Keith_W

This was a great week with some tremendous insights into the food culture in the middle east. Thank you so much for your effort!

I have been there quite a few times. My favourites are the corn tempura, the miso lamb, the fried chicken, and the buckwheat Udon. I didn't think I would like it - the Udon broth has nothing but liquid from cooking the udon in it, but it is really delicious. I am quite glad for the lack of signage, it keeps the undeserving out

Hmm, OK. I was taught to make gravlax by a friend's mother and that's what she said I suppose that might be an old wives tale then. The next time I make a batch, I will try it in a zip-lock bag. Oh and BTW Oliver and go back to the UK! I can't stand him

In general there are Chinese and Japanese fermented soybean pastes. The Japanese varieties are Miso, and there are a number of types. Chinese soybean pastes may be "fu yee" (fermented white tofu, sometimes sold plain, sometimes with chilli) or "nam yee" (fermented red bean curd - is slightly sweet). Both types are pungent and powerful and not for the faint hearted. Chinese fermented tofu is much more powerful than Miso, which is subtle and mild by comparison.

Emily, I do quite a bit of clay pot cooking but with a Chinese clay pot. I grew up eating out of it so it does not strike me as a special utensil. As weinoo said - it is also very cheap! Clay pots are porous. You want a glazed pot to stop flavours from penetrating the pot. As for soaking the pot - the pot will emit steam as it is heated up. I suppose the steam is good for different types of breads. I wouldn't know - my clay pot isn't big enough to bake bread in. Clay pots are wonderful for one pot meals. I put uncooked rice, chicken stock, ginger, chinese sausage, and marinaded chicken pieces in the pot. Cover and simmer at low heat for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, stir and you have a delicious healthy meal.

I can think of two potential issues. I normally wrap my salmon in something semi-porous (e.g. foil or plastic wrap), then place it in a bowl, with a smaller plate on top of it, with a weight on the plate. This produces a lot of liquid which weeps out of the fish and into the bowl. Crucially, the liquid can escape whilst most of the cure is still held against the fish. The liquid is emptied every day during the curing process. In fact the whole idea for curing fish this way (with a weight pressing down on it) is to get rid of as much moisture as possible so that you can achieve the signature texture of cured salmon. The first issue - if you use a zip-lock bag, your fish will be in contact with the liquid throughout. It will eventually reach an equilibrium and the fish will not weep any more moisture. Given how delicate fish is, this equilibrium will probably be reached very quickly - perhaps in less than a day. You may actually find this desirable but it will change the result. The second issue - make sure your zip-lock bag will maintain the seal when you weigh it down with a heavy weight. You don't want it to burst and spill fishy liquid in your fridge ... BTW another Melbournian ... welcome!

Robert, you might like to try some Trisol with your onion rings. I make deep fried whitebait (they might be called silver fish or anchovies where you are) - but you get the idea. Tiny little white fish with black eyes that you eat whole. They commonly serve these at Yum Cha places. My Trisol whitebait is easily better - a thin coating of a shatteringly crispy crust with fishy goodness inside. Recipe: 50:50 Trisol and all purpose flour with a pinch of salt. Put the flour and fish in a plastic bag and shake. Fry immediately at 180C until golden. I am sure the recipe can be adapted for onion rings, but if you want a bit more body I would probably dunk the rings in the flour mixture twice. The secret is Trisol. You want it. Hunt it down!

Actually you can get North American products here if you know where to look. Try USA Foods. You will have to mail order though. I don't know what the tea time culture is like at your place, but I have stopped bothering with mine. I used to try to bring nice things in for tea - but you will find that half the people will bring in Tim Tams or carrots and dips or open a pack of biscuits or corn chips. Bad food is the norm in much of Australia

Hi Hassouni, so "grill-fried service" is where they cook the fish for you. What a great idea. I suppose the fish you get there should be top quality, given where you are. Somehow I don't think a restaurant like that would work down here in Australia, although one might think it would.

This is turning out to be one of the more fascinating food blogs. Like the National Geographic of food. What is "Grill-fried service" (bottom of third picture)?

Really enjoying your food blog. Would love to see more of the city and some of the coast. Beirut is meant to be beautiful.

Wow, it looks fantastic Xilimmns! If it is not too much trouble, could you make a post in this thread along with comments about what you thought about the recipe and you would do differently if anything?

So do you define 'honesty' as serving simple food? Simple in the way, say, a grilled steak is simple? I define "honesty" as something that tastes of itself, and not trying to be something that it isn't - e.g. a coddled egg that isn't a coddled egg as per my link Well, I meant that tongue in cheek since you mentioned Masterchef. A good example of "dishonest food" are Japanese crab sticks. I wouldn't mind so much if they called it what it is - hydrolyzed protein sticks - but painting it red with food colouring and adding artificial crab flavour and calling it a crab stick goes too far, IMO. Yet another example is the "ham" they put on pizza. It is also hydrolyzed protein with pink food colouring and a lot of salt. Call it "meat substitute" but don't advertise that it is "ham" when it clearly isn't. Another example of "dishonest food" - food which has been overwhelmed by so many other ingredients and spices that it no longer tastes of itself. Being of southern Chinese descent, our food is cooked simply with an emphasis on the taste of fresh produce. This type of philosophy is echoed in a number of other cuisines - e.g. Japanese, Italian, South American, French, and it appears to be a baton that modern chefs are taking up. This also means that I am not a fan of using heavy spices (e.g. Northern Chinese, Hunanese, or Indian cooking). To a Southern Chinese - you do that because you have something to hide. Produce which is subpar or not fresh, perhaps. When you bite into a steak cooked by Neil Perry you can really taste the beef and the effect of his private dry aging cellar under his restaurant. His cooking style amps up the flavours which are already there. A piece of sashimi is a study in simplicity - superb fish dipped in soy sauce, with nowhere to hide. In contrast - when you eat a beef rendang, the spices overwhelm the beef so much that you may not actually taste any beef. The meat might be buffalo or horse for all you know. Or the beef could be roadkill. Don't laugh - that's what it is like in parts of Asia.

A food processor with a blender attachment will never get a puree as smooth as a blender. Even a blender won't get super-smooth purees unless you get a high powered blender like a Blendtec or a Vita-mix. Unfortunately those are very expensive in Australia. I have a Magimix FP. I can tell you that slicing is best done with a knife. If I have to do a lot of slicing, I pull out the mandolin. I hate using the food processor for slicing, because it is a pain looking for the correct disc, then washing everything up afterwards. A mandolin is easy to wash. A food processor isn't.

I have really enjoyed this blog Chris. I have MC but I haven't tried some of the more ambitious recipes. I am looking at your onion dish with slack jawed amazement ... even if I had the time to do it, I wouldn't have had the determination. Your eyes must really hurt from chopping up all the onions? Well done, and thanks for a great week.

They talk about "honest food" then they make a faux egg with mango puree for the yolk and vanilla ice cream for the white, like this.

Sorry Mark I was wondering if you could clarify. Pasta dough that becomes more crumbly the more you knead it does not sound like a good thing. To my mind, crumbly pasta dough won't come together. Perhaps you meant to say the opposite?

You could add gelatin back to it and make an aspic.

Don't know. I just followed Heston's instructions. There was something in the discussion about yogurt helping the marinade penetrate further into the chicken, but I don't know why he didn't combine both marinades into one. BTW the chicken straight out of the BBQ was simply amazing. It was so good that I wondered if the sauce would add much to it. Kim Shook if you want somewhere that makes those pork belly buns ... try Momofuku

This was the chicken tikka masala from In Search of Perfection, not HB at Home. But since it's close enough, I thought I would post it. Unlike some of the other recipes in this series, this one is do-able. i.e. it does not have multiple layers of insanity, like the black forest gateau or the baked alaska. These are the steps involved: - brine the chicken in 8% brine (6 hours) - soak the chicken in water to remove the salt (2 hours) - marinade the chicken in ginger and garlic (5 hours) - make the garam masala - marinade the chicken in yogurt, garam masala, and kashmiri chilli powder (10 hours) - make a tandoor by stacking bricks in your Weber kettle then cook the chicken (2 hours heating and messing around) - make the cashew nut butter (20 min) - pressure cook tomatoes with coriander and cumin (20 min) - make the sauce (20 min) - bring the cooked chicken and sauce together and adjust (5 min) Some comments: - ignore the book's recommendation for salt. I did my usual thing and seasoned at the end, and I was glad I did. The thing was salty enough, and only needed a pinch to finish it off. - the suggested amount of chilli powder was nowhere near enough. While I was cooking I had my suspicions and doubled the amount called for in the recipe and it still wasn't hot enough. It might be that my chilli powder was insipid compared to his ... but make sure you check. - following the recipe as published gives you a very thick sauce (see photo). I diluted it with some water after the photo was taken. - I ignored the book's suggestion to make a tandoor. Instead, I grilled it over an open flame on my kamado. Bad idea - the marinade sticks to the grill and a lot of flavour was left stuck behind. Don't mess with tradition - do what the book says and build yourself a tandoor. - instead of metal skewers I used soaked bamboo skewers. Bad idea - soaking them doesn't stop them from catching fire.

Dinner tonight: Chicken Tikka Masala as per Heston's In Search of Perfection. The chicken was brined for 6 hours in an 8% brine, then marinaded 12 hours in garlic and ginger, and another 12 hours with yogurt, chilli powder, and garam masala. Then the chicken was grilled on the kamado. In the meantime, a sauce was made by pressure cooking tomatoes with spices. To this was added fried onions, cashew nut butter, fenugreek, garam masala, yogurt, and butter. Finally the chicken and sauce was brought together with the above result. Unlike other butter chicken, this one has a nice texture and a hint of char from the fire. Cucumber and mint raita, with home made yogurt. Dinner was served with saffron rice.

You can buy beef tallow from your local supermarket. It is usually wrapped in foil and sold in the refrigerated section, next to butter. There is yet another variable to mention - the quality and type of potato. I have found that even with the same type of potatoes, some batches of triple cooked fries fail and some succeed. I suspect that this has something to do with how old the potatoes are (and thus the dry weight of the potato), and how much sugar vs. starch is in the potato. By the way, have you read this Serious Eats article on replicating McDonalds french fries? Suspend your urge to smack me in the head for a moment for mentioning McDonalds ... but apparently your humble neighbourhood Maccas has been serving up triple cooked fries for years. This is the process used by McDonalds: - blanch in 77C hot water for 15 minutes in vinegary water - fry at 180C for 50 seconds - freeze - fry at 180C for 3 1/2 minutes Lacking an ultrasonic machine, I make my ultimate fry via Heston's triple cook method. After reading that article, I added a freezing step. It really worked - the fries turned out noticably better. And then it hit me - why not bypass all the trouble and try the oven fry chips sold frozen in the supermarket? After all - they take careful selection with their potato (if they want a consistent product), and they would have cut, blanched, and performed the initial fry for me before freezing. All I had to do was complete the frying. I went out and bought a 1kg bag of the stuff for $4 (about the same price as a 1kg bag of gourmet potatoes!!) and fried it up when I got home. Result: as good as Heston's triple cooked fries, much more consistent, and without the trouble. The article also says that there is no magic in the oil. I tend to agree to a point - after all, the only major differences in oil are the flavouring and the smoke point. If it is texture we are talking about - that depends on your frying temperature. Cooking oils have mostly the same surface tension so that should not affect how well the oil coats your fry. But there is no doubt that cooking your fries in duck fat or tallow results in a tastier fry. For me, my french fry journey ended up in supermarket oven fry chips, fried in beef tallow or duck fat. Somehow, even admitting this makes me feel dirty and unworthy of being on eGullet - but there you have it.

Fried rice should definitely be fried! Like almost anything cooked in a wok, you need a furnace. The best fried rice should have each grain of rice individual, rather than clumped - and each grain should have a slight char. I know most people advocate using day old rice in the fridge, but my preferred method is to toast the uncooked rice with a bit of oil first - similar to tostatura with risotto. This helps keep the grains seperate when steamed, and helps the grains seperate when fried. It also helps with the "wok hei".

amkr welcome to eG! Beautiful looking pork buns there ... like I said in the other forum

I asked myself an interesting question while making my latest batch of bolognese sauce tonight - can there be too much umami? Of our other five taste senses - we can easily detect when we are overloaded with a particular taste. Something can taste too sour, or too sweet, or too bitter, or too salty. The effect is to put us off our food. But is there such a thing as too much umami? To find out, I spooned off a portion into a bowl. Into this bowl. I progressively added MSG. Bear in mind that my bolognese sauce is already designed to maximize umami - the mince has been browned in portions, it has parmesan rinds, concentrated tomato, and fish sauce in it. Result: it improved for a while (developing that characteristic savoriness) and then it started to get noticably saltier. I suspect that the saltiness comes from the Sodium in the MSG rather than the glutamate itself. It became impossible to ignore the saltiness, but I could not detect the umami itself getting stronger. What do the rest of you think - is it possible to have too much umami?