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Posts posted by anzu
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Now I have become obsessed with finding out where Halvah originated.
Some people claim it originated in Northern Epirus, which is now Southern Alabania. Others say Turkey and still others say India.
Anyone have a history book on the orgins of food?
Are you looking for the origins of sesame halvah or including halvah made with other grains or flours?
Also, are you still counting it as sesame halvah if formed into balls or other shapes?
Not sure if the following will help, or will just muddy the waters further:
Looking up K. T. Achaya A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food , it would seem that sesame originated in India, and sugarcane was also cultivated from early times in India. One of the members of Alexander the Great's expedition to India (327-325 BC) mentioned sweetened laddus (balls) of sesame for sale in the markets. He wrote that they were made from sesame and honey but Achaya points out that 'honey' was mentioned here because sugar was unknown to the Greeks (sugarcane was described by another member of Alexander's entourage during the same expedition). So the sweetener may have been sugar - probably less refined sugar (jaggery).
Again, according to Achaya, there are written references from Vedic era texts (1500 - 500 BC) to sweets made with sesame and jaggery.
Halvah in modern India usually refers to sweets that are soft, pasty, and usually eaten quite rapidly after preparation - they are made from a variety of materials, such as various grains, fruits, vegetables, or nuts. Many of these are similar to the Turkish and Persian halvas mentioned above.
For what it's worth, halvah is certainly referred to in the Mughal period (1526 - 1707), notably in the book Ain-i-Akbari which documents science, technology, food and many other subjects during the reign of Akbar (1556-1605).
So if your sources say when halvah is meant to have been consumed in Epirus and Turkey, maybe you can narrow it down.
Re qand/candy. I believe this is a Persian not an Arabic word. Qand means lump (i.e. of sugar). The i is a posessive marker (as in Ain-i-Akbari above). It is believed to be related to the Sanskrit word khand (lump). Qand certainly means lump sugar in modern Persian (or at least this is what my Persian teacher taught us!).
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I tend not to eat out all that much, and have never been to a club in my life, so I'm not that much help. However, some particularly restaurant-dense areas are:
1) The area directly to the north of Hackescher Markt, within the area bounded up to U-Bahn station Oranienburger Srasse if heading along the street of the same name, and (more or less) to the U-Bahn station Rosenthaler Platz if heading directly north.
2) Prenzlauer Berg, in particular the stretch along Kollwitzstrasse continuing on into Knaackstrasse.
This is probably easiest to get to by taking the U-Bahn to Senefelderplatz and walking north, or to Eberswalder Strasse, and walking south.
3) (just to show that not everything is in the former East Berlin side).
The area directly south from U-Bahn station Nollendorfplatz, in particular along Maassenstrasse and continuing on into Gotzstrasse. Incidentally, there is also a large greenmarket along here, at Winterfeldplatz, held on Wednesday and Saturday mornings. The side streets along here also have quite a few restaurants. This area has had a reputation since about the 1920s (though obviously disrupted greatly in the 1930s and 40s) for being a trend-setting - and also particularly gay-friendly - part of town. It's trendiness has partly been overtaken by the new areas on the eastern side of town, but it is still a fun region to visit.
Nothing to do with your questions, but for fun with chocolate not that far from where you're staying first, head for Fassbender und Rausch at Gendarmenmarkt (corner of Mohrenstrasse and Charlottenstrasse) just one block in eastwards from Friedrichstrasse. Apart from some really great chocolates, truffles, etc. you can also enjoy/be grossed out by (depending on your predilections
) kitsch items such as giant chocolate sculptures of things like the Brandenburg Gate. Don't know about the Dachgartenrestaurant, but the queue for the Reichstag dome is always pretty long (probably about a minumum of an hour-long wait ?) even in hailstorms, below-freezing weather, etc. Now that the weather is finally warming up, the queue will be getting even longer, so being able to bypass it by means of food would certainly be worthwhile.
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Uh Pan,
tourte aux blettes is made with Swiss chard (blettes are Swiss chard). I recently came across a couple of other desserts using Swiss chard, and have now forgotten where they were cooked (Romanian cuisine??). I agree that tourte aux blettes does taste good.
However, there is a type of strudel filling I've read of that is made with sweetened cabbage, and an Indian milk-based dessert (the idea of which, I must admit, I find somewhat less attractive) featuring reduced milk, sugar, and boiled cabbage.
And green peas turn up in both Japanese and Indian sweets.
On the topic of azuki beans in sweet foods - I think it is the idea rather than the taste that upsets people. I know some people who will happily eat Chinese sweet sticky rice dumplings filled with bean paste, but won't touch Japanese desserts featuring beans. Perhaps because the latter is visible and the former not?
And, as was stated upthread, if you think about it, most Western baking centers around flour, eggs, milk, sugar, just recombined in umpteen different combinations, and with a few different flavorings added here and there. So, IMO, this doesn't really differ in principle from centering sweets around sticky rice flour, beans, chestnuts, and green tea.
But this is all quite a different subject from the original question. I'm very grateful to Kris for the links she gave earlier. I've bookmarked them for my own future reference!
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It is calcium hydroxide, also known as pickling lime. There is a bit of a discussion of it in this thread.
Some Indian groceries stock it (it is used in making a sweet called petha, made from ash gourd/winter melon, which also has the texture you describe). Indian stores which stock the supplies for pan/betel nut should also carry it. The Hindi name for this lime is chuna.
Some Chinese groceries also stock it, often on the same shelf as things that you really do not want to ingest. The ones I have seen are labelled only in Chinese. Due to this, if buying it at a Chinese grocery I would only get it at a place where I trust them very much and where I am sure that they can tell me I'm buying the right thing. I believe you can also buy it online.
Here is an Indian recipe for petha, which gives you some idea of the time and process for making the Indian equivalent. Other searches for 'petha' will also give you recipes with a very short soaking time in the lime (just a couple of hours). Personally, though I haven't made it, I feel that this shorter time will probably give a less desirable result - not crunchy enough.
Petha is one of my favorite sweets. So murraba el arih sounds wonderful to me.
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Nit-picking pedant chiming in here.
I think you'll find it is 'sev raita' and not 'sav' (sev means apple, sav doesn't mean anything that I know of).
And if you're going to make onion bhajis (i.e. pakoras), please please don't make the tennis-ball sized abominations. That seems to be a particular UK specialty, and because they are too large they always end up with disgusting raw batter and/or raw onion on the inside. Make them smaller, so that you have delectable little crispy morsels...
And they don't have to be onion either. My favourite is to use a very thin batter, which only just adheres to your vegetable, then to draw individual spinach leaves through the batter, and then to fry. You have a crisp, thin sometimes lacy layer of batter enclosing the leaf. It's so good...
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Eel outside of China and Japan (There are countless more dishes, but these are ones I can think of offhand).
In the UK - jellied eel
In Germany - eel in herb sauce (Aal gruen)
In Spain - fried in olive oil with a touch of chili and garlic
Eel.
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Pig's ears:
- sold in many regular German supermarkets next to liver, trotters, etc. So I presume people are eating them.
- apparently also very popular in Mongolia. A classmate when I was studying in Japan was from Mongolia and said it was one of the things he missed most while in Japan. Every time he went back home he ate huge amounts, he said.
- also used (though other parts of the pig are sometimes also used instead) in a type of Vietnamese raw/semi-fermented sausage called nem chua. This sausage is delectable: crunchy, and sour.
Fern shoots:
also eaten in Malaysia and Indonesia (called paku and pakis respectively), the Philippines, Laos, Thailand, and parts of India. In India they are cooked fresh, and also made into pickles.
Fiddlehead fern shoots are also eaten in North America.
Here's another question: do the Chinese eat bauhinia blossoms? I believe the bauhinia tree is the official tree of Hong Kong. In India, people eat the blossoms, but do the Chinese eat them too?
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Why is rice so expensive?
Japanese rice farming is massively subsidized, and the increased cost is passed along onto the consumer.
Some aspects ofthe subsidies:
rice in all its facets from growing it to consuming it is considered an essential part of Japanese life, and therefore it is supported by the government (the irony of this is that the consequent high prices have lead consumers to buy less rice and more bread than they otherwise would have).
Following on from this, it was considered for a long time that import of rice would undermine Japanese rice farmers. Therefore no rice was imported. This meant that the much cheaper price of rice on the world market did not affect the price within Japan. (Are imports allowed right now? When I was living in Japan, no imports were allowed, but I know that this was relaxed one year when the harvest was really bad, and rice was imported for a few years after that. Did they allow that to continue, or stop it again?)
I've forgotten the details about this, but politically, there is a type of gerrymander system going on, where rice farmers have a huge tax advantages (and more voting power?? I have really forgotten this stuff). Politicians are very unwilling to step in and make any changes to this system. However, it results in very skewed patterns of rice farming. For example, tiny plots of land are maintained for farming rice even in the middle of otherwise built-up suburban areas - in the normal scheme of things such land would be worth far more if sold for housing or other development, however the susbsidies mean that the land continues to be farmed even though the actual scale of production and amount of rice produced is very small. Without the subsidies, these would not be economically viable.
(On the plus side - from my own experience - living next to a rice field even when you living in the suburbs is a source of great aesthetic pleasure. Watching the rice develop from brilliant green young shoots to golden ripe heads hanging ready for harvest was something I never tired of).
Finally - this is not so much a matter of subsidies but rather of marketing systems - again I have forgotten the details, but there tends to be a system of middlemen within the Japanese marketing system so that distribution is not as direct as it will be in certain other countries. If I recall correctly, this is particularly the case for rice. Of course, the middlemen have to make a living, so the more hands the rice (or other product) goes through, the more the price increases.
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A pregnant Indian aquaintance ate pineapple the other day and - after the pineapple had already been consumed - numerous other women told her that she was putting herself at risk for miscarriage as pineapple was 'too heating' to eat in pregnancy. Seeking to put her mind at rest (she was extremely upset, but the pineapple was already eaten, what was she meant to do?!), I found an article on 'hot foods' in India and how their consumption is believed to affect pregnancy.
Since this concerns India rather than China, and is therefore somewhat tangential to the actual topic, I nevertheless thought that people might be interested in comparing which foods are considered hot in the two cultures (and also how much the classification of 'hot' can vary regionally within India itself).
The article is here, Table 2 contains a list of foods.
Moving back to China: a lot of people have said how elder (usually female) family members passed on their knowledge about the intrinsic qualities of food.
I thought I'd share my own experiences in China: as a foreigner who spoke Chinese, I found it hard to avoid people - even complete strangers (and yes, they were usually elder women
) telling me that the food I was eating was 'too hot' or 'too cold'. On certain occasions, people were giving me advice because it looked as if I had a cold - actually I was in a city in China where the air pollution was very bad, and my body responded to this with a running nose and other symptoms that resembled cold symptoms.
Whatever I ate, it seemed that someone would appear - be it the woman cleaning the hotel room, or even a complete stranger in the street - and they would tell me off, saying that eating that paricular food would not let my body recover from the cold that I obviously had.
I seem to recall (it's quite a long while back) that peanuts, mangos, mandarins, bread, coffee, were all BIG no-nos (too yang, I presume).
Although mandarins were not okay, oranges apparently were alright.
Seeing as I didn't actually have a cold (and figured that my body would get accustomed with time to the air pollution), I wanted to keep eating those foods - it's hard to abstain from ripe mangos! Although such concern from people I didn't even know was very touching, it actually got to the point where I was hiding from all people to eat certain foods so that I wouldn't get told off
Another thing I was told was that there is a difference in the yin or yang quality of different types of tea. Flower teas in particular were NOT to be drunk with yumcha, only wulong/oolong was acceptable. (this rankled, as I like all tea except for wulong, and my objections were firmly over-ruled).
Does this distinction between different types of tea sound familiar to anyone?
And, changing topic direction once again:
the earlier discussions touching on when Chinese food philosophy came into being got me interested, and I did a little reading up of my own.
I'll summarize them here (I have to summarize because although I took notes I was scatterbrained enough not to keep proper track of the umpteen sources I took the notes from
).Disclaimer here before people start shooting me down in flames:
although I do actually have a PhD in social history
, the subject I know most about is far removed from this particular area of knowledge. So what I am doing here is summarizing other people's work, with a little conjecture of my own thrown in. It is meant to be a jumping-off point for discussion, not cut-and-dried statements from a viewpoint of extreme knowledge. Although the concept of yin and yang do indeed have much earlier origins, the earliest existing written records relating yin and yang to food, and applying this relationship to balancing the body, treatment of illness etc. come later. They apparently date to approximately the first and second centuries AD. The two works are the Shennongbencaojing and the Shanghanzabinglun (my sources were in English, I don't have the characters even though I couldd guess at some/most of them.)
The Greco-Roman- Persian-Arab concept of balance between the humors follows a similar pattern - the concept of four elements and four humors was posited earlier (Empedoclus 490-430 BC for the four elements). However, linking the concept of balancing out the humors through avoidance or consumption of particular foods came later. The work of Dioscorides in particular develop this concept. This was written in the first century AD.
In India, a relationship between diet, body, and balance (ayurveda) allegedly existed as early as 1500 BC (disclaimer here, the source I had this from was rather too nationalistic and vague for my tastes). More reliably, sources dating from earlier times were written down and codified in the fourth century AD (texts: Charaka samhita and Sushruta samhita) and the seventh century AD (Ashtangahrdya samhita).
Many scholars suggest that there was a strong cross-fertilization of ideas between the various systems.
Certainly in Roman times there was trade between Rome <-- > India <--> China. There was also, for example, direct contact between India and Greece in 327 BC (Alexander's invasion), Greek trade contacts before this, Roman trade after this date, etc. Trade often involved the exchange of knowledge as well as commodities, so ideas relating food/body type/ medical applications may well have been transmitted at this time.
Certain later links are clear. For example, the Greco-Arab-Persian system utilizing the concept of humors was developed further by Galen (Arabic name Jalinus) 131 - 200 AD, Rhazes (Al-Razi) 859 - 932 AD, and Avicenna (Ibn-Sena) 980 - 1037 AD. This medical tradition was also introduced to India by the Arabs and reached a high point in India after the Mongols invaded Persia, when scholars of what was called 'Greek medicine' (unani) fled to India and continued teaching and practicing there. The flowering of 'Greek medicine' in India lasted through approximately the 13 - 17 C (though practitoners of unani medicine are still common in India today).
Getting speculative here: there was a lot of intellectual and cultural interaction between India and China throughout much of this period. Most of this interaction was less spectular than Zhenghe, but it was none the less effective. One example was Buddhist monks going from India to China. This is NOT something I know about, but surely it is not inconceivable that concepts of yin and yang, hot and cold, the humors, treating illness with food, etc. were transmitted throughout this period.
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I see now that sufganyiot are a traditonal Jewish doughnut served often at Hanukkah. Maybe deserving of it own thread, but where do these originate from and what was the traditional oil used before more modern vegetable oils were available?
This only partially answers your question, but in Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food, she writes that they were an Austro-Hungarian peasant carnival donut which became popularized at the court of Marie Antoinette.
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This is not bicontinental, but across borders.
For a couple of years, I was living in Germany, but on the border between France and Germany. I could walk out of my house, hop on my local bus, and go into France to do my shopping (the bus made a quick loop into France and then headed back out into Germany). Alternatively, I could change from the bus to a tram, and go to a different French town for my shopping. I was always 'filling the gaps' from one country with products from the other.
From France:
Lipton citrus herbal tea (infusion agrumes)
Live basil plants (the type with smaller leaves)
Algerian red wine
Aioli in jars
Small dried white beans (forgotten the name: was it cocos?)
Ready-made brik wrappers
Buckwheat flour (ble de sarrasin)
Various types of pate and charcuterie
Peches de vigne if/when available
To France: (this is more limited, becasue it has always been short holidays, day trips, etc.)
German bread (German bread combined with French cheese and charcuterie is really combining the best of both worlds)
Such a relief to hear that I'm not the only one who wrestles with flimsy European plastic wrap/cling film in lousy packaging. I was beginning to think it was just me!
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I feel the same way about Splenda and other artificial sweeteners. Sugar is 16 calories a tablespoon. Do anyone benefit enough from saving 16 or so calories in his or her iced tea that it is worth consuming something that tastes horrid? Again, no way!
For some of us (like me, who has insulin-dependent diabetes) some of us can get enough benefit from this. Here, the particular issue is not calories but how many carbs the sugar contains. Carb-wise, a teaspoon of sugar is equal to eating a few large luscious strawberries, or a couple of squares of chocolate, or a pretty decent serving of yogurt (Greek or Turkish, and full-fat of course. 10 percent fat is even better
). With iced tea, for example, I would just skip both sugar and artificial sweetener. But there are certain things that simply HAVE to be sweetened or they are just plain unpleasant (rhubarb and quince are a couple) and if I were using sugar to get the amount of sweetening that they need to taste good, I'd have upped the carb content so much that I would be able to eat only a tiny portion - so artificial sweetener it is, and I can then eat a human-sized amount of them. So I am utterly grateful that artificial sweeteners were invented. They can have their place and are not only for people who are concerned about weight.
Butter, now, is a different story. If you do have cholesterol concerns, there are perfectly edible and tasty substitutes, such as olive oil.
Butter was never present in our house growing up - this was when it was believed to be oh-so-bad for you, and margarine was meant to be better. My parents diligently followed such teachings and so it was margarine all the way. Horrible, nasty-tasting stuff it is too.
Cream, bacon, and full-fat milk were never around either due to the same concerns. And as soon as I left home I started buying butter, lard, bacon, ghee, etc. Margarine would never darken my doorstep. I did eat margarine inadvertently at a friend's house a couple of years back - I'd forgotten quite how bad it tastes. I really don't understand how anyone can tolerate the taste.
So I suppose my butter backlash has lasted several decades now.
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Bhature are leavened only very slightly in what is fundamentally a sourdough method.
I'm giving three methods of making the bhature dough. What can I say, my relatives are all Punjabi who adore fried food!
First is the regular, every-day method. This is how my relatives usually make bhature. Then I'm giving the purists version, and then the quick and dirty method.
The amount should yield about 8 bhature.
2 cups white flour (maida)
1 cup semolina (sooji)
1/2 teaspoon soda bi-carb
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 cup yogurt (preferably slightly sour) at room temperature
Mix together all ingredients, adding enough warm water to bring the dough to a softish consistency that will let you roll it out easily with just a little flour added to the surface on which you roll out the bread. Knead. Set aside in a covered bowl in a warm place at least 3-4 hours. (As chole bhature is often a breakfast food for Punjabis, it will often be left overnight and cooked in the morning).
Form into eight balls, and roll out. Bhatura are usually very slightly larger than puris (though of course this depends on the size you make your puris!) - I've never actually measured them, but at a guess I'd say about 10 cm across. They are also rolled out to be just a tiny bit thicker than puris.
Then, of couse, fry one at a time. Fry till each side is JUST beginning to turn golden - they should be a slightly lighter color than puris.
The purists method:
Mix together only the semolina and the yogurt. Cover, and allow to remain at (warmish) room temperature for 8-10 hours. This forms your starter. It should have risen very very slightly. Now mix together the starter with the flour, salt, sugar, etc, and leave to rest as in the instructions above. Roll out and fry in the same manner.
The quick and dirty method:
(because you're skipping the fermenting step, the taste is slightly inferior. However, this is useful if you live in a very cold house, or don't have time to let your dough sit around)
Substitute self-raising flour for the white flour and omit the soda bi-carb. Mix together with the remaining ingredients listed above, roll out, fry, etc.
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Clueless question: would the suspended air bubble effect perhaps be useful if making icecream or sorbet?
A couple of decades back in Australia there was a soft-serve 'icecream' available that was made only from fruit that had been pureed (and cooked?) and mixed with some type of gum that they would not disclose.
It was wonderful stuff, with the taste of unadulterated ripe fruit but the texture of icecream. When one went back to regular fruit flavored icecream after eating this stuff, it felt as if the milk/cream, sugar etc. really muddied up the flavors.
If it turns out to be xantham gum that can be used to get this effect from a fruit puree, then I'm off to track some down ASAP.
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What, no bhature? Shame.
Joking aside, I usually serve my chole with rice as well. Partly because I'm lazy
, and partly because it ends up so heavy when serving bhature.Which brand of chole masala powder are you using? (I don't use a bought powder, the one brand available locally is not one I like).
Also, for the benefit of anyone who wants to follow your recipe, could you specify how much kasoori methi you're adding, and at what stage?
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Does anyone know of a good stand where they do this "street style" and give you naan or pita to wrap your meat in? And separately are most of the doner kebab places the same? Or are there a few that standout?
Although I do see some places that also offer the food on a plate, the default is always in bread. I would think if you specify "In Fladenbrot" or "In dürüm", it should ensure that you get it wrapped in the bread. Or take it 'to go' (Zum Mitnehmen) - that way it would have to be served in bread.
On the subject of 'sameness': the majority of places apparently buy their döner already put on the skewer from one particularly Turkish business located here in Berlin. So most will be the same.
This information appeared in a newspaper article a few months back when there were a series of scandals here in Germany about unscrupulous wholesalers selling meat that had been classified as no longer fit for consumption and/or past its use-by-date. So the article was less about the taste of the food, but was more to reassure the consumer that the meat being used in döner was actually being prepared under hygienic and strictly supervised conditions.
However, the same article did give a list of places which made their own döner, places where the taste was utterly outstanding, and so on, and now I can't find the article.
I was sure I'd saved it, but apparently not...However, look out for the signs "Eigene Herstellung" (i.e. that they have made it themselves) or "Holzkohlengrill" (charcoal grill). With any luck that should give you a döner that tastes different from the run-of-the-mill places. Incidentally, in the section of road along Turmstrasse that I mentioned above, at least one place advertises making their own, and at least one place cooks over a charcoal grill.
The best lahmacun I ate was not in Berlin, but in a city of Germany very far from here. So unfortunately I can't offer recommendations.
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Well, I grew up in Australia eating offal, and I'm fourth generation Australian on one side and (I think) fifth generation on the other. My ancestors came from Devon, Scotland, and some unknown part of Germany. So I suppose my ancestry is not one you would associate with offal consumption in the same way that one associates, for example, Chinese ancestry and the preparation and consumption of offal.
Nevertheless, at home we ate tripe, brain, liver (usually lamb's as it was the cheapest - three for a dollar!), tongue and kidneys. Marrow, of course, was fought over, and brains were a rare luxury. Everything else was also popular except for the tripe as my mother had only one way she ever cooked it, and that wasn't particularly good. Didn't stop her making it though. And all of us kids still cook all of those things, although the dishes they appear in are quite likely to be different from my mother's (and I don't think any of us are clamoring to make her particular tripe dish).
Back when I was first married and had no money at all, moreover, I would frequently buy pig's trotters or a pig's head and cook them. Seeing as these were available at regular supermarkets in Adelaide, where I was living at the time (this was the early to mid 1980s) , I don't think they were really all that rare in Australia. Surely they wouldn't have been for sale in such a location if there were no market whatsoever for them?
In fact, I've lived in the US, the UK, and various other countries since then and although pig's trotters are not too hard to get hold of, I've never yet seen pig's heads for sale in a regular supermarket in any of the places I've lived. Tripe doesn't appear too often either. In fact, I often have to make more of an effort to hunt down many types of offal than I did while in Australia.
It could be that my family differed greatly from the norm (always possible I guess) - we definitely had less disposable income than most of the people we knew.
But it could also be that a certain number of people had just been eating it quietly at home throughout - after all offal traditionally never had a high enough status to be served to guests or to make it onto restaurant menus. And that - as people have become more aware of how offal is prepared in certain other cuisines - its status (and price) has risen enough that it is being paid more attention. If that is the case, maybe you can look forward to it becoming increasingly available on restaurant menus?
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I swear I pressed 'enter post' only once.
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When I used to live in Japan I was in the Kansai area, and bought my Indian ingredients in Kobe. Kobe has (or had?) the largest Indian population of any region in Japan, and has a few businesses aimed specifically at Indians, such as spice shops, a sari shop, and so on.
Even there, fresh curry leaves were not to be found for love or money. So, although I am not really aquainted with the availabilty of various foods in the Kanto area, and of course times do change and things previously unavailable can sometimes become available, I still would not hold out high hopes for your finding fresh or even frozen curry leaves.
A tip from a different site for when you are absolutely stuck without fresh curry leaves was to finely crumble the dried ones into the oil that you are using to fry the onions, spices or what-have-you. Not as good as fresh curry leaves, but apparently crumbling them finely and frying them a little will bring out some flavor. However, I would personally would resort to this technique only when the curry leaf taste is a very small flavor component of the dish, and would certainly not use it for dishes where curry leaves play an important role.
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I gave a recipe a while back, in a different thread. Sesame halva.
I have made this, though it's been a few years. As I say further down that thread, I used a Japanese suribachi to grind the toasted sesame seeds (you are aiming for a fluffy, powdery texture).
It doesn't have to be a suribachi that you use. I was living in Japan at the time I last made this, so I was using what I had to hand. However, I think a food processor might simply turn the seasame into an oily mush unless you were very careful about grinding them only in very brief pulses. Or grind them in smaller batches in a coffee grinder.
I haven't tasted Joyva, but I think you're looking for the kind of sesame halva that is frequently sold in large blocks and you just slice off a piece, right? (sold as Turkish halva, Israeli halva, Greek halva, etc.)
If so, this is it. And it literally takes only a few minutes to make.
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A thought off the top of my head: Could the Japanese have gotten korokke from the Dutch?
I wrote a post on a tangentially related subject in the Japan forum quite recently. For anyone who wants to wade through it, the post is here (plus there are a few posts before and after that one). That was actually about whether korokke could have been introduced to Japan by the Portuguese, and the answer was: No, they could not have been.
Summarizing and changing the focus from the Portuguese to the Dutch, the period when the Dutch were present as the sole European traders in Nagasaki (late 1630s till the late 1800s) does not appear to coincide with the time when korokke became widespread in Western Europe.
However, in the late 1800s, there were Dutch, Portuguese, and French (as well as other foreign nationals) living in the so-called treaty ports in Japan - Nagasaki, Yokohama, Niigata, and Kobe. Korokke were almost certainly introduced to Japan around that time from one of these groups, but there do not seem to be records as to which group it was.
On the topic of Portia Smith's comment about Dutch cuisine not having any noticeable affect on Japanese cuisine: a couple of years back I was looking through the cookbook/food section in a public library in Japan, and one of the books was about the history of and recipes for candies in Japan in the pre-modern era (before the later 1800s). I could easily be recalling this incorrectly, but I think the author claimed that the technique and concepts of making hard candies had been learnt from the Dutch.
If I am recalling correctly, then, there would have been Dutch influence on Japanese food in this area at least. However, since sugar was an extremely expensive food that mostly had to be imported into Japan (in fact, contemporary Europeans complained that Japanese sweets were 'not sweet' because they used so little sugar), I suspect it would only have affected the food of the richest in Japanese society.
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I didn't read the discussion (yet), but I too have used store bought bread dough for mantou. (I was a penniless student at the time, the store was selling a whole lot of frozen bread dough at a crazily reduced price, how could I not buy it?)
It was okay, and of course useful if one was in a hurry, but somehow I always felt guilty using it - perfectionist I guess!
Ben, I'm probably obtuse, but I'm not following you. You added more sugar into the bread dough when making the pork buns, and then re-kneaded once to distribute it in the dough, or you put more sugar into the pork filling to counter the effects of having less sweet bread?
Jo-mel, the ready made ones ready for steaming that I have seen have always been cooked and then frozen. The steaming is just for thawing ithem out and warming them up.
The most exotic food you have eaten traveling?
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
I didn't find donkey sausage all that exciting actually...
I've had dog, several kinds of snake, stir-fried crickets, etc. but for me the most exotic food was stir-fried grass (the kind cows eat, not the other kind
).
When I was studying in Shanghai in the late 80s many of the small food stalls out behind the university switched their menu items to reflect the change in seasons when spring arrived, and this was one of the items on offer.
It tasted like... just how you'd expect grass to taste when it's been stir fried with soy sauce and a little sugar. Rather unpleasant, and not something I'd want to order a second time.