battlepanda

I ended up going to Bright Pearl. The experience was good, but not great. I feel like my Dim Sum cravings have been provoked, rather than sated. Tomorrow, I will hit Pearl Harbourfront since it's close by, and who knows, maybe I'll take my cousin to Lai wah heen before I go. Something inside me is very suspicious of fancified dim sum, but since I've heard nothing but good about that place I should give it a try. By the way, this week's copy of "Now" (a free alternative weekly) just so happen to have a guide to T.O.'s best Chinese food. Pick up a copy and see if you agree. Wow! Mark, you know how to make your own dimsum? Kudos. I think of it as strictly restaurant food, especially since one of the chief reason I like it so much is the staggering variety. Yup. I'm one of those girls who always wants a bite of whatever everyone else is having. The only dimsum I want to make on my own because I can just eat it all day long is the lotus wrapped rice. It's one of my favorite dimsums and I feel like lots of restaurants skimp on it, using inferior fillings. Another one I want to make is those little cute custard tarts. Mmmm...

I guess the consensus seems to be you don't need a big bulky appliance to enjoy crepes. My poor cousin and her boyfriend are basically stuck with it on their counter, and it's got a huge footprint. I wish folks would think before they give gifts more! Tomorrow will be project crepe day. I found the poor little wooden paddle at the bottom of the "odds and ends" drawer. I will combine some suggestions and modify alton brown's crepe recipe by browning the butter slightly first. Sounds yum! Stay tuned to see how it all turns out.

Thanks guys. I'm venturing out to chinatown today. I'm going to go to the Royal ontario museum and a couple of touristy places like that. From frozen? The only one I know that cooks up good from frozen are the char shu buns. Then again, I'm from Amherst, Massachusetts and the asian store there is not very comprehensive.

Hey guys. I've heard that Dim Sum in Toronto is the best. I'm here visiting my cousin for a few days and as I'm a dim sum fanatic I have to get my fix before I go! So, sock it to me. Where do they serve good dimsum in toronto? I'm staying in the harborfront but will be willing to travel (by TTC of course). And while you're at it, what is the one thing I'll have to see while I'm in Toronto, as this is my first trip here?

I'm visiting my cousin in toronto. She and her boyfriend has a crepe maker they recieved as a gift or something. They never use it. In fact, they don't know how to cook. I'm itching to try it out sometime in the next few days. Does anyone have a good recipe? Also, when I see the crepemakers being used in restaurants, they have a little paddle to smooth out the batter and make it nice and thin. I can't find the paddle in their kitchen anywhere. Is there anything I can replace it with?

Interesting...I have made about 6 batches of beer to date with no problems. Maybe I've just been lucky. Ugh! Sanitizing the equipment is onerous enough as it is. I don't think I can get myself to brew if I had to add another step. By the way, I think b-brite is a great cleaner all around the house. It's gentle and gets rid of much scumminess. Certainly smells better than bleach.

I do home brewing and sanitize all equipment with a proprietary cleanser called "b-brite". It's a powder that I stir into water at the rate of one tablespoon per gallon. Sometimes after I brew I save the b-brite solution and use it in spray bottles to clean my kitchen. It seems to work well at loosening gunk and has no offensive odor unlike bleach. Is this a safe/effective use or should I stick to the ol' bleachy water? I tried to look up what is in it, but couldn't find more information beyond the fact that b-brite is some kind of oxygen activated cleanser.

OK, guys. This is what I did. No exact quantities because...proprietary info, y'know ;) Not that I'm really afraid of anyone stealing my secret -- the real secret of making good curry from scratch is that it's a lot of work! I decided to make a beef curry, both because it's my favorite kind and because it stands up to long simmering a lot better than chicken and I wanted a curry that is nice and 'stewy'. I bought some boneless short ribs. Not too expensive. I didn't trust the anonymous diced meat they sell as 'beef for stewing'. I knew I needed a flavorful stock. So I roasted beef marrow bones in a low oven. Meanwhile, I lightly caramelized a ton of sliced onions. Half I reserved for the curry itself, the rest stayed in the stockpot. In addition to the bones and the onion, I added carrots and a few bay leaves, then boiled everything gently for two hours until the stock was really rich. I also added some sliced apple and tomato in there towards the end for good measure. While the stock was working, I made my roux with some butter, S&B curry powder and flour. I cooked it for a really long time to get the flour-y taste out, on really low heat of course. As a bonus, the long, slow, cooking also drew out this delicious nuttyness in the butter that was detectable in the final curry. I also steamed some potatoes and carrots to go in the curry. I cut the short ribs into nice, meaty pieces and seared them in a skillet. Once they are brown all over I added the onions I reserved earlier and stir-fried them together briefly. Now I'm finally ready to start the curry itself! Into a large saucepan went the roux, to which I slowly added hot stock while stirring constantly. Exactly like making a white sauce. Then I added a puree of some of the steamed potatoes, carrots, half a raw apple all blended up with some stock. This thickened the curry up even more. I added the previously seared meat and onions and started braising everything. I tasted the sauce. It had a lot of rich flavor, but it was also kind of wan and lacking in depth. I needed something savory. Something strong. Something to bring out the beefiness...V8 vegetable juice! It did the trick. I also added one square of S&B amakuchi curry roux for the requisite hit o' MSG. After more simmering, the meat was tender. The onions melting. The curry was silky and full of flavor. The recipe is by no means perfect, and I'm sure I'll have many more batches to cook in front of me before I'm ready for the restaurant to open. The next challenge: I have some friends coming over on thursday who are very "crunchy granola" types so I need to develop a healthy curry with absolutely no MSG by then! Wish me luck.

Thanks for the interesting ideas, Hiroyuki :) Today I went to the Asian store and looked around. They had three kinds of S&B curry, mild, medium and hot, plus two kinds of vermont curry. I picked up the medium S&B and made two batches of chicken curry at home. First, I sauteed chopped garlic and grated ginger in the skillet with a little vegetable oil. Then I added diced boneless chicken thigh and browned it before adding the veggies, onions, peppers and a tomato. I steamed the potatoes and carrots seperately. Then, going with an idea I saw in a cookbook, I pureed some of the potatoes and carrots with a little chicken stock to add textures to my curry. Then I finished up the curry by adding water and roux cube as usual. I also made another batch just with chicken and onions, as per the instruction on the back of the box. THE VERDICT? My boyfriend preferred the straight-up version unequivocally. He found the messed around version too complex, with the curry flavor muted by the other additions. I too, have to admit that the straight-up version had better immediate mouth-appeal. The pureed potatoes did not noticably affect the texture of the stew, which was a little gummy for me. The garlic and ginger was overpowering. And I suspect the addition of the stock made the curry too salty. I liked the texture of the vegetables, but I think having so many different aromatic vegs in there made the flavors muddy. Dispite the shortcomings of my version, however, I think it had a more three-dimensional taste that people expect from restaurant food. Both versions suffer from some common flaws -- my tongue is numb from the full-on salt and monosodium glutamate assult! I also found the 'gravy' of both sauces unpleasantly gummy. My boyfriend thinks that the straight-up version is hard to beat. And though I have to admit that it is pretty darn tasty, I think people going into a restaurant is not going to be happy with something quite as one-dimensional. I also want to cut down on the salt and monosodium glutamate content of the curry. MSG is a short-cut of making things taste good, but ultimately it is not as satisfying as real flavor. I also want to improve on the texture of my curry. Tomorrow, I'm going to make a beef curry with S&B's hot roux. Keep posted to see how it turns out!

Hiroyuki is right. Japanese curry is not the healthiest food. Especially if we decide to serve it over tonkatsu. But as we are marketing ourselves mostly as an alternative to other standard student fare such as pizza and other fast food, I don't think we're going to do any more damage to people's health. But my boyfriend and I better watch our own curry consumption. I'll probably get sick of it relatively quickly, but he can eat curry all day every day. And as for fukujin-zuke, there's an well-stocked asian store in town where we can buy them. We'll probably just leave them out on the condiment counter for those who want them. My boyfriend absolutely hates fukujin zuke. I can take them or leave them.

I looked on the U.S. Heinz website...no mention of curry. However, at my local Asian store they do have a selection of curry cubes. S&B's Golden Curry is what we usually use for ourselves.

Thanks for the welcome and the info, Torakris. I'm still working my way through reading the curry thread...there's a lot of ideas there! I'm planning to open the restaurant in Amherst, Mass. It's a college town so I'm aiming squarely for the hungry student customers. Not very many Japanese people here, but I doubt our curry will be authentic enough for them anyhow. I think okinawaChris is right - roux cubes are the way to go, at least as a departure point. As for educating our consumers, I'm counting on the curiosity factor to get people in the door (we'll make it clear from our sign and our advertizing to differentiate ourselves as JAPANESE curry). I'll keep you all posted as the recipe testing phase commences. Hopefully my boyfriend and I won't gain too much weight in the next few months.

Greetings, I'm new to eGullet. I had to join after finding this Japanese food section. You guys are really fanatical about food! Anyhow, I have a question about Japanese curry. Me and my boyfriend absolutely love it, and is in fact thinking about opening a small restaurant specializing in Japanese curry in the United States. I know we are taking a risk because nobody knows about Japanese curry in the States, but at the same time it is so addictively tasty we believe our restaurant can take off in a big way if we do it right. Anyhow, right now when we cook Japanese curry for ourselves we use the roux cubes we find in the local asian market. It makes for a very acceptable product that is less complex than the curry you'd find at specialist curry stores in Asia, but nevertheless pretty good. From what research I've done it's clear that this is the way that curry is made in most households. But, to tell you the truth, I would almost feel like cheating using a convenience product like curry cubes in our restaurant. Does anyone have good recipes for making curry truly from scratch? Or are there additional steps or extra ingredients I can add to our curry to make the roux more flavorful? My boyfriend thinks I'm being silly. He has a point since then roux curry is really quite yummy and we're hardly in competition with anybody else selling an even remotely comparable product. Still, I want to make our food the best it can be. Any advice will be helpful!