Blog

Our favorite products, gadgets, restaurants, bars, wine, beer, and food websites and blogs.
» Food Media

From Tangled Roots

Department of excellent reads: While The New York Times chronicles the efforts of U.S. growers to produce that most ephemeral of fungi, the truffle, Elatia Harris turns in an epic tone-poem on the history and mystery of truffles that makes it abundantly clear why the truffle is one of the most valuable and sought-after commodities in the world. The piece, which appears in the Web magazine 3 Quarks Daily, starts out with a long-ago dinner in a Paris restaurant. The “elderly esthete” to Harris’s right declines a conventional appetizer and entrée in favor of ordering merely a dish of eight golf-ball-sized truffles, lightly sautéed and splashed with cream. When he places one of his prizes into her mouth, she has an awakening:

Best just to liken it to the entrance into the room, naked, of that person whom you know will make all the difference. Time passed—I’m not sure how much—and as I licked my lips and refocused on the table I saw that people—all but one—were smiling those faint, intent smiles not at the truffles but at me.

This must have set her on a quest, for the rest of the article is a heady history of truffles, from the age of antiquity, when nomadic peoples prized the desert truffle for its medicinal properties, to the news that the truffle’s genome has been sequenced, the better to detect truffle fraud. Along the way, Harris drops highly entertaining anecdotes and lore. “Rossini tells how he wept to see a truffled turkey he was rowing to a picnic go overboard into the Seine, one of three times in his life the composer would admit to shedding tears. Nor was Byron immune to truffles, although he did not eat them but kept them on his writing table, stroking them, finding the aroma a stimulant to creative juices.” But the most telling story about the value of the little nuggets comes near the top:

A Parisian banker, discovering that his cook had served his only truffle to two of her friends, made television news by shooting her. The investigating magistrate refused to bring the banker to trial for what was “obviously a crime of passion, completely understandable and completely forgivable.”

Posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 by Miriam Wolf in Food Media | 1 Comment
More like this: , , , , , ,

» Food Media

The Flavor Purple

New York Magazine’s food blog, Grub Street, has a regular feature with great appeal for food bloggers who like to autopsy their restaurant dishes. In each outing, The Annotated Dish focuses on an exceptional dish prepared by an au courant toque-jockey. This week in the hot seat: a dessert from Jordan Kahn, the pastry chef at tony NYC restaurant Varietal. Claiming that inspiration for his “Meditation in Purple” (you know a dish is high-concept when it has a title, in quotes even) springs from the writing of Brillat-Savarin, Kahn says, “Purple is the color of inspiration. I wanted to make a dessert that would inspire. And one that, if you tasted it, you could tell was purple.”

When I think of the taste of purple, I can’t help remembering the fetid-grape flavor of Welch’s grape juice, but Kahn has other ideas. As the reader mouses over a photograph of “Meditation in Purple,” she learns that what looks like a thin slice of fruit leather is in reality gelled hibiscus tea, which, according to Kahn, is “like a Listerine breath strip in the way that it melts in your mouth, but it tastes like hibiscus.” And that the cake underlying Kahn’s creation is a beet genoise that reportedly tastes like beet (this is a selling point, for some reason). And that a smooth purple lump atop the dish is a rooibos tea–infused ice cream, which Kahn claims tastes “like the milk left over from when you eat Fruity Pebbles.”

Speaking as a lifelong cereal-milk slurper, that is a culinary advance I can stand behind.

Posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 by Joyce Slaton in Food Media | 1 Comment
More like this: , , , , , , , ,

» CHOW Tour: North America

Big Dog Down

Los Angeles

A horrendous stomach flu is ravaging the West Coast, and my digestive tract is ground zero. After waking up violently ill with high fever, I somehow manage to trek from my hotel to a nearby 7-Eleven to pick up an array of stomach medications and electrolyte-rich sports drinks.

Next to the 7-Eleven is, somewhat miraculously (a hallucination?), a great-looking place called M & M Mississippi Home Cooking (5496 West Centinela Avenue, Los Angeles, California; 310-215-8186).

This find under these conditions could only be providence, and providence must never be ignored … however much I’d like to run screaming in the other direction. So I stoically pull myself together and walk in to place my takeout order. In light of my utter lack of appetite and stomach like a vortex of everything evil, I stick to vegetables …

… plus the good corn muffins that came with:

I don’t eat very much, and am not of much mind for detail, but I manage to grimly determine that this is some relatively serious soul food.

I somehow get back to the hotel, where I spend the better part of a week not venturing from my room and consuming only Pedialyte and Gatorade. My sole contact with the outside world comes from the increasingly urgent pounding on my door by housekeeping ladies who’ve begun to wonder whether to ask the rescue squad to break in and remove the corpse.

Posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 by Jim Leff in CHOW Tour: North America | 7 Comments

» Food Media

Food Set Him Free

Jeff Henderson, the executive chef at Café Bellagio in Vegas, began his career as a big-time coke dealer, raking in $35-large every week. His transformation from drug kingpin to culinary denizen via a stint in a prison kitchen is the stuff that memoirs are made of, so of course he’s gone and made one—Cooked: From the Streets to the Stove, from Cocaine to Foie Gras, which was just released last week. While the confessions-of-a-dealer genre has become pretty well-worn territory in the last decade, the exclusive excerpts on eGullet are riveting.

Some of the best parts are the unexpected revelations about prison cuisine—like this one, in which Henderson describes daily goings-on in the kitchen:

The huge oven looked like something you’d see in a crematorium. An inmate opened the heavy steel door to reveal six long shelves that held four sheet pans each, filled with cinnamon rolls, cakes, and cookies. I’d later learn that all of the baked items that were served in federal prisons were prepared according to military recipes. The traditional pies served were Boston cream, lemon meringue, apple, and peach, all made with canned fruits that reminded me of the government commodity food I’d eaten when I was growing up, but the pies were still very good.

On the other side of the bakery, a guy was running the giant ninety-quart Hobart mixers. I was amazed. You’d think that all of the baked goods in a prison would be shipped in from outside sources, but everything was made fresh on the premises, all of it run and operated by inmates.

Fresh-made doughnuts and pies, eh? Sounds better than what a lot of schoolkids eat these days.

Posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 by Christy Harrison in Food Media | No Comments
More like this: , , , , , , , ,

» Food Media

Who’s Calling Who X-Treme?

I love the folks at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Its newsletter cheers and delights me in the way that it kicks butt and names names. I always turn right to the “Right Stuff/Food Porn” section. It’s endearing that the organization has maintained its stringent (strident?) stance through a decade and a half of being labeled as the “food police.”

The Center’s latest crusade is to try to get restaurants to add nutrition information to their menus (the wave of the future, my friend: Point-of-purchase nutrition information was the underreported conjoined twin measure enacted with the New York City trans fat ban). To that end, they’ve lowered the boom on chain restaurants, accusing them of promoting X-Treme Eating.

The center’s strategy of using information like the actual calorie count of foods like Ruby Tuesday’s Fresh Chicken and Broccoli Pasta to draw media attention to its issues is a canny one. But in some ways it may be backfiring. Surely, I can’t be the only one who, upon reading that the Cheesecake Factory’s Chris’ Outrageous Chocolate Cake has layers of cheesecake, brownie, and pie, has a (luckily controllable) desire to run right out and get a slice, calories be damned.

On the other hand, the pizza skins, from Uno Chicago Grill’s appetizer menu, is just overkill.

We start with our famous deep dish crust, add mozzarella and red bliss mashed potatoes, and top it off with crispy bacon, cheddar, and sour cream.

Posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 by Miriam Wolf in Food Media | 6 Comments
More like this: , , , , , , , , ,

» Food Media

Bacon, Bacon Everywhere

Naturally, when you’ve finished your celebratory Year of the Pig offal dinner and drained the last drops from your bacon martini, your fevered food-drunk imagination begins casting about for pork-compliant dessert possibilities.

Bacon s’mores? Bacon ice cream or cookies? Old hat, chum. Nay, you could ask for no better a porcine postprandial than a bacon mint, both reviewed by those brave folks at sugar-addicted blog Candy Addict:

When the package arrived, it contained two tins of Bacon Mints and two tins of Bacon Flavored Toothpicks (more on those later). Opening the shipping package brought a scent to my nose that I wasn’t prepared for. It was bacony, minty, and had a smell of a hospital. The smell was odd and didn’t hit me as being an appetizing smell.

I opened a tin and took a big sniff and it nearly knocked me over and I don’t mean that in a good way. It was an absolutely awful smell. It’s really hard to describe, but it’s not a smell you want to get a whiff of. At this point I wasn’t really looking forward to trying them, but reviewing candy isn’t all about tasty chocolate—sometimes you must eat some questionable candy.

For the record, reviewer Brian Pipa could only keep them in his mouth for 30 seconds, and one of his dogs accepted a mint while the other one refused. Let that be a warning to you: A dog refused something bacony? Dogs will eat shoes and books, and will treat a cat’s litterbox like it’s a buffet. Anything a dog won’t eat, you probably shouldn’t either.

Posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 by Joyce Slaton in Food Media | 4 Comments
More like this: , , , , ,

» Food Media

Deck the Hall

So, what’s Top Chef winner Ilan Hall doing with his $100K chunk of cheddar? According to PRist/gossip blogger Jennifer Leuzzi at Snack, the man’s been hitting the bling big time. Hall is spotted at JFK on his way to last weekend’s South Beach Food and Wine Festival, decked out in pink-laced kicks, white Louis Vuitton belt (and matching luggage), and a five-figure diamond watch.

Snack adds it up, from $4 bucks for the laces to $11,950 for the Patek Philippe Aquanaut Luce watch in pure white (with diamonds), then adds the kicker:

Having a b-list blogger play ‘The Price is Right’ on your ensemble … priceless.

Snack’s advice? Skip the bling and go do a stage (that is, an unpaid or minimally paid internship) at a fancy-pants European restaurant. Because, as she puts it, “What else are you supposed to do with $100K? That barely covers the attorney’s fees to set up a new restaurant in Manhattan.”

But it sure buys some nice rocks.

Posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 by Stephanie Rosenbaum in Food Media | No Comments
More like this: , , , , ,

» Food Media

A Culinary Getaway to Achewood, California

The online comic Achewood brings The Al Qaeda Cookbook to its readers this week. Web nerds have known about Achewood for forever and a day, but it’s about time that foodies jumped on the bandwagon.

From blogger Julie Powell to molecular gastronomy to erotic wine tasting, there’s little in the food world that this profane, literate, and world-building strip hasn’t laid a glove on in recent months.

And full-on laffs weren’t enough—the strip also offers a cookbook written in the voice of its characters and its own culinary gift set, featuring a signed copy of the book, hot sauce, and an apron.

One tiny warning: Achewood’s creator, Chris Onstad, works with profanity and sass the way another artist might work with oils and canvas. But if you can handle the potty-typing, it’s all downhill from here.

Posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 by James Norton in Food Media | 2 Comments
More like this: , , , , , , , ,

» CHOW Tour: North America

Adopted by Fijians, Moved by Koreans, and a Defense of Apple Pan

Culver City and Los Angeles

It’s showtime at Fiji Market (10305 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, California; 310-559-9218). As I recounted in report #63, I’d arranged with the disembodied husband of a smiling Fijian grocery counterwoman for said wife to whip me up some Fijian victuals. I arrive at the appointed hour and find husband (in the flesh!) and wife giddy about this unfamiliar transaction, which seems to have broken up the doldrums of market management.

This encounter is so far off their script that the happy Fijians don’t know how to handle me. Apparently never having prepared food as a commercial endeavor before, they bestow my order as if I were family, with such heartfelt hospitality that I, a perfect stranger, feel almost embarrassed. Money has not been mentioned. I offer $20, and, eager not to linger on financials, the husband hastily nods and abashedly scrunches the bill into his pocket, immediately resuming his heartfelt sendoff.

I leave with about 15 pounds of takeout containers. There are three
dishes, in all, whose names (as dictated by the owner) I’ve noted on
this scrap of paper:

Portions, as expected, are enormous. I now find myself the owner of a vast pile of tubers …

… a sea of thick, gurky taro leaf in coconut cream …

… and countless plump segments of crudely hacked fish peeking from beneath piles of wet English cabbage.

It’s ingenuous, artless, sturdy cooking whose soul is in its grounded earthiness. I have been plunged into the full, unfiltered Fijian experience, as if I’d magically appeared in someone’s home for lunch. And I couldn’t be happier.

+ + +

Apple Pan (10801 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles, California; 310-475-3585), a venerable greasy spoon, is controversial. Some Angelenos love it, often with an apology, but many deem it utterly generic. I’d never eaten there, because natives beg me to save limited digestive real estate for the city’s really good offerings.

But I was craving baseline, and what’s more baseline than burger, fries, and pie? Indeed, do photos exist that can more deeply stir one’s red-blooded American heart than these?

There are those who summarily reject french fries made from frozen, burgers made from preformed patties, ice cream with low butterfat content, and generally any food item prepared from ordinary, unrefined ingredients. While I have an abiding respect for strong food preferences, I feel sorry for these ingredient materialists, because they miss realms of deliciousness.

Some of us are used to our food hitting certain buttons and striking certain notes. Nothing at Apple Pan clears the gourmet’s high bar. Their fare can’t possibly do for you precisely what ground-to-order sirloin and hand-cut fries will do. But one must learn to sometimes drop expectations, and be submerged in an experience.

I’m more concerned with what’s done with ingredients than with their individual characteristics. The goal of cooking (as with any art) is to produce a result exceeding the sum of its parts … so why get hung up on the parts? To me, poor ingredients brilliantly applied are preferable to terrific ones applied even slightly less deftly.

All kinks have long ago been worked out of Apple Pan’s system. These guys produce a flawless rendition of what they aim to produce, and that’s only a problem for those whose expectations are fixed and inflexible. There is personality and perfection in Apple Pan’s cooking that only a snob could fail to appreciate.

+ + +

I’ve been slightly obsessed with a little restaurant called Korean Folk Cuisine (4251 West Third Street, Los Angeles, California; 213-384-7147) without ever having tried it. I spied the place while driving by during my last visit to Los Angeles, my chow-dar redlined, and ever since then I’ve nursed a groundless conviction that they serve North Korean cuisine. It’s been a top priority to check out on my next trip … and that means now!

I was half-right. It is definitely great … but it ain’t North Korean. Just straight-down-the-middle Korean victuals, prepared with uncommon care and aplomb, and served by a happy crew of nice women. I’d need a few more meals to be sure, but Korean Folk Cuisine (I’m guessing a better translation might be “Korean Soul Food Restaurant”) is a strong contender for being my favorite Korean restaurant.

Most righteous panchan (freebie appetizer plates).

Oh, sublime luxury: pajun (crispy pancake) served as gratis panchan!

Poetic sprouts.

Stir-fried octopus in spicy sauce. Superb.

Raw oyster, boiled pork belly, and, pickles, all for wrapping up in raw napa cabbage. A voluptuary experience like no other.

Near-perfect haemul pajun (seafood pancake).

Happy table.

The menu.

+ + +

Thi Nguyen is crazy about the cold, refeshing, palate-and-soul-cleansing hand-pulled noodles at Ma Dang Gook So (869 South Western Avenue, Los Angeles, California; 213-487-6008), and he drags me there after the Korean banquet for what he bills as nothing less than a spa treatment via noodles.

Naengymul (spicy cold noodle).

Here are three shots of soybean-milk cold noodles:

+ + +

Habayit (11921 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles, California; 310-479-5444) looks like a good falafel place. I snap a photo as I drive by:

Posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 by Jim Leff in CHOW Tour: North America | 7 Comments

» Food Media

In Defense of the Cookbook

Between food blogs, mega-recipe sites like Epicurious, and the Home Cooking board on our sister site, Chowhound, there are a plethora of recipes on the Web for just about anything you’d ever want to cook. The Internet, it seems, can sate many appetities. But will food-related Web content kill the cookbook? Salon ponders a Joyless world in an article titled “Ciao, Cookbooks.”

As writer Jonathan Beecher Field notes,

If, as of Sunday, Feb. 25, Epicurious.com serves up nine recipes for ‘Yorkshire pudding,’ and Allrecipes.com has 43 for “black bean soup,” and Googling ‘vichyssoise’ generates 265,000 results, who needs an all-purpose cookbook like ‘Joy’ with only one or two recipes for each of these dishes?

But just as the reader is about to gather her skirts and go all Luddite on Field’s ass, the writer reveals it’s all been kind of a tease. You see, he believes in the power of the printed word, revels in the ability of the cookbook to connect a cook to powerful traditions or even cherished family members. Field even goes a bit overboard critiquing the Web-based recipe hunter in the service of elevating the cookbook:

The materiality of cooking and the immateriality of the Internet make for an uneasy pair. In the ether, Web sites can be devoted to things like selling portraits of yourself with Stevie Nicks, or to people who look kind of like Kenny Rogers, and the only thing it costs you is a moment of your (boss’s) time. But when these concerns translate into real ingredients, and actual temperatures or techniques, your time, your money and, most of all, your meals are at stake.

The reality is that in our delightful world, we don’t have to choose between the Internet and cookbooks. For a recent gathering, I made a fruit crisp straight from the pages of Joy of Cooking. As it was cooking, I consulted the Web for ideas to spice up a bland hummus and paged through the newspaper food section for drink ideas. The savvy cook uses all available resources.

Posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 by Miriam Wolf in Food Media | 7 Comments
More like this: , , , , , , , , ,

Page 1 of 1112345»10...Last »