A good sommelier is like a good chef, the truly great ones know when to be simple. Dazzling the table with a complex and obscure bottle and talking shop with the wine steward about what side of the hill got more sun in ’04 is all well and good, but for the uninitiated the world of food and beverage pairings is murky and confusing.
To achieve success you must first learn how to drink properly with food:
Take an anchovy, preferably one that has not been curing too long. Place the oily fillet onto a toasted crustini of white bread. Have a wine glass generously full of simple Montepulciano table wine. Take a sip, taste the acidity and the bite; thats the age. Taste the dark juicy notes and feel it staining your teeth, that is depth. Now, before the taste leaves your mouth eat the anchovy. Then take a generous slug of wine to wash down the salt and oil. Continue as needed. The acidity needed something oily and the fruity juice wanted salt to help it come alive. This is paring. For dark, earthy foods chose a lighter, sharper wine. The two should compliment one another, never contend for affection, and the wine should run out only when the food does.
I realize I’ve not been including music. Listen to this while eating anchovies.
Chana Masala is a staple at every Northern Indian restaurant you frequent. It is a lot of fun to make, and, this will give me a great excuse to throw some Bollywood tunes your way. I got to this place called Daabah, where they play these great old bolywood songs, interspersed with some bhangra.
First, listen to this as you gather ingredients, and get in the groove.
4 cans of garbanzo beans, chickpeas if you prefer. Rinse them.
Sea Salt
3 tbls neutral cooking oil.
1 tablespoon cumin seeds
3 medium onions
4 cloves of garlic
about and inch and half of ginger, peel it you savage!
2 teaspoons ground turmeric
4 small green chilies, hari mirch, thai chilies.
10 fresh roma tomatoes, chopped
2 tablespoons ground channa masala spice blend (trust me, just go buy a box or you will have all the way too obscure spices in your cupboard for ever)
2 tablespoon ground garam masala
2 tablespoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons sugar
Juice of 2 lemon
2 teaspoon amchoor powder
Alright now it’s prep time
Cut your onions, chilis, ginger and garlic, put them to one side.
Dice up your tomatoes, saving as much juice as possible.
open up your chana spice mixture, put it in a bowl.
Now the time has finally come to cook, and shake your hips a little as you start to fry the onions, garlic and ginger, adding the chilies as the onions start to caramelize.
Now turn the heat down, and add the tomatoes.
Add tomatoes
chana spice mixture
cumin, sugar
cover and simmer for about 25 mins, until the tomatoes are nice and stewed
add chickpeas, simmer for a little longer, about 10 or so minutes
add amchoor and garam masala powder simmer, serve.. Amchoor powder is THE ingredient for chana masala, its dried mango and gives it that tang we love so well.
and that, is that.
Chana should be tangy, cooking it should be joyous and fun. It’s so simple you should really have a bollywood dance party afterwards.
Then, as it all simmers, set the table with metal plates and put on the following songs and eat it with someone you love.
”I got you this because I know you like it”, a smiling, slightly tipsy man said as he plonked down two coffee cups half full of Hennessy. He raised his own glass, we ‘Yam sing”d and he walked off.
It was the opening day of the Washington cafe, huge floral arrangements decorated the florescent doorway and tangerine plants covered the floor.
The Washington cafe took over the space that was previously operated by New King Tin, a place I frequented until it was shut down for health violations, and will write an obituary of at a later date. One day I was walking to New King Tin and saw the owners piling into a airport shuttle and asked; ” Oh, are you going on vacation ” the answer I got from the matron was a hurried and exasperated ‘yes yes’ as she loaded children and boxes into the van and took of never to be seen again. Four months later, Washington Cafe came onto the scene.
Part of a larger group of restaurants of a similar ilk, I have heard the Washington Cafe referred to as a ‘cafeteria style’ ‘hong Kong style cafe”; by various people. It is a collection of about 12 tables, a menu of about 150 items and operating hours that last well into the night.
Having been to the cafe many times since it’s opening I got to know the owner. We have shared bottles of wine and Hennessy while talking about what owning and operating a restaurant is like in Chinatown; in the business we call this talking shop, or bitching about work; either way, It’s important to have other restaurant owners to talk to about this kind of thing; preferably over a glass of poor cognac.
During the first months of their operation they focused on cheap and simple Cantonese style food. The chef is a friend and ‘student’ of Truman Du of Pot Sticker/Spicy king – but goes in a different direction. The chef here has a crowd who don’t like anything too unusual, so the food stays typically Cantonese, however, as we are in San Francisco, not China, typically Cantonese here means Cantonese food as you would get in China, not ‘typical’ or ‘non unusual’ for those of us not versed in Cantonese cuisine. This is an important distinction to make; lots of places play it safe, but Washington Cafe plays it safe in a whole different way; safe to a community who don’t want to assimilate to the western palate – and that’s what makes the food here interesting. Without going into too much detail, I like the spicy chicken feet, beef stew, and the Quails Pot.
Then as they had been opened a few months, they installed hot pot plates in every table, and now offer some great and inexpensive hot pot, and if I had enough friends to go to these places en masse, I would eat it all the time.
The crowd is great, and if you visit on a Saturday night after 10pm be prepared for older men playing cards, drinking cognac, eating hot pot (crab), and generally being raucous. As a veteran of the Chinatown bar scene, I can safely say that its’ 90% non Chinese in the bars here, and that most locals tend to drink with friends at restaurants. The best upside to this is that you can bring any booze you want into any restaurant in Chinatown and not have a problem.
Aslo, plenty of Hong Kong Cinema is always on the TVs, and even if the servers don’t understand, they will write the name of the movie down and you can go an get it pretty easily in any store around.XO sauce –
This place introduced me to XO sauce; a Hong Kong sauce made with various dried seafood and aromatics. Apparently it’s all the rage in Hong Kong and is in fact named after the XO brandys (and marketed the same way, in fancy boxes and even uses the XO(extra old) distinction brandys use). The Washington Cafe will put it on everything and anything, and with good result. It offers a fermented seafood flavor, umami and salty, in a dark ‘demi-glas esque’ preparation, it might even have brandy in it.
There is something going on with Hong Kong and brandy; XO sauce clearly marks the trend, and friends in Shanghai or anywhere else in mainland china don’t report a predilection for hennessy, so it has to be a Hong Kong or diaspora thing.
There is this old man who lives and works around here; he’s short, probably around 70 or 80, smiles a lot, shakes his head and is always holding a plastic bag of food leftovers.
When I first moved here he would speak to me, ask me about eating, where I was eating, had I eaten, and my reply was always the same – I’m going to work and I eat there. His name is Jackie Chan, and he goes by the epiphyte Jackie Chan number two; lifting up two fingers.
I would see him around, mostly he chatted to tourists, and when he and I spoke it would be a contest over who had the shittiest apartment, and who’s paid the least rent. He assures me that not only is my apartment a hovel, and probably illegal, but that I’m also being robbed blind with the amount I’m paying. It’s because I’m a foreigner, he explained. He’s keen into the chinatown photographic society and we’d go there and look at the pictures stored in a brightly lit room with a couple computers and pictures of serious looking traditionally dressed people standing in various places around town.
When I asked him what he did for a living he looked at me like I was an idiot; clearly, obviously, he said: he was retired. It wasn’t until my mother came to visit that i figured out what he does for money. I was upstairs getting a shirt on and my mother waited downstairs by herself, and when I returned there Jackie was speaking to my mum. He was telling her about a restaurant he liked and wanted to take her to; and when he saw me approach decided we all had to go to this place. We walked and he talked to my mother about how her son was paying too much rent, but that he knew a great cheap place for food. We follow him up to Stockton and weave our way through the crowds to a busy, counter service lunch cafe that advertised Dim Sum under a layer of grime on the doorway. Whatever I ate that day I have forgotten about, so surreal was this experience, but as we left my mother offered to pay and after some argument he begrudgingly accepted her money and she told him to keep the change.
Now, I could be reading this entire thing wrong; Jackie could have genuinely wanted to take us to dinner, we were, after all, acquainted; and my mother is a very nice lady who would buy lunch anytime. So I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he just likes company and free lunch, which is fine.
Wing Sing Dim Sum is like most of the other dim sum – lunch service counter places on stockton. They make large amounts of food, store it at temperatures not entirely food safe and sell it for cheap.
The lunch plate is 3 types of food over rice, it’s $4 and that’s fine.
There are two different experiences one can have here. In one senario you walk in, point frantically at dumplings or pork buns, and walk out with a plastic bag containing some doughy dim sum, which you then happily eat, pleased with your ability to grab street food and eat like the locals. Never-mind that no one ever eats on the street unless they are homeless, and you paid fifty cents more than normal; it’s all part of the service.
The second experiance involves getting a tray with a plate of lunch food, which consists of typical cantonese stuff prepared using the least amount of effort – beef balls, pork balls, tofu with pork, eggplant with black beans, fried tofu skins stuffed with veggies, small bluefish fried in potato starch, and so on. It all tastes vaguely the same and is pretty boring. How Wing Sing differentiates itself from the other 8 or so cafes of a similar ilk within a 8 block radius is with their incredible disregard for any kind of food safety regulations or even reasonable sense.
As my friend and I sat eating, or rather picking at our plates moving shapeless pork products onto the tray, we marveled at the rawness of the beef balls; the box of frozen fish fillets sitting on the floor, the shoes stored in a potato box, and the pervading yellowness of the walls.
I’m not a stickler for decor, I don’t care if a place has yellow walls and, fine, sometimes you can’t throw the fish in the freezer right away; there are plenty of places in CT with just as flagrant a disregard for health code and I’d eat there any day, but this was a special kind of filth.
We left and vomited, then drank yakult to calm our gastrointestinal systems. It was a great experience and I would never do it again, but I reveled in the dirt, and have no permanent damage to my bowels as of yet, I’d even eat their ribs again if I had siracha.
Inspired by a little something I had at three Michelin starred Le Bernardin, a restaurant that is both ubiquitously french, and ubiquitously New York. So before we even get started:
The main components of this dish are some toasted brioche, thinly pounded smoked Scottish salmon, and påté du foie gras. All very fancy, as you would expect.
I think they also served it with a touch of Osetra caviar on top.
Clearly these ingredients are not to be found in my home kitchen, and if I were to ‘borrow’ any from any kitchen I was employed in I would no longer have a job.
So I will use salmon roe, because it’s cheap, but it is so fishy, I will literally use one.
I will also make my påté out of duck livers.
So this is a post in two parts. Make duck liver påté, then make the rest of the dish. One could always buy some foie gras, if one is bourgeois enough.
Påté recipie:
Livers
Bacon with plenty of fat
Parsley
Salt
Terragon
Garlic
Steps:
Chop up and render the bacon. Rendering means putting it a pan on a low heat and letting all the fat melt. It does not mean burning the bacon.
Since we are cooking bacon…
We have a NYC theme here. This might take a minute, so feel free to listen to the song on repeat and get outraged. ACAB!
Once the bacon is all rendered (hardly any fat left not melted) add the chopped. If one ever wanted someone to walk into ones kitchen and say “wow, it really smells good in here, you must be a skilled chef” cook some garlic in bacon fat.
Don’t turn the heat up, just let the garlic slowly become translucent.
While this is going on, trim your livers, that means get rid of any sinew (white bits), and wash them well. This is a bloody business, so here is something appropriate.
Damn that was brutal, look at all that blood in the sink. Maybe do some metal fingers while your hands are covered in the blood of ducks. If you feel bad about killing all those ducks, remember that ducks are the only species that reproduces using exclusively gang rape, and that, other than humans, they are the only animals documented to practice necrophelia.
Now add your cleaned livers to the pan with the bacon and the garlic, and turn the heat up just a bit, put a lid on and let them get to know one another for a while. Add some salt.
In the meantime you should chop up about 1/4 cup of parsley and 1/4 c tarragon.
Since we are being classically french here:
Now the livers and bacon and garlic should be sufficiently cooked, the livers will be brown, not red.Take them off the heat and allow them to cool down, and get your robo-coup ready.
Here is some more french music to inspire and delight you as you wait for the mixture to cool, it will cool faster if you put it in a new large shallow bowl, (like a hotel pan).
Once the mixture is cooled, put it in the robo-coup and pureé it until it is smooth, then add the herbs, taste it, and add more salt if necessary, and a pinch of pepper if you desire.
We are including the tarragon because it’s going with fish, and fish an tarragon are best friends.
Now, place the finished paté into various small containers and put them in the fridge to solidify.
now to the creation of the dish, Finally.
If you purchased paté, you are a cheater, but that’s ok. Start here.
Get your smoked salmon, scottish is the best. A lot like Scottish twee is the best.
Lay out a sheet of saran wrap place a piece of smoked salmon on top and cover with another sheet of saran wrap. Now delicately pound it out thinly, not transparent, just very thing.
Gently. here is some Gentle scottish music to make sure you GENTLY pound it out.
NOw preheat your oven to make some toast. Put a little oil on one side of the toast, and slice the toast on a bias, so it resembles a biscotti.
one the toast is done, and the pate is cooled, combine them.
Now Gently lay the salmon on top and squeeze lemon juice over it, take a single piece of salmon roe and put it in the middle.
First, a wok is essential for basically all styles of “ASIAN” cooking.
Some woks have handles, some don’t. I personally prefer the non handle ones, as the fit in the oven better, and are easer to flip with the use of a rag.
Take a trip to chinatown. Walk past the fish stores, smell the smells.
The common misconception with chinatowns is that they smell bad. They don’t, they smell different, they smell like Chinese ingredients – dried seafoods ground up into powders, roots (also dried) and then still living fish swimming 10 on top of one another in constantly flowing water. That smell you don’t like is probably dried sea cucumber, or dried codfish roe, or dried scallops. All the ingredients used in XO sauce and a myriad of other dishes,
Braving the smells go into a few stores and find a stack of woks, perhaps slightly rusted on the handle, and black, never silver. The iron is brittle, and has coal dust worked into it to make it less so.
Once the wok is home the time has come to put the most work into it you will ever have to do.
You require steel wool, some oil, some dish soap, and time and strength.
First rinse your wok with water and scrub vigorously, don’t let water flow, you want it to become brown. This is going to be hardcore scrubbing. Play Nurse With Wound – Bottom Feeder from the Album Bacteria Magnet. It’s throbbing proto industrial that will make you scrub the shit out of that wok.
Scrub with steel wool, you want to get some scratches but not many will appear. ONLY USE SOAP ONCE, drain the brown water, new water, repeat until the song ends. After you have scrubbed for the length of the song, it’s time to fill it up to the half way point with water and put it on a medium to low heat. This is going to boil any remaining soapy bits, and take of the loosened layers of crust.
The time to boil is going to be about a minute, so sit back, relax, calm down from all that throbbing noise, put on I go wild By The Bats from the album By The Night this will relax you. Once its dry take it off the heat and let it cool down for a further minute. (That’s why the song is 2 minutes).
So, now the wok is cool. Get a paper towel and start to rub it down. Gross, why did you spend 5 minutes rubbing it to have more of this disgusting brown crap keep coming of off it. That’s the coal dust worked into the iron. That means it’s time to get back to the sink and start over with Nurse With Wound. Repeat these steps again, and now once it’s dry from the second heating/cooling now is the time to apply the oil.
Start with a neutral oil. Dampen 3 paper towels with neutral cooking oil (explain neutral cooking oil). This is where the whole thing becomes sensual, put on something sexy You’re a lady by Johnny Adams
followed by That’s How Strong my Love is by O.V Wright.
and work that oil into every inch of the interior of the wok. You don’t want any pooling in the bottom, just work it. Massage it, that’s right, she is tender, she needs that loving. Switch towels as they start to become brown. That’s what all those tiny scratches are for, you want to work oil into those, into every inch.
As for what oil to use, I like to use something with a high smoking point, so you don’t burn your wok every time you use it, but you’re going to be baking the oil into the wok so don’t worry too much. Canola works for me,
Next Turn your oven onto ~350 and put the wok it while the oven is still cold.
This part is going to take by far the longest, a low temperature wok bake. Go do something else for 45 minutes. Now wipe that oil off., put more oil on until no black residue comes off.
After the first bake, put the wok back in the oven on the highest heat. (preheat this time) My over goes to 500, but idk about you. This part needs watching, so don’t leave your oven. Peer into the window from time to time. And to keep you on edge listen to some classic sweedish death metal to remind you that it’s going to be really fucking hot when you take it out the over. In Death’s Sleep by Dismember from Like an Ever Flowing Stream. Should keep you currently on edge to remember to watch that thing to make sure it does not explode.
Now when it’s hot, take it out and let it cool, take your time to do this, as you will be woking more oil into it, then slow baking it again.
John Hutt 