Gabriel Lewis

Funny, I'd never though police cars looked like taxis here; some taxis can be pretty inconspicuous though. The baseloup? I'm not sure, maybe some other montrealer can help me out here?

- For my eggs, something red and acidic - think lots of red chiles and vinegar. - I don't really have a collection persay. I am a bit obsessive, and you won't find many pre-prepared things in my kitchen; partly because I am loath to pay money for something I might be disappointed by, and partly because if its feasible to make it, chances are I prefer to make it myself. - Later this week. - I think its novel and pretty tasty, but I'm not obsessive about it. The only kind I've tried I like is the original dark chocolate one. I find it unsubstantial though; I have trouble not eating it too fast. - Lots, I get around a wide variety of places on my bike, and I'll be showing you the infamous Jean-Talon market, around my neighbourhood (mile end), and a number of other places too. Montreal is quite a lovely city, I hope I'll be able to address some of your interests as the week goes on.

My pleasure peter, it is nice to have a chance to reciprocate as I enjoyed reading your blog and about other adventures, if somewhat silently. The eggs are a relatively new thing, I probably have them once or twice of week as of late.

Thank you. I'd be interested to hear about your method for opening them, as I have little experience with them myself. I had boughten them as a side project of sorts rather than for anything sichuan or japanese persay. Thus far I was thinking homemade grenadine, or perhaps sorbet, but we'll see.

Good morning everyone, lots of questions to answer. I'll start by posting breakfast for this morning, but I don't have time to get to all the questions now. I have to head to class, and after that I have a full work day, so I won't be back until late. Rest assured though that when I get back I'll address all the questions in full, and there will be plenty of pictures of montreal. I was very tired yesterday, and needed a bit of time to recover. Breakfast this morning was a cheese (swiss) omelette with apple juice. I generally stick to simple breakfasts, and don't necessarily have japanese/sichuan breakfasts everyday, though I do from time to time. Omelettes are a favorite breakfast of mine as they are quick, easy, and delicious. And given all the super fresh eggs I had boughten yesterday, it just seemed to make sense. It took me a while to get the flipping and timing down, but thanks to the eCGI course I know consider myself a fairly proficient omelette maker

Texture, taste, aroma, satisfaction. Bagels made at either St-Viateur or Fairmount (the two top bagel places) are all handmade, and baked in a woodfired oven after being boiled. At almost any given time of day you can walk in to see one guy cutting and rolling the bagels, one guy inserting them into the woodfired oven on a long wooden board, and one guy manning the register. They have a great texture you can really sink your teeth into, and they're good enough to eat by themselves. It's like the taste of really good bread with a hint of smoke. I'm not exactly doing them justice, but when you've had them you know. So dinner tonight was Sichuan food, as you may have guessed from the mise en place photo. The main meal: Gong Bao chicken with Jiang Zhi Jiang Dou (Longs beans in a ginger sauce), with rice. Otherwise known as the infamous "Kung Pao" chicken, this classic sichuan dish is a wonderful combination of sweet, sour, spicy, and numbing. I get the impression that Dunlop's version is much closer to the classic Sichuan version than the innumerable bastardizations to found in chinese restaurants around the world. I had tried this before with Pork and it didn't turn out quite as I would've liked, but tonight it was perfect. Tender chunks of chicken in tangy, hot, and numbing sauce with crunchy morsels of roasted peanuts. And as per the Sichuan custom, we finished the meal with soup: My apologies for the steamy picture. What we have here is Lian Guo Tang (pork and white radish soup). A simple unassuming broth made with the water the pork is cooked in, scallions and ginger. You take slices of white radish and pork out with your chopsticks, and dip them in a pungent relish of sichuan pepper, dried red chiles, and soy. It makes for a very interesting contrast between the explosive flavor of the relish, and the soothing simplicty of the soup. I loved the tast it left lingering in my mouth.

This. Also, how did you transport that flat of eggs on a bike? Or were you not ← I have a big backpack, and they come packed between two flaps tightly bound with twine, no problem . Here's the mise en place for tonight's dinner: And now that my girlfriend is finally here, I can start cooking it. I'll be back later with photos and details.

I'm not prone to sweeping statements, but montreal bagels are definitely the best, bar none. Swung by the market on my way home and picked up these supplies: The meat, long beans, and daikon radish are for tonights dinner. The limes and eggs for ice cream and sorbet. The pomegranites because they were on sale, and I have always wanted to experiment with them but have found the price prohibitive, and the rest is general purpose. I'm off to prep dinner, I'll be back later with some more pictures, and a more detailed explanation of my "one cuisine at a time" approach.

So to breakfast: St-Viateur toasted sesame bagel with butter and jam: A favorite of mine for breakfast. I live only a block from the bagel shop, and this for me, is a combination that's pretty hard to beat. Apple Juice and crispy fried eggs with maple, soy, and hot sauce: This is how I've taken to cook my eggs lately. I let some butter brown slightly in a frying pan before adding a sprinkle of sea salt. I then crack in four eggs, fry till the whites are crispy but the yokes runny. When almost done I add a touch of soy and maple and shake until lightly caramelized, plate, and drench with hot sauce. Did I mention I like strong flavors? That's it for now, I'm off to class and then the market before heading home in the late afternoon. The sorbet you ask? We'll get to that.

Hello everyone and welcome to Montreal. It's a beautiful day here, looks to be a beautiful week, and I couldn't be happier to have this oppurtunity to share some of my life with all the lovely people on eGullet. I am a student here in montreal, but as you will come to see my life revolves more around my obession with food than my studies, although they are beginning to leak into each other (we'll get into that). My apologies for the late start. I had forgotten I had lost my compression software in a recent crash, and it took a while to get that up and running. Firstly, I should explain my somewhat enigmatic title and teaser photos. I have something of a unique philosophy/approach to learning about the different foods that I am interested in. My interests are pretty much all over the board, so what I do to manage this is select a particular style of cooking, and concentrate on that for an extended period of time. I begin by gathering my resources for a specific style of cooking. This means getting atleast one super solid cookbook, bookmarking blogs, recipes, and other websites of interest pertaining to the topic. Reading a little bit about the evolution and history of the cooking of interest, learning the regions; I think you get the picture. This might make some sense to those of you who follow the Thai thread, as I have posted a number of pictures of my Thai food in there. Thai cuisine was my last focus; I did it for 8 months, and loved every minute of it. But the time for a change had come, and although I hadn't initially planned to do Sichuan or Japanese cooking, it just sort of turned out that way. I purchased a few cookbooks recently, and among them were these two: Both of which I found out about through egullet. Browsing through both of them after they arrived I was taken aback at how different Sichuanese and Japanese cooking were from the foods I had cooked before. For a while I struggled with deciding on which one to do first, until I realized why not do both? I already had many of the staple sichuanese seasonings, and the overlap in terms of grocery shopping was enough to make it feasible. So that what's I decided to do. That's where the teaser photos come in. The first was intended to be a contrast between the two styles of cooking, with 3 staple of seasonings of each cuisine on the top/bottom. For Japanese it was shoyu (soy sauce), bonito flakes (for dashi), and mirin (I didn't haven't any sake at the time). For sichuan: sichuan peppercorns, "facing heaven" chiles, and sichuan chili bean paste. The second photo is of all the ingredients I picked up a few days ago at one of montreal's better asian grocers. I carried that all in a giant backpack about 10km on my bike, as that particular grocer is pretty far from home. I've had heavier trips before, but none quite so long. The bagels are seperate of course, from the infamous St-Viateur bagel shop. I was hoping they might be identifiable enough for someone to guess montreal, but I guess that wasn't very fair of me. Welcome to the madness.

Sorry about that Ce'nedra, didn't realize you were curious about oyaku donburi. My recipe is from Japanese Cooking: A simple art, and differs a bit from Hiroyukis'. It uses sugar instead of Mirin, and the ratio is roughly 9:4.5:1.5; dashi, shoyu, sugar. It also calls for a mix of light and dark shoyu (soy sauce). I find using these ratios can be tricky scaling up though, and always taste to check. Just remember that it should taste too strong so as season the rice enough without making the dish too soupy. I found Shizuo's version a bit brothy actually, so I might try a version with next broth next time more similar to Hiroyuki's. I used Dashi but shizuo notes that chicken broth/stock is fine for this dish as the main ingredient is chicken. It's about a simple as a dish can get. With your cooked rice ready, prepare the broth in those proportions. Bring to a simmer and simmer chicken until almost cooked (3-5) mins, add the onions and simmer for a minute more, and then add the eggs like Hiroyuki showed. Be sure not to stir the eggs initially; only stir them once they start to bubble at the edges and are almost set (they will finish cooking over the hot rice). The recipe calls for japanese long onion (naganegi), but those are pretty hard to find here, so I just used to the suggested substitute green onions, cut into 1 inch diagonal slices. The japanese tend to be very specialized in terms of equipment, but you should be just fine with a regular saucepan; but do try to use something large enough for the eggs to lie in a single layer over the broth.

I work for Philippe de Vienne, who owns Olive et Epices at the Jean-Talon Market, and the Epices Cru brand. I'll pass on what I've learned from him and what I've gathered from my own experience. In general, the fresher the spices are the better. The essential oils that give spices their charateristic flavor and aroma are subject to deterioration over time. They can "evaporate", react with chemicals in the atmosphere into flavorless compounds, or otherwise disappear. In general the shelf life for whole spices at room temperature (20c) in an opaque container is about two years, dried herbs a year, and ground spices 1-3 months. These are rough limits for peak quality, often they will still be good after this but the quality will start to suffer. But this all depends on conditions, with a few basic principles in mind you can work out the situation for yourself. Surface area: the more surface area you expose, the more chance you are giving essential oils to react or escape. When you grind up a spice you are essentially exposing the maximum surface area to the environment and catalyzing it's deterioration. Light and Heat: these are the main enemies of spices, they promote chemical reactions and will cause your spices to deteriorate much faster. And moisture of course, you need to keep your spices dry; if you live in a humid climate, storing in an airtight container is preferable. So keeping this in mind it's pretty obvious that things like whole cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves stored vacuum packed in a deep freezer in an opaque container will keep much better than ground cayenne pepper in a small glass jar on a shelf next to the window. The former are in conditions that minimize their oppurtunity to react with the environment. That said, some spices do improve with age. Dried mandarin peels for example, the older they are, the better they are (provided they have been aged in appropriate conditions). We have some 10 year old peels from china that have the most wonderfully complex aroma. It's possible that some spices might improve when stored in a cold, dark environment, but its hard to say without empirical testing. At any rate, even ground pepper will store pretty well if stored vacuum packed in an opaque container in cold/dry storage; so they're may be some truth to their claim. But it certainly isn't necessary to buy their aged spices, and its dubious that they are even of better quality. Health food stores and Indian shops are excellent places to buy spices as they generally have a very high turnover, and you can expect your spices to be fresh and inexpensive. I usually have about 30-60 spices kicking around in my kitchen, and I use simple strategies to manage this without wastefulness. I buy whole and in small quantities generally, and grind myself. The spices I use a lot of I keep the bulk of in large opaque containers in a cool dark place, and keep smaller quantities in small jars out in the kitchen. I periodically grind and replace them as I need them, and do an inventory check every so often to toss the stuff that needs to go.

As others have said, definitely toast them first. How much you want to toast them depends on what you want to use them for, but generally when they are super flexible while still warm, and very fragrant (like a campfire, as the eg salsa course puts it) they are good to go. For grinding it helps if you toast them enough for them to be brittle when they cool off (assuming yours are fresh and good quality, they won't be brittle to start with). In fact, when I'm doing a lot I generally toast my chiles in a low oven, say 225-250 on a baking sheet for 3-6 minutes, turning once. I don't even use prepared chile powder any more. Once you grind a spice, your exposing a lot more surface area and the quality deteriorates much faster. Plus there are so many interesting dried chiles out there. Toasting and grinding small quantities keeps the flavors and their best, and makes for fun experimentation.

I guess I should clarify a bit. It isn't strictly correct to say that "pad thai" originated from China; it's a bit more complicated than that. Noodles were brought to thailand from china, and it was chinese immigrants who originally came up with the dish. It was a fusion dish of sort; cooked in a chinese style, but with a flavor profile that would cater to the Thai. But don't read this second hand from me; at the bottom of Kasma's recipe under the notes section she explains the details carefully. If you really want to know more about Thai food you should work your way through this thread. I know it's a staggering 30 pages long, but there's a wealth of information in here, and I think you'll find it pleasurable reading if you take it a few pages at a time. As people come and go I find myself answering the same questions, not that I might or anything; I am happy to help. But you'll find a lot more than I can write if you take the time to read it yourself. To clarify, limes are definitely a part of traditional cooking, but lemons are not. All the sources I rely on seem to indicate that tamarind is the traditional souring agent for Pat Thai, but there very well may be some cooks in Thailand who make it with lime. There is no one "authentic" recipe, and the same can be said for all thai food really; my mental palate does think tamarind is definitely a prefered choice to lime though. Additionally, there are a plethora of articles on both Kasma's site and Pim's thai food section about thai cooking, ingredients, culture, and history, as well as many excellent recipes. If I had to pick one go to Thai cookbook, it would be David Thompson's Thai food. And as I mentioned above, if you work your way through the thread you will discover many other great Thai cooking resources.

Since somehow becoming Thailand's "signature dish", despite being chinese in origion, there has been a proliferation of pad thai recipes out there. I don't know what recipes you've tried, but it can be pretty difficult to get a good result without a reliable source. There certainly shouldn't be any lemon in it, even though limes are known as lemons in thailand, they are definitely NOT part of traditional thai cooking. Here are two excellent recipes with detailed instructions Kasma's and Pim's. You don't want to add the noodles bit by bit as they won't cook evenly; the ones added first will be done before the ones added later are fully cooked. But I digress, both of those links contain all the info your going to need and more, and either will do you well. Bruce: You Nahm Dtok looks great, I find thompson's dressing a bit intense as well, and even he stresses taste as the penultimate rule in thai cooking. There may very well be some thai cooks who like it the same way you do. From what I've gathered the Thai have taken well to cherry tomatoes too; perhaps not in nahm dtok, but certainly within the limits of keeping in the spirit of thai cooking. I made an unorthodox curry with them myself a few weeks ago; an orange coconut based curry with shrimp, with a seasoning emphasis on fresh tumeric and tamarind, and large bowful of amazing sungold cherry tomatoes. The combination was sublime.

You can make vinegar from anything sweet essentially, but because the bacteria involved convert ethanol to acetic acid, if there isn't a source of alcohol already present you have to do a primary fermentation with yeast first. This is how pineapple vinegar in mexico, and coconut vinegar in southeast asia are made, often with a sort of symbiosis between the yeast and acetobacteria in the vinegar crock.

Jamie: Black soy sauce is a Thai soy sauce that is fermented with a considerable amount of sugar in it; it is similar to Indonesian Kecap Manis. It isn't really a substitute for regular soy, and some people don't care for it, but a number of my favorite simple thai dishes are made with it. You can read about it here, at the bottom there are some links to recipes that use it. As for your dried lemongrass, no it isn't a substitute for fresh, but that doesn't mean you can't find a good use for it. Try toasting in a cast iron pan over medium heat until fragant and brittle, and then after it has cooled grind it to a powder and use it in spice mixtures, as a dry rub, in marinades, or as a finisher for thai salads. You can make lovely satay with a rub that includes dried lemongrass. Failing that, I would just grind it to a powder and try experimenting with it. Smell it and taste it to see how it compares to lemongrass, and then go from there to try using it. As long as you account for how it differs from fresh, you shouldn't run into anything too unpleasant. Abra: Here's to hoping you can get to paris soon. I often wonder what it would be like to relocate to somewhere where all the esoteric ingredients I love aren't available; I don't know that I could handle it. If you haven't been there before, or even if you have, Austin's blog RealThai is an excellent place to drool as well.

Duck eggs aren't all that different from regular eggs other than being a bit larger, and having a richer, more "eggy" flavor. You can use them exactly as you would regular eggs, but to appreciate them fully you might try sticking to simple preparations that highlight the flavor of the eggs themselves.

Here are a few of the things I've made in the past few days, and some commentary on them. As my Japanese pantry is as of yet incomplete, I have tended to gravitate towards the simpler recipes. 親子丼Oyako Donburi, Chick-'n-Egg on Rice This was very tasty; simple, homey, and delicious. I especially liked the way the eggs soaked up so much flavor. The only thing I wondered was how to improve the presentation, but perhaps this is a dish where presentation isn't so important? 牛丼 Gyudon, Beef Bowl This was quite good as well, but I was a bit puzzled by the amount of water specified in the recipe, with the sauce seemed so heavily diluted it seemed to take far too much sauce to flavor the rice enough, and this made the rice a bit gluey. ほうれん草ごまあえ Horenso no Goma-Ae, Spinach with sesame dressing Tasty, but I think I failed to squeeze the spinach sufficiently, as the dressing seemed too diluted. 三度豆胡麻味訴曾あえ　Green Beans with Sesame-Miso Dressing This one tasted a bit of alcohol and seemed a little overdressed. I'll try tweaking it next time with less dressing, and boiling my mirin longer.

In the spirit of the original dinner thread and the related threads it has spawned, I thought it might be nice to start something similar in the Japan forums. A place where members could post about Japanese food they have made recently, share ideas and techniques, and celebrate the beauty of Japanese cooking. I recently purchaseed a copy of Shizuo Tsuji's Japanese Cooking: A simple Art, and have begun to stock my kitchen appropriately. I haven't managed to track down everything I want yet, but things are coming along. I know there a lot of people cooking Japanese food on these forums, and I know I will be cooking a lot myself in the future. I would love to see what everyone else is making!

Having begun to stock my kitchen with the staple seasonings of Japanese cooking and a copy of the excellent Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, I have started to wonder about some of the holes in my knowledge of japanese cuisine. The book is of course an excellent guide, but I was struck by a thought when Tsuji mentioned that his book focuses on the cooking of Osaka. I realized I had no idea how regional japanese cooking was. Geographically, it isn't much smaller than countries like Italy or France, which despite their small size are very regional. How much do seasonings, techniques, emphasis, etc vary from region to region in Japan? Could it be said that is a backbone to Japanese cooking present in every regional variation? Does it make sense to conceptualize "Japanese cooking" as a whole, or is more about the collection of different regional contributions?

Go right ahead and use it, if you scroll through the vinegar thread someone provided a link to above, you'll find the details on how to set it up. The quality of your vinegar isn't that dependent on the quality of your wine or your source; it is a complex interaction of the population of microbes in your mother, environmental conditions, whatever was in the wine in the first place, and time. Many people have been fairly indiscriminate about what wine they use for their mother, and still produce outstanding vinegars. Whatever's in there now will be the biggest determinant of flavor for the vinegar of course, but it is an ongoing competition between different species of microbes, and if you keep it alive it will adapt to your environmental conditions over time.

Insomniac: coconut water is the water from a young coconut, but you can often buy it frozen or refrigerated, though typically it has been sweetened. Fresh from the coconut is better I find if it isn't rancid, something that seems to rarely be the case for me. As an aside a recipe similar to the "dancing prawns one" can be found in David Thompson's Thai Food. I think it gets its name from the tiny prawns eaten live in thailand that literally "dance" around in your mouth; this is also where the title for one of Kasma's books came from. When I make ceviche I start by cutting the fish into the desired size, and then immersing this in enough lime juice to almost cover. I then add a large quantity of salt, stir thoroughly, and leave to sit for 10-15 minutes (for tiradito), stirring occasionally until the fish has fully changed color. I then check the salt/acidity balance, and adjust accordingly. Ceviche is obviously going to be sour, but I find when the balance is right its a sour you can't get enough of rather than puckeringly sour; usually it takes quite a lot of salt for me, 2-3 tsps coarse sea salt to 6-8 tbsps lime juice and 150-200g fish. Then I strain the seafood from the lime juice, add all the other ingredients and mix, and add back as much curing juice as required "tigre de leche"; sometimes I serve the juice seperately in a side dish. Peter mentioned textural contrast; to create this I like raw onions/shallots, thinly sliced deseeed chiles, jicama, chulpi (deep fried popcorn, like peter mentioned). Susan: I know some thai dishes similar to ceviche that use freshwater prawns, but my peruvian friend always used say that he preferred saltwater fish for ceviche. Couldn't hurt to try though. First things that came to mind for me were standard thai with lime juice, fish sauce if desired, and your choice of things like aromatics (lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, kaffir lime zest) herbs (mint, coriander, sawtooth herb) thinly sliced shallots, thinly sliced thai chiles. Something with fresh tumeric infused coconut milk, shallots, lemongrass, shredded kaffir lime leaves, fish sauce, thai chilies and maybe a pinch of sugar might be nice. Another possibility would be to work the chinese/japanese peruvian mix that has spawned a lot of tasty creations in peru. A version I very much enjoyed included thinly sliced red onions, toasted sesame seeds, sesame chile oil, shredded green onions, and lime juice. Or perhaps ponzuish with soy sauce and citrus.

The gelling of pectin depends on a certain ratio of acid to sugar, your blackberries may not have been acid enough for the amount of sugar you used or something similar, I don't have the references with me atm but if you look around the net you should be able to find some guidelines.

If the lime juice doesn't kill the parasites, why is it ok to eat shrimp cerviche?I always thought shrimp were one of those things you should never eat raw... are raw shrimp generally ok to eat? ← You shouldn't eat shrimp raw because their digestive tracts contain a lot of bacteria that, while symbiotic when the shrimp are alive, cause the shrimp to detoriate rapidly when dead. This is why shrimp are usually sold head removed, as the digestive tract is located between the head and tail. If the shrimp are fresh enough, I would have no qualms about eating them raw. The FDA and the like always make a big fuss about ceviche not killing all the bad stuff, but if the seafood is immersed in undiluted lime juice long enough for it to fully penetrate all the way to the center of each piece, I don't see how any bad stuff could survive. The pH of lime juice is much too low for any microbes, or any form of life really to survive any signifcant period of time in such an acid medium. If you do make shrimp ceviche, I would use small shrimp are cut larger shrimp into smaller pieces though, and I would only use fresh shrimp, sort of the same way one approaches fish choices for sushi. The time the fish needs to sit in the lime juice will depend on how thick it is, i.e. how long it will take the lime to fully penetrate the fish. Whenever a peruvian friend of mine made this it only took about 10-15 minutes, as the fish was fully immersed in lime juice ,and the fish was cut very thin. You could tell it was ready when the fish had turned fully white. I don't have as much experience with traditional ceviche, but it would take a lot longer if the fish were cut into chunks. My peruvian friend also usually used seabass, but he always said any white fleshed ocean fish would do.