Sarah Perry's Profile
White truffle paste
Creative list of uses and the flip flop thing cracked me up.
My favorite use of white truffle to date has been, as you say, plain boiled pasta.
While My Za'atar Gently Weeps
Thanks - title suggested by aforementioned gluten-intolerant boyfriend.
Hope you like it! They have a special one with cheese and rose syrup only on the weekends but I haven't managed to get one yet.
While My Za'atar Gently Weeps
I have lived near Little Armenia for years, and I've had lots of lahmahjoun, sometimes called Armenian pizza - flatbread topped with seasoned ground beef. The ones I've had have usually been sad, soggy affairs. Only recently, after trying the manaish (aka manakish) (aka Armenian pizza) at Shanto's Bakery, did I realize that I'd never had a good version.
Shanto's Bakery is basically a pizza place - they specialize in Lebanese flatbread (manaish, manakish), and the pies come out of the oven with a nanometer-thin layer of crispy on the bottom, chewy and perfect the rest of the way through the thin crust. My favorite topping is esfiha, a tart, rich mix of ground beef, pomegranate, and spices. Za'atar (thyme and mixed herbs) is intensely savory, a beautiful dish with or without cheese or lebne. Kashkaval cheese with honey is great hot out of the oven and doubly great cold as a midnight snack.
It's one of those places where the food has no right to be as good as it is for the money. I put its pizzas up there with the Oaks Gourmet in Hollywood, which is on my block and which I eat all the time, but Oaks charges $10-12 for a pizza and Shanto's is more like $3-4. (No duck confit or barata on the Shanto's pizzas, but Shanto's ingredients are undeniably high quality.)
To-go pies are charmingly served folded in half in wax paper and a paper bag, calzone-style.
I should mention that my boyfriend can't eat gluten, but he loves this place and demands to go regularly - he just eats the toppings off the pizza and doesn't eat the bread!
Shanto's Bakery
3747 Foothill Boulevard, La Crescenta
818-330-9835
http://www.shantosbakery.com/
LA Weekly review - http://blogs.laweekly.com/squidink/2011/05/shantos_bakery_lebanese_bakery.php
Re-thinking Chowhound Digest - Requesting Feedback
I am also an editor (of the General Topics digest).
I read LA, General Topics, and Home Cooking, through email (you can sign up to get the digests that are relevant to you in the upper right hand corner of your screen where it says "sign up for chow newsletters").
I see the digests as giving extra exposure to particularly great topics and comments, since not everyone has time (or inclination) to read every thread. As pane says:
>Sometimes people append interesting information into a thread that might not otherwise interest me, so I wouldn't have read it. I want the Digest to pick up both of those.
Exactly!
Sometimes, posters and commenters assume a level of expertise that not everyone has, so part of the job of Digest is to provide context (as pane said) to make sure that everyone can learn from the threads and participate in the conversation.
I would love for Digests to be more connected to the rest of the content - searchable, maybe popping up in the sidebar when a relevant topic is displayed. I'd love for the posters and commenters to get more recognition for their awesome posts!
Asian Market: Beverages
I really like grass jelly drink as well and also find it hard to describe the flavor - unless "medicinal, but in a good way" sounds halfway appetizing? Not for everyone, but I find the flavor and the chewy jelly very appealing.
Persian cucumbers, my new favorite salad ingredient
I agree that Persian cucumbers are meatier in texture - they seem to have fewer and less noticeable seeds than ordinary cucumbers. They also seem to have noticeably more cucumber flavor - as arktos notes, Japanese cucumbers have a more delicate flavor, but Persian cucumbers kind of shout CUCUMBER! in your mouth. I love both for different uses.
Raspberries, Lemonheads and Twinkies Challenge
This thread makes me proud to be a Chowhound. No obstruction is too great!
Looking for THICK drinking chocolate mix
When you buy "drinking chocolate," for the most part it's a bag of chopped/ground-up regular chocolate, like a chocolate bar. You can either buy "drinking chocolate," or just buy a chocolate bar you like and use that.
Chop up the chocolate coarsely with a knife. Add about four tablespoons chocolate to about a quarter cup of boiling water, and whisk it together until it's all melted. Then add milk, cream, booze, etc. (I add a few tablespoons of heavy cream and a little vanilla extract.) You can do this over heat in a saucepan, or you can do it straight in the cup. I've been making lots of it this month so I have the technique down! I love the pudding texture.
AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO HATES TURMERIC?
I love the fresh roots - you can eat them raw, like a spicy carrot! (And they temporarily dye your teeth a pleasant orange color.) The flavor bears little resemblance to the powdered stuff, although that's useful too.
Is there anyway to tell when an egg has 2 yolks?
I've been lucky enough to get turkey eggs from the farmer's market and I LOVE them - even to the point of having them raw in smoothies. They have a somewhat different flavor from chicken eggs, and taste to me more like meat than chicken eggs do. If you like things like grass-fed beef and venison, turkey eggs are probably for you.
How can Americans incorporate more fruits & vegetables in their diets on a budget?
I love all the suggestions for "hiding" vegetables in things - instead of changing your whole eating pattern, sneak vegetables into dishes you already eat.
My suggestion (also a completely traditional Italian dish, maybe Roman?): instead of having pesto with just pasta, you can boil small potatoes and green beans in the same water as the pasta and toss the pesto sauce with that (n.b. not necessarily for the same amount of time as the pasta - I go potatoes first, then pasta, then beans). More recently, I figured out that you don't have to actually use any pasta at all, and you can use any vegetables at all, and also they don't have to be cooked at all. Good pesto makes everything taste good.
The Best Whole Wheat Bread in LA
I love soft, chewy, dense bread, and I don't really like crunchy, crusty bread. The three kinds of whole wheat bread from The Bagel Factory on Cadillac & Robertson are the best breads I've EVER had - whole wheat or not.
They make whole wheat challah and two kinds of whole wheat sandwich bread. The breads are all sweet, flavorful, dense, chewy, yeasty, and delicious. They have ingredients like oat flour, eggs, molasses, malt, and raisin juice.
When I was little, my mom had a business making homemade whole wheat bread in her kitchen and delivering it around our little town. Her bread was great. This is better. (Is it wrong to say that?)
The "High fiber sandwich bread" is the lighter of the two sandwich breads, with several flours (oat, rye, corn, more) and barley flakes on top. The other whole wheat sandwich bread is darker and more intensely yeasty, and has little nutty whole grains in the mix.
I don't have a favorite. All three are stellar.
I just eat it straight. No butter, no sandwich fillings, just bread. Maybe a little salt once in a while. And a glass of milk.
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Bagel Factory
2320 S Robertson Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
Just a thought: Why value-brand packaging may not be such a great idea.
That's absolutely fascinating. I'd never thought about it that way before, but of course, upon reflection, we make consumption decisions not only at the supermarket but at home. And stuff we have sitting in our freezers or cupboards absolutely influence our consumptions decisions at the store.
I wonder how much advertisers think about appealing to consumers to eat (or discard) their products once bought, versus appealing to consumers to buy their products off the shelf. I suspect that many "best by" dates occur unreasonably soon after purchase, and that this is in an attempt to encourage consumers to discard and replace unused items, but that is pure speculation.
Does such a thing as produce carpaccio REALLY exist?
I LOVE raw beets - either cut into beet sticks (like carrot sticks) or grated over plain cooked lentils.
Adapting to local taste versus "dumbing down."
Ha ha - I used to. Really, I just hang out with too many analytic philosophers.
Waffle day - what's your favourite waffle topping?
I also love yeast-raised waffles - but I think flavorful, long-risen sourdough waffles pair BEAUTIFULLY with homemade height-of-the-season-strawberry ice cream and whipped cream. (On top, not on the side!)
Adapting to local taste versus "dumbing down."
I think this is an interesting and completely legitimate question. As the OP indicates, there are examples of clearly "dumbed down" food (like the "Szechuan" restaurant known as The Inn Place on my block, which serves deep-fried battered meat blobs covered in red syrup), and examples of aesthetically awesome "adaptation to local taste" - or local ingredients (like Japanese spaghetti with fish roe sauce - yum).
Obviously, we all have some criteria for quality of food beyond popularity - otherwise, we'd have to agree that, e.g., McDonald's makes the BEST hamburgers in the world. There must be SOMETHING upon which we judge food quality, other than popularity. But I suggest that the criteria for quality vary from cuisine to cuisine. Each cuisine has its own aesthetic values, its own structure, its own axes of quality. What's important in one cuisine is irrelevant in another.
I would say that one of the central important qualities of Thai food is the balance between strong flavors (sweet, spicy, pungent, salty, etc.). In Vietnamese cuisine, it's about clean tastes and the freshness and variety of herbs (for instance).
To answer the question of whether a given adaptation qualifies as "dumbing down" or legitimate "adaptation" (Thi N calls it "natural fusion"), we could apply these steps:
1. What is aesthetically important in the "home" cuisine? What are its axes of quality?
2. Does the adaptation apply or extend the aesthetic values of the "home" cuisine? (Or does it shamelessly crap all over what is important and great about the "home" cuisine?)
3. Alternatively, does the adaptation impliedly substitute a NEW set of aesthetic values for those of the "home" cuisine?
I think if the answer is "no" to the final two questions, you've got a "dumbing down" situation. But if the adaptation follows the value structure of the old cuisine, or creates a new, interesting set of aesthetic values, then I think it's legitimate fusion.
What's your favorite gum flavor?
I cannot agree more, although most of my friends seem to think it tastes like soap. It's very perfume-y like soap, but there's no bitterness - it's just association, I think.
I love having perfume-scented breath. This is part of the pleasure of drinking rose kheer or eating candied violets. If only they made sandalwood gum, rose gum, neroli gum, geranium gum, my aesthetic life would be complete.
Green leafy vegetables.
Re: arugula pesto - that has to be the most exciting thing since grape leaf pesto (http://www.chow.com/blog/2009/07/grape-leaf-pesto/). I am trying that this weekend, thanks.
How long can I store duck fat in the fridge?
I don't use much duck fat and mine was definitely rancid after a year in the fridge. I really shouldn't buy quarts of duck fat.
New Year's Resolutions: Eating Natto
Based on my experience: buy the most expensive natto you can find. There's a BIG difference between the one that's, say, $3.00 a package and the one that's $2.00 a package.
Mix it up well. Have it over rice with some furikake/seaweed/sesame/etc. sprinkles, and/or soy, mustard, or another condiment. Or make a hand roll with rice wrapped in nori.
Oh -and apparently it's not cheating to pour off some of the slime.
Chow Digest with some tips on natto - http://www.chow.com/digest/2008/03/neba-neba-natto/
Here's something cool about people determined to acquire the taste for natto: http://thenattoproject.com/
Grape leaves other than for stuffing?
I've only used grape leaves for dolma-like objects, but I just wanted to mention that I've bought fresh grape leaves from an Armenian grocery store here in Hollywood (Jon's, if anybody's interested). I found them much more fragrant and tart than pickled grape leaves. Elsewhere in the US, you might check local grocery stores anywhere with high grape-leaf-using populations for signs of fresh grape leaves.
REVIEW: Priyani, Northridge
He won't say so, but Thi N. has a review of Priyani in the L.A. Times.
http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-find27-2009may27,1,68976.story
Gusano - Worm Salt
I can't wait to try the dessicated fried chicken. And sal de gusano definitely needs to be a perfume!
Gusano - Worm Salt
Hey pglalioni, I linked to your comment in the comments section of the digest page - http://www.chow.com/general_topics_digest/7470.
Gusano - Worm Salt
My friend just got back from a trip through Oaxaca, and brought back some powdered gusano salt with chilis - that means worm powder, guys. She had eaten several dishes prepared with the stuff, and had some with tequilas, and decided to bring some home. I tried it in order to demonstrate how macho I am.
Turns out it's great! A very savory, umami flavor, reminiscent of mushroom or truffles. Rich and complex, meaty and delicious. I can TOTALLY understand why this would be a culinary necessity. I never thought I would enjoy a worm, but there it is! It is not just Fear Factor food. It is genuinely excellent.
Has anyone else tried this? I can see it working well with tequilas and cocktails, and being added to dishes the same way you might add truffle salt (which is to say, if you want the deep bass flavor to dominate the dish).
Recent Duty-Free Visit Yields 190-Proof Grain Alcohol...Now What?!
I've had excellent results with Buddha's Hand Citron, height-of-the-season strawberries, and maximally fragrant pink-fleshed guava, all from the farmer's market. My rule is, if it smells fantastic, buy it and stick it in some grain alcohol that day. Grain alcohol dissolves the flavor and color of fruit much faster than vodka - within a few days, as opposed to months. I like to add Estate Gold Liquid Cane Sugar when I dilute down the infused alcohol, even though it adds a caramel tinge - but I don't care about the color of the final product, just the fragrance and taste.
No method I've yet tried preserves the flavor and fragrance of fresh, perfect fruit as well as infusion in alcohol. It's lovely to be able to smell perfect summer strawberries in December.
Blue Diamond Almond Milk
Just to clarify - I'm pretty sure the Almond Breeze product Agent Orange is talking about is the Blue Diamond brand almond milk - http://www.bluediamond.com/shop/natural/almondBreeze32.cfm.
Atole season
If you've never tried atole, you should try it - I usually get atoles from taco trucks. The flavor and consistency of atoles and champurrados varies a great deal from cook to cook, but I can't say I've ever had a bad one. Generally, atoles tend to be much less sweet than hot chocolate or arroz con leche. As Pat says, they are extremely emotionally comforting on a cold night.
I recently had an atol de elote (corn atole) from a Salvadoran restaurant - it was made with fresh corn, and had an amazingly satisfying custardy texture and a sweet fresh corn flavor. I'd never had atole like that before - much richer and sweeter than the taco truck versions I've had.
