Kent Wang

I don't know of any specific books, but traditional Chinese cuisine is filled with many cold "appetizer" dishes. At any mid-grade restaurant one should be able to find at least a dozen cold dishes on the menu. Here are some that immediately come to mind: Sliced beef tendon drizzled with chile oil (Sichuan-style) Jellyfish with daikon slices Salt-pressed chicken/duck Salt-pressed duck gizzard (see my recipe) Lotus root stuffed with sugar and glutinous rice Cold dumplings of many kinds

What do you think about the Fee Bros peach? To me it tastes too similar to just a high fructose corn syrup peach flavoring agent, with little nuance, e.g. bitterness or essential oil. Edit: Also, in what drinks do you use it? I've tried it in a Pegu Club. That was OK.

According the aforementioned Independent article: It is certainly illegal in Texas, or else the farmers wouldn't be selling milk shares. Still, the bulk of what I've read about this has been on milk and not cheese. Why aren't there cheese shares? I rarely consume milk these days, so raw milk is not an important issue for me. But unaged, unpasteurized local cheese would be great to have.

There are several farmers at the markets in Austin that sell "milk shares". This is unpasteurized milk, which is illegal to sell. The farmers skirt the law by selling shares of the cow, which comes with the milk. This seems to have been going on for a while and is not highly secretive. If this can be done, why not cheese shares of unaged, unpasteurized soft cheeses?

Why not shop at Central Market? I think it's much better than Whole Foods. There's also farmers markets on Wednesdays and Saturdays. For places to eat, there's a very recent thread on this.

I'm still interested in what it is that brings you to Amsterdam. I spent ten days in The Netherlands a few years ago and would love to live there just for a few years. One of the most memorable shops for me was a patisserie in Den Haag called Jarreau. They have some terrific marzipan treats. Are there any very traditional Chinese restaurants in The Netherlands? Can one find dim sum?

I think I tried this or another one from South America and it is nowhere like the genuine article. I agree that the crystalline bits of umami may be the most difficult thing to reproduce.

As a partisan of Central Texas style barbecue, I must say that this thread has been very amusing and enlightening to me. I hope to venture over to your part of the country to experience your style of barbecue.

Thanks for posting your notes for all of us that couldn't be there.

Will you be covering any barbecue?

I mean that steaks are just seasoned with salt and pepper and it would be blasphemous to smear some steak sauce on to it. Anyway, I know the barbecue issue is a contentious one. I do believe that Central Texas is the One True Barbecue, but I don't expect to convert you. ----- No more dinner, I'm stuffed! Thank you everyone for tuning in and for the kind words.

Shanghai opened recently. It was started by some of the people that used to work at Marco Polo. The address is 6718 Middle Fiskville, near Highland Mall. I recently went to their dim sum (photos and report in my eGfoodblog). It has become my new favorite, better than T&S and Pao's. This is surprising as I've always found Marco Polo's dim sum to be mediocre. My current dim sum rankings: Shanghai Pao's Mandarin House T&S Seafood Marco Polo Tien Hong One thing T&S will always have that others won't: salt and pepper shrimp. I'd like to try Shanghai for dinner sometime as well.

From my eGfoodblog: another visit to City Market in Luling.

Sunday dim sum at Shanghai restaurant, a new place that opened up recently. Beef tendon, phoenix claw (chicken feet with black bean sauce), bean curd roll. Shao mai, turnip cake, har gaw (shrimp dumpling). Deep-fried bean curd roll. I've had a lot of dim sum in my life but I've never had this dish before. Not terribly novel as it's just a simple permutation of the classic bean curd roll, but it's a nice change of pace. Dumplings. Jellyfish with daikon slices. Steamed barbecue pork buns. Steamed pork spare ribs with fermented black beans. Roasted pork belly. Sesame balls with red bean paste filling. We already have some very good dim sum in Austin with Pao's Mandarin House and T&S Seafood, but Shanghai has become my favorite. They serve all the Cantonese classics and everything is well executed. Unfortunately, despite being called Shanghai they do not have the quintessential Shanghai dish: xiaolongbao aka Shanghai soup dumpling. It is surprising that one cannot find xiaolongbao at all in Texas except in Dallas. Maybe one last meal tonight and then I will have to bid everyone farewell.

Saturday lunch. On the way back from Houston to Austin, I took a detour to the city of Luling, a major producer of watermelon and home to City Market, one of the best barbecue restaurants in the world. Watermelon water tower. I bought two yellow-flesh watermelons for $5. Watermelon trash can. Note all the trucks. I have been to all of the top ten (by expert consensus) Central Texas-style barbecue restaurants, and City Market is in my personal top five. Not everyone in Texas wears cowboy hats, but they are more common in rural areas such as this. All good Central Texas barbecue restaurants have you order by the pound. The three staples are always beef brisket, pork ribs and sausage. Sometimes beef ribs, mutton and ribeye are offered but not here. The sign also states: "No fork. Use fingers." The meats are cooked in huge pits. This is why there aren't traveling barbecue competitions in Central Texas like there are for the Kansas City and Carolina styles; the pits can't be hitched to a truck and hauled to a competition site. Meats are sliced to order and served on butcher paper, no plates. I bought several pounds to take home for dinner with friends, and a bit to eat right way. Sausage, brisket, pork ribs. A bit about the Central Texas style of barbecue: Unlike other styles, we do not use sauce. All the flavor comes from wood smoke (usually oak) and the dry rub used on the meats. It is because of this minimalism that I believe that the Central Texas style is the best, most pure and true style of barbecue. After all, steaks are cooked in the same way, not drowned with sauce. Therefore the best Central Texas barbecue is the best barbecue in the world -- nay, the universe! Brisket is the most important of the meats. When ordering, one can specify moist or dry (fatty or lean). This is like an insiders' secret. If you don't ask for "brisket moist", you'll probably be stuck with an inferior cut. But if you utter those magic words, the meat cutter will know that you are serious about barbecue and give you the best cut. Every place uses a different rub. City Market's is very minimalist, even compared to the other top Central Texas joints, with just sugar, salt and a bit of pepper. The sausage is also minimally seasoned. You can buy their sausage raw and attempt to cook it yourself but it will taste very bland. The flavor comes not from spices or seasoning but from the wood smoke and the juicy fat. The casing is of course natural and not synthetic and has a unique snap to it. While biting down on this sausage I sprayed a rivulet of fat five feet across the table. Fortunately, no one was hit. The usual sides at Central Texas barbecue restaurant are potato salad and coleslaw. City Market only has potato salad -- and a mediocre one at that. So if we don't use barbecue sauce on the meats, what do we use it for? On the potato salad! More about City Market and Central Texas barbecue.

Good thing I didn't buy any shrimp from the boats! My mother's friend's neighbor is a shrimp fisherman (a shrimper?). So we bought ten pounds of fresh, never-been-processed shrimp directly from him. No, I haven't heard of the place. What regional cuisine is it? Just an old point and shoot, the Panasonic DMC-FX01. The only trick is to take photos when the sun is still out, so that's why I often dine early.

Friday dinner at Hong Kong Food Street to celebrate my father's birthday. The restaurant is located in the Houston Chinatown in the Bellaire area. Unlike Chinatowns in older cities like New York, Houston's is sprawled across a number of strip malls like this. Note all the Japanese and German cars, hardly an American vehicle in sight. Inside Hong Kong Food Street. Nearly all the customers are Chinese. The few whites here are accompanied by Chinese. Maybe they are co-workers or friends. We ordered a winter melon soup, which is a rich soup cooked inside a winter melon. It is considered one of the most famous dishes of Cantonese cuisine. This had to be ordered a few days in advance. The soup starts with a rich base of chicken stock and has bits of shrimp, dried scallops, Yunnan ham, shitake and of course bits of winter melon. We also ordered what was described on the menu as a "clam soup flambe". It turns out that this is a Cantonese medicinal soup, filled with numerous Chinese medicine ingredients which were rather bitter and unpalatable. The idea is that one would drink the soup for health reasons, and not just for flavor. After dinner, we went to a Chinese supermarket. My mother likes Welcome to the other supermarkets like Hong Kong as they have higher turnover and their foods are fresher. I bought a little something-something that I hope to cook with on Sunday when I get back to Austin.

I like the pelican's philosophy: "A wonderful bird is the pelican, his bill can hold more than his belly can." The Gulf Coast produces mostly shrimp, crabs, red snapper and tilapia. We also produce oysters (mighty big ones) and catfish, though those are farmed.

After lunch, I went down to the pier where one can buy fish directly from the boats. Unfortunately, I got there a little late and all the boats had closed shop. Birds often gather in this area to feed on the scraps tossed out by the fishermen. Cormorants and pelicans. Heron -- or maybe a crane? I'm no ornithologist. Pelicans, my favorite bird. Seagull running away with a shrimp.

Lunch in Galveston at Charles' house. Galveston Island is 30 miles southeast of Houston. It is an old seaport and one of the oldest cities in Texas. Had it not been devastated by the 1900 Storm, Galveston would probably be the largest city in the South today and Houston would have never developed to be a major city. Well, this is the typical wistful speculation every Galvestonian will tell you if given the opportunity. Charles' family lives in an old historical home. Dining room. Some take-out from Benno's, a mediocre cajun restaurant. Fried catfish, fried shrimp, fried oysters, crab balls, hush puppies. An impromptu salad.

I prefer slicing instead of spooning. When they're in season in the summer I'll usually eat about two medium-sized watermelons a week. In lieu of drinking water I'll just slice up some watermelon. Watermelon is quite cheap in China as I believe we have a lot of land suitable for its cultivation: dry, sandy soil and hot weather. Exactly what we have in parts of Texas, actually. Luling in south-central Texas is a major producer and hosts an annual festival, the Luling Watermelon Thump, which I believe is one of the biggest such festivals in the world. Several watermelon records such watermelon size, seed spitting and watermelon eating have been set there. I remember as a child in China going with my family to market to buy watermelons. We would always keep three to seven watermelons on hand -- I think we put them underneath a bed -- though these were fairly small, about the size of a basketball.

Thursday dinner was cooked by my mother. Clockwise from top: Soup with eel chunks and bits of shitake and Yunnan ham. Pork stomach with slighly spicy Szechuan-style sauce (my father can only tolerate a small amount of spice). Chilled cucumber in soy sauce and rice vinegar. The cucumber is fresh from their backyard garden. Every Chinese family I know that has a house has a vegetable garden, and my parents have one of the more abundant ones. They tell me they hardly ever buy vegetables anymore and just eat what they grow. Dates. Oranges. My father pointing at a cucumber. Cucumbers. Chinese eggplant. Winter melon. Friday, I'll go down to Galveston during the day for some seafood and then go back to Hong Kong Food Street for dinner with my parents.

I drove Wednesday night to my parent's house in Houston (actually Clear Lake, southeast of Houston). Thursday, I had lunch in Houston with Robin Goldstein, publisher of the Fearless Critic, an Austin restaurant guide. My parents had already planned for us to go to Hong Kong Food Street, a traditional Chinese restaurant, for dinner on Friday but Robin and I decided to try it out for lunch, too. Good Chinese restaurants have such expansive menus that one could go every day for a week without running out of options. Pig ear, pork tongue, pork stomach braised in soy sauce and spices. I think I've seen this called "tiu chiu" style at other restaurants -- can anyone correct me on this? This was one of the better executed versions as the sauce was heavy on aromatics like star anise and Szechuan peppercorn. Clams steamed in rice wine. One can find similar versions in Spanish cuisine that use sherry instead of rice wine, French using white whine and Italian using red wine. Rice wine is the least acidic of these and greatly enhances the richness of the broth. Sea bass steamed with fermented black bean paste. Black beans added a rich, smokey flavor to the fish. Usually the beans are served whole but the paste form allows you to more evenly coat the fish. The gentle cooking action of steam preserved the gelatin-rich components of the sea bass. Austin has some fine traditional Chinese restaurants but this meal alone showed just how lacking the Austin Chinese restaurant scene is to Houston -- no wonder considering how many more Chinese and other Asians there are in Houston. Despite this, there is a dearth of accurate information on traditional Chinese restaurants in Houston compared to the reviews available in Austin. There are an incredible number of restaurants in the sprawling Chinatown but it's hard to find reviews conducted by those that truly appreciate traditional Chinese cuisine. A review of one restaurant's sweet and sour pork versus another is useless to me. Is Hong Kong Food Street the best in Houston? Probably not -- as there is just such much unexplored terriotory -- but it's the best that I've had. Stepping back a bit from the Austin-Houston comparison, it is still quite remarkable that Texas has as good Chinese as it does. Most people don't realize how many Asians there are in Texas. The best Chinese that I've had in San Francisco, Vancouver and New York is only a notch above what can be had here.

Your avatar reminded me that I'm the first eGfoodblogger in a while without a pet. I do love animals, cats especially, but I don't feel right about getting a kitten when I plan to move to China in three years. Oh, yeah, about that: After visiting China last spring, I made up my mind to move to Shanghai by 2010 (in time for Expo 2010). I can operate both my web development and fashion businesses from there at much lower cost than in the US. All my relatives live there and it would just be exciting to live in such a booming city. And of course -- the food!

From my eGfoodblog: Best meal at Lola's yet. Soul Food Wednesdays at Ben's Longbranch BBQ.