Rye à l’Ikea, or Bread From a Box

Since the advent of Ikea, everything you could ever need can be carried home in a cardboard box. I didn’t realize until my last trip that this extends to authentic Swedish rye bread.

I’m not opposed to the idea of Ikea as a food purveyor, and here’s an interesting fact: the Ikea Café in Red Hook is at the top of the list when you search for Brooklyn restaurants by customer rating on Menupages. While I’m sure this is not reflective of any real truth, I will say that Ikea has some good selections and has probably provided millions with their first taste of lingonberry jam and meatballs. I’ve had less mass-produced versions of some amazing dishes at Fika, a Swedish café in midtown, thanks to the generosity of my good friend who works there (theirs are not exactly “Ikea prices”), and I’ve found that the Swedes have figured out how to make food that is rich and satisfying without being stodgy, as I often find German food to be.

Shortly after that Ikea trip, I had another very Swedish day at the Midsummer Festival in Battery Park. The festival was truly idyllic: as we entered we were each handed a bunch of flowers on long stalks, and taught by a jovial blond woman how to fashion them into head garlands with ivy and twine. The lawns were flooded with flowery heads, and an epic tug-of-war game was orchestrated for the kids. People everywhere were lounging beside impressive picnics of potato salad, fresh fruit, and pickled herring on crisp rye bread. The vendors’ offerings looked extremely similar to what people had brought from home – an encouraging sign that it was authentic and carefully produced. We tried korv, a hot dog topped with skagen (shrimp salad with lemon and dill) and fried onions. The skagen was a perfect example of the Swedish talent of balancing richness with acidity (and, of course, incorporating seafood). A cold bottle of lingonberry Kristal was a welcome refreshment after a hot day of trekking through New York. We wore our flower wreaths on the subway home and enjoyed the attention they drew, and I wished that summer solstice happened more times each year.

After that afternoon, I was eager to produce some Swedish stuff in my own kitchen, and extremely curious about how successful the shake-and-pour process can be in producing satisfactory rye bread. Most of us have found that assembling the contents of Ikea boxes is not as universally foolproof as they want you to think, so I had a feeling the bread might not turn out to be exactly as advertised. But thankfully, this ended up being a relatively painless project. The 45 seconds of “vigorous shaking” after pouring the water into the carton were more strenuous than I had anticipated – a heavy, glutinous mass forms fairly quickly inside the container, but it’s important to keep agitating it to make sure that all of the dry mix gets incorporated. Then there’s the question of getting the goop out of the carton and into the loaf pan: a little daunting, but by hitting the sides and end of the box I was able to get most of it out.

After an hour in the oven, the dough (it looked more like batter, actually) had turned into a hot, dense block of oats and rye. The outside was very crunchy, but the inside stayed moist and somewhat chewy. It’s an incredibly hearty bread – not very useful for sandwiches, but delicious with butter and other spreads. It has a rich, nutty flavor that doesn’t really need anything added to make it an interesting snack.

So, bread from a box is a success, overall. Once again, the Swedes bring us good quality with easy assemblage.

Cast-Iron Cooking

Cast-iron cookware smacks of history and tradition. A heavy black skillet always adds a pioneer aesthetic to any kitchen, whether it’s a real heirloom or a recent purchase. And then there’s the fact that it has to be seasoned and carefully maintained: since you can’t use harsh modern soaps, everything that ever goes into a cast-iron skillet seems to add something of itself to the pan – metaphorically, not literally, of course.

I recently acquired a cast-iron skillet, my very first and one that I plan to use for years and pass on to future generations, and I wanted its inaugural dish to be something that reflected the Southwestern roots of the person who gave it to me. I also wanted the dish to be something incredibly tasty, so I decided on skillet cornbread. Research revealed a lot of internet ranting about the rule that authentic Southern cornbread must not contain sugar under any circumstances; fine with me. I also noticed a tradition of using buttermilk; even better. I wanted my first attempt to be fairly plain: a test of a basic template that I could embellish in the future. But because I can’t resist a little embellishment, and because Chase has done an impressive job of doubling the size of his herb plants, I decided this baptismal cornbread would be seasoned with sage. (However, versions studded with cheese, jalapenos, chestnuts, and caramelized onions are sure to ensue).

I used stone-ground cornmeal, and followed a simple recipe from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything (but omitted the sugar to please the Southerners). It would have been even more authentic if I had had some lard or bacon grease on hand, but the melted butter bubbling in the skillet was an appetizing substitute. The whole process could not have been easier, and will therefore be repeated many times: whisk an egg with some buttermilk, mix gently with the dry ingredients and whatever add-ins you’re using, then pour into the butter-coated skillet and bake for about 30 minutes.

The result had an airy texture but was full of dense, corny flavor, with a rustic coarseness from the cornmeal and an earthy perfume from the sage. The searing hot surface of the pan created a lacy crust of crackly cornmeal. It was perfect on the side of a bowl of “Austin-style” black beans seasoned with chipotles in adobo and lime. It was also perfect crumbled over the top of said beans, and as a utensil for wiping up the last of the spicy sauce a few minutes later. And I imagine it will be perfect with butter and honey as a midmorning, afternoon, (and/)or evening snack.

So the verdict on cast-iron cookware is certainly a positive one. This skillet could crush all of my flimsy K-Mart non-stick pans in any kind of cook-off – both literally and metaphorically.

Skillet Cornbread with Sage

1 ½ cups coarse-ground cornmeal
½ all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
1 ¼ cups buttermilk
1 egg
4-5 sage leaves, chopped
2 tablespoons butter

Preheat the oven to 375 F. In a large bowl, mix together the cornmeal, flour, salt, baking powder and chopped sage. In another bowl, whisk the egg with the buttermilk, then add to the dry ingredients and stir until combined (I used a spatula for this, but I think a whisk would do it more efficiently). Melt the butter in the skillet, and swirl it around to coat the sides. Pour the batter into the skillet and even it out with a spatula. Bake it for 30 minutes, until the edges are golden brown and pulling away from the sides.

Found: Affordable Bubble Tea in Sunset Park

Bubble tea goes by many names: tapioca tea, pearl milk tea, boba; it comes in even more flavors and varieties: hot or cold, liquid or blended slushie, infused with ginger, almond, taro, blended with fruit or mixed with red bean. It has been a personal quest of mine to test and compare variations of this Taiwanese invention wherever I find it, but unfortunately this is an expensive habit in this city. I was introduced to the drink at Quickeley on Bancroft in Berkeley, and every trip home includes almost daily visits to its new Durant location (where it has dropped the locally inspired spelling and become “Quickly”) for the 99-cent tea special, which, with tapioca pearls added, comes to the reasonable price of $1.19. The “bubble milk tea” flavor is a straightforward black tea, creamy and satisfyingly sweet. It’s either incredibly simple or incredibly strange that gelatinous spheres, milky tea and ice could combine to create such a refreshing treat.

But simple or strange, it is not to be had cheaply in Manhattan. The standard price I’ve found is $2.95, and that’s usually for the more basic flavors – if you want something like taro or red bean, you may be paying well over three dollars. So I was elated when I discovered City Café in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, which offers a long list of bubble tea flavors for only two dollars. I ordered the black milk tea, thinking it was best to try out the basics at a new place before venturing into more complicated flavors. City Café’s version tasted extremely creamy; it was probably made with half and half or even some condensed milk. Its sweetness balanced nicely with the aromatic quality of the black tea. It was refreshing, but definitely sugary enough to serve as dessert. Most importantly, it was not overwhelmed by ice (a major pet peeve).

Brooklyn’s Chinatown in Sunset Park consists of a strip of 8th Avenue between 42nd and 61st Streets. Though it’s much smaller than Manhattan’s Chinatown, it can get very busy at certain times of the day, and the bustle is due more to locals going about their daily activities than hordes of tourists looking for handbags. The avenue is lined with produce stalls, and exciting fruits like lychees, starfruit, and durian are all easy to find. I bought a bunch of lychees with their stems still attached, and the collection of spiky globes looked like some kind of beautiful alien bouquet. The strip culminates at 61st street with the Hong Kong Supermarket, a comprehensive source of Asian specialty foods. For fresh groceries, Chinese snacks, and the added bonus of reasonably priced bubble tea, 8th Avenue in Sunset Park is certainly worth the trip. And if, unlike me, you’re not crazy enough to walk the 9.5-mile roundtrip journey from Park Slope, the N and R trains both stop nearby.

All the Way to Chicago for Turkish Ice Cream

Last weekend was my third time visiting Chicago, but my first visit during a time of year when the exterior environment was hospitable to human life. Fortunately for me, it also coincided with the annual Turkish Festival in Daley Plaza.

Of all the outings that Katherine and I planned before my visit, this was probably the one I insisted on the most, even though in some ways it was hardly a break from what I’ve been doing in New York. Chase moved to Atlantic Avenue in March, and a Middle Eastern restaurant of some sort seems to occupy almost every fourth storefront on his stretch of the avenue. As a result I’ve discovered a new favorite food in the “Crazy Fatoosh” sandwich available at Fatoosh (a huge, fluffy pita wrapped around four salads of your choice), I’ve spent so much time wandering the aisles at Sahadi’s that I think they’re going to start asking questions soon, and I’ve probably consumed about three tons of hummus.

So the Turkish Festival in Chicago offered a lot of familiar (and beloved) items: grilled kebabs, hummus drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with paprika, herbed eggplant salad, and flaky spinach pie. But it also had something I’d never tried, something that turned out to be nothing quite like anything I’d ever tried before: Turkish ice cream, or dondurma.

The sign in front of the ice cream stand claimed that the crucial ingredient in dondurma is orchid, so I expected it to have a floral, soapy taste like the lavender ice cream I loved to get in Paris. But, I eventually discovered, orchid does not contribute to the taste of the ice cream: in fact, powdered orchid root (or salep) is used to give the final product a distinctive chewy texture. Yes, chewy.

At the festival, tubs of dondurma were loaded into a cylindrical container and then pummeled into submission by a man with a sharp stick, presumably to soften it slightly. Once he deemed it ready to serve, he used the stick to extract a rectangular slab of the stuff (this ice cream is not conducive to scooping), which he stuck vertically in a waffle cone, and dipped in crushed pistachios. The consistency reminded me of one of those trademarked goops that were all the rage when I was about eight – was “Gak” the one that stretches into long strings when you pull it slowly, but breaks clean if you pull it apart fast? Turkish ice cream is pretty much the same idea. But instead of smelling like chemicals and presumably tasting similarly, it has a mild and creamy vanilla flavor, delicately sweetened and light enough for you to want to eat a whole lot of it.

Unfortunately, it seems that dondurma is very difficult to find in the United States, because of the rarity and high cost of the salep powder that creates its essential characteristics. Internet searches have turned up recipes that substitute cornstarch, which, for those of you with ice cream makers, might be easier than a trip to Turkey. But I’m determined to find some of the real thing somewhere in this city, not only to satisfy my own addiction, but to introduce dondurma to everyone I know: the texture is something truly foreign to most American tongues, and certainly worth experiencing.