Apicio

Let me know if something like this has ever happened to you all. A couple of week-ends ago I ate at a Turkish restaurant on 49th and 2nd (NY) and tried their broad green bean appetizer with my shish kebab. Although the vegetable was overcooked, it reminded me of our own bataw without the purple ridges. So I decided to try it at home this week but taking pains not to overcook it. It was like cooking Filipino food, you know, oil, garlic, shallots, chopped tomatoes then the broad green beans. What is different is it calls for bayleaf and also dill. I intend to eat it like a meal instead of just an appetizer so I decided to mix in some cooked lima beans, humongous ones that I picked up from the Korean market here. Remember, Bahay Kubo? Well this my new dish is bataw, patane. I drizzled it with a very good Spanish virgin olive oil that I pick up from a South American store close to my home here in Toronto. Is it ever good. I immediately followed it with a spoon of Argentine dulce de leche that I also picked up with the olive oil. Marvel of marvels, the flavor of ripe durian filled my startled mouth.

I am not sure if this is what you are looking for but they call it ginisang munggo where I came from. Guisa usually means sauteéd in garlic, chopped shallots or onions and tomatoes. A little bit of meat such as pork or pork crackling (yes, chicharron) and if meant for Friday, shrimps or smoked fish is added to lend flavor and body to the soupy texture. After the mung beans that has been soaked in water and boiled separately is added, it is garnished with sweet pepper plant leaves or bitter mellon vine leaves before serving. Traditionally served on Fridays paired with escabeche. Filipino escabeche, by the way, is very different from the more well-known Mexican but closer to the Chinese sweet and sour fried fish and Jamaican fish escabiche.

Some more distinction between pollo relleno and galantina are: Galantina is formed into a fat cylinder and wrapped in cheesecloth and poached in stock. The poaching liquid is then usually made into a sort of aspic to accompany the cold slices of galantina. The relleno on the other hand is reformed into a chicken shape. Our insider euphemism for left over is tirayaki. The pork siopao filling is also called asado although Enriqueta David Perez has a chicken asado recipe that is pretty close to a fricassee without the cream. The giblets are cooked with the chicken pieces and the liver is crushed to form a nice sauce with the reduction. A reversed adobo, if you like.

"JB even asked me to prepare staff meal for the entire PM shift one sunday. He specifically asked for adobo. The funny thing was, due to the ingredients I had to work with, that was the most awesome Filipino meal I've ever had. The pork was marinated overnight and was cooked in the combi. It was later fried just to give it an exterior crunch. As I was given carte blanche (for the most part) in terms of raiding the larder, well, let me tell you that adobo made with Pe Se veal stock and pok ciusson (instead of water) to go with the vinegar and soy sauce makes for an out of this world adobo. Instead of using small shrimp as is commonly done in Manila for this shrimp and garlic dish called Gambas (actually a Spanish adaptation) we had to use lobster claws as we don't normally have shrimp at Per Se. On and on it went...lentils for mung beans (monggo), and salmon and cod as well as pedigreed vegetables (you know, Tokyo turnips, King James Leeks, etc.) for the sinigang...I tell you, it doesn't get much better than that!" Now that’s what I would call my “repas imaginaire” for a last meal request or even for hereafter. Filipino food prepared with care and imagination by a competent and intelligent cook using the best ingredients that ample resources can assemble. In fact that’s just what I noticed when invited to dine in affluent homes in the Philippines. The dishes they serve are more or less the same ones a trained and resourceful housewife would serve except that the freshness and extraordinary quality of the ingredients used and the care with which they were prepared and served kicked them up several notches to the ideal height they so well deserve. My experience might very well be unique but Filipino food snobbery I dont recall having ever come accross. On the contrary, some of them surprised me with their penchant for Filipino food items that a lot of us tend to pass on or altogether avoid such as bagoong na alamang, tuyo or daing and the discourangingly unappetizing various buro they tend to produce at home throughout the Tagalog region. Filipino food pairing though is sublime. Munggo is simply great with escabeche.

I am grateful for your thoughtful and though provoking post stagiaire. My quote was not clear enough though. What I meant is that because of the relative facility with the English language of most Filipino immigrants, they find a much easier way to earn a living than going into the food business. It was a propos that that I added a comment about the challenges facing a person running a food business.

To prasantrin, I refer you to a recent thread titled Empanada and another older thread about dan tarts (chinese custard tartlets) where I posted our puff pastry crust recipe. When you are ready to try them, pm me and I shall walk you through it. Further to the restaurant topic, I recall an article about a second generation Chinese American with an Ivy League pedigree asking her dad why he went into the restaurant business probably wanting to confirm her romantic assumption that it was a longing for the food he had known as a child but instead received a frank reply that it was to make a living. The food business is a toilsome craft (un metier penible), most Filipino immigrants anywhere in the world have more than a passing acquaintance with the English language (part of our not being chauvinist, no doubt) with them and thus have more choices about the way they are going to make their way in the new world they have chosen. The other groups dont have as much.

Thanks to stagiare for doing the bulk of the analyzing for me. Although it has puzzled me since I started thinking about food, I have not really sat down and fleshed it out like you have done. I simply chalked it to: 1. We have not really worked on the style side of presentation; 2. The better dishes are labour intensive; 3. We are not chauvinists. The Filipinos community is a very open and welcoming group even when it comes to food; we travel to and settle in other places but hardly ever wither in the absence of our every-day food (say unlike the Japanese, for example). But the more important question for me (and here I know I am going on a tangent), is why does Filipino cuisine have to go mainstream in the first place? I shall keep it to myself if I happened to hit upon the mother load. It bugged me no end when my Filipino customers rave about my empanada because their friends liked them. Why does our food have to be validated by others before we begin to think better of it? Specially by the mainstream that presumambly allowed the proliferation of McDonalds, Burger Kings and Krispy Kremes around the globe.

Siopao is the Philippine version of the dimsum item called char chiu bao. They are steamed and are usually the size of hamburger or kaiser buns filled with either chicken or pork cooked in a sweetish thick gravy and dotted with slices of chinese sausage and a wedges of hard boiled egg. They are usually served paired with a bowl of noodle soup. During my university days (in the 60s) there were three preeminent siopao restaurants in downtown Manila you can go to. One was Hen Wa on Rizal Avenue and the other was the unforgettable Ma Mon Luk which first popularized this pairing and in fact served these two items exclusively for a long time right before and after the Pacific War. The third one was called Charlie’s which was famous for their beef mami (noodle soup) and beef siopao. The place was right accross the Manila Times offices in Florentino Torres. You can also pick them up from street vendors late at night but I resisted buying these because of doubtful provenance (and hygiene). Begging your pardon for overlapping some of the previous replies.

I opened a bake shop six years ago in the west-end of Toronto, Ontario that exclusively sells Philippine empanadas and sweet bean paste pastry. Our crust is egg enriched puff pastry and the filling is a basic minced pork mixture that we also use for filling omelets, i.e. course minced pork, sauteed in garlic, onions and tomatoes and then extended with, green peas, diced carrots, diced sweet red peppers, a little bit of raisins and lots of diced potatoes. Rose Levy Beranbaum has a similar filling recipe in her Pie and Pastry Bible. We bake them. Our clientele is made up of roughly 50% Filipinos and the other half, Latin Americans and other immigrant groups. This our version of empanada is a take-off of my mother’s. My mom’s, however, looked more like Italian sfogliatelle and were fried and never got any chance to cool down. I just came back from a trip to Brazil and Argentina. Brazil’s version is called empadas and are like chicken pot pies in that they are molded in mini tart pans and the filling has a sort of bechamel sauce in it. The Argentine version that I tasted in Buenos Aires, however, are made with crust that looks like pita bread sealed with a perfectly rolled rope edging. I also noted that moochers in the pedestrial street where my hotel was ask you for change to buy empanada.

I immediately wanted to agree with Chefkoo about the priciple of cooking in that you use whatever ingredients are freshly available to you where ever you are. Is it not exactly what terroire means? That was also the same priciple operating when great classic dishes such as Chicken a la Kiev and Veal marengo were concocted for the first time. The regional classification of dishes I suspect depends on who produced it and for whom. Hence, a chinese army chef would most likely have produced entirely different dishes if he found himself in the same situation as Napoleon’s cooks. He would have produced General Cho’s chicken!

I discovered Thai cuisine about twenty-five years ago in Bangkok Garden in Toronto. At the time the only images than came to mind about that country was what Hollywood served up in The King and I. In fact, the dishes had names linked to that story. But to discover a remarkable cuisine, prepared with utmost care and served with that unique exotique stylishness was truly unforgettable. Recalling it now would make it sound like a French citizen longing for the douceur de vie of the ancien regime. Their satays were excellent and their grilled beef salad provoked an obsession about the place. I took all my out-of-town guests there for dinner until two years ago when it changed .

Or you can follow the thread about “jungs” and try that. Or you can use it for risotto, beats any rice from Italy that I know of and tried. Or you can use it for paella, not authentic but actually better, IMHO. And for dessert, try using it for rice pudding, creamier than any other rice they ask for.

You will find lots of different recipes of Tres Leches cake in the web. It is the hispanic tiramisu, everyone has his own favorite version. Basically, it is a round sponge cake sliced into layers and moistened with a mixture of three kinds of dairy, evaporated milk, condensed milk and fresh milk or table cream. Depending on the richness desired (or the country involved), they frost it with seven minute frosting, whipped cream or butter cream. I have come across ones that were based on butter cake too. An Argentian baker friend and his Mexican girlfriend gave me a version filled with cajeta which I believe is the mexican term for dulce de leche. If you have access to imports from Argentina, their dulce de leche is IMHO, one of the finest you can taste. Failing this, there is a thread on how to make dulce de leche by boiling an unopened tin of condensed milk for one to two hours.

There is a Filipino word for whatever food you bring to present to people who meet you on your arrival. It covers a lot of territory just like “kueh” in the rest of South East Asia but also more because it also includes seasonal fruits and other savoury treats. You usually bring this on your return from a trip to the city. Fifty years ago this meant to us two kinds of hopia, the mung beans and the winter mellon and a chinese confection shaped like tiny sacks (around 1-1/2”x3”), hollow with crisp walls made up of bubbles and look like kropek (and therefore, fried) coated with candy and rolled in either popped rice, sesame seeds or chopped roasted peanuts. The ethnic Chinese sellers call them “lo hwa.” Does anyone in this marvellous forum know what it is?

Mother was a culinary equivalent of FDR. Make the best of what you have where you are. She served all of us nine kids invariably good meals. She cooked each one of us our favorite dish for our birthday. I can only recall one meal that none of us could eat. That was when she served the meat of a pig we were very fond of.

This is a basic puff pastry that is used in any of the savoury or sweet asian pastry that calls for puff pastry. In the shop, we use it for hopia which is a Filipino version of a particular kind of mooncake. We use them for wrapping sweet mung bean paste, wintermellon filling and our very own purple yam paste. It is also fantastic as crust for no-fry empanadas when egg is substituted for part of the water.

Here is 1/18 of the formula we use at the shop. We use a commercial dough relaxer to shorten rest periods and to improve the laminating quality of the dough. A sales rep once told me that you can substitute a little vinegar for the water so we tried it and it works. Real chinese puff pastry such as Virginia Lee’s requires the cake flour for the lard paste to be steamed and cooled overnight. We never tried this. Too much work. We bake this to golden brown at 375 for 18 to 22 minutes. Now for the custard tarts you have to find the optimum temperature because the best texture of custard is obtained in a slower oven. From the ever so refined Hong Kong version that I adore, I suspect that the custard filling contains very little milk making it almost like the Cuban tocino del cielo. Chinese Puff Pastry All purpose flour 500 grams White sugar 75 Salt 5 Salad oil 175 Cold water 250 Cake flour 200 Lard (not Crisco) 150 Place the first three ingredients in your food processor, pulse, add the salad oil and pulse until the oil is absorbed. Pour in the cold water and process until the resulting dough forms into a ball. Wrap in plastic film and refrigerate until dough has relaxed (say an hour.) Place the last two ingredients in your food processor and pulse until a uniform paste forms. This paste gets runny in a hot kitchen. Do not allow it to get runny by chilling it in the fridge. It should be of spreading consistency though. Proceed as with classic puff pastry by rolling the first dough into a rectangle. On to 2/3 of its surface, spread the lard paste with a spatula. Observe the rest/chilling periods to allow the dough to relax. Rose Levy Beranbaum’s puff pastry adds an extra turn at the end making it identical to Chinese puff pastry.

Just a note of difference (that does not really make any difference), the green fruit that looks like hand-grenade is called sweetsop in Jamaica and sugar apple elsewhere in the English speaking countries where they are cultivated. Custard apple, although a close relative (family Annonaceae) looks different in colour and texture, the scales are flatter and almost concave instead of in high relief. Another close relative, the guayabano or soursop on the other hand is usually a lot larger and acidic. A modern hybrid called atemoya draws together the best qualities of this family, large, beautiful fresh flavour, very sweet and few seeds that are far between. This was my mother’s favorite. She planted a seed and it grew and bore fruits that looked like our old sweetsop albeit as large as baseball. Anyway, I was in Rio last week where they are now in high season, three large ones as big as husked coconut for five reais (around US$2.)

Beautiful pictures Jason. Their term for hotdog is a direct translation, cachorro quente (cashoho kenchee). They produce these treats in impossibly tiny and cramped bars along with the irrisistable salt cod fritters and the tasty empadas. The fresh fruits are amazing too, figs as large as tennis balls and sweet sop as large as coconuts three of them for five reais (about US$2.) I went to a rodizzio churrasqueria in Sao Paulo where absolutely everything was remarkable. What impressed me most though is the grace and friendliness of the people.

What do you want to bake first? I suggest to people who want to start baking to start with their favorite baked goods. If you lean towards cakes, you should get the feel by starting with your favorite muffins. If you want to bake yeast raised items, get the feel by baking Moomie’s beautiful burger buns elsewhere in this forum. I am a professional baker but nothing in my repertoire beats MBBB for ease, reliability and speed.

To bpearis: The closest to texture (not flavour) that comes to mind is collard green. When fresh it looks like lotus leaves and as with lotus also thrives in swampy habitat. Yes that is what gave the man who ate everything extreme mouth discomfort. The sap stings so cooks let them wilt before handling them. The starchy rhizome is delicious boiled or cooked like yams but also stings so cooks coat their hands with grease before peeling them. The Chinese call them monkey heads.

Thanks to Jackal10 for the recipe. The Indonesians call them cropeck and serve them as soon as you are assigned your table in a restaurant while the Chinese use them as bed for crisp skin fried chicken. You can get them in Asian markets but you are absolutely correct, they are much better when made at home and your nori variation is eye-catching. I’ll use a little bit of black sesame on half of the recipe when I try it.

I finally tried some from the bag of Jamaican Blue Mountain Cofee “Blend.” I find its quality at par with that of their other bags of beans so I consider it a really good buy at that price. Being well into my anecdotage, perhaps I can inflict on you my coffee odyssey. For the last five year I have been buying Costco’s Columbian beans and at first alternated it with their Starbucks Roast and later blended them together when I found that the Starbucks roast was too dark and almost burnt for my liking. I was using Melitta funnel filter drip then and I was happy. Before that time and for sixteen years, I worked for a Jamaican boss who brought me back my supply of Jamaican Blue Mountain beans and I was happier but most good things in life must end some time. And then last July new friends invited me for dinner and served me coffee from their Bodum Santos Electric using the Starbucks roast beans from Costco that I have been using. What a revelation. That beans never tasted so good with my morning set-up. The result was I was ready to buy this new fangled coffeemaker which incidentally was exactly the same model that i have been eyeing for some time at my Starbucks location. He persuaded me not to buy it though. He said that that coffeemaker he was using that evening was his fourth Bodum Santos Electric in two years because the plastic material its made of kept cracking and as soon as it does this no vacuum forms so no coffee. So I did my internet research and ended with five fifty year old vacuum coffee brewers that have never been used from e-bay. However, in using these brewers I find that I gradually became discontented with the beans I picked up at Costco. So another flurry of internet research yielded a coffee roasting store on the Lakeshore only ten minutes away from me. I pick up my weekly half a pound of freshly roasted beans there (for $7.50) and I pick them blind because it does not really matter to me now what kind. They are all invariably good and I like pleasant surprises. My new friends by the way are now using a chrome Sunbeam vacuum coffee brewer that I gave them for Christmas. I got it from e-bay for $20.00.

Sorry there Chef Koo, a debate was what I was actually trying to avoid. The most popular? Well, then, a great majority of people I know would order Remy Martin by name.

Two and a half thousands of years ago, when there were few beautiful women and lots of brave men and gods were hovering over them to dictate who was the most this and the most that, it was easier to zero in on Helen as the most beautiful of all. Now-a-days claiming something to be the mostest will just generate a lot of discussion but will hardly settle anything. Take for example a “simple” spirit like vodka. For the last ten years Grey Goose claims in their print ads that it was rated number one. And then three weeks ago a panel assembled by a journalist at the New York Times had a tasting of premium vodkas and comes off with the so unpremium Smirnoff acing the expensive ones. Although I went out once to pick up a bottle of Grey Goose just to see what the experts found in it, I remain unconvinced and so still automatically reach for a bottle of the domestic (and a lot cheaper) Iceberg when in the liquor store. And I suspect that I will continue doing so inspite of what the New York Time’s panel’s most recent findings. But to go back to Chef Koo’s question, the hierarchy of cognacs (VS, VSOP, Napoleon, Xo, etc) is determined by official age and price but that does not necessarily determine quality. You and you alone create that trancendent experience in your mind so allow no god or panel of gods dictate it to you while you keep on tasting new ones.