Bad Bread

We walked into the Montauk Bake Shop last weekend, looking for some bread to eat for breakfast. They had a pumpernickel loaf that looked suspiciously identical to the white loaf, just brown, but I bought it anyway. At least it's made by a bakery, I thought.

It turned out to be a truly wretched loaf. Tough, flavorless, and unappetizing. So much so that we bought an industrial rye bread the next day, and resolved to think about what to do with the pumpernickel later. I am trying to find a way to use it. The rye bread wasn't any good, of course, but it was a perfectly acceptable vehicle for apricot jam.

The whole episode made me think about one of the truths underlying the current power of our large food conglomerates. Simply put, on average they provide tastier food for lower prices than single proprietors. Am I saying that your local bakery isn't as good as Wonder Bread? No, of course not. Many local bakeries are much better, and some transcendent. But what people sometimes forget is that for a long time, local meant unpredictable, unhygienic, and just plain old bad. Ben & Jerry's isn't better than Grom, but it is better than the bad "artisan gelato" we had in Montauk. IHOP, sad to say, beats up on many local diners. McDonald's, yes McDonald's, does what it does better than some local burger joints. The alternative, in other words, to industrial food from some heartless factory is often terrible food from a local scoundrel.

Of course, here in New York we're insulated from that to a large extent by what has become an extraordinarily ruthless food market. But that wasn't always the case, and one need not think back too far to remember a New York where Starbucks was a dramatic, world changing improvement to the coffee scene. Yes, yes, local, local local. But let's remember what our industrial friends have bought us.

Molecular Gastronomy

Combining Michael Ruhlman's post on the meaning of molecular gastronomy with Jeremy's post about miracle fruit brings me to an interesting problem. How can we be living in a moment where both haute barnyard (earthy, back to the farm, fresh, local) and "molecular gastronomy" (chemical, forward looking, industrial) are the two dominant food paradigms? A world where one can get reservations to neither WD-50 (Wylie Dufresne's molecular gastronomy mecca) or Blue Hill at Stone Barns (Dan Barber's fanatically farm driven simplicity)? To me, they are nemesis, and yet people talk about both phenomena as if they are part of the same world.

I don't discount Adria, Dufresne, Achatz, and the rest of the molecular gastronomers, by the way. Assuredly, many of their methods will fade away, because they are flawed. But to the extent what they are doing is using modern cooking methods on traditional foods, like all innovators, other novelties are going to stand the test of time. I don't doubt that there is a place in this world for agar as a stabilizer, especially in dessert, for example. But I am willing to put my money on haute barnyard as the more lasting trend, because, fundamentally, it's not a trend. It's how everyone used to eat, and hopefully will eat once more.

Gum Arabic

A few years ago in college, the ice cream maker of the wonderful Jannetta's ice cream in St. Andrews, Scotland, came to give a talk to the university's wine and cheese club. I stood up, and asked a question about the gooey, oozy, ice cream I used to eat in Syria, which we called booza. Since I loved it, I proudly asked the man how they did it, expecting to hear some kind of exotic, interesting ingredient.

He wrinkled his nose, and told me that it was gum arabic, and that its job was to be a filler and to keep ice cream from melting as quickly. Since then, I've been quick to pick it out.

So as soon as we got our "artisan gelato" at 668 , I knew what was up. It oozed like a Twix in the commercials, or like Bubble Yum pulled by a kid out of his mouths. The dull, un-fresh flavors were no more promising, and for $4 a scoop, we were really disappointed. We left yearning for Ben & Jerry's (which leads me into another topic, which is the technical superiority of industrial food over most food, which I'll get to), and wondering why no one else is doing something better in a town that is almost exclusively a sea-side resort. Puzzled, we stumbled on to dinner, unsatisfied.

Montauk

We spent the long weekend in Montauk, New York, a sea side community at the very tip of Long Island. To get to Montauk, you have to pass the heart of what people call the Hamptons. I had not appreciated quite how ritzy those places were until I saw the Tiffany & Co. in the middle of what was clearly otherwise just a series of small fishing villages. Why, precisely, anyone needs a Tiffany's in a fishing village is unclear to me, but there it is.

I'm going to post a number of more specific observations and notes, but I'll first reprise generally for reference. We arrived on Friday, settled in at the perfectly adequate Sun N' Sound hotel, and then headed to the Montauk Harbor area in search of food. My research (i.e, trolling Chowhound for 15 minutes before I left) had told me that Gosman's Dock was a good place to start, so we hit the main restaurant for an excellent lobster roll and lobster salad, served overlooking the sea. We then went off to explore the area, stopping at an Edy's for a nostalgic (but bad) mint ice cream, and on the way (due to my urging) hit up Gosman's fish market for supplies for the evening. A while later, and with a bottle of local Long Island Reisling, we headed back to the hotel, and I cooked up a skillet dinner of pan roasted potatoes, Long Island wild blackfish, and baby carrots with a local mesclun salad (picture forthcoming). The next day, breakfast was organic eggs with some perfectly bad pumpernickel bread from the Montauk Bake Shop (more on this later) and coffee. We visited the Montauk Point Lighthouse Park for some delightful wandering (except for rude employees at the snack bar, and some party pooping visiters who mocked the lighthouse) and ended up on Duryea's Lobster Deck for some mussels (delicious) and another lobster roll (also delicious). Were it not for the swarms of odd, throughly disgusting flies plaguing the sea air, it would have been a truly wonderful meal. Then it was off to Nick's beach for some further wanderin', and diverted ourselved to Gig 668 for what they claimed was "artisan gelato". Chewing through the gummy, flavorless roasted pistachio and coffee flavors, we decided it was neither. Why there isn't anyone making ice cream at a sea side resort town is beyond me. Later we bought another bottle of wine from the good people at Finest Kind Wine shop, which we took back home with some snacks to nibble before heading out for dinner.

That set the stage for the great wine debacle of 2008, about which more later. All I'll say now is that it involved buying another corkscrew, coffee filters, lots of pulling, and a much delayed meal.

When we did eventually eat, it was at Gosman's again, but this time we tackled the pure lobster itself. Delicious, except that we much preferred the boiled to the broiled article. As wonderful as the seafood was, we spent the next twenty minutes stewing jokingly that the waitress stole my girlfriend's coleslaw from under her nose. I realize you want to go home. But it was good. Why take it?

We headed home the next morning, sated and a little more tan, except for a minor detour about which I WILL NOT talk about. As I say, more detailed thoughts and pictures will follow.

Reflexions, Richard Olney

I've loved Richard Olney's writing ever since I first opened up Simple French Food. His food, to me, is the acme of cooking. His Ten Vineyard Lunches is my candidate for most overlooked cookbook on the planet. Concise, but masterful. So when I picked up his autobiography, Reflexions, I was ready to be entranced.

I'm still reading, so no conclusions yet. My first impressions? One does not think of sex when thinking about Richard Olney, but there is an awful lot of it in this book.

Second, I found this delightful passage, which it pays to meditate on in the wake of our over-the-top dinner at Ko:

It (a restaurant in Piraeus, Greece) was an odd place. Except for the staff, there were no Greeks present. The food was banal, but they had created the formula, a quarter of a century before the nouvelle-cuisine loonies launched le menu degustation, of the non-meal - fifteen or twenty little dabs of unrelated foods, served in interminable succession, one after the other . . . .

Oh, math

There are about fifty million things wrong with this student article published by the law review of my old law school (HT: Amber and Abovethelaw), but possibly my favorite is the following stupidity:

"But the point about debt is merely another
version of the argument for making lots of money. Debt is nothing
more than a monthly payment — it can thus be thought of as a portion
out of your salary. Suppose you choose a public interest job that
pays $4,800 per month. If your debt payments are $500 per month,
then your monthly earnings become $4,300. On an annual scale, that
debt turns a $57,000 yearly salary into a $51,000 yearly salary. The
desire to make a higher wage is no different than before — the fact of
debt does not change the moral calculation because it is simply another
example of the urge to earn more money"

Apparently, our author has not heard that there is such a thing as government, and the government exacts (a lot of) taxes, and student loans are paid out of after tax salary. Whoops.

PS: By the way, how did the Harvard Law Review staff miss such a preposterous mistake? Yes, so the author's (stupid and unconvincing) point isn't necessarily obscured (even relatively impoverished elite laywers still make enough to support their families, and debt obligations are just a monthly payment) but it's like adding that point to a sentence that suggests the moon is made of wasabi dusting, and then not suggesting that the author perhaps fix that part of it.

Also, our friendly writer might be lucky enough to have had a $500 student loan payment, but if I hadn't paid mine off, the monthly bill was four times that. The plucking of some plausible figure the poor devils with debt might have to pay back strikes me a bit like when the old President Bush hadn't the slightest idea what milk cost.

Faux pain au levain

I had a chance to make my faux pain au levain over the last few days. (I call it a faux levain because it's made with yeast rather than wild sourdough, as it ought).

I've been perfecting my technique over about four years, and it's really my signature bread. Roughly, it's equal parts white and wheat flour, kneaded, and then slowly ripened in the fridge for at least 24 hours. Then I place it in a brotform (actually, a plastic colander with a clean towel) for its second proof, and slide it onto a baking stone or tray in a 450 degree oven, in which I've left a tray of water evaporating for moisture during the entire preheating period, for slowish baking.

As you can see, the result is really a nice bread, with great distribution of holes (large, medium and small), a thick crust, and a subtle, yeasty aroma and flavor.

A detox spinach sandwich

In a continuing effort to detox post Ko, I've been keeping fish-o-vegetarian for the week. Dinner last night was this super simple spinach sandwich - some fresh spinach blanched, drained, and then sauteed in olive oil with garlic, flaked red pepper, salt, and pepper, all stuffed into a Sullivan St. ciabatta piccolo with some grated cheese.

Momofuku Ko dish ranking

Instead of writing a classic review of our meal at Momofuku Ko, I've decided to rank the dishes instead. Note that it's really an 8-10 course tasting menu, but at points they serve different dishes to each member of a couple or group, so you end up with rather more, if you assiduously taste each other's food. NB: This meal was accompanied by the $50 drinks tasting menu, which included a number of wonderful wines (sparkling and otherwise) , sake, beer, and sweet sherry.

To comment globally before embarking on the parade below, Ko is a valuable, interactive experience. Valuable because one sees a modern commercial kitchen at work. Much of the food is pre-prepared, and needs only warming, or dressing. What is cooked is cooked in ways that you wouldn't necessarily even care to duplicate at home (or do you enjoy pouring butter over and over on your pan seared halibut as it cooks, or deep frying enormous tubes of stuffed chicken?) Interactive because the cooks jabber, and shimmy, and twirl right in front of you, like a high class sushi bar and hibachi rolled into one.

The food? Ah. I am tempted to gush. It was good. Very good. But at some point, there must be some line where the chef says, "no more". No more fat. No more grease. I must relent before I cross the line into vulgarity. Chang mocks that line. He laughs at it while blithely crossing it. Vulgarity of this sort is apparently his badge of honor. The result is the menu below, packed full of pork fat, and other fat, at literally every turn. I reeked of pork and fat this morning, I dreamt of pork and fat last night, I woke up sweating porky and fatty bullets of sweat. As trendy it is these days to revel in bacon and smoke, this is not my ideal situation. Don't get me wrong. I have a wrought iron stomach. But I was not comfortable going home last night, and I wonder very much if everyone else is able to shake off this bachannalian excess unscathed. I do not think even the most dedicated of French carnivore chefs would inflict such a tasting menu on his audience. I leave open the possibility that I am overreacting.

1. Long Island Fluke "sashimi" with buttermilk, yuzu, and poppy seeds - I would never have thought in a million years that buttermilk on raw fish would taste even acceptably well, but this tart creation was revelatory. So simple, and so good, and yet disappointing, in a way, because it shows that Chang can cook something other than pork fat sauteed in pork fat.

2. Pork Belly and Oyster in Kimchee Consommé with Napa cabbage - I've never had such powerful flavor from a broth, though I could discern no kimchee whatever. Paired with the fatty, unctuous, pork belly, it tasted like tonkutsu gone on steroids. And the oyster was a briny treat amid all the pork. A magnificent, unexpected dish.

3. Pea Soup with crayfish and morels - Tremendous pea flavor, and crayfish deeply redolent of their home. And, wonder of wonders, a small packet of morels right in the center. They made the dish for me. As Frank Bruni (Ny Times, of course) says, "[t]here’s a Georgia pea soup with such resonant pea flavor that you wonder about the bastard pedigree of all prior peas in your life and almost fail to notice the morels and the delicate crawfish in the soup."

4. Deep fried sous vide short ribs - beef short ribs cooked in a vacumm until extraordinarily tender, and then deep fried. Bruni calls it a "miracle of tender crisp contrast", and I think that sums it up terribly well. It's served with a spring onion, two carrots, and pickled mustard seeds, which looks like a sort of yellow caviar, and is more interesting texturally than as a flavor.

5. Grilled trout with bacon puree - Terribly wonderful New York river trout, paired, astonishingly, with pureed bacon. Why? I don't know. But the combination works wonders for a fish that by definition needs a little help.

6. "Smoked" Egg with onion soubise and chips - an egg masterfully cooked to a set white and completely liquid yolk, dipped in liquid smoke, knifed open, and served with what amounts to an onion jam and tiny, cornflake-like potato chips. I've love this for brunch, perhaps with the fatty english muffin.

7. English muffin with whipped lard - I hesitate to rate this as a "dish", but I don't know what else to do. Like eating bready pig.

8. Fried apple tart with sour cream ice cream - delicious. As everyone else has said, a cool play on the McDonald's apple pie, except that the McDonald's apple pie is now baked, and this is fried, in god knows what unholy oil. I've ranked it this low only because, in the end, it's fried apple pie, wasabi dusting or not.

9. "Lasagna" with whipped ricotta, roasted ricotta salata, the flowers of broccoli rabe, burgundy snails, and mushrooms - two squares of pasta plucked delicately out of the boiling water with some kind of forceps, and then topped with the bewildering flurry of ingredients above. My verdict? More snails, less whipped ricotta, please. I loved the broccoli rabe flowers.

10. Sorbets - Mine, an "arnold palmer" sorbet (half iced tea, half lemonade). Hers, Canteloupe on a base of cashew butter. The canteloupe, given the season, was surprising but terrific.

11. Chicken stuffed with morels and ramps (?), cooked ( I think), and then deep fried until crisp - salty fried goodness, but not as good as the short ribs that were the alternative.

12. "Cereal milk" panna cotta, with avocado creme - I didn't get the avocado, I didn't get the cereal milk, I didn't get the cornflake granola accompaniment. Blurgh.

13. Frozen foie gras, white wine jelly, lychee, and pine nut brittle - a snowy blizzard of fat (i.e, foie gras grated through the small end of a box grater) on top of a Riesling jelly embedded with lychees and sticky chunks of pine nut brittle. Inventive? Yes. Tasty. Eh. There was already so much fat, so much unct, in this meal. What I wouldn't have given at this point for something lemony, to cut through the seemingly endless parade of bellies, fats, creams, and fries. Instead, we got a foie gras dish with a caramelized sugar accompaniment that works no better than the atrocious foie gras creme brulee at Jean Georges.

14. Custard with caviar, asparagus, argan oil and cashews - A sort of cold set custard topped with asparagus, poached cashews, hackleback caviar, and oil. To my mind, a waste of space. The custard wasn't delicious, and the cashews nondescript. Argan sounds great when described, but in the dish it fades away to nothing.

A rhubarb crumble

I am just back from a long (so long that I'm still remembering dishes half an hour after sitting down to write down notes) and mostly splendid meal at Momofuku Ko, and am far too full and drunk to write anything substantive at all. My only comment - does one meal really need so much pork? So much??

Instead, I'll sign off tonight with Saturday night's rhubarb crumble, and leave the Momofuku review for the morning. The secret to the crumble - bake the topping separately from the fruit, yielding a crunchy, independently tasty streusel. I'd normally top with ice cream, but I had made the rhubarb too sweet, so I compensated with tart, tangy, greek yogurt.

Funny fish

I guess this is ok, so long as they're not serving the fish.

Friday Night Dinner

Sauteed fiddle head fern and ramp (baby wild leaks) risotto. I sauteed the ferns and the ramp leaves in butter and olive oil, and stirred them into my risotto at the last minute to warm. I made the rice with a chicken stock from an organic chicken, real parmesan, and Irish unsalted butter.

As a second course (I was feeling Italian last night) I served pan fried porgy dipped in flour with chopped parsley and lemon.

Dessert was little chocolate bouchon from Bouchon bakery, here in New York. Not much dessert, but oh so good.

Artichoke II

One more note - I was walking with my pizza from Artichoke back to Union Square, and was stopped by a guy in the street. "Is that from Artichoke?", he said. "Yeah", I said. "Is it good?", he asked earnestly. "Very good", I said.

"F$#@ yeah!", he said, and then ran almost at a sprint towards where I had just come from.

Artichoke Pizza

No, not a pizza with artichokes (though that too) but Artichoke Pizzeria, the newest entry into the New York city-wide pizza wars. Artichoke has been clogged with people since it arrived, and yesterday was no exception. Although I arrived at 5 pm on a Wednesday, there was already a crowd of about 20 snaking out of the restaurant, a problem which is exacerbated by the fact that Artichoke isn't really the kind of place that rewarms slices that have been sitting around the entire day. 45 minutes later, I arrived at the front, only to find that there weren't any regular slices. When would they be ready? "Shrug", the man behind the counter said. But, luckily enough, a huge artichoke and spinach pizza had just come out of the oven. I pointed at that, forked over my three dollars, and went scurrying out, the lengthening line staring enviously at my score as I squeezed by them.

How was it? Alan Richman's verdict (what I linked to above), is spot on:

This isn’t just pizza. This is the way ordinary food used to taste in New York—superficially no different from food anywhere else, but in reality considerably better. It had little to do with superior ingredients and everything to do with New York know-how.

Is it an amazing Italian style pizza? No. It's not meant to be. It's thick. And big. And cheesy. What it does, however, is explain to skeptics raised on doughy, mushy, "New York style" fast food why a New York pizza was once thought to be something special. I only wish I could wander around Times Square diverting tourists down to Artichoke, and away from the depressing places they end up in. But then, the wait for me would get even longer.

Cashiers

In the comments to her post on haggling (which I also dislike, although I'm less annoyed by it if the expectation that one haggles is clear - what I really hate is not knowing whether to haggle or not, as my haggling personality is alien to me and can be unpleasant, and so it takes a bit of warning to clothe myself in it), Amber says, " I don't even like making conversation with cashiers. Half of them can barely handle ringing me up or making a return, much less negotiating a discounted sale."

I couldn't agree more, which explains my preference for self check out lines where available, especially in grocery stores. An example: recently, my local grocery store's computer broke down, so they were ringing us up by hand. I had three items. One cost $4.49, the second $3.49 and the third $5.99. The cashier asked me for $5.99. I told her that I owed more than that and gave her a $20 bill. She pointed at her calculator. I said that I saw the calculator, but since a single item was $5.99, and it said $5.99 in big numbers on it, it was highly unlikely that my total was $5.99. She didn't answer, and then just said $5.99 again. I tried to convince her again that it wasn't $5.99. She went to get the manager. The manager came, and pushed "total" on the calculator.

Flurgh. Give me the machine any day.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, I've been a cashier. It's no more fun on that side of things.

Why Stuff?

Mark Bittman writes today about a chicken stuffing. His contention - that most stuffings are for appearance's sake rather than for taste. I think he's basically right, and certainly I have no soft spot for turkey stuffing at thanksgiving. But there are exceptions, which I posted as a comment on his blog. Hopefully, I'll have started a conversation:

It’s an interesting argument, and I think you’re usually right. I guess I can think of a couple of reasons besides aesthetics, though, to stuff things with other things. (a) The stuffing would taste good alongside, but the stuffing melts, or otherwise renders itself difficult (b) Convenience - packages of things are sometimes easier to manipulate than one thing flopped onto another thing (c) surprise or disguise - need to convince someone to eat beef cheeks? Want to surprise your guest with a little pop of raisin in a grape leaf, or cheese in a chicken? The answer is stuffing.

Goat cheese and fava flatbreads

I served the artichoke and spinach stuffed chicken below with a puree of fava beans, which are precisely in season right now, combining olive oil, cooked favas, and a little bit of heavy cream into a soft, unctuous paste. And for something to nibble on while I finished cooking the main course, I thought using some of the leftover favas along with some cherry tomatoes that I was worrying about losing to age would be great. So I roasted the tomatoes at 175 degrees (f) for four hours to concentrate their flavor, making a olive oil rich flat bread in the meantime (flour, water, salt, and olive oil - what I imagine a pissaladiere crust to be like). Instead of topping the bread with the cheese and other condiments, I cooked it first, and then slathered on the cheese while it was hot, dotting it with favas and tomatoes shortly thereafter, once the cheese had firmed up a bit. The flatbreads paired beautifully with the puzzlingly sweet Vouvray we were drinking, and it occurred to me in mid-bite that the same recipe could work wonders with the other darling of the moment, baby artichokes.

Die Chicken is boned

* Better pictures with a real camera of full meal to come


Ever since reading a review by the Washington Post's secondary food reviewer about five years ago about a boneless chicken stuffed with rice and raisins dish in suburban Virginia, I've been wanting to perfect the technique of boning out a chicken.

It turns out, ultimately, that it is far more intimidating than difficult. The trick is to watch Jacques Pepin do it on television about 40 times with a chicken sitting on your lap while waggling the drumstick, and then to leap back into the kitchen manically repeating his instructions so you don't forget them.

"Pull back the skin, and move the wing. I can feel zee articulation of the joint, and so my knife goes here. I'm in zee articulation now, but if I was not, I would just wiggle the knife, and it would slide in".

Wiggle wiggle. Slide.

"Then, put your fingers through the carcass here, and pull out like so".

Fingers in carcass. Pull meat out a chicken is surprisingly cathartic.

"Now pull all the meat away from the front of the chicken, until you see the oyster, you see? And then pull the leg up, and then pull it out like this to break it, and then cut zee sinew"

I don't see the oyster. I just see indifferentiated meat and other things that I don't recognize as meat. Where? Where?

Oh. I didn't pull the thigh hard enough. Oyster found. Leg up, like a Rockette, and then pull out and break with a satisfying crack. There are more sinews on my chicken than his. Hum.

"Scrape the meat off the thigh bone, like this, and then break the leg to pull the thigh bone out like this."

I have no idea what my landlord thought of the loud pounding which constituted my efforts to break the damned chicken's foot, but suffice to say that the back of my knife was ineffective, and I resorted to an extremely heavy stone pestle (in case you're not getting the idea, you break the bone where the leg meets the foot. This way you can pull out the drumstick, but you leave in the last joint, to help keep the skin from shrinking). And unless you actually are Jacques Pepin, scraping the meat off a thigh bone of a chicken should be done with a dull knife, not one's chef's knife. As amazing as you think you are with it, the idea that it's not going to slip and and, say, slice off your hand, is a little optimistic.

"It should not take you more than a minute to bone out a chicken".

Says Jacques. It should take 20 sweating minutes if you're me.

Travails aside, in the end I had a boned out chicken. I made a stuffing of artichoke hearts and spinach, and tied the chicken up for roasting. The result was delicious. Now, to perfect that rice and raisin mixture for next time.

Momofuku-d

Finally, a Momofuku Ko reservation!

Now comes all the shame for succumbing to such a ridiculous fad. And yet, it should be fun... I'll report back after the dinner next week.

Death and Company

After a fairly pathetic effort to get into PBT (I'm not totally convinced by a bar one enters through a secret door in a mediumly good hot dog stand, but I didn't get in, so I'll pass on making a judgement), my girlfriend and I ended up at Death + Company on Friday night, an intentionally old style bar that has recently gotten some good press (see here). We decided to start off with a martini, and sat bemused as our bartender flew around, breaking apart blocks of ice with some sort of pick, pouring other kinds of ice in and out of various cups, tasting, and mixing. A few minutes later, we had two pretty startling martinis, my girlfriend's with a little squeeze of orange bitters, and a generous second helping hanging out in an ice bath in front of us. We sipped happily, and devoured a very passable hot crab dip that I ordered to try to make amends for some atrocious fries I bought while we were waiting to try to get into PBT. When the bartender came back to clear things away, I just told him to make me something archaic, since I don't know anything about drinks anyway. He whirled about again and presented something made with rye, some twists, something red, and some other things, which was really wonderful. My girlfriend, for her part, stuck with gin, and asking for something with mint, got a wonderful South Side. (I'm not claiming the link is the recipe they used, but you get the idea).

Above all, Death is a comfortable bar with moderately loud music, and a vibe that's acceptable even for someone who dislikes bars, and trendy places even more. Highly recommended.