tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1 2008-05-14T19:04:46Z Movable Type 3.36 tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1.246 2008-05-14T15:44:38Z 2008-05-14T19:04:46Z

Andrea Nguyen is the author of Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors. The first thing I notice about Andrea Nguyen, as she strolls through the crowded dining room, is the crinkly good humor in her eyes and...

SpiceLines Andrea Nguyen is the author of Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors. The first thing I notice about Andrea Nguyen, as she strolls through the crowded dining room, is the crinkly good humor in her eyes and her winning smile. Being female, the second thing I notice is her hair. It is thick and black, and the cut is casual chic with a few jagged ends, almost—but not quite--as if she had scissored it herself. Dressed in a tight zip up Juicy Couture-style jacket, she stands out among the woozy academic types ruminating over breakfast this chilly spring morning. At 39, Nguyen is arguably the most compelling voice in the American Vietnamese food world. Her 2006 cookbook, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Food Ways, Modern Flavors was a finalist for the James Beard Award of Excellence and garnered a Chicago Tribune review that compared her to Julia Child. The book, written in a friendly, down to earth style, not only clarifies Vietnam’s somewhat mystifying culinary heritage, but also explains in detail the role of such unfamiliar ingredients as fish sauce---where it came from, how it’s made and why you might add salt to this already salty condiment. In the nicest possible way, it establishes the author as an authority on the food of her homeland. ]]> carefully delineates each step of the book’s 175 recipes. This is essential if you’re Western and trying to make gio thu, Vietnamese headcheese, for the first time. That recipe begins: “Examine the [pig’s] ears for stray hairs and use a sharp knife to scrape and remove any you find. If there are lots of hairs, remove just the long ones. Hairs on the rim can get cut off later. A few short ones are okay.” I myself have made gio thu, but I can assure you, I missed the hairs. And though the recipes are clearly authentic, each also reflects Nguyen’s very modern, practical sensibility. In Vietnam, we learn, “birds the size of sparrows” were boiled and fried by itinerant, somewhat secretive Chinese cooks, and then eaten “bones and all.” Using her mother’s memory of this delicacy as a springboard, Nguyen has developed a tasty recipe that can be recreated in Western kitchens. She substitutes quail for the unnamed, sparrow-like birds, and, instead of boiling, steams them to preserve the flavors of the ginger-rice wine marinade before coating them with honey and soy sauce and deep frying them. The flavors and crispy skin are true to the original, even if the methods have changed. When I met her for breakfast in Chapel Hill a few weeks ago, Nguyen told me: “I want to be your friend in the kitchen. Not your mother and certainly not my mother. But I want to persuade you to use the best ingredients and the correct methods. I want to explain Viet home cooking to you, and show you how real people actually do it.” This is about as far from the celebrity chef approach as you can get: No shouting, no weird adaptations, no food porn--just careful, loving attention to the way dishes are prepared and eaten at home. Nguyen has created a big on-line presence via her website and blog at vietworldkitchen.com. As she describes it, the website is “an information hub dedicated to providing knowledge on Vietnamese culinary traditions.” It’s the place to go if you want to learn about the sticky rice cakes served at Tet, the Vietnamese lunar new year; how to use pungent shrimp sauce (and what brands to buy); and even how to pronounce Viet food words. There are dozens of recipes, as well, including many from her cookbook. But it’s on the blog that you really get a sense of what’s happening in the Viet food world. Here Nguyen holds lively, opinionated conversations with her readers about topics such as authenticity in Viet cooking, the best fish sauces and the feasibility of establishing a Vietnamese restaurant empire in the U.S. The following interview took place at the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill, N.C. in mid-April when Nguyen was here to preside over a dinner at the Lantern Restaurant featuring recipes from her cookbook. It was sold out, by the way: Over 60 of us sampled five courses featuring locally raised pork and vegetables paired with Spanish sherry and wines. Dishes like Ficklecreek Farm Pork Terrine—a version of gio thu, or headcheese—served on Banh Mi, the classic French Vietnamese baguette sandwich, put a local spin on this evolving Southeast Asian cuisine--without, I suspect, losing a whit of authenticity. How would you explain Vietnamese cooking to someone who had never tasted it? It’s a crazy animal of its own. It’s the intersection of Asian cuisines. It’s not Thai, or Chinese or Cambodian, but the blending of all those cuisines with influences from France and now the U.S. Why is that? Geography. Vietnam is a long narrow country with a coastline about the length of the [American] Eastern seaboard that has invited foreign contacts with new ideas and flavors. Roman coins have been discovered at the Oc Eo site in the lower Mekong River delta. Hoi An was a major trading post and there were once Chinese, Dutch, Japanese and Indian residents there. Also consider the 1,000 years of Chinese domination—we’re the only Southeast Asian cuisine that uses chopsticks-- and 75 years of French. Vietnam, as we know its borders today, has been that way only since 1802, when it was unified under Emperor Gia Long. What sort of influence has the U.S. had on Vietnamese cuisine? Access to more western ingredients like white flour, refined sugar and butter. There’s more meat here, particularly beef and chicken, which are expensive in Vietnam. Shaking beef, where cubes of beef are seared by shaking them in a hot skillet, is not regular homey fare, but it has become popular here due to crossover restaurants needing a steak-like option for customers. Over time Vietnamese Americans and Vietnamese restaurants are picking up on the trend too. Is there a single Vietnamese dish that reflects all those influences? The banh mi sandwich. You look at it and go, “Oh, it’s a baguette sandwich.” But actually it reflects a lot of the influences of Vietnamese cooking. The diner gets to decide what goes on it: mayonnaise, soy, cilantro, chilies. You can have beef, char siu pork, garlicky chicken or Vietnamese cold cuts like gio thu, a headcheese made of pig ears, pork tongue and pork shank. At the end of the day, you can have it your way. What are some of the principal flavor combinations in Vietnamese cooking? People think of Vietnamese as light and refreshing and it is – with the lime, chile, fish sauce and herbs. But it can get funky and murky too. Galangal, turmeric and shrimp paste are a classic flavor combination in turtle or dog stew. These same ingredients are used in Indonesian cooking, but the flavors tend to be more layered and intense because they’re used in large quantities and rendered down into a concentrated level. Have you ever eaten such a stew? What’s it like? I make a mock turtle stew with pork, plantain and fried tofu, and I grew up with my Mom’s mock dog stew. But there are other dishes with this flavor profile. Cha Ca (also known as Cha Ca Ha Noi Cha Ca Thanh Long) is catfish marinated in turmeric, galangal juice and shrimp sauce. It’s served with rice noodles, lettuce, herbs and a great tangy-sweet dipping sauce with lime, sugar and shrimp and fish sauce. It’s a favorite dish. Another classic flavor combination is lemongrass, shallot and garlic. In my cookbook there’s a recipe for chicken stir fried with lemon grass and chile. You add Madras curry powder and fish sauce, but instead of simmering in a sauce, all the ingredients are stir fried so they retain their individuality. With the curry powder and stir frying, that sounds like another multicultural dish. Definitely. That method combines Chinese stir-frying with common Southeast Asian ingredients like lemongrass and fish sauce and an Indian spice blend. When I think of Vietnamese cooking, I also think of fragrant herbs and lettuce wraps. Yes, I don’t know any other Asian cuisine that wraps as extensively. There’s always a gigantic plate of lettuce and herbs that comes with so many dishes as a garnish. I may grill or deep fry, but then offset with light, bright flavors of herbs like the Vietnamese balm, fish mint and sorrel that come with Cha Ca. You’re encouraged to play with your food. How about spices? We don’t use spices as extensively as Malay and Indonesian cuisines. Vietnam was not part of the ancient spice route. But we do use peppercorns, cinnamon and star anise in certain dishes because they’re grown in Vietnam. The broth for pho bo, for example, is flavored with star anise and cinnamon, as well as charred fresh ginger and onion. Bo kho is a beef stew simmered with tomato, star anise and lemongrass. In your book, you describe fish sauce as the keystone of Vietnamese cooking. Fish sauce, or nuoc mam, is ancient. The Chinese were using fermented marine products centuries ago and it’s not inconceivable that the idea came to Vietnam during the Chinese domination that lasted from 111 BC to AD 939. It’s easy to see how it developed: you have fish and hot weather, and the need to extend it. It’s a practical approach. You can mix chunks of fish and salt and leave it to ferment. It will digest itself. It’s very nutritious and full of amino acids. In the west, there’s a misconception about fish sauce. It is not stinky or fishy. It sounds unpleasant, but high quality fish sauce is a delicate condiment that lends a savory or aromatic quality to foods. Fish sauce rounds flavors and puts a Vietnamese stamp on dishes. You might even simmer foods in fish sauce to preserve them. I often use it in conjunction with salt, even though it is salty on its own. Old fashioned Vietnamese cookbooks always say to add salt until it is vua vua, just to taste. Why add salt if it is already salty? The savoriness of salt and fish sauce are two different flavors—like two different hues of the same color. The combination tends to harmonize flavor. Also, people tend to use different brands of nuoc mam and to equalize things, just add a little salt and back off the fish sauce. When blending sauces and seasonings that include soy sauce, a little salt is often included. What brand of nuoc mam do you recommend? Here in the U.S. I use Viet Huong’s Three Crabs and Flying Lion’s Phu Quoc brands. Actually they’re both made by the same manufacturer. The best fish sauce comes from Phu Quoc and Phan Thiet, where it’s made in wooden casks and earthenware jugs. Look for those place names on the label. You should avoid any fish sauce that is very dark and salty. Good fish sauce looks reddish brown and clear, and its flavor is pleasant and fresh-tasting. Actually, there are three grades of fish sauce in Vietnam: First, a high quality one for eating with rice at the table; second, for making dipping sauces with lime juice; and third, a lower grade for cooking. But here I exclusively use high grade sauce since at around $3.50 a bottle, it doesn’t break my budget. You and your family came to California when you were only seven years old. What’s it like to go back? It’s very shocking for overseas Vietnamese to go back to the motherland. You look around and say, “This is where I’m from,” but everything is different. When I returned for the first time in 2003, I didn’t quite feel at home because I was born there but grew up in the U.S. I don’t look like the typical Vietnamese person either because I’m taller, bigger, I grew up on lots of good American food and good nutrition, and my hair is short. Many people were surprised that I could speak Vietnamese. Plus, you’re used to a certain comfort level in the U.S. Like many returning overseas Vietnamese, I worried about getting sick from drinking the water and eating raw foods there. But you can’t enjoy Viet food without the herbs and if I saw other people (locals) eat their herbs, I would too. In Vietnam, there’s a frontier mentality. You don’t quite know what’s going to happen next. People are hyper-entrepreneurial. It has changed much over time and with each visit, I feel much more at ease. What’s the first thing you eat when you go back? I have to have a bowl of pho for breakfast. And there are all kinds of snacky things. You never know what you’ll stumble on. A sticky rice vendor will sell different kinds of freshly made sticky rice treats. Or maybe I’ll find someone selling delicious banh mi sandwiches. Pho is one of those iconic Vietnamese dishes that seems to have been shaped by a variety of influences. Could you describe it? Pho developed in the north during the 1800’s after Vietnam was colonized by the French. When cows were slaughtered for beef, the local people picked up the parts that the French didn’t want to use. So in the beginning it was a soup, made of beef bones and tough, stewy type cuts, flavored with fish sauce, and with star anise and cinnamon, which are grown in the north. It had small flat rice noodles which likely came from Southern China, and charred onion and ginger which are uniquely Vietnamese. In 1954 when northern Vietnamese families migrated south, southern Vietnamese started enjoying the soup. The bowls got bigger, because everything is bigger and better in the South, and they added bean sprouts and herbs like Thai basil and offered hoisin sauce and chile sauce as accompaniments. These days, pho bo can be made with fancier cuts of meat like eye of round and even filet mignon, but you should start with a broth made from knuckle and leg bones with marrow. Some restaurants also serve pho ga, which is made from chicken and is delicately flavored with coriander seeds and cilantro. When you eat pho in Vietnam, where do you go? Pho 24 is a nice national chain, sort of like Starbucks. On my last trip back in March, I really liked the half price place next to my hotel, the Sommerset Chancellor Court, in Saigon. I was attracted to it because it advertised being Pho Bac. “Bac” means northern so when you see Pho Bac, that signals that the proprietors are trying to prepare hard-core, old-fashioned pho without all the accoutrements of southern-style pho. Then there were the disheveled young men who made the soup. You didn’t think they could put out a decent bowl, but they did, even when the kung fu movie was playing on TV at night. Like a lot of other families, yours left Vietnam in a hurry taking only family photos, jewelry and recipes. [Nguyen's family was airlifted from Saigon in 1975.] This seems to happen all over the world. Why is it always the photos, jewelry and recipes? You’re under a lot of pressure, so you take your most valuable possessions. Photos of family members are a form of identity. Jewelry you take because you can sell it for money, but you can also wear it to look good. Recipes so you can feed yourself. All these items sustain you in different ways. It’s the notion of stability. When you put them together, you are grounded. They give a sense of self when you are jumping off into the unknown. Your mother gave you the orange recipe book she brought from Vietnam. Did you have an epiphany or a moment when you knew food would be your life? I had always wanted to do something in food, but as the first generation in the U.S., I did what was expected. I got a B.A. in banking at the University of Southern California. My husband, who was in a PhD program in political science, was so excited. He thought, “I’ve got my meal ticket.” If I had been born here, I could have pursued a more impractical career, like writing or working in a restaurant. Actually, I did work at City Restaurant in L.A. with Mary Sue Milliken and Sue Fenniger. My mom was so embarrassed, yet it was her love of food and her curiosity that got me into it. At the end of the year my Dad did a complete turnabout and asked if I wanted to go to cooking school. Anyway, I got a job as a university administrator and started writing restaurant reviews. I always thought I couldn’t get into the food world, but I had ideas about subjects that no one was writing about. I noticed that Saveur was taking a fresh approach to food and I wrote Colman Andrews a query letter. My first article for them was on my mom’s mooncakes. Then I developed my website and a proposal for my cookbook. Vietworldkitchen.com is amazing. It’s like the place to go for anything you could possibly want to know about Vietnamese cooking. And now you have a blog as well. What’s been the benefit of all that? The internet has opened up the conversation. Whether you ever have anything printed on paper, your ideas will be heard. It has democratized the food world. When my cookbook came out, people wanted me to blog. I thought, “Why do people want to know some of the weird stuff on my mind?” But it is a great way to represent yourself on line, and to encourage discussion. There’s an interesting thread on your blog about authenticity in Vietnamese cooking. How would you define it? Well, the food has to taste good. You have to use the very best, well-crafted ingredients you can afford, with a sensibility of how flavors and techniques come together. You need to know the fundamentals before you start riffing. So often people just throw a lot of stuff together and make it too fussy. That’s not Vietnamese, and definitely not good cooking. I don’t know if you can pinpoint authenticity in a particular dish. It’s always moving and changing. But it has to be grounded in the fundamentals, even if it’s going to take off in some other direction. Unless you understand pho, it would be a disservice to the cuisine to make it with seafood. The vegetable chapter in my book begins with a recipe for vegetables boiled in salted water, refreshed in cold water and served with a dipping sauce. In a way, that’s not a “recipe,” but it is authentically how the Vietnamese people commonly eat their vegetables. There’s a good demo on your blog about how to make the caramel sauce which is used in so many recipes in your book. But caramel seems like something out of left field. Is it a legacy of the French? No, it’s not French. It was originally boiled fresh coconut water and it involves the notion of burning sugar and simmering food in inky, savory sauces. It’s theoretically like red cooking in China or adobo in the Philippines. It’s actually done all over Asia. In Vietnam, you can simmer foods in fish sauce blended with sugar and keep them for days without refrigeration. Caramel sauce is used in kho dishes—homey, everyday dishes--to impart sweet-savory flavors to simple foods using just a few ingredients. My recipe for chicken and ginger simmered in caramel sauce uses boneless, skinless chicken thighs cooked with a few tablespoons of caramel sauce, fish sauce, water and salt to create a rich, reddish brown, bittersweet sauce. It’s like the burned end of a roast. It’s what’s known as the Maillard effect. So can you get authentic Vietnamese food in the U.S.? Oh, yes. Ha Nam Ninh Vietnamese Restaurant [337 Jones, between Eddy and Sacramento] in San Francisco, has great pho. You can get good banh mi sandwiches at New Paris Bakery in Sacramento [6901 Stockton Blvd. #300]. Their bread is amazingly good. In Asia, people tend to specialize in one dish, like pho or sticky rice. In the U.S. they tend to serve everything. So you should look for the restaurants that specialize. ]]> tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1.245 2008-05-12T01:28:31Z 2008-05-12T02:09:24Z

Fresh curry leaves, plucked in a Hindu family's garden in Kerala, lend a pleasingly bitter edge to fish, coconut and vegetable curries. They have nothing to do with curry powder. Fresh curry leaves are one of the more mysterious...

SpiceLines Fresh curry leaves, plucked in a Hindu family's garden in Kerala, lend a pleasingly bitter edge to fish, coconut and vegetable curries. They have nothing to do with curry powder. Fresh curry leaves are one of the more mysterious ingredients in Indian cooking. These green, almond-shaped leaves have nothing to do with curry powder, of course. Nor are they related to the lacy, pale grey curry plant that appears at herb stands in early summer. But curry and curry leaves do have one thing in common: the word “curry” which derives from the Tamil kari, meaning soup or sauce. And it all makes sense when you discover that the fresh leaves are widely used to season the fish, coconut and vegetable curries of South India. ]]> Murraya koenigii, that grows wild in India and Sri Lanka. It is a member of the vast Rutaceae family which includes numerous exotic citrus fruits, like the bergamot, kaffir lime and pommelo. Oddly enough, it also includes the prickly ash tree which yields the lemony-tasting Sichuan peppercorn. As I said, it’s a big family. But the small black fruit of the curry tree is poisonous. I first saw the tree—really a bushy shrub--growing in Kerala in the backyard of a large Hindu family compound. It was in bloom, bearing clusters of pretty white flowers, but the shiny sharply pointed oval leaves are the real prize. Crush them and they release a vaguely unsettling aroma: for a brief moment, they are powerfully aromatic. As Gernot Katzer suggests, there may even be a faint whiff of tangerine. But that is promptly swept away by the earthy, acrid smell of freshly poured asphalt, or possibly scorched brake pads. Naturally this not how they taste in cooking. Curry leaves are commonly sizzled in hot oil, often with mustard seeds, and then simmered with fish or vegetables and other spices. Their slight bitterness gaves backbone to the other flavors, or what Amit Ghosh, executive chef at the Taj Malabar, describes as a “strong, muscular, appetizing” taste. There is no substitute: if you cannot find fresh curry leaves, simply leave them out. Here in the U.S. stems of fresh curry leaves are mainly sold in Indian grocery stores. Look for them in plastic bags in the refrigerated case, often for as little as 99 cents. They will keep in your own refrigerator for a few days; after that you can freeze them for a month or two. All the flavor is concentrated in the volatile oils—consequently dried curry leaves are completely tasteless. In The Indian Spice Kitchen, Monisha Bharadwaj observes that curry leaves are sometimes removed from a dish before serving. She cites an old Indian saying which “likens a person who is only wanted for a particular use and is discarded after this end is met, to a curry leaf, which enhances a dish but is eventually discarded.” For a recipe using curry leaves, see Red Snapper Curry with Kashmiri Chilies, Ginger and Coconut Milk. See also Grains, Greens and Grated Coconuts by Ammini Ramachandran for a host of Kerala Hindu vegetarian recipes that use curry leaves as a key seasoning. ]]> tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1.244 2008-05-07T22:18:03Z 2008-05-07T23:30:21Z

Diary of an obsession: It took four weeks and a dozen failed attempts before I was able to replicate the sumptuous red snapper curry I tasted in India. This is what happens when I become obsessed with a recipe:...

SpiceLines Diary of an obsession: It took four weeks and a dozen failed attempts before I was able to replicate the sumptuous red snapper curry I tasted in India. This is what happens when I become obsessed with a recipe: In the last few weeks, I’ve cooked 9 pounds of red snapper, cracked open 13 coconuts, and bought so many fresh curry leaves that Thomas and James, the owners of our local Indian grocery, thought they’d found the promised land. I flew through the kilo of dried Kashmiri chilies I hand-carried back from Goa, then spent days calling and emailing around the country looking for more. I fried so much chili paste that the house filled up with eye-watering fumes. Doors slammed, imprecations were muttered. And let’s not talk about clogging the sink with grated coconut, or the many sample containers that clogged the refrigerator. ]]> I’ve been trying to replicate the seductive red snapper curry that I tasted at the Taj Malabar in Cochin a couple of months ago. Amit Ghosh, the hotel’s personable and infinitely patient executive chef, has been a willing co-conspirator in this endeavor. It was Amit who, after a few false starts on my part, sent the real recipe from the hotel kitchen and who has genially responded to a flood of inquiries about each step of the process. He even studied the photos I’ve sent of each version, commenting on the thickness-- or not--of the curry sauce. “I feel the gravy is a little loose,” he said of a watery one. “Maybe you can reduce it and add very thick coconut milk so it will have a pouring consistency.” Amit is just the kind of friend I would love to have in the kitchen all the time. A native of Calcutta, he’s been with the Taj Hotels for 21 years, 17 of which were spent in Bangalore in the south of India. On his own, he likes to cook simple foods with simple ingredients: “Not too much oil or fat, and just the right spices and masala [spice mixture] when I cook Indian food.” The lightness of his touch is evident in this recipe for meen mullagittathu, which means “fish in a spicy red sauce.” In my case, the fish was red snapper plucked from Arabian Sea, exquisitely fresh, perfectly succulent. It was presented in a mellow sauce with a fascinating interplay of flavors. There was the sweetness of ginger and sautéed shallots, the slight bitterness of fenugreek, mustard seeds and curry leaves sizzled in oil, and the gentle heat of red Kashmiri chili paste. Towards the end, he added the tangy liquid in which kokum, a popular South Indian souring agent, had been soaking, and then some luscious freshly extracted coconut milk. The fish, which is simmered in the curry sauce just long enough to be cooked, brought all these flavors together into a delicious whole—in end, it is the fish, even more than the sauce, that you taste. Meen mullagittathu is a traditional Kerala curry, that, in ordinary kitchens, is made in a clay pot called a chatti which lends a special flavor to the sauce. Lacking a chatti, as most of us do, you can also make it in a heavy saucepan. But it does require a few special ingredients, so some shopping is necessary. This is not a spur of the moment Tuesday night curry, but a special one for the weekend when you have time to tarry in the kitchen. A few words about the ingredients: Kashmiri chilies: Naturally, after a week of searching on line and by phone, I happened to return for the 18th time to The Spice Market in Durham where a new shipment had just reached the shelves. (It helps that Thomas and James are from Kerala). The brand is Tulsy and the chilies are very close to the ones I brought back from Goa. These medium, tapered dried red chilies are used to make the all-important chili paste. The flesh of the chilies is not particularly hot, but has a pleasant, mildly fruity taste. On the Scoville Scale, the Kashmiri clocks in at 4,000 to 5,000 units, similar to a jalapeno. Most of the real fire is concentrated in the seeds, so after softening the chilies in water, you can control the heat by removing as many—or as few—of the seeds as you like. This paste also lends a beautiful rich red hue to the curry sauce. The recipe also calls for a spoonful (actually many spoonfuls, but I cut back) of Kashmiri chili powder to stoke the heat. This is a very different animal, much hotter than the whole chilies since it includes the ground up seeds. It’s an example of the way Indian cooks use different versions of the same ingredient to achieve different effects. Although the powdered chilies do not have as much flavor as the whole chilies, still if you can’t find the latter, you could make the chili paste by combining a tablespoon of Kashmiri chili powder with a little water. Just be sure that the heat doesn’t overwhelm the taste of the fish or the other flavors of the sauce. Do not substitute any of the other Asian chili pastes, by the way—most are very hot and some contain other ingredients such as shrimp paste. Kokum: This is the dried dark purple fruit of the garcinia indica tree which grows along the west coast of India. It is widely used in the cooking of that region as a souring and a cooling agent. At Mapusa market in Goa, I saw kokum—also known as cocum or kokam—spilling from open burlap bags. Cut in half and dried, it looks like a small, blackish-purple citrus with a chewy rind. Here in the U.S. the fruit tends to be quite hard and dry. Even when it’s soaked for hours, it never really softens up. In this recipe, the fruit is not used, but the very sour, tangy water in which it has been soaked. Substitutes might include tamarind water, which is widely used for sourness in other parts of India, or even lemon juice mixed with a little water. Coconut milk: It’s nice that we can buy canned unsweetened coconut milk, but frankly there is a huge difference in flavor between the greasy tasting stuff in cans and the divine richness of milk extracted from a freshly cracked coconut. Of course it is much more time consuming to make it fresh. Purists will blanch, but I cheated by blending frozen shredded coconut from the Indian grocery with hot water. I then pressed the coconut through a strainer to extract the liquid. This yields a thin, but flavorful coconut milk which will very nicely temper the heat of the chilies in the curry. You can thicken it by gently simmering the sauce for a few minutes before the adding the fish. I should point out, of course, that Amit Ghosh and his chefs always use the thick coconut cream extracted from a freshly cracked and grated coconut. If you want to do this, follow the directions for removing the coconut from its shell provided in Aliza Green’s excellent cookbook, Starting with Ingredients: Pierce the soft eye of the coconut with a sharp tool and drain the water. Bake the coconut in a 350-degree oven for 25 minutes and cool. Crack with a hammer and use a small spatula to separate the meat from the shell. Peel the dark skin from the white meat, if desired, or leave it natural. To make the coconut milk, coarsely chop the coconut meat. This will yield about two cups. For each cup of meat, pour in 2/3 to 3/4 cup hot water and process until the coconut is very finely ground. Pour into a large strainer positioned over a bowl, and press out the rich cream with the back of a spoon. Or you can pour the coconut into a clean non-terry dishtowel and squeeze out the liquid. Coconut oil: The recipe calls for coconut oil and that is what I used, since it adds deep, rich notes to the curry. However, it is not the healthiest oil, so feel free to substitute canola oil if you like. I used the Parachute brand of pure coconut oil, which comes in a bright blue bottle that looks like it holds shampoo. Actually Thomas told me that you can use it on your hair as well. Kerala Red Snapper Curry with Kashmiri Chilies, Ginger and Coconut Milk (adapted from Executive Chef Amit Ghosh, Taj Malabar Hotel) To Serve 2 to 3 Ingredients: 2 ounces dried Kashmiri chilies (see note) 1/4 cup dried kokum (see note) 2 cups frozen shredded coconut, thawed (see note) 12 ounces red snapper fillet 1/4 teaspoon turmeric 1/4 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons coconut or canola oil 1/2 cup shallots, thinly sliced 1-1/2 inches fresh gingerroot, peeled and julienned 1 tablespoon garlic, thinly sliced (4 to 5 cloves) 1-1/4 teaspoon brown mustard seeds 1/2 teaspoon fenugreek seeds 24 curry leaves (see note) 1/4 cup Kashmiri chili paste (see directions below) 1 teaspoon Kashmiri chili powder (optional) 1/3 cup fresh tomato puree 1 cup coconut milk (see directions below) Salt to taste Method: 1. Make chili paste: Place the dried Kashmiri chilies in a bowl and cover with boiling water. When the chilies have softened, pour off the soaking liquid but reserve 1 cup. Remove the stems, tear open the chilies and remove as many of the seeds as possible. Put the chilies in the blender or food processor along with 1/4 to 1/2 cup of the soaking liquid and whirr until the chilies are reduced to a thick paste. Only add as much water as needed to process the chilies. This will make approximately 3/4 cup paste. Set aside 1/4 cup for this recipe. The rest may be frozen for future use. 2. Place the dried kokum in a bowl and cover with 1/4 cup boiling water. Set aside. 3. Make the coconut milk: Put one cup of the shredded coconut in a blender with 2/3 cup hot water. Blend for 1 to 2 minutes, until very smooth. Place a strainer over a bowl and pour the coconut mixture into the strainer. Press on the solids with the back of a spoon to extract all the liquid. There should be 2/3 cup of thin, but flavorful milk. Discard the solids. Repeat the process with the second cup of shredded coconut for a total of 1-1/3 cup coconut milk. Set aside. 4. Wash the fish, pat dry and cut into 1-1/2- to 2-inch pieces. Rub with turmeric and salt and set aside. 5. Make the curry sauce: Heat the oil in a saucepan over a medium flame. When it is hot, add the shallots and sauté for 2 minutes. Add the ginger and garlic and sauté for another 1 to 2 minutes, until the shallots begin to turn golden. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside. 6. Add the mustard seeds to the remaining oil. (You can use a spatter screen to keep them from jumping out of the pan.) When they begin to crackle, add the fenugreek seeds and curry leaves. Saute for 1 minute. 7. Turn the heat to medium low and stir in the 1/4 cup chili paste and 2 tablespoons of water. Stirring frequently, cook the chili paste for 3 to 4 minutes. Add the chili powder (if using), fried shallots, ginger and garlic to the cooked chili paste and stir. 8. Turn the heat to low and add the tomato puree. Cook slowly, stirring occasionally, for 15 minutes. 9. Discard the kokum solids and add the soaking liquid to the curry mixture along with 1-1/2 cups water. Bring briefly to a boil, then lower heat and simmer gently for 7 to 8 minutes, until the curry sauce is slightly reduced. It should be liquid, but not thin or watery. Add the coconut milk and stir to combine. 10. Bring the curry sauce to a very slight simmer, then add the fish and salt to taste. Continue to simmer very gently until the fish is just cooked. It will turn white and opaque. Taste the mixture and correct seasoning, adding the 1/3 cup reserved coconut milk and more salt if desired. 11. Serve with basmati rice and bottles of ice cold Kingfisher beer. Note: A well-stocked Indian grocery store will be your best bet for Kashmiri chilies and chili powder, frozen shredded coconut (unsweetened), dried kokum, pure coconut oil and fresh curry leaves. I found all of these items at Spice Bazaar, 4125 Durham-Chapel Hill Blvd., Durham, NC 27707-2666. Telephone and fax: 919-490-3747. email: spicebazaar2@gmail.com I used Tulsy brand Kashmiri chilies, chili powder and frozen shredded coconut; the pure coconut oil was Parachute brand. You can freeze fresh curry leaves for 1 to 2 months. ]]> tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1.243 2008-05-04T21:02:29Z 2008-05-04T22:25:00Z

In Coatepec, Veracruz, Don Ruperto Opoch now sells Altura coffee to buyers in South Korea. A post on SpiceLines brought him to their attention. You’ve heard of the “butterfly effect,” haven’t you? It’s the idea, put forth by Conrad...

SpiceLines In Coatepec, Veracruz, Don Ruperto Opoch now sells Altura coffee to buyers in South Korea. A post on SpiceLines brought him to their attention. You’ve heard of the “butterfly effect,” haven’t you? It’s the idea, put forth by Conrad Lorenz, that the whisper soft beating of of a butterfly’s wing may stir up air currents that create a storm thousands of miles away. Something like the butterfly effect seems to have happened in Veracruz. And it’s very good news. Two years ago, I wrote about the plight of Don Ruperto Opoch, a genteel third generation organic coffee farmer whose story nearly broke my heart ("Veracruz: Great Coffee If You Can Find It; a Grower’s Lament"). "We are starving," he told me with simple dignity. After a lifetime of hard work and passion for his craft, he was slowly watching his entire world slip away. ]]> Don Ruperto and other small growers in the area had not been able to maintain a market for their high quality—and higher priced—Arabica beans. This, despite the fact the Coatepec coffee “is prized by connoisseurs for its medium acidity, good balance and smoothness of taste.” Over the years he, like many, had been forced to sell off his land, bit by bit, to survive. Tragically one group of farmers exchanged their tiny plots for money to pay smugglers for illegal entry into the U.S., but died when they were abandoned in the Arizona desert without water. Now life may have taken an unexpected turn for the better. Last week a friend who lives in Mexico wrote: “I must tell you when I went to Veracruz this March we went to see Don Ruperto who had copies of your article in his papers…He told us that because of the article some South Koreans ordered 800 kilos per month for a year and he organized coffee growers from Veracruz, Chiapas and Oaxaca to grow for them. A charming man and I can see why you loved him so. You should feel good about what can happen with a good piece of writing.” Please go here to read the original SpiceLines piece, posted on May 22, 2006. And if you go to Veracruz, be sure to visit the lovely colonial city of Coatepec. Café Opoch, where you can sip a cup of Altura coffee or buy Don Ruperto’s beans, and his coffee museum are located at 5 de Mayo No 66 at the corner of Allende. Telephone: (228) 816-07-07. Look for butterflies. ]]> tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1.242 2008-05-01T15:56:40Z 2008-05-01T17:29:30Z

The best juleps are homemade, of course: Here, sipping quality bourbon, simple syrup, and fresh mint in a silver cup. April showers, sometimes tropical, have propelled the garden mint skywards. A few days ago there were just a few...

SpiceLines The best juleps are homemade, of course: Here, sipping quality bourbon, simple syrup, and fresh mint in a silver cup. April showers, sometimes tropical, have propelled the garden mint skywards. A few days ago there were just a few paltry shoots poking out of the ground. Now a towering phalanx of purple-stemmed English peppermint with the most luscious fragrance has slipped through the boxwood hedge and is engulfing the jalapenos. Just in time for the Kentucky Derby this Saturday. Will Recapturetheglory nose out bookmakers’ favorites like Big Brown or Colonel John? I have no idea. But I do know one thing: All that mint is just calling for a julep. Or two. ]]> Wikipedia, from the Arabic julab and the Persian gulab, which refer to a refreshing rosewater drink. Over time the taste for juleps moved westward to the Mediterranean where mint was more common. Eventually “julep” came to be used generically for any flavored concoction that disguised the taste of medicine. How exactly the mint julep came to be the iconic drink of the American South is unclear. We do know that one John Davis, in an 1803 book entitled Four and a Half Years of Travel in the United States, described the cocktail as “a dram of spirituous liquor that has mint in it, taken by Virginians in the morning.” Apparently gentleman farmers knocked one back before going out to plow the back forty. But in the early days, they probably used a slug of corn whiskey, rye or whatever “spirituous liquor” they had at hand. Note too that Virginians, not inhabitants of the Blue Grass State, are the named imbibers. However it came to pass, the mint julep has been the traditional drink of the Kentucky Derby for nearly a century—and, according to the official web site, the Early Times Mint Julep Ready-to-Serve Cocktail has been the “official mint julep of the Kentucky Derby” for 18 years—about as long as Early Times has been sponsoring the Derby and other races at Churchill Downs, I would guess. (This may be the place to point out that Early Times is not bourbon, but a blended Kentucky whiskey. Both are made of corn, barley and rye, but by law, bourbon must be at least 51 percent corn.) Last year Churchill Downs race-goers quaffed 120,000 juleps during the Derby and its companion race, the Oaks—a bartending feat which involved 10,000 bottles of that cocktail mix and over 1,000 pounds of fresh mint. Real Southerners know that it's all just an excuse to sip outrageous amounts of their favorite bourbon. The great novelist Walker Percy, in a 1978 monograph simply titled Bourbon, observed that few Southerners actually drink juleps. Percy himself preferred to sip bourbon neat for the “aesthetic” pleasures of “the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot, bosky bite of Tennessee summertime…” But on Derby Day, he wrote, “people drink them like cocktails, forgetting that a good julep holds at least five ounces of bourbon. Men fall face-down unconscious, women wander in the woods disconsolate and amnesiac, full of thoughts of Kahlil Gibran and the limberlost.” Bob Dylan, whom you’d think would sooner chug Southern Comfort out of the bottle like Janis Joplin, gave such a precise recipe for a mint julep on his radio show in 2006 that you figure he’s been secretly imbibing them for years. “First up, you take four mint sprigs, two and a half ounces of bourbon. I’d put three. A tablespoon of powder sugar, and a tablespoon of water. You put the mint leaves, powder sugar and water in a Collins glass. You fill the glass with shaved, or crushed ice, and then add bourbon. Top that off with more ice. And I’d like to garnish that with a mint sprig. Serve it with a straw.” Dylan not withstanding, a julep is not a mint-packed mojito. The notion of sticking four sprigs into the bottom of the glass would make General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr. (more about him in a moment) rise up from the grave. In fact the mint should be barely a whisper, just a leaf or two, not muddled or mashed, but gently bruised. In the words of a dying Virginia gentleman (courtesy of Francis Parkinson Keyes), one should “Never insult a woman, never bring a horse into the house, and never crush the mint in a Julep.” Probably the most authentic recipe—and the one most likely to yield a Walker Percy-sized 5 ounce bourbon julep—is the one on the Buckner family website. General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., a grandson of a Civil War general of the same name, who himself was killed on Okinawa in 1945, gave a ceremonial mint julep recipe imbued with quasi-religious fervor. There’s lots of good Southern talk about “dipping a consecrated vessel into a spring of cool, crystal-clear water [bubbling] from under a bank of dew-washed ferns.” You must “gather the sweetest and tenderest shoots” from “beds of mint growing in aromatic profusion” and “gently carry them home.” And it helps to have an ancestral sugar bowl and a row of silver goblets. But here’s what Buckner says about the actual making of the julep: “In each goblet, put a slightly heaping teaspoonful of granulated sugar, barely cover this with spring water and slightly bruise one mint leaf [italics are mine] into this, leaving the spoon in the goblet. Then pour elixir from the decanter until the goblets are about one-fourth full. Fill the goblets with snowy ice, sprinkling in a small amount of sugar as you fill. Wipe the outsides of the goblets dry and embellish copiously with mint." Fresh purple-stemmed English mint from the garden, slightly bruised, adds a whisper of flavor to a bourbon julep. Nowhere in all this discussion does Buckner or anyone else address the type of mint that is to be used. In my opinion it should be the purple square-stemmed English peppermint that’s growing in my garden—OK, you can use spearmint in a pinch—but certainly not chocolate or pineapple or orange or any of the other flavored varieties that you might be tempted to try. Buckner's recipe is for the die-hard bourbon lover. It goes without saying that that the bourbon should be sipping quality. You could go a notch down from the very costly single barrel bourbons that ought to be drunk neat—something like W. L. Weller 7-Year Old or Buffalo Trace would be an excellent choice. But if single barrel Rock Hill Farms is your favorite elixir, use it by all means. Still, you might want to play with the other ingredients. Instead of sugar--powdered, superfine or otherwise--you could use simple syrup made by boiling one cup sugar in one cup of water. Mark Brown, president of The Sazerac Company, which owns a slew of great bourbons, recommends a homemade mint-flavored syrup: Use 2 cups sugar to 2 cups water; when the water boils, add the sugar, but don’t stir. Boil for 5 minutes, then spoon out the sugar. Pour the remaining syrup over 6 to 8 fresh mint sprigs, top off with torn leaves from 2 to 4 more sprigs, and refrigerate overnight. On the other hand, there are some who find the sweet stuff in the bottom its own reward. In that case, use a spoonful or two of granulated sugar drizzled with a little water. General Buckner and Dylan both insisted on shaved or at least finely crushed ice. We once had a great crank-handled ice crusher, but it vanished sometime in the 1970’s. General Buckner crushed ice in a canvas bag–-B points out that those annoying carryalls that are handed out at every conference could be pressed into service—but you could also use any non-terrycloth dish towel. Quite frankly, this is a pain—enough to drive one to e-Bay where it happens that a vintage Ice-O-Mat crusher is up for sale ($1.99 opening bid). Even if you have an automatic icemaker that delivers crushed ice with the press of a button, you will have to crush it even finer. The main thing to remember is that you’ll need two to three times as much ice as you expect. It may be heresy, but in my opinion the julep is at its best 10 minutes after you make it, when the ice, sugar and bourbon start to meld of their own accord. Enough talk. Here’s the recipe--as Dylan said, “Two or three of these and anything sounds good.” The Perfect Mint Julep Makes 1 mint julep Ingredients: 1 tablespoon simple syrup (or 1 heaping tablespoon sugar plus 1 tablespoon water), or to taste (see note) 2 or 3 leaves fresh mint 36 to 48 ice cubes 3 ounces bourbon, or to taste 2 or 3 sprigs mint for garnish Additional sugar or simple syrup, as desired One silver julep cup or 8 ounce glass One six-inch straw Method: 1. In the bottom of the cup or glass, put a tablespoon of simple syrup (or one heaping tablespoon sugar drizzled with 1 tablespoon water). Use more if you prefer a sweeter julep. Add the mint leaves and press lightly with the back of a spoon. 2. Crush the ice cubes in a clean, non-terry dish towel, using a hammer. The ice should be finely crushed. Fill the cup with ice to the brim. 3. Pour over the desired amount of bourbon. Add more ice to fill the cup, garnish with sprigs of mint and plunk in a short straw. Walk around chatting to your guests for 10 minutes. Start sipping. If you’d like it sweeter, add simple syrup or sprinkle with sugar to taste. Note: To make 1 cup simple syrup, bring one cup of water to a boil. Stir in 1 cup sugar and boil until the sugar has dissolved. Let cool before using. ]]> tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1.241 2008-04-28T01:32:57Z 2008-04-28T02:02:55Z

Susana Trilling's Chile Lovers' Tour is among the culinary vacations featured in the May 2008 Gourmet. Here, a pail of rare chilhuacle chiles harvested in the fall. Photo credit: www.seasonsofmyheart.com Somehow we wound up at a raucous baptism, drinking...

SpiceLines Susana Trilling's Chile Lovers' Tour is among the culinary vacations featured in the May 2008 Gourmet. Here, a pail of rare chilhuacle chiles harvested in the fall. Photo credit: www.seasonsofmyheart.com Somehow we wound up at a raucous baptism, drinking shots of mescal and dancing to pulsating music. A few years ago, I took a summer cooking class in Oaxaca with Susana Trilling. One day there was a surprise invitation to a fiesta. After driving aimlessly around a colonia on the outskirts of town, we heard music and let our ears take us to the party. Susana’s friends welcomed us warmly into their backyard and sat us at a round wooden table. We got to kiss the young man whose baptism we were celebrating—a sturdy, two-year-old riding on his grandmother’s hip. ]]> I remember dancing under a ceiling of blue and white balloons with wildly flickering strobe lights. Children in party clothes were racing about, mothers crooned to their babies. I ate chicken in a subtly spiced black mole sauce and a moist white cake with a creamy filling. The baby’s father poured shots of his special mescal para mujeres—fermented juice of the maguey plant "just for women." Infused with coconut, it was potent and delicious. Then a woman plunked down her own home-brewed mescal. This one was scented with oranges and came in a plastic gasoline jug. A curandera promised a handsome young bartender in our group that she would teach him all her mystical lore—oh, and she had a lovely niece… I describe this in some detail because it illustrates what I believe to be a cardinal rule of travel: There are moments when you have to ditch the plan and veer off track. Give in to spontaneity. You never know, you may wind up at a party with 100 new friends. The May 2008 issue of Gourmet is devoted to cooking vacations, from the posh to the purely adventurous. In “The Hot Zone,” (pp. 164-171), Kemp Minife describes his own moment of serendipity on another of Susana’s culinary excursions: the fall chilhuacle chiile harvest in the Canada region outside Oaxaca. “Marta brought us steaming bowls of broth piled high with chunks of meat, squash, beans and chilies….[We} pulled off the chile stems and tore open the skins, letting the tender flesh slip gently into the soup. Except for the pork and beef, I could have been in a 14th century time warp, slurping on that pre-Columbian combination of squash. beans and chiles…” Never mind about the abortive parrot viewing expedition—without it, Minife would never have had the thrill of stumbling back down the trail in total darkness while a hungry puma circled the van. Story value back in New York: priceless. Other vacations include the intriguing Route of Flavor jaunt to Ushgouli in the Republic of Georgia (“First You Milk the Cow,” p. 56-58.) where cheese-making sessions alternate with visits to 12th century monasteries. I’ve just returned from India, but I’d fly back tomorrow if I could take the curry class at Phiilipcutty’s Farm in the languid backwaters of Kerala (“Curry, No Hurry,” p. 38.) On the same trip, Jane Daniels Lear ran into a Cochin pepper merchant who whispered about a recently discovered “rare wild pepper plant with pungent fruit and lemon-scented leaves.” Two more reasons to return… To read more about Susana Trilling and her cooking school, Seasons of My Heart, go to Conversations with Cooks and Writers. Check Travel Diary for posts on our vanilla trip to Vera Cruz. ]]> tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1.240 2008-04-21T01:02:11Z 2008-04-23T13:12:43Z

Signs of spring: fresh soft shell crab and green garlic from the Farmer's Market. Yes, spring is here. The herb and vegetable garden is ready for ex-pat transplants: Black Russian tomatoes, French tarragon, Mexican poblano chiles. And sometimes, a...

SpiceLines Signs of spring: fresh soft shell crab and green garlic from the Farmer's Market. Yes, spring is here. The herb and vegetable garden is ready for ex-pat transplants: Black Russian tomatoes, French tarragon, Mexican poblano chiles. And sometimes, a purely local meal comes together in a most unusual fashion. ]]> Lettuces from the Carrboro Farmer's Market: (clockwise from top right) Eruption Red Romaine, McAdams Farm; Out-Red-Geous Romaine, Ayrshire Farm; Ferrari Red Red Oakleaf and Galisse Green Oakleaf, McAdams Farm. Yesterday I rose at dawn, gulped some green tea, and went to the farmers market. Around here, lettuce is having a moment. At McAdams Farm, luxuriant heads were almost exploding with ruffles and frills in shades of black plum, burgundy and lime. Even the names are volcanic: Ferrari Red Oakleaf, Eruption Red Romaine. Somehow I came home with five heads, enough for a week of salads. But meandering among the early strawberries and purple irises, I did a double take. Leeks? No. Green garlic. Pulled from the earth when the long flat leaves are still supple and the bulb hasn’t yet separated into cloves, this springtime delicacy has a mild oniony flavor that becomes sweeter when cooked. Peregrine Farm seemed to be operating a veritable nursery for green garlic—there were wispy baby stalks like scallions gone long, toddler stalks showing sturdier growth, and a gang of adolescents that were almost as big as leeks. I scooped up some of each. Then, on the way home, I stopped at Tom Robinson’s. This dilapidated cinderblock shack on Roberson Street is the place to go for fresh North Carolina seafood: Every Thursday, Tom checks out the local catch at the coast and hauls it back to sell through the weekend.. At 8:47 AM a young couple was spending their last $21 on a hunk of red snapper and a dozen big scallops. But the soft shell crabs, plump and wriggly when lifted from their wooden box, were the prize that caught my eye. I bought a pair and went home. Now when you have live soft shell crabs, there is only one thing to do: Eat them immediately. And so we did, for breakfast, with sautéed green garlic and a Japanese-style dipping sauce of soy, lemon and mirin. The crab was crisp on the outside, sea-sweet and succulent on the inside, and the greens added a soft garlicky bite. A drizzle of soy and lemon was all it took to reach morning bliss. The green garlic and the soft shell crabs, au naturel. Green garlic may resemble small leeks before the bulb matures and separates into cloves. You really don’t need a recipe for any of this, but here it is: Sizzled Soft Shell Crabs with Green Garlic and Lemon-Soy Dipping Sauce To serve two: Ingredients: 1-1/2 teaspoons lemon juice 1 teaspoon soy sauce 1 teaspoon mirin or rice wine 1 teaspoon rice vinegar 2 teaspoons seafood or chicken broth 1 large stalk green garlic, about the size of a leek 1 tablespoon canola oil 2 large live soft shell crabs ¼ cup flour Salt and pepper to taste ¼ cup canola oil Method: 1. Make the dipping sauce by combining the lemon juice, soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar and broth. Set aside. 2. Trim the roots of the green garlic and remove the tough outer leaves. Slice the garlic into thin rounds. If there is any grit, swish the garlic pieces in a bowl of cold water. Scoop out, drain and pat dry. 3. Heat the tablespoon of canola oil in a skillet over medium heat. Toss in the green garlic and sautee until soft and just barely golden. If the garlic is browning too fast, reduce the heat. When the garlic is cooked, take the pan off the flame and remove to a cold burner while you cook the crab. 4. Clean the crabs: Using kitchen shears, remove the crab’s face by snipping about ¼ of an inch behind the eyes. Press down on the shell to squeeze out the greenish matter located behind the eyes. ( The worst is over.) Lift up the edges of the shell on each side and pull out the spongy gills. Flip the crab over and pull the down the triangular flap or “apron” at the bottom of the shell, and remove. Rinse in cold water and pat dry. 5. In a cast iron frying pan, heat the ¼ cup of canola oil over a medium flame. Combine flour, salt and pepper and lightly dust each crab with the mixture. When the oil is hot, place the crabs in the pan, right side up and sizzle for 3 to 4 minutes. Turn the crab and cook for another 3 to 4 minutes. The crab should be crisp and golden brown—lower the heat if it seems to be cooking too fast. 6. Drain the crabs on paper towels and serve at once with a large spoonful of sautéed green garlic and a small bowl of the dipping sauce. ]]> tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1.239 2008-04-16T19:12:37Z 2008-04-16T21:50:50Z

At the Rice Boat restaurant in the Taj Malabar, spicy meen mulagittathu, a delicious fish curry flavored with Kashmiri chilies, is served with basmati rice. First taste of India: a delicate coconut cookie, thin with buttery crumbs. When I...

SpiceLines At the Rice Boat restaurant in the Taj Malabar, spicy meen mulagittathu, a delicious fish curry flavored with Kashmiri chilies, is served with basmati rice. First taste of India: a delicate coconut cookie, thin with buttery crumbs. When I open my eyes, there are sunrise views of the Arabian Sea. My fourth taste: a sumptuous fish curry. Chunks of tender red snapper swimming in bright orange broth burnished with Kashmiri chilies, crackled with mustard seeds and curry leaves. ]]> the scent of thick, humid air perfumed with smoke and sandalwood. Not incense, but mosquito coils with glowing tips. Malaria, you know. And roadblocks, three of them, on dusty roads lined with shadowy palms and dimly lit food stalls. A clutch of khaki-garbed policemen loomed in the headlights, then pantomimed rolling down the window. They looked at the young driver, at me, at the back seat. Each time, he said, “Taj Malabar,” and they waved us on. Finally I asked why. “Looking for spirits, modom,” mumbled the driver. I had a sudden vision of ghosts attaching themselves underneath the car. Could the battered Flying Police Patrol van with a man in khaki slumped over the front seat have been a ghost wagon? The driver continued: “Liquor, modom.” “Smuggling?” He nodded. Jetlagged to the point of hallucination, I fell into a bed strewn with marigolds. But about that fish curry. I’m at a table in the Rice Boat at the Taj Malabar. The restaurant, inspired by a traditional kettuvalam with woven ceiling, is perched over the grey blue waters of the Arabian Sea where tankers and smaller craft steam to and fro. Across the harbor is old Cochin with its cavernous go-downs or warehouses, vaguely redolent of the black peppercorns that once made this port the nexus of the Indian spice trade. But that was centuries ago. A pair of Italian women at the next table pick desultorily at a pair of lobsters. Hmmm. I glance at the menu. The waiter suggests freshly caught red snapper, prepared three ways in the style of Kerala, the skinny state on the west coast of India in which Cochin is located. I order a glass of freshly squeezed pineapple juice, sweet-tart and frothy. Soon the first round arrives: a morsel of masala-grilled fish, coated in a thick red paste fragrant with the spices that perfume the kitchens of Kerala: turmeric, red chilies, curry leaves, shallots, ginger, garlic and black pepper. Pan sautéed and served on a banana leaf, the fish is just this side of over-cooked, but I am surprised at the subtle flavors. Next comes meen pollichathu. This time a snapper fillet is wrapped in a banana leaf and grilled. But first the fish is marinated in lemon, turmeric and red chili powder, then topped with a luscious cooked masala, or mixture, of 10 spices, including mustard seeds, curry leaves and fenugreek crackled in coconut oil. The spices are tempered with tomatoes and thick coconut milk, and soured with cocum, the small dried black fruit of the garcinia tree prized for its tartness in this part of India. I tease open the banana leaf with my fork and taste--the snapper is tender and sublimely spiced, with multiple layers of flavor. I could eat buckets of the masala. “Very typical of Kerala,” smiles my waiter, as he puts a final bowl of meen mulagittathu in front of me. If this is typical, please let me have it every day. The fish curry is exquisite, hotter that the first two dishes, not searing but producing a glow that starts in the stomach and courses through the body, ending in a near-euphoric flush. Succulent chunks of red snapper are bathed in a rich, bright orange broth, spiked with Kashmiri chilies, balanced with tomatoes, fresh ginger and shallots. Again, there is the slight bitterness of mustard seeds, curry leaves and fenugreek sizzled in coconut oil, and the sourness of the cocum. I eat this vivid, burnished dish with basmati rice, soaking up the broth with an appam, a thin rice flour “pancake” that becomes thick and spongy as it absorbs the liquid. I am deeply, truly happy. Taj Malabar, Willingdon Island, Cochin 682 009, Kerala, India. Telephone: (91-484) 2666811/ 2668010 Fax: (91-484) 2668297. E-mail: Malabar.cochin@tajhotels.com. Web: www.tajhotels.com. . ]]> tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1.238 2008-04-12T17:39:52Z 2008-04-12T18:19:06Z

Bittersweet chocolate truffles from La Maison du Chocolat on Madison Avenue are dusted with cocoa and filled with coffee-flavored dark chocolate ganache. B returned from New York Thursday night, bearing surprise early birthday gifts—forty-eight, to be exact, and all...

SpiceLines Bittersweet chocolate truffles from La Maison du Chocolat on Madison Avenue are dusted with cocoa and filled with coffee-flavored dark chocolate ganache. B returned from New York Thursday night, bearing surprise early birthday gifts—forty-eight, to be exact, and all in one box. The surprise? Oh, just a quarter pound of the most exquisite bittersweet chocolate truffles from La Maison du Chocolat on Madison Avenue. Two layers of handmade cocoa-dusted morsels, filled with unctuous dark chocolate ganache subtly flavored with coffee. Unwrapping the signature cocoa-hued box, tied up with a café au lait-colored ribbon, was almost as delicious. ]]> Robert Linxe’s irresistible truffles. There was one spiced with ginger, another infused with two varieties of fresh mint, another with, yes, that same coffee. Bliss. An earlier memory: In the pre-hedge fund days, when Greenwich, Connecticut was a small town with a certain drowsy charm, B and I would often have Saturday lunch, babies in tow, at a chic French charcuterie. At the counter, displayed like jewels in a chilled case, were plain Maison du Chocolat truffles and jellied pate de fruits sparkling with sugar. We’d devour the pate de fruits for dessert, but the truffles were another matter. We’d nibble one apiece, slowly savoring the rich bittersweet chocolate, then stash the rest in the refrigerator where they would stay until the following weekend. Then out came the box. Two more truffles were consumed. We could make a dozen last for a month of weekends. Fast forward to the present: The Madison Avenue Maison du Chocolat is offering tasting sessions in its cacao-colored café. Tamanaco traces the history and production of chocolate from growing through finished production. Participants will taste a range of couverture and ganaches before preparing a fresh ganache to taste. (Sign me up!) The Duo explores “the interaction of flavors of three oolong teas and two coffees paired with specific chocolates.” Each $70 class is offered twice a month through July. Call for dates and reservations. La Maison du Chocolate, 1018 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10021. Telephone: 212-744-7117. Website: www.lamaisonduchocolat.com. ]]> tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1.237 2008-04-07T19:54:59Z 2008-04-08T01:01:01Z

Denise Vivaldo of L.A.-based Food Fanatics dishes about food styling: "I always tell the actors the food is poisoned so they can't eat it. If they have to nibble on camera, I serve them a few salad leaves." Here’s...

SpiceLines Denise Vivaldo of L.A.-based Food Fanatics dishes about food styling: "I always tell the actors the food is poisoned so they can't eat it. If they have to nibble on camera, I serve them a few salad leaves." Here’s what I did last weekend: Blow-torched a nearly raw chicken into gleaming submission, sealed limp hamburger buns with Scotchgard, built a toothpick scaffolding to prop up a collapsing wedge of chocolate cake. Then there was the no-melt “ice cream” made from a blend of Crisco, powdered sugar and cornstarch, and… Well, you get the picture. ]]> Master Food Styling Class given by Denise Vivaldo and Cindie Flannigan, the powerhouse team behind the L.A.-based Food Fanatics. Denise and Cindie are the go-to-girls when, say, Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson do a cooking segment on the Ellen DeGeneres show. They’re in there making sure the strawberries are picture perfect and that hundreds of other culinary details are just right. They’ve lent their recipe and styling talents to cookbooks for celeb chefs like Sandra Lee and Suzanne Somers, designed feasts for countless movies, TV and print ads, launched a series of their own “Do It for Less!” books. If you’re thinking mini-empire, you would be right. And the class was fun! Here’s my diary for a few hours of the first day: 8:57 AM: It’s gloomy outside, but inside Chez Bay Gourmet Cooking School, the lights are blazing and a video camera is ready to roll. Denise—who’s got short reddish brown hair, quizzical eyebrows and hands that swoop, swirl, pat and stab the air before they ever touch the food--is already dishing out styling info peppered with wicked tales of certain Food Network chefs. “Honey, you don’t think she comes up with her own recipes! You’re so sweet! The woman doesn’t know how to find the kitchen!” 9:07: While Denise keeps us laughing, Cindie is unpacking a box of raw chickens from Costco. A former art director and graphic designer, she’s blonde and quietly intense, a perfect match for Denise’s megawatt personality. (Denise: “I’m ADD, she’s OCD-- we’re the ideal couple!”). Meanwhile, it’s introduction time. There are 17 of us—mostly personal chefs, caterers, ex-restauranteurs, budding food stylists--anxious to hit the big time where you can pull in $800-$900 a day tweaking lettuce and making perfect mustard drips. There’s Martha who’s just closed her Maine fish market, Kelly who wants to expand her Hawaii catering business, and Norie who’s already styling food segments on Houston morning shows. Brent, the sole, very genial guy in the class, runs a national personal chefs’ network out of Charlotte. And there’s me, the blogger. I met Denise at Changi Airport in Singapore six weeks ago when we were on our way to Kochi for a culinary tour of India. She’s a top West Coast food stylist and super-savvy, award-winning instructor: When she invited me to join the class, I couldn't wait to learn a few tricks. And besides, she's one of the funniest people I know. Chef Brent plumps up his discount store chicken with paper towels. 9:45: “Oh boy, these are really ugly chickens,” exclaims Denise. “ It’s much more challenging this way. If you’ve got the budget, always buy organic chickens. They’re soooo much more beautiful.” She points to a red blotch on her bird: “Look, he’s got a birthmark, and here’s a tear in his skin. That’s what paprika and pepper are for!” Like everyone else, I’m diligently stuffing the cavity of my chicken with a wad of paper towels, then plumping up its cold hard breast before tucking the wings underneath and trussing the legs. “Tie them up really tight,” commands Denise. “We always say we never want to look in there!” 10:09: The chickens, sprayed with PAM, are ready to go in the oven, but only for 10 to 15 minutes, just enough time to take away the raw look. Meanwhile Cindie unpacks some “horrible, frozen” hamburger patties, and shows us how to make them look delicious: First, she blow-torches the raw pattie, then paints it with dark Karo syrup, blots with paper towels, torches it again and sprays it with PAM. After all that, the pathetic discount meat is starting to look pretty appetizing. 10: 17: “Now for the grill marks,’ she says. She plugs in an electric charcoal starter. When the prongs are hot, she presses one side onto the surface of the burger. Voila: a perfect sear. She repeats at regular intervals to get the look of the grill. Denise tip: “This is a great technique for steak, especially if you need it to look charred on the outside but rare and juicy inside.” 10:24: Cindie picks up a can of Scotchgard and does a doubletake: “We don’t usually use the carpet kind.” Oh, well. She sprays the white foamy stuff on the inside of the bun. Denise tip: “It works the same as it does on fabric. It seals it so moisture can’t get in. You can use it on pancakes too—you don’t want the butter and syrup to sink into the pancake.” 10:33: Now Cindie is building a better burger, creating gorgeous layers of lettuce, red onion, tomato, the pattie and, as the final touch, a slice of American cheese which she’s melting with a hairdryer. Warily I’m eyeing my own just-thawed buns. They are flat and the top crust is cracked—definitely not what stylists call “heroes.” Denise tip: “Spritz them with a little water and stick them in the oven for a few minute to puff them up. You don’t want your burger to look like Fatty Arbuckle sat on it!” Definitely not ready for prime time: My burger's lopsided and there's a nick in the tomato. "Fix it with red food coloring," advises Cindie. 10:47: Cindie checks my burger. Expertly she tucks in a stray bit of lettuce, then points to a little nick in the skin of the tomato. “You can fix that with red coloring.” She sprays the cracked top of the bun with PAM. Suddenly it looks delicious. 10:59: The chickens are out of the oven and already look better than when they went in. I spray mine with Cindie’s “proprietary” blend of Kitchen Bouquet, yellow food coloring and water, and it starts to glow. Now for the blow torch. “It’s not so much to brown as to tighten up the loose skin,” explains Cindie. I sizzle my bird with the flame and the skin shrinks visibly. Then I get a little too enthusiastic and torch a rip in the skin. It widens alarmingly. “Don’t worry. You can cover it up with paprika.” The makeover: An "ugly" chicken gets a paint job with Kitchen Bouquet and paprika. Blow-torching the skin helped too. Denise tip: “If you have to carve a turkey in a movie, cut the cooking time in half, just until the breast turns white. They’ll do dozens of takes, so you need to have at least four or five cooked breasts in reserve plus extra skin from the thighs. I always tell the actors the food is poisoned so they can’t eat it. If they have to nibble on camera, I serve them a a few salad leaves.” 11:29: Next up: deli sandwiches. Cindie says, “Scotchgard the bread if it need to last a day. Otherwise put the lettuce on the bottom and start adding ingredients.” I just have to use the Scotchgard. After the chemical foam dissolves, I start layering: lettuce, a thick slice of tomato, then ruffled folds of turkey and ham, a thick slice of tomato and another slice of bread. I decide to skip the mustard drip. Wow! It looks great, almost good enough to-- “There’s a nick in the turkey,” points out Cindie. “Try to fill in with a little Vaseline.” It may look tasty, but this sandwich is not to be eaten. The bread's been treated with Scotchgard to keep it from absorbing moisture. 12: 12: Food, food everywhere and not a bite to eat. Luckily it’s lunchtime. Brent, Karla, Norie and I head over to Kim Son for Vietnamese food--the edible kind. 1: 01: We race back to class, where Denise is delivering one of the big lessons we’ll learn over the two days: “The food is easy. The engineering is what’s tough.” And indeed, a lot of food styling is engineering, whether it’s plumping up a cherry pie with cotton balls or building a toothpick scaffolding to prop up a slice of chocolate cake. Like engineers, food stylists have an arsenal of tools. For a frozen mustard drip on a sandwich, they’ll mix the condiment with xanthum gum, a natural thickening agent available at Whole Foods. Another tip: Marie Callendar’s thickener makes sauces stick to a plate. And speaking of sticking to a plate: “We were doing a Hooter’s commercial. Now, what are we really selling in a Hooter’s commercial?” asks Denise, rolling her eyes. “The waitress had to run through the restaurant with a plate of shrimp and slap it down on a table. Our job was to make the shrimp stay on the plate and not fall off--we stuck museum wax on the plate and them used bent pins to attach the shrimp to the wax.” 1:25: The problem: making pasta dance. Cindie’s dishing out gobs of cold spaghetti coated with oil to keep the strands from sticking together. At our stations we have neat piles of ingredients for styling pasta primavera: defrosted peas, cherry tomatoes, carrots, multi-colored peppers, purple onion and parsley. I mound pasta in a bowl, taking care to tuck the ends of the strands underneath so they don’t show. (This is one of many unwritten rules of food styling.) Then I start positioning the vegetables—soon the dish looks like a Jackson Pollock with lots of drips and spatters. There’s definitely movement, but… Cindie tip: ‘The trouble is, all those ingredients are pulling the eye in different directions. Group some of them so the eye has a place to rest. “ She picks up a hunk of spaghetti and caresses it into a thick swirl which she lays over the tangled mound on the plate. Then she deftly re-arranges a few slivers of purple onion and red pepper. Suddenly, the dish comes alive with motion and rhythm--and dare I say dancing. New and improved pasta primavera, after Cindie rearranges the strands of spaghetti and re-groups the vegetables. 2:01 PM: Struggling to dress another plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce that looks like something other than clumps of lava sliding sluggishly down a volcano slope. Secretly, I'm beginning to suspect this is not my metier. Denise cuts to the chase: “Honestly, you need to let go. There’ll be some days when you’re going into overtime and the food still doesn’t look right. You’ll say, ‘I could work on this for two days and it would never get any better.’ And you know what, someone is going to look at a shot of mango sorbet that looks like a duck’s bill and say, ‘Oooo, I love that shot. The sorbet is melting and it looks so natural.’ Go figure.” “Food stylists are pretty much down there with security guards,” she adds. “If they have to wait on the food, it’s a pretty sure bet they’re not going to hire you again.” There was lots, lots more that day and the next. And then, Sunday night… !0:30 PM: I’m watching a Kashi commercial on TV. Suddenly I notice that the milk in the cereal bowl isn’t moving. I fire off an email to Denise: What’s up with that? The next morning… 7:30 AM: “White glue. We did a Kashi commercial a few months ago. Could be one of ours!” I should have known. OK, white glue is definitely going on the list… For a schedule of upcoming food styling seminars given by Denise and Cindie, go to www.culinaryentrepreneurship.com. And for more on Food Fanatics, see their website, www.foodfanatics.net. ]]> tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1.236 2008-04-04T19:31:49Z 2008-04-06T20:21:11Z

Gerard Vives, photographed in Paris last spring, sells 19 varieties of extraordinary peppercorns to the top chefs of Paris--and to you, if you know where to shop. In Paris last spring I finally had breakfast with Gerard Vives, I’d...

SpiceLines Gerard Vives, photographed in Paris last spring, sells 19 varieties of extraordinary peppercorns to the top chefs of Paris--and to you, if you know where to shop. In Paris last spring I finally had breakfast with Gerard Vives, I’d been on his trail for over a year. Or maybe five. That’s when I first ran across his peppercorns at Maison Izrael. Izrael is Paris’s most venerable spice shop, stuffed to the rafters with dusty packets, jars and bottles, and that wintry Friday afternoon rue Francois-Miron was thronged with weekend chefs, stocking up on hard-to-get ingredients. (One kitten-heeled woman asked for Mazola as if it were the rarest huile d’argan.) The place was mobbed and how my eyes ever lighted upon the slim box inscribed Le Comptoir des Poivres I’ll never know. ]]> Les Grandes Poivres D’Asie--black, white and green peppercorns, as well as cubebs and long pepper—from India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. Turning my back to the harried clerk, I broke the seal on a tube of Tellicherry peppercorns and inhaled. The dark, rich, pungent aroma was intoxicating, so fresh that I could smell the sun and the earth from half a world away. Les Grandes Poivres D'Asie--the Great Peppers of Asia--include nine types of vibrantly aromatic peppercorns from India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. There was a booklet of recipes from a chef named Gerard Vives. I was so busy reading about fois gras with balsamic vinegar and freshly ground Sarawak creamy white peppercorns that I scarcely noticed that I was also handing over a big wad of pre-Euro 100-franc notes for this culinary treasure chest. Flash forward a few years: One of SpiceLines’ first posts was a review of Parameswaran’s extraordinary white peppercorns, grown on India's Wynad plateau. Almost instantly I received a congratulatory email from Gerard Vives with links to his own websites: www.lescomptoirdespoivres.com and www.gerardvives.com. Both were a revelation: the first offered a tantalizing glimpse into the aromas and flavors of exotic peppercorns. The other revealed the soul of an articulate cook, passionate and opinionated about every nuance of his cuisine. For the second time, I was smitten. This is how Vives writes about pepper: “Small, crumpled” Madagascar black peppercorns are “aromatic with notes of brioche, pine-nuts and marshmallow balanced by fresh notes of acid-green fruit….” Malabar mg1 from India is “the ancestor of all peppers…a very fine bouquet of woody and fruity aromas, warm on palate with musk, smoke and burnt wood… “ You could chalk such descriptions up to the pervasive creep of wine-speak, but I sensed that something else was going on—a sort of wild intoxication, a sensuous, almost delirious appreciation for pepper that is uncommon, perhaps even in France. Vives is the renaissance man of the spice world. He describes himself equally as a gastronome and a chercheur des epices, or spice hunter. As I wrote in another post, he has thought long and hard about the differences between peppercorns from Sarawak, Muntok, Lampong and other ports of call, and how they might be used in recipes that coax their individual aromas and flavors to the fore. To find the most exquisite peppercorns and other spices for chefs like Pierre Herme, Michel Troisgros and Heston Blumenthal, he's spent much of the last decade traveling to Asia. Back in Fourcalquier in Haut Provence, he ran an atelier and part-time restaurant, Le Lapin Tant Pis, as much an experimental cooking laboratory and classroom as it was the venue for delicious meals. Vives closed Le Lapin at the end of 2007 and is now planning his grand dream: a Spice Academy in Marseilles, which will teach everyone about the pleasures of taste. He has two books due out in 2008: Le Grand Livre des Poivres, which is all about pepper and how to cook with different varieties, and La Cuisine Chic Sans Fric, which he describes as a book of recipes “ludique et militant” [playful and vigilant], a reference to his belief that cooking should be fun but also utterly scrupulous about ingredients. Last month he was involved in a conference on spices and the wines of the Rhone. Then there are the TV appearances, lectures and consulting gigs across Europe. The morning Vives came to my Paris hotel, he created a stir. Broad-beamed, clad in black, with a shaved head and a truculent brow, he has the look of a man you’d want watching your back if, say, you found yourself trapped in a back alley on the waterfront in Marseilles. His blond, long-legged wife, Karine, came along too. It would not be inaccurate to say that they were both sleepy-eyed and desperate for coffee. Vives was in Paris to give a pepper presentation at the Salon d’Agriculture. When he handed me a thick manila envelope, I thought it held press releases. Instead it contained 19 vials of peppercorns in a rainbow of colors. There were genuine rarities: Voastsipifery or poivre sauvage from the rainforest in Madagascar, true red peppercorns or poivre rouge from Pondicherry, and the deeply perfumed maniguette or meleguetta pepper from Africa. But there were also seven types of black peppercorns, four of white and one green, each with a distinctively different aroma and vibrant flavor—testament to the fact that there is much more to pepper than the insipid supermarket product. Among the 19 vials of peppercorns Vives brought to our meeting were true red peppercorns, or poivre rouge from Pondicherry in India. They are so hard to dry that they are almost unobtainable in Europe or America. The following conversation took place that morning and in subsequent emails. You say you are a self-taught cook. What drew you to the world of food? It’s a question of passion. I started cooking to give pleasure and love to my friends…and later to my customers at Le Lapin Tant Pis…customers became friends and friends became customers. What did you do before you started cooking? No comment. I was without interests. My job was too serious. Did your family influence you? It was the biggest influence. I’m from an Italian family, born in Marseilles, and went straight from my mother’s breast to spaghetti. What led you to spices? Spice equal life in the kitchen plus exoticism and travel. I was cooking and it was hard to find good spices in Europe. I left France for India and Indonesia. Vasco da Gama did the same in 1498--I’m sorry I’m too young to be the first. I didn’t want to be a spice trader, so I met people like a journalist and asked a lot of questions. What happened on that first trip? I found a lot of good pepper especially in Indonesia. Lampung black peppercorns, Muntok white peppercorns, long pepper. The quality of the spices was wonderful. I sent samples to chefs like Olivier Roellinger. Later I started Le Comptoir des Poivres to bring the finest peppercorns from Asia back to France. What makes you go so far to buy pepper? It’s the only way to find the best. Most spices in Europe and the U.S. are too old. By the time they get to the customer they have been stored in warehouses, maybe for years. They have no taste, no flavor, no aroma. They are dead. You will never find the best spices in the supermarket. It’s like wine. There are thousands and thousands of bottles of wine in the supermarket, but never the best. It’s the same for spices. How do you assure the high quality of pepper and other spices you buy? I buy small quantities direct from growers or from small wholesalers who have very fresh spices. I pay the price without bargaining and always look for the very best quality. They are shipped to France by air. There’s no middleman. They are not irradiated or treated with chemicals. Terroir makes a big difference, and also the way it is processed. Pepper must be fresh, full of aroma, with the taste of the place it is grown. In Cambodia, it is hard to find good pepper. It is too dry, too old. It has strength, but no flowers. India has wonderful pepper—Tellicherry, Malabar, Pondicherry--but it is difficult to buy because it is grown by small farmers. I get it from a small wholesaler who has very high specifications. Vietnam is number one in terms of quantity. They harvest two or three times a year. Sometimes the pepper is very good, sometimes not. It’s like grapes. Sometimes there is good and bad pepper on the same vine. In your search for pepper, have you found anything truly rare? I was the first to sell wild pepper or Voastsiperifery, poivre sauvage or, as it’s sometimes called, poivre bourbonnaise. Three years ago a man in Madagascar told me about it, but he said, “We don’t sell it because it grows in the rain forest and we use it for medicine and for cooking.” I tried it and it was fantastic. I wanted to sell it in Europe, but it was very difficult. In the rainforest people use it very fresh. It would be impossible to import. The first harvest was one ton. There was so much humidity that after we dried it, there were only 100 kilos. All the famous chefs wanted this pepper as soon as they tasted it. How do you use poivre sauvage? It’s fantastic with fois gras, with different kinds of fish, chicken or pork. It smells like lemon. You can make a cocktail of mandarin orange sorbet with champagne and a touch of wild pepper. Is it hard to be a small pepper specialist? Of course. That’s why I’m the only one. Why not get bigger? You’re asking an artist why he is not a business man. Who else do you work with? I like to invent new ways to use pepper and other spices. I’ve been working with an ice cream maker in Pisa, developing new flavors. One spice, one fruit. Cherries and green cardamom, avocado and vanilla, lentils and tonka beans. Fausto Giardini, the famous lardo maker in Colonnata is using my peppercorns to make two kinds of lardo. [Here, Karine interjects: Tell her about Fausto. It’s a good story] Ok, tell me. I was visiting Fausto for the first time. We had a mutual friend. We went down to his cellar. There was a big marble box of fat with spices and herbs. It stayed there for one year. The quality was amazing. The fat was incredible-tasting. In another room there were 200-year-old marble boxes of lardo. He makes it for a lot of famous chefs in Italy. One wants it with capers, others want different flavors. He said to me,”I found a fantastic pepper.” We went into his office. There was a safe there with a lot of complicated locks. He opened it and took out some boxes of pepper. It was my pepper! If you had a dream, what would it be? To sleep, because I’m very tired. It’s a joke, of course. I don’t know if this is a dream or a utopia: that people become less crazy and eat good food in the right season and that they would choose food of the best quality. That’s what I want. To read more about Gerard Vives, see his blog. ]]> tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1.235 2008-04-02T18:26:48Z 2008-04-06T20:09:07Z

“How sophisticated we all felt back in the dark days of the 1970’s when the moustachioed Italian waiter approached our table with a three-foot-tall, polished-wood pepper mill…” writes Charles Campion in “Real Food: Hot Stuff,” at Independent.co.uk (March 29,...

SpiceLines “How sophisticated we all felt back in the dark days of the 1970’s when the moustachioed Italian waiter approached our table with a three-foot-tall, polished-wood pepper mill…” writes Charles Campion in “Real Food: Hot Stuff,” at Independent.co.uk (March 29, 2008). “Black pepper became the mainspring of fine dining and…the ingredients list of every recipe…tailed off with an identical mantra—add salt to taste and freshly ground black pepper.” ]]> Foodie pantry shelves are now stocked not just with black, but also with white, green, and true red peppercorns—all fruit of the piper nigrum vine, but each is harvested and processed differently. And lately inventive chefs have conjured up dishes redolent of the exotics—flowery, but tongue-numbing long pepper, tailed cubebs used in medieval cookery, and fizzy, citrus-flavored Sichuan peppercorns. (Not all of these are true pepper; Sichuan peppercorns are actually a burr-like fruit of the prickly ash.) For most people, though, pallid supermarket black pepper—sanitized beyond flavor or aroma—is still the norm. As Campion notes, “the idea that different varieties of black peppercorns from different countries could taste radically different comes as a shock.” In contrast, he cites chef Olivier Roellinger’s line of peppercorns from India, Indonesia and Vietnam: “…They all have distinct flavours—the Telicherry is flowery and fruity; the Wynad can be resinous; the Sarawak is warm and pungent; and the Vietnamese pepper is sharp rather than hot.” Olivier Roellinger, incidentally, is chef at the Michelin three-star restaurant at Les Maisons de Bricourt in St. Malo. His website, with exotic footage from a forthcoming film by Christian Lejale, is a dream. I’ve always suspected that the French have a deeply sensual relationship with spices, and the lands in which they were born. This proves it. Go here to read more about peppercorns on SpiceLines. ]]> tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1.234 2008-04-01T15:23:53Z 2008-04-02T18:26:44Z

A school of caramel "carp" with dark chocolate scales are a sweet April Fool's Day prank. Photo credit: www.patrickroger.com Oh, to be in Paris today, scooping up these cunning faux carp from Patrick Roger. Not that they would actually...

SpiceLines A school of caramel "carp" with dark chocolate scales are a sweet April Fool's Day prank. Photo credit: www.patrickroger.com Oh, to be in Paris today, scooping up these cunning faux carp from Patrick Roger. Not that they would actually fool anyone. But with their caramel filling, black chocolate scales and googly white eyes, a netful of these little darlings would make a delectable April Fool's Day prank. Roger, one of Paris’s top chocolatiers, has a passion for sculpting fish and other whimsical creatures out of his favorite medium. When I was at his Boulevard St. Germain boutique last spring, schools of bright tropical fish were swimming through one window while life size penguins perched on ice floes in the other. A few weeks later, wicked caricatures of Nicholas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal, on bowling pins made of chocolate, danced across his website. Go here to read more about Patrick Roger on Spicelines. And for the dark (not chocolate) side of April 1 pranks, read “April Fool! The Purpose of Pranks” by Benedict Carey, in today’s New York Times, Science Times, pp. D1 and D5. ]]> tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1.233 2008-02-19T15:16:05Z 2008-02-19T15:30:38Z

“You are going to India?” be asked. “Then you must bring back some Kashmiri saffron because no more is coming in.” He thought for a moment. “And you must try black spot fish. Very delicious.” He thought a little...

SpiceLines “You are going to India?” be asked. “Then you must bring back some Kashmiri saffron because no more is coming in.” He thought for a moment. “And you must try black spot fish. Very delicious.” He thought a little more. “You are going to Kerala? This is the most beautiful part of India.” So! I’m leaving for the west coast of India tonight. My head is spinning with visions of rosy peppercorns ripening on the vine and winged fishing nets on the vast Arabian Sea. Dreaming of idlis and appams, coconut curry and green chilies, a hundred varieties of bananas. Portuguese churches and pork vindaloo. Elephants, temples and rose-flavored kulfi. Bollywood bangles, scents at the attarwalla. I’ll be back in March. See you then… ]]> tag:www.spicelines.com,2008://1.232 2008-02-16T15:37:14Z 2008-02-19T18:59:50Z

A teaspoon--or even a baby spoon--makes short work of peeling ginger's gnarly skin. When I peel it, I use a sharp paring knife. But a recent peek at Apartment Therapy's Kitchn revealed a new way to remove ginger’s gnarly...

SpiceLines A teaspoon--or even a baby spoon--makes short work of peeling ginger's gnarly skin. When I peel it, I use a sharp paring knife. But a recent peek at Apartment Therapy's Kitchn revealed a new way to remove ginger’s gnarly skin—with a spoon. Could it be? I went right down to my own kitchen, pulled a knob of fresh ginger out of the fridge and began scraping with a teaspoon. In moments the fragrant root was naked, ready for grating or chopping. This is an easy alternative to peeling with a knife, especially if your blade is a bit dull. For best results, use a teaspoon with a thin or tapered edge—Alexandra’s silver baby spoon, which I now use for serving condiments, was ideal. And if you’re wondering how best to grate ginger once you’ve peeled it (or not), see SpiceLines' Tools of the Trade on our grater competition. ]]>