the taro pancakes with lilikoi syrup were actually very very good. I wouldn't bother with the buffet, though - it looked fine (probably better, objectively, than the House with a Key), but I wouldn't (and didn't) pass up the pancakes on my two visits.

Mai Tai Bar - Also at our hotel, and not known for food, and expensive, but I got some pleasant coconut crusted shrimp here while listening to some very nice music and sitting outside. I wouldn't completely discount this place if what you want to do is hang out and talk.

Pineapple on Pupukea beach - ok, so not a restaurant, but an actual pineapple I bought from Foodlands supermarket (I also bought a cool-looking fruit knife) that we ate on the North Shore beach of Pupukea. Pineapples in Hawaii are complex fruits, completely unlike what we get in New York, and this was one of the best lunches we had on our trip.

House without a Key - we had a terrific breakfast here, based on chowhound recommendations. The food was good (a full buffet with great fruit, and surprisingly good macadamia pancakes, of which I consumed a large number), but the view and the setting (overlooking the beach and an obviously ancient tree) were the real treats. We loved it.

Keo's - Perfectly adequate thai food in a beautiful room festooned with flowers. Not as good as its reputation (but we're from New York, and a lot of the Thai here is excellent), but we certainly didn't regret the meal.