Kings of Pastry

In “Three Stars”, we saw how stressful it was to stay on top as a Michelin Three Star chef.  But wait till you see “Kings of Pastry”.  This is about a group of pastry chefs competing for the honour of being one of the “Meilleurs Ouvriers de France”.  This is a contest that is held once every four years in France for various artisanal professions, including everything from pastry making to steel engraving through a range of highly skilled crafts.  The process is brutal.  These craftsmen spent years preparing for the three day test.  But when they get the award, it’s for life, and because of its gruelling requirements, much honoured and respected.

In “Kings of Pastry”, we followed several pastry chefs in their preparation for the test.  They have to prepare a fancy sugar sculpture centrepiece and all kinds of pastries and chocolates for a wedding party.  They drew on all their creative and technical resources to design the sculpture.  The rest is probably easy for these skilled craftsmen.  But the most draining was the actual preparation of the sugar sculpture at the test site – the sculpture had to be made in the kitchen and then carried by hand to the tents that were erected for this purpose.  They actually had staff directing traffic to ensure there is no collision during this transportation.  A slight change in humidity could be disastrous for the sculpture – and it happened to one chef whose sculpture collapsed as he placed it on the table.  It was devastating – but after calming down, he went back and finished the competition, gathering up his creative juices, he salvaged what was left of the broken sculpture and quickly turned it into another creation, almost like a phoenix rising out of the ashes.  I won’t spoil the film by telling you the results of the contest.  But it was finger-biting exciting.

Chef repairing the damage after the collapse of his sculpture 

One can’t help but admire these dedicated artisans who put their all into this test of their endurance over the course of just a few days.  They have to have their technique down pat in order to survive all the ups and downs during these stressful hours.  Their reward, if they win, (there is more than one winner - they just have to get a certain number of points) is a prestigious collar ribbon presented by the French President at the Sorbonne. 

"Three Stars"

I binged on food documentaries last week.   Watching one led me on to another, and another.  Food docs can be addictive.  The three I watched were all very good.  Although I wasn’t inspired by them, I was certainly fascinated – and excited by the passion that had inspired these chefs. 

The first one: “Three Stars” directed by Lutz Hachmeister introduced us to nine Michelin starred chefs, their personalities, how they run their kitchens, the philosophy behind their cooking and more importantly, how the Michelin star designation affected their lives.  The “Three Stars”, referring to the rating by Michelin, could make or break a restaurant, and its chef.  In the case of Bernard Loiseau, who committed suicide when he thought he might lose his 3 star status, it indeed broke the man.

These chefs, all fascinating personalities, could not have been more different.  Some were boisterous, some reserved, but all dedicated and focused on perfection.  One chef, Oliver Roellinger of Brittany, was defiant.  He gave up his Michelin 3 stars and closed the Maison de Bricourt.  He chose to share his cooking in a less formal setting in Le Coquillage, opening at the same time a spice importing company, a cooking school, a guest villa and a pastry shop.  This is one restaurant I would like to visit.

You can see the names of the other chefs on the cast list of the documentary.  Jean Georges Vongerichten, who owns and operates a “constellation” of 3 and 4 star restaurants, is obviously a savvy businessman in addition to being a famous chef.  He was the consummate actor in his own show.  Contrast him with Nadia Santini, the first female chef in Italy to earn the three stars.  She was relaxed and gentle, completely at home in her small town restaurant, Dal Pescatore in Canneto sull’Oglio in Lombardy – another one that I would like to visit.  I was also sad that Sergio Hermann announced that he will close his restaurant Oud Sluis in the Netherlands in December, 2013 as he seemed so charismatic.  But then it does make me wonder at the stress these guys must be going through – living on the edge, almost with a sentence over their heads – perform, or lose your 3 star status.  No wonder they opt to close, and then start again from scratch - too many of these occurrences to be coincidence. 

The million dollar question:  How long can one sustain perfection?

I admire these chefs but I do feel sorry for them, except for the ones for whom the “three stars” is not a sentence, but just another adornment external to their calling.  As for the Michelin people?  They certainly know how to keep their edge - they have developed a separate rating system for restaurants in Asia.  Now I call that savvy!

I will talk about the other two docs in another post.

Growing my own salad

I love the idea of harvesting lettuce from my backyard for my salad - apart from the fact that I know where it came from, it is also very fresh and tasty - very satisfying overall.  I had started growing my own salad this year, thanks to my serious gardener friend who  offered me nine lettuce plants that she had pulled from her vegetable garden.  I planted them in organic soil in an old planter liner, and in two weeks, I was able to harvest enough for a salad.  This is despite a random attack by the resident raccoon.  Somehow it just dug up the plants, chewed up a few leaves and never came back - thank goodness!

A week after planting

Three weeks after planting - weekly harvests, and almost no work at all.  
I must have watered them three times this month, thanks to the rain.  I applied an organic fertilizer that came in spikes.

This is a week's harvest - enough for a salad and at least four sandwich wraps

 add some cherry tomatoes from my deck planter

 
and I have myself a salad!

Thanks, D!

Is It Really Cake?

A friend of mine brought this remarkable "cake" to my attention.  It was too good an opportunity to pass up so I asked her to do a guest post for us.  To my surprise, she agreed - another example of "never ask, never get".  Enjoy ~

Few of his clients know that Bob Hansen, a multi-talented construction contractor who does work for me from time to time has another life as a painter cum cake master.  His often whimsical, always Food-Network-worthy cakes are the stuffs of legend and perennial winners at the local July 4th county fair.  The only times Bob didn't win was when he didn't compete in order to (in his own words)  "give others a chance". Lucky for us fans, this year Bob somehow managed to vanquish his altruistic feelings and reentered the fray.  The result? What else but another cake that took the cake:

Love the details!  crumpled paper on the floor,  note on pad, printer output on the floor...

Lest anybody thinks this tour de force is a mere concoction of colorful plastic gizmos and thingies, I should point out that all but the legs and antennae of the butterfly are edible. The chair pad and back are real ginger bread; the cables are black licorice; the pencil and apple are gum paste; the floor is royal ice painted with food coloring to look like wood planks.  

The desk is a multi-functional engineering marvel featuring a built-in printer, an USB port with flash drive and a few SD memory slots. One side is the printer's in-feed and the other side is the out-feed with a catch rack made from sugar dough.  Great space saving design with patent pending by the way. The legal pad, which most would agree to be the pièce de resistance, is gum paste overlaid with icing upon which an edible food printer is used to print the lines with food colored ink. Ditto for the computer display and printouts.  

Left side view - more details: cellphone charging, printer paper feed...

What is that iridescent butterfly doing on the back of the chair, you ask? It turned out it's Bob's trademark signature which is guaranteed to give copycats nightmares. Originally Bob intended to create a figurine to sit at the desk but ran out of time.  No problem, the absence was ingeniously covered up by the inscription "I'll be right back" on the legal pad. Pretty slick, eh?

Crumpled notepaper turned into crumbs!

Incredible?  Apparently others agreed.  On the first day of the fair, some faithless soul came along and, instead of stuffing a chunk of cake into his/her mouth (which would have been reasonable), pulverized  the computer printout and legal pad page that were on the cake floor just to be satisfied that they weren't real paper.  Not to be outdone, the next day another (or maybe the same) villain ripped off the loose page from the legal pad.   After that, since the fair still had two more days to go, I no longer had the heart to follow the fate of Bob's masterpiece.  Now who says the Americans are a nation of lemmings that blindly run over cliffs?

- With thanks to sanssoucci

Bob Hansen actually makes custom cakes -  http://isitreallycake.com/

More on Amochinmi’s Onomichi Ramen (阿藻珍味の尾道ラ一メン)

We bought more Onomichi ramen (尾道ラ一メン) from Amochinmi (阿藻珍味) in spring.  They came with different soup stock.  One was a light version of the regular shouyu soup – ‘Assari!’ – prepared with usukuchi shouyu (light soy sauce 薄味醤油) and half the amount of pork fat.  Another was a rich version – ‘Noukou kotteri!’ – made with kogashi shouyu (caramelized soy sauce焦がし醤油).  The third was ‘Tonkotsu’ (とんこつ), a white stock of pork bone and in this case enriched with small fish from Seto Inland Sea and oysters from Hiroshima prefecture.  All were very good.

Assari! ramen

Noukou kotteri! ramen

Tonkotsu ramen

We ate them with slices of home-made chashu, and sometimes with boiled gyuutan (beef tongue).  

ramen with beef tongue

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Amochinmi has introduced a number of cold ramen for the hot Japan summer.  The offerings include chilled lemon (冷やし檸檬ラーメン) and tomato ramen (冷やしトマトラーメン), cold ramen with sesame sauce (ごまだれ) and sweet vinegar sauce (甘酢だれ), and the spicy hot Hiroshima tsukeramen (広島流つけ麺).  Tsukeramen, originated from Hiroshima, is cold ramen eaten with a dipping sauce that has been spiced up with red hot chili pepper (唐辛子), nin’niku (garlic) and goma (sesame).  We are looking forward to trying all of them as soon as they are delivered.

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Besides Amochinmi, we tried a shio koji (塩麴) ramen made by Menno Shimizuya of Hida (飛騨), Gifu Prefecture (岐阜県).  

shio koji ramen

Shio koji, the fermented product of rice inoculated with a mould culture called aspergillus oryzae (the same starter for sake, soy sauce and miso), salt and water.  It has been the latest trendy food ingredient in Japan for its health benefits.  Firstly, it is a probiotic.  Secondly, it contains much less sodium than salt but just as much umami.  It is being used in place of salt for seasoning and pickling.  We have enjoyed karaage (deep fried chicken meat) and tsukemono (pickled vegetables eaten with rice) marinated with shio koji, so we were eager to try this shio koji ramen.  We were surprised that the soup gave us a thirst for the rest of the day.  I could not understand that since one benefit of shio koji was to reduce the sodium intake.  Out of curiosity, I read the nutritional information on the back of the soup packet and was shocked that it contained 2,515 mg of sodium, 10% over the recommended daily limit of 2,300 mg.  Incredible!!! 

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My not-so-precise recipe for making Japanese Chashu (チャ一シュ一):

Poaching liquid:  Put a cup of koikuchi shouyu (濃口醤油 dark soy sauce), mirin (みりん sweet cooking sake) and junmai sake (純米清酒 sake brewed without added alcohol) into a pot.  Heat up the liquid to a gentle boil.  Add sugar to your taste.  

Pork for Chashu:  The pork should have some fat.  Many people use kata rosu (肩口一ス shoulder roast) or bara (バラ pork belly).  I use both, and sometimes also sotomomo (そともも pork butt). 

Cooking the Chashu:  Make sure there is enough poaching liquid to cover the pork; add water if necessary.  Bring the liquid to a boil.  Add the pork.  Let the liquid returns to boiling.  Cover the pot and turn off the heat.  After 15 minutes, bring the liquid to a boil a second time.  Again, turn off the heat and leave the pork in the covered pot.  Repeat the process a couple of more times for a large piece of pork.    Slice the chashu thinly for ramen.  This quick recipe is very different from the usual ones that simmer the chashu for a long time until it is tender.    

Home made chashu

Save the poaching liquid:  The liquid keeps well if you refrigerate it after it cools down.  You can reuse it for making more chashu or braising other meat.  The liquid acquires more flavors from the meat with each use.  You can also reduce the liquid to make a thick sweet sauce similar to tare for yakitori and teriyaki.

One less place for Alsatian food in Toronto

Just last December, I wrote about our food experience at Elle m'a dit, the Alsatian restaurant on Baldwin Street in Toronto.  The place received rave reviews in the newspapers and on food sites.  So it was with consternation that I received the news of its closure from my friends (who shared dinner with us that evening).  They found out the hard way - thinking of dropping by for dinner when they were in the neighbourhood and found the place closed!

I still have fond memories of their hot casseroles on a cold December night but more particularly, the very delicious and unique tarte flambée.  I couldn't just let this go without finding out more.  There were indeed writeups in The Grid and Toronto Life - closing due to a family issue and hoping to reopen at another location in a year.  Well, I hope they do.  Bonne chance!

Cantonese "White-cut" Chicken 粵式白切鷄

My all time favourite Chinese dish is the “white cut chicken” (白切鷄), which comes in many guises, the popular HaiNan chicken being a variation on the same theme.  When I was in my twenties, my roommate and I could easily polish off a whole “white-cut” chicken between us.  Now, I still couldn’t pass the dish by; whenever I go to a new restaurant, if they offer it, I’ll try it to see if it meets the “standard”.

As the name suggests, it is actually a poached whole chicken, chopped up and reassembled, and served with ginger and scallions.  The chicken itself is not hard to make, it’s just difficult to perfect so that the chicken is thoroughly cooked but stays tender. That is not easy because of the anatomy of the chicken and the difficulty of having to cook white breast meat the same length of time as the dark thigh meat.  The true test of a well-made white-cut chicken is in the tenderness of the white meat and the ‘crispness’ of the skin.  There is also a technique to making the ginger-scallion sauce.   A friend of mine, Mr. Anonymous, has the method down pat.   I can vouch for that as I’ve tried his homemade edition - yes, he prepared a takeout special for me last time I visited the west coast!  He had picked up the method from talking to a few experienced chefs.  Here are his instructions:

1.     Cook with the best whole chicken one can get:

Whenever possible, buy a freshly killed, never before frozen, organic, free-range chicken, found in poultry shops that handle their own processing.  The perfect size is a bird between 2.5 and 3 pounds.  Chinese cochin, the so-called “yellow-feather chicken” (a misnomer as the feathers are actually bronze in color) is preferred because it is leaner and has more flavor; the meat is firmer and the bones harder. 

2.     Poaching the “Easy Way”:

Fill a large pot with enough water to cover the whole chicken.  Add a couple of slices of ginger, a stalk of green onion and a teaspoon of “sha-ginger” powder (沙薑粉 more on this powder later).   When the water is boiling, hold the chicken by its neck or feet and dip it into the water in a slow up and down motion a few times to fill and refill its body cavity with hot water.  This brings the inside and outside of the chicken to the same temperature for even cooking.  The water at this point will be below boiling point, so bring the pot to a boil again.  Submerge the chicken, cover the pot, turn off the heat and let it sit for 15 minutes.  Bring the water to a simmer, turn off the heat, and poach for another 15 minutes.  Take the chicken out to cool. 

3.     Alternatively, for the best results, poach with two pots and finish the cooking with a cold bath:

Fill two large pots with water.  Add a couple of slices of ginger, a stalk of green onion and a teaspoon of “sha-ginger” powder into each.  Bring both pots to a boil.  Hold the chicken by its neck and dip it into the first pot in a slow up and down motion a few times to fill and refill its body cavity with hot water.  Bring the water to a boil again.  Submerge the chicken, cover the pot, and turn off the heat.  After 15 minutes, move the chicken to the second pot of boiling water.  Again, submerge, turn off the heat and poach for another 15 minutes.  Violà, the poaching is done. 

While the chicken is being poached, prepare a large body of cold water with some ice cubes and season it with some “sha-ginger” powder.  Drop the poached chicken immediately into the cold water until its skin is cool.  The cold bath (過泠诃) stops the internal cooking, firms up the meat, and crisps the chicken skin.

(Optional step: Rub the chicken all over with some chicken fat from the pot to give it sheen.  For a healthier option, use sesame oil)

Note: a large chicken may have to be poached for another 15 minutes.  Exact cooking time depends on how much water in the pots, the size of chicken, etc., try it out and make appropriate adjustments.

4.     To make the classic Ginger-Scallion Dipping Sauce:

Grate a large piece of fresh ginger.  Chop finely a bunch of scallions.  Mix the ginger and scallions in a bowl.  Add a couple of teaspoons of “sha-ginger” powder and some salt.  “Sha-ginger” is the secret ingredient; it adds a unique aroma and complexity to the sauce.  To finish, pour very hot cooking oil over the mixture and mix it well.  

A few notes on making the sauce:

·       Chop the scallions and ginger by hand instead of using a food processor for better texture.

·       Be careful when pouring hot oil over the ginger-scallion mixture.  It will splatter and can be messy.

·       Another option is to add room temperature salad oil to the mixture and let it steep.  This method works but the sauce will be less aromatic and the scallions stay raw. 

·       Do not use microwave to make the sauce; the ginger and scallion will most likely be burnt.

·       For the brave ones, use rendered chicken fat in place of cooking oil.  Delicious!

·       The proportion of ginger and the white and green parts of scallions affects the color, texture and flavor of the sauce.  Adjust the amount to suit your taste. 

 –  ˜

Finish eating the white-cut chicken preferably on the day it is made.  Chicken spoils quickly even with refrigeration.  That is one reason why so many Chinese bbq delis and restaurants nowadays sell “kwei-fei chicken” (貴妃鷄) instead.  “Kwei-fei chicken” is white-cut chicken marinated in light colored spicy brine (白鹵水) for a savory flavor.  The brined chicken lasts longer.   

So, what on earth is 沙薑粉 (pronounced  Sha Jiang Fen)?

–  ˜

  The Chinese name literally means “sand-ginger”, and according to Google, the spice name is Zedoary. It is a rhizome, ginger-like but not regular ginger, galangal or turmeric.  I have seen it only in powder form in the spice section of Chinese markets.  The Chinese use it for cooking certain chicken dishes besides white-cut chicken.