choice eats

Last night I went to the first Choice Eats event in the Puck Building. This was a food festival curated by Village Voice critic Robert Sietsema. It was, in a word, gastronomical.

First, a quick highlights rundown:

Most disappointing

I'm sure that the toasted walnuts with local honey and fennel pollen is a bar-snack masterpiece of subtlety when you actually have it at Jimmy's No. 43, but when the guy to your left is serving spicy chorizo and the guy to your right is serving an obscenely good rib (see below), it just doesn't cut it.

Kinda disappointing

I've been meaning to go to Hummus Place forever, given their rave reviews and rock-bottom prices. In fact, given the way people seem to swoon about it, I imagined that tasting this hummus was going to be a bit of a revelation about what hummus really could be. Unfortunately the hummus tasted like, well, hummus. And not especially flavorful hummus at that. Furthermore, perhaps its a hummus faux pas, but I think I prefer my hummus cold. This was hot.

Gone too fast

Everyone who I've seen cover the event said that Fette Sau was awesome, but they were gone before we got to them.

Best taco

Ok, it was the only taco I was aware of, but Mercadito had a pretty awesome one with shrimp and avocado.

Best food (honorable mention)

In comparison with my top pick (below), Fatty Crab's short rib "rendang" is much more composed dish, creative even. The short rib has, besides some kind of a sauce, some toasted coconut, lime and chili. It came with some coconut sticky rice. At first bite I was ready to say "well it's good, but too sweet..." but then came just the perfect amount of heat on the finish. Delicious.

Best food

The rib. Oh man. I almost melted when I tasted a wonderful, sticky, sweet, crunchy, unctuous, perfect rib from Kampuchea. I mean I am sucker for a really good rib in general but this was just a whole other level of awesome. So awesome that for my last piece of food I physically finagled my way past the line to get what turned out to be the very last one. Curiously, it doesn't seem to be on their regular menu

John and I agreed that neither of us had ever been that full in our lives, probably owing to the fact that we were eating at a pretty ridiculous rate. We also had plenty of alcohol (I'm talking shots of Jäger here), but were eating so much that it didn't seem to effect us much at all. The beer was actually one of the highlights of the event. There was a large number of varieties available, few of which I had even heard of let alone tasted.

And there you have it. Photos of the event on john's flickr.

taco map updated

New blurbs include Calexico and a revisit to Tehuitzingo, now my favorite taco place in the city. see the map here.

tacotacotaco

somewhat inspired by jim leff of chowhound's jackson heights map, I present to you my work-in-progress map of tacos in manhattan. yes i know all of the good ones are in east harlem.

new favorite wikipedia entry

List of foods named after people

on banh mi, crappy mice, and the homeless

we have previously covered the eating of bánh mì, but today i went to a different bánh mì place, this time in chinatown. A Chau Deli is at 82A Mulberry St, between Canal and Bayard. The sandwiches are delicious, large (about twice the size of nicky's) and super cheap; the #1 is $3! It has a variety of vietnamese cold-cuts, some pâté, cucumber, pickled carrots and cilantro. The coldcuts seemed a little less processed and generic than what you get at nicky's. And so cheap was this that I decided to try a sardine sandwich too ($2.75). It was good, but not nearly as good as sandwich #1.

I only ate half of each one, figuring I could give the rest to a homeless person. but let me tell you, today must be a homeless person holiday because there was not a bum to be found between chinatown and the village. seriously, it must have been the first time in 20 years that there were no homeless people in washington square park. what the hell. for you conspiracy theorists, note that today is the day the city starts their annual official homeless census.

finally, coming up to nyu entails, as it so often does, the usage of a mac. i really don't dislike macs on principle (well, the DRM thing doesn't exactly enthrall me) so much as on practice. The keyboards, as previously noted are quite painful to my wrists. and now, the computers here in the library all have mighty mice which want to right click everything until you look it up and find out that it's supposed to sense whether you are clicking on the right or left. but there is nothing about the mouse itself which suggests it does this, so instead I just sit here getting frustrated about how this computer seems to keep getting stuck right-clicking everything making it impossible to use. Then once i figure out the problem, i find i have to lift my right finger up when I click in order to reliably click the way i want to. this is, i hasten to add, exceedingly uncomfortable and I might not even be able to do it if my piano teachers hadn't made me do finger-independence exercises when i was a kid. i appreciate that this might work well with a little getting used to, but for chrissake, stop telling me that everything apple makes is so fucking well designed. attention getting and cool are NOT good design principles, i'm sorry. though i can certainly understand why they are good for sales.

sweet cuppin' cakes

I had some ganache left over from the first installment of The Great Yellow Cake Bake-off and Regional Pro-Am of 2038, and I needed to do something with it before it went bad. I didn't really have enough to fill or ice a cake, so I decided: Cupcakes! Yaaaaay!

This was Cook's Illustrated's "Yellow Cupcakes with Chocolate Ganache Frosting," which is only available on their website to subscribers but was easily found elsewhere via google.

The money shot:

Vitals:

Fat

Butter

Flour

all purpose

Leaveners

Baking powder

Ratings:

Flavor

Very good, but I wish it had a rounder finish. Maybe my vanilla is just too cheap.

Texture

Good. Tender but not too delicate. The tops were a little funky but hey everyone loves icing.

Moistness

Spot on.

Aesthetics

Very good. A nice golden yellow, not so yellow that it looks artificial. Consistent but not overly consistent crumb. Some of them were a wee bit misshapen on top but that's more because I'm incapable of using a spoon than anything in the recipe.

Miscellaneous notes:

• Last time I noted that my oven seemed to be running a bit cool, so I obtained an oven thermometer. I have not yet carried out an extensive experiment, but so far it looks like my oven's thermostat is actually pretty good.
• Dishers are great for cupcakes because you can scoop each one out to an identical size. Unfortunately, I am incapable of actually using one apparently because I ended up with 10 cupcakes instead of 12, and some of them had tops that were way too big.
• As we shall see in later installments of The Great Yellow Cake Bake-off and Regional Pro-Am of 2038, Cook's Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen is CRAZYGONUTS when it comes to cake baking. By which I mean they completely eschew this blog's eponymous method in favor of, well, tossing all of the ingredients in a bowl and mixing them together (their full-on cake recipe is actually only slightly more complicated than that). Results: delicious! I don't have a stand mixer, and I did find that with the hand mixer it was a little hard to mix in the butter when I wasn't creaming it with the sugar first.

So, in short:

Pros

Good product all around, easy to make.

Cons

Flavor not round enough at the finish; I can't use a spoon.

yellow cake... fuckin' right

I have felt as if I've been neglecting the cake family of desserts in my sporadic baking endeavors. I was thinking about it, and I don't really have a good old reliable yellow cake recipe. I looked over a bunch of different ones, and many questions arose:

• Which is better: shortening, or butter?
• Does cake flour really make a better, more refined cake than all-purpose? Is all-purpose + a little corn starch a reasonable substitute?
• We know that a cup of flour is supposed to be 5 oz, but what is a cup of cake flour supposed to weigh?

and so on. therefore, gentlemen, behold: The Great Yellow Cake Bake-off and Regional Pro-Am of 2038!

Our first entry comes from Marion Cunningham's classic tome The Fannie Farmer Baking Book. The cake is the basic master recipe for “Yellow Cake with Chocolate Butter Cream Filling and Frosting” (page 307). Please note that I only utilized the cake portion of this recipe; the filling was a different buttercream (also from Ms. Cunningham, specifically her "Uncooked Butter Cream Filling" on page 412) and the frosting was a simple ganache.

First, the money shot (photography by Laura):

Next, some vital facts:

Fat

Vegetable shortening

Flour

2.25 cups cake flour

Leaveners

2.5 tsps Baking powder

And now, we rate:

Flavor

Very, very good, which surprised me since there is no butter in this cake. Hooray for vanilla!

Texture

A very delicate, fine crumb with just a few larger bubbles. Very good over all.

Moistness

Poor to fair. This cake was just way too dry, so much so that I could tell from the moment I cut into it.

Aesthetics

This cake was very pale, not surprising since it was made with bleached flour and vegetable shortening, the vanilla and egg yolk as the only source of color. Marion prescribed the use of two 8-inch pans for this cake, which proved to be ill-fitting; I would have been better off with 3 layers, or maybe 9 inch pans. As it was, one layer had a very prominent dome, and the sheer height of the layers combined with a paucity of buttercream (it always seems like more when you put it on) just screamed "yikes, that's a big piece of cake!" Overall, acceptable.

Miscellaneous notes:

My oven seems to be running a bit cool. This led to an increased baking time, which I am concerned may have in turn led to a drier cake. It does however, confirm that there is too much batter in this recipe for two layers; a dome usually means that your pan is too hot or that there's too much batter in the pan.

So, in short:

Pros

Very good flavor, texture. Only medium difficulty level in preparation (assuming the cons didn't come from something I screwed up and didn't realize...).

Cons

Too dry, too dry, too dry. Also, I'd prefer a cake made with all-purpose flour because plain (as opposed to self-rising) cake flour can be both hard to track down and expensive.

gratuitous food network post

If the world of "domestic doyennes" (cringe) were a highschool, Garten would be the effortlessly hot, pot-smoking writer and Martha Stewart would be the psycho valedictorian who secretly wants the school to blow up. Paula Deen would be everyone's learning-disabled best friend. link.

the key

i've made key lime pie before, but the consistency wasn't quite what i wanted; it was too much like delicious lime pudding in a pie crust. this time, i did a bit of a mashup of some very similar recipes, and it was spot on. i've seen recipes with some weird additives (gelatin, cream cheese, sour cream) but the trick to getting the right consistency (not too pudding-like, not jello) seems to be the beating the egg yolks good and proper. little excites me more than having something not so great the first time, and then finally getting it just right, so i figured i'd share.

Key Lime Pie

• graham cracker crust
• 3 egg yolks
• 14 oz. can of condensed milk
• 1/2 cup of nellie & joe's lime juice

1. Beat the egg yolks with an electric mixer on high for 5 minutes. Really do it for 5 minutes, don't do it for 3 and decide that's enough. Time it.
2. Keep beating, slowly adding the condensed milk, over a period of 4 minutes.
3. Mix in the lime juice.
4. Pour into the crust, bake at 350 for 10 minutes.
5. Cool on a rack. When it's cool, stick it in the fridge, preferably overnight.

notes: I haven't actually tried it with any other type of lime juice. america's test kitchen compared regular (persian) limes to key limes and decided that regular limes are fine, but the word on the street is that this particular brand of lime juice makes a huge difference. i can tell you that the flavor is awesome, but i don't know how it compares to using regular lime juice+zest. if you want this brand of lime juice in new york, you have to go to d'agastino's. i know, i know.

if you make the crust yourself, use 12 crackers worth of crumbs, 6 tbsp of butter, 2 tbsp of light brown sugar, a pinch of cinnamon and a pinch of salt. bake at 350 for about 10 minutes (i have a recipe that says 7 minutes, but it really needed more). if you have the 9.5 inch pyrex pie dish (which is far and away the most popular pie dish around), don't build the crust up into the ridged part of the side. there is not enough filling and you will be left w/ a giant standing ridge that is a little more in danger of burning that if it wasn't there. however, if you know you are going to give this a whipped cream top (as opposed to just serving it w/ a dollop of whipped cream on the plate) you can let the crust be a little tall so there is a place for the cream.

also, since i last made this, i have learned that you can freeze egg whites. put them in an ice cube tray!

in other food-related news, rachael ray is going to be on celebrity jeopardy, which is really the only rachael ray-related thing i've had any desire to watch since i heard her say EVOO for about the gajillionth time a few years ago.

finally, this overheard from last week is absolutely hysterical.