Ptipois

Yum. Could we possibly get better acquainted with this wonderful ponzu recipe? Thanks in advance johnnyd.

Thanks, Austin. A badly-needed guide, and your pictures are beautiful and informative. You write that phrik chii faa goes from mild to slightly spicy — however, some orange-colored chii faa I've come across came out as very very hot. And sometimes I've found some relatively mild phrik khii nuu (yes they were khii nuu, their size and shape were unmistakable). I suppose that's part of the universal mystery of chillies. Phrik khii nuu have a unique, subtle, unmistakable taste once you go beyond their fieriness. Seeding them before adding them to pastes, dressings or any dishes brings forward that flavor, but it's a tough job. I know our friend khun Pim always deseeds them.

Exactly.

You are right, obviously, but none of this is the point. The scale is not a pertinent element in our discussion.The point is: is it possible to consider the superior quality of some Japanese French-style pastry, no matter its "scale", as compared to French pastry in France — a superior quality that has been noticed and described by some, inclulding myself — a manifestation of Japanese skill, refinement, creativity and savoir-faire? Or not? If not, what is it a manifestation of? So you see we're back at the start. And bringing up the argument that there are indeed "bad" French-style pastries in Japan is irrelevant because it doesn't change the fact that part of the national production is indeed of super-high quality. Trying to argue that it is not particularly Japanese isn't very convincing, since it is notably better than its French equivalent.

Why? Did you tell the lady anything?

As I told you, it's hard to put words on it. It's an atmosphere that's reminiscent of the Belle Epoque, the late 1800s-early 1900s. Chic and relaxed at the same time, with hints of the Colonial culture. Potted plants, barbotine ceramics, the smell of beeswax and (of course) tea, pretty boys doing the service, etc. Helped by your description of the Mariage shops in Japan (I've only seen the one near the Isetan department store in Tokyo), I think I can tell you that they are very much like the ones in Paris. The one in rue du Bourg-Tibourg just has a lot of atmosphere because it is also a tea-room and it is the original location. Besides, it is in the Marais, which is a very nice, old part of Paris. This is just like the Mariage shops in Paris! No — it's a Mariage tradition. Again, just like Paris. That is part of it. The French are more reluctant to add milk than the British. I always put milk or cream in black teas (or red teas by Chinese standards) since an Indian man told me that it helped the tannins not to stick to the œsophagus. Also, "French style tea" may not be substantially different from "English-style tea", it's just that Mariage is sooo Parisian. And they like to label their own tea style as "French". Yes.

Apologies accepted, but I hadn't sensed any agressivity. Only that you failed to accept a pretty obvious fact and expressed your disapproval a bit brutally. Of course. Which is exactly why I wrote that, on the subject of pastry or viennoiserie, you cannot put an excess of sugar and an excess of butter on the same level of nuisance. Chic modern French pastry suffers from an excess of goo and sugar. Old-fashioned pastry and viennoiserie as I remember them weren't suffering from butter, even if butter was oozing from them. Whoever is familiar with kouign-amann or picard "gâteau battu", for instance, knows that more butter is necessarily better. Sugar and butter are not equivalent as ingredients and their economy is different. Crêpes, OK, but that's a definite example. In viennoiserie for instance that parcimony doesn't apply in the same way. I tend to think that butter that behaves the way you describe it must be an unusual butter indeed. Excess butter may exist in French viennoiserie, but it is not that smelly. This is getting a bit too complicated and straying from the point. Let's get back to the basics and the true matter of the discussion. I was stating that if a national cuisine may be defined by a scale of quality/luxury/rarity — whatever, there is no reason why the fancier aspects and upper part of that scale should be deemed less typical of the national style than the lower ones. Is kaiseki less Japanese than tonkatsu? Leaving aside the fact, of course, that "national style" is a complex subject indeed and can't be defined or detailed easily. In the case of Japanese French-style pastry, some people here agreed that the examples they had tasted seemed lighter, better, more taste-balanced and more refined than their equivalents in France. Personally, I agree with that. Now whether that was "upper-scale" or not doesn't change the fact that we are definitely dealing with an aspect of Japanese touch, style and savoir-faire there. The existence of lower-quality pastries, which is certainly an evidence, won't change that.

I wouldn't describe it as a tourist-only kind of place, though there are lots of foreigners. Just avoid weekends. It is "French-style tea", which is a bit hard to define precisely, it's all in the atmosphere and design. Strong points are darjeelings and flavored teas, adding milk is not encouraged, and Chinese teas — served "French style" — are not particularly well treated (go to other abovementioned places for that). Food and pastries are very nice. Mariage Frères have been around (rue du Bourg-Tibourg) forever but their true hype period started only twenty years ago or so. Before that, it was only a confidential tea shop.

May I add my favorite tea shop, L'Empire des thés, 101, Avenue d'Ivry - 75013 Paris. Tel.: 01 45 85 66 33. 200 fine teas directly imported from China (the importers are the Kawa house, who run a big kitchenware store on avenue de Choisy and have an impressive range of teaware including hundreds of Yixing teapots). Also: some lovely teaware, cookies and incenses, and tea classes and tastings on the last Sunday of each month. I don't recommend La Maison des trois thés on rue Gracieuse: esthetically impressive but overpriced, very haughty service and a snobbish attitude towards tea in general. There is also a Chinese tea shop, Thés de Chine on 20, boulevard Saint-Germain, that seems to have been taken over by Taiwanese people recently, and it looks very good, but perhaps a bit overpriced (judging by the price of the dragon tea balls). I should take a closer look to be more accurate.

OK, let me rephrase In what way could "common versions", in this case of French-style Japanese pastry, be more representative of the "national style" (in this case Japanese), however this national style may be defined, than the more upgrade versions of the same style (Japanese French-style pastry), given the fact that we've already stated that those upgrade versions are different in quality from their equivalents in France? Or, more simply, why should "common" be more representative of the country than "upscale" in general? Between a poularde demi-deuil and a bœuf-carottes, whichever my preference goes to, I'm not going to label the former more or less representative of the national style than the latter, or vice versa. The present matter is complicated by the fact that we're dealing with the Japanese interpretation of a non-Japanese pastry style. But even then, the question asking why should upscale be less "Japanese" than lower-scale remains pertinent.

Sorry for nitpicking, but this is a strange idea.

Whoa, easy friend. I don't think I wrote any nonsense. No, all ingredients have their specificities and the effects of too much sugar are not comparable to the effects of too much butter. As a baker you should know what I mean. When I make a pâte brisée for apple tart with notably more butter than the original recipe asks for, the pâte brisée is not ruined. It is lighter, crispier and much tastier. If I put too much sugar in any pastry, it is plain ruined, period. This sounds strange. Are we really referring to real butter or to "butter taste"? Even with an "excess" of butter in a Norman brioche (can there be an excess of butter in a brioche? I'm not sure), you won't be able to smell it at a distance if it's wrapped in plastic. That must be some butter indeed. Recently I bought some Hokkaido butter in a Bangkok supermarket and I didn't notice any difference with French butter of average quality. It was very mild. Edited to add that a butter smell that you can feel steps away is no good sign. In French viennoiserie chains specializing in brioches and the like, a strong artificial "butter" smell is used (sprayed about the shop or whatever means they use) in order to reproduce (caricaturate, in a way) the smell of warm brioche out of the oven and attract the customers. That smell is not based on butter. True warm butter smell emanating from a bakery is more subtle, it is more like Indian ghee and doesn't particularly spread miles around.

Thank God you can't copyright a recipe. If it were the case someone would have copyrighted blanquette de veau or kouign-amann long ago and the whole world of cooking would be a nightmare.

Well, we're no longer discussing national styles anymore but competence and price ranges. The more common versions of French-style pastry in France, or of any pastry anywhere, are not great either. Pâtisserie is a fragile art. As for creativity I'll skip the subject because I don't think the notion goes well with pastry-making.

I think the worst problem a croissant can have is not enough butter. Think of the three secrets of good cooking according to Escoffier... Who remembers them?

Possibly. Personally I think the excess of sugar, not the lack of sugar, makes things insipid and tasteless. Whether in the case of cheap industrial pastry or in the case of Hermé-style designer sweets (the hype being bound to define future styles), French pastry is being slowly killed by an avalanche of sugar and goo. And I've often found that French-style Japanese pastry had just the right amount of sugar, which allowed the taste to come through. An excess of butter is no problem (I mean butter only, not in association with creams and gelatins), since butter never ruins taste. It is a vector of taste. Sugar may help taste too but only in moderate quantity. A bit too much and you taste only sugar. I think "modern" French pastry lacks in tastes and textures (sour, acidic, astringent, bitter, crunchy, crispy) that may be considered "unsafe" in a philosophy of maximum comfort and thus not liked by marketing counselors, but they still remain the discrete basis of successful pastry-making, they are the foundation on which the art of sweetness may be built. If they are not there to play their role, I think there's not much happening. My main reason for disliking fancy-schmancy overpriced French pastry is the excess of sugar, associated with a heavy relying on gelatinous-creamy-gooey textures: so you may have yuzu, macha, expensive chocolate, rosewater, whatever in it, the tastes are blurred and cloying and there's no real variety of textures. Good traditional French pastry relies more on a play with textures (crunchy, soft, crispy, melting, chewy, etc.) and highly characterized tastes (sweet, sour, fruity, fragrant, bitter, etc.). Those qualities I find in the last remaining French pastry worthy of the name in France, in the work of French pastry chefs outside of France, in some non-French styles of pastry (Eastern-European, American), and in French-style pastry in Japan.

And will continue doing so. There is still a good choice of chickens for sale at Monoprix, so yesterday I prepared a farc normand.

If you make piri-piri with Thai chillies, I suggest you don't use the smallest kind (phrik khii nuu) because of their distinctive flavor. Use the red kind, one size above. I forgot their name but they are much like the all-purpose ones used in Vietnam. I think they are the closest to the small red chillies for piri-piri I've seen in Algarve.

Oh, mercy, please, my friend, do me a favor: not here. It was painful enough on the "Myth" thread, but it was on a non-French section of the forum, so that was sort of okay. I'd be broken-hearted to see that kind of thing here, where the regulars are more informed. Just use the link provided by John, you'll find everything. No need to repeat that here. That thread was, in fact, based on the erroneous postulate that "farmers markets" in the US wrere equivalent to French open markets, which they aren't: farmers markets are supposed to be producers markets, and French markets are not, though they include producers. There was the funny idea that French markets were supposed to be producers' markets, and there you go. Savoyard cheese makers are a good "cas d'école" to describe the deep misunderstanding found in the book, where (in one excerpt) the author claims that cutting cheese from the large wheels is a way of tricking the consumer into believing that the cheese vendor has actually produced the cheese. Now that is one of the silliest things I've ever read. Everybody (who knows a bit about food) knows that Savoy cheeses are large, heavy, aged for long periods, and the result of painstaking and heavy work. Same with Cantal cheeses, etc. In Savoie, the cheese makers do cheese making, period. They have no time to sell at markets. Savoyard cheeses sold at markets are never sold by the vendors and nobody expects them to be. Cheeses sold at markets, except small-producers goat cheeses, are not produced by the vendors. There's cheese making, which is a job, and selling cheese at retail, which is a job too. But Savoie cheeses are cut from the wheel by the vendor, quite simply. Yesterday, at one of those profusely decorated "country stalls" that are sometimes laid in front of Paris train stations, where vendors from various regions sell stuff, I found amazing Summer beaufort, tomme de chèvre from the Pyrénées and a thick slice of "jambon de coche", a large cured ham from Ariège. In spite of the fact that these colorful stalls sell all sorts of things and are not precisely places I would trust for authenticity, they can still provide great stuff if you look a bit closely. They are not producers and do not claim to be so (except when they feel they can take some tourist for a ride), but their job is finding where the good stuff is and bringing it to the customer. Now that is why I insisted on the competence, not of the vendor but of the buyer. I made friends with the vendors (who are from Toulouse and travel around France) and we had a great conversation on great products. But maybe they wouldn't have given the same information to a tourist with partial knowledge of French, or even to a French person who doesn't know s..t about products. No trickery there: they're here to sell stuff, not give anthropology classes or deserve an award in verbal probity. The region around Paris is loaded with vegetable or fruit (apple) farms that cater exclusively to the Paris and suburban markets. You'll spot them easily by the mention "maraîcher" and the exact address and location of the farm. In order to provide a complete array of vegetables (because their purpose is to serve the customer, not to be a touristy curiosity), one small part of the items they sell are not home-grown. For instance, in late Winter, they'll propose plenty of fresh salads, swiss chard, red peppers, cabbage, turnips, carrots, potatoes, celery, onions, leeks, etc., all grown on the farm. But they'll also have a crate of bought garlic, some Jerusalem artichokes (cleaner than the other stuff), a few tomatoes if they could find a good source, the first globe artichokes from Italy, etc., which are never labeled as farm-grown but with their true origin, or the origin will be given on demand. It is as simple as that. In the same markets (which are not "farmers markets" or "country markets" but just "markets", the concept of farmers market is not big in France), there will be "regional" stalls, often highly reputable, with vendors choosing the products once a week or once every two weeks at local sources in the original region, and then going back to the markets spots to sell them. That's the case of some Savoyard vendors that are present on some Paris markets. Market people drive a lot, travel a lot. Their ability to get things at the source, or close to it, is precisely what makes them able to compete with other types of commerce. I know, on the Marché Monge, a very old Breton lady and her husband who every Sunday pack their car with freshly-made buckwheat pancakes, buckwheat flour, home-made jams, yogurts and fresh cheeses. All home-made. They have come for decades. After market-time, they pack whatever's left and drive back to Brittany. And they're not an isolated example. There are many others, in Paris, in the close suburbs and in the regions. The guys who get their stuff from Rungis or from the local wholesale will say so and not pretend they got it anywhere. If they did, well it's serious fines and prosecutions. The origin of every produce is written on a small blackboard above the item. If it isn't there, ask for it. I wish it were definitely understood, here at least, that the de La Pradelle book (seemingly bound for success outside of France in spite of its dubious methodology) was based on the study of ONE market in TOURISTY PROVENCE, therefore not on any market, with some peculiar scientific methods and gross postulates applied. And that in no way it may be considered a study on markets in France in general.

Any North African shop or kosher grocery, especially in "ethnic" areas like marché d'Aligre or Barbès, will carry pungent garlicky harissa in glass jars, plastic tubs or even "en vrac", ladled into plastic bags from big buckets. This harissa doesn't keep well. A thin film of olive oil on the surface of the harissa, and you can keep a small jar in the fridge for a couple of weeks.

Unless the excerpt wasn't really taken from the book, I can't see how it could not be the equivalent of the horse's teeth, and how things couldn't go downhill from there. Sorry - small as it is, it contains enough to put the entire field of anthropology (or sociology, or archaeology, or geography, or food studies) to shame. Can't buy that horse.

I wouldn't give that advice lightly. I might actually read the book. Why can't you express your opinions on her "findings" now? Besides, haven't you yet? (PS: having directed a department at the École pratique des hautes études has never prevented anyone from not knowing much about markets.)

Well, in that case, Jamie, it is possible that you didn't do a very good job of promoting this book. Unless it is actually very different from what you made it appear, it is very likely to be scientifically null, for various reasons that have been precisely discussed here (which is what I call "elevating the debate"). Life is short, I have no time left in my life for sloppily researched studies. In this case, all the red lights are flickering. I have seen quite enough of those. Some of them that sold well. Oh, by the way, the best "sciences humaines" studies are seldom best-sellers outside of their field of interest.

I have done the editing for his latest book, so feel free to e-mail me for some help.

That must be "vergeoise", which is unrefined beet sugar, either blonde (light) or brune (dark). It has the right moist texture but not the rich taste of cane sugar. Recently I have seen "sucre de canne brut" (real moist cane brown sugar) at Monoprix. Until then, it had only been available at health food stores under the various names panela, muscovado, sucre mélasse, sucre de canne brut, etc. As a rule, regularly visiting health food stores ("magasins bio"), the bigger the better, is a good way of finding substitutes for things you miss from the United states, from peanut butter to raw sugars, nuts, dried fruit, cereals and good bread flours. The distribution is different and you can find stuff that is unthinkable in mainstream food distribution. For instance, Italian lemons, more fragrant than Spanish lemons but disadvantaged by European commercial regulations, may be found in "bio" stores. I use 65 to 55, never lower. There's not enough gluten in type 45 flour. And I also get it from bio stores for better taste. That's the closest I have found to US bread flour (home bread baking is not big in France). The closest to Philly I have found in France is double-crème fresh cheese, available under different brands and in various qualities. While Philadelphia is slowly getting available in some supermarkets, there's still not enough of it to get cheesecake-makers out of trouble. To plan safe, use Kiri, which has perfect taste and texture: just the right saltiness and dryness. It is recommended by many pastry chefs as a substitute for cream cheese. Samos 99 is also a good option, when you can find it (in fact I'm not sure it is still available). Other chefs recommend Saint-Môret, but I have found it to be too moist and too sour. And a bit too salty too. Fromage frais by "Madame Loïc" (in many supermarkets) is fine too but still a bit too moist. Brillat-Savarin can be good if you find one that is dry enough. If not, it should be kneaded and drained in a piece of cloth for a while.