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.

Unlikely Combinations: Savory Strawberry Salad

Spring means strawberry season. I had kind of forgotten about strawberries until they started popping up in grocery stores and on fruit stands on every block in the last few weeks. They’ve never been my favorite fruit, I think because of their fairly unexciting texture – I’m more likely to be pulled towards crispy apples or juicy nectarines – and the fact that when they aren’t perfectly ripe and sweet enough, their flavor has little going for it. I think what made me put down a bag of firm, shiny plums and pick up a box of strawberries yesterday was their stunning ruby-red color. And while texture and taste are undoubtedly important, I am certainly not the first person to point out that we also “eat with our eyes.”

My cooking is often driven by color, which can lead to some unlikely combinations. The problem with labeling anything an “unlikely combination” is that objectively speaking, no combinations are really that unlikely. Often, what seems incompatible or unusual turns out to be a classic flavor technique of another culture’s cuisine. Most Americans reserve cinnamon for sweet dishes like apple pies and French toast, but Middle Eastern cooks have mastered its use as a component of savory meat and vegetable dishes. If two things are edible, why not try putting them together? This philosophy seems sensible enough.

Anyway, these strawberries had such a vibrant color that I couldn’t resist mixing them with as many other colors as I could find in my kitchen. I decided to make a savory strawberry dish, which isn’t so uncommon – strawberry and spinach salad isn’t hard to find on menus these days. I wanted to use up a few ingredients I had in the fridge, so I started with some pre-cooked beluga lentils. This kind of lentil is tiny and jet black, with a shine reminiscent of caviar or polished pebbles. Against this glossy black background, I knew the strawberries would seem even brighter.

I mixed the lentils with some sautéed yellow onion and sliced almonds, then remembered I had some cooked spinach in the freezer and quickly microwaved and added it – red and green is the most classic example of color contrast. Finally I added in the chopped strawberry, salted and peppered the mixture, then splashed it with some balsamic vinegar. I dotted the top with clumps of immaculate white goat cheese. The bowl now represented a considerable range on the color spectrum.

And it tasted pretty good too. I realized that a lot of sub-groups of these ingredients are relatively straightforward: a berries-and-cream effect was achieved by adding the goat cheese, the balsamic vinegar with the lentils and almonds produced a satisfying earthy-plus-acid flavor combination. With all of it together there was a lot going on, needless to say, but overall, it worked. Next time I would add mint, for a refreshing herbal element.

Flapjacks

My mother never baked anything until several years after I moved out of the house. With the exception of a few school picnics for which she created some very damp meringues, her food production was limited to one-step “dishes” like grated carrots, frozen TV dinners, and toast. But for some reason, with both of her children away at college, she has become a mass-producer of all kinds of homemade jams, cakes, and ice creams.

When it comes to baked goods, my mother has mainly stuck to her English roots, with butter-infused recipes that my grandmother has always made expertly. But although my mother has come to embrace culinary projects with multiple steps and ingredients, she is still reluctant to actually follow recipes, even when they are right in front of her. This is why each batch of one of her signature dishes, oat cookies called flapjacks in England (nothing like the pancakes we Americans associate with that name), turns out radically differently.

Flapjacks are a bar cookie (although in England they’re “biscuits,” of course), typically made with rolled oats, butter, brown sugar, and sometimes a sticky binder like honey or golden syrup. Beyond that, people often add nuts, dried fruits, or chocolate, and they can be made crispier, stickier, or chewier depending on your preference. We tend to mix in whatever cereal needs to be finished, for a crunchier effect. If you cook like my mother, you can achieve all these effects in turn just by “following” a single recipe.

A word of warning: the combination of fat and sugar in these cookies creates a flavor that speaks to our evolutionarily encoded desire for, well, fat and sugar, and they can be so addictive that you find yourself totally incapable of not eating an entire plate of them. You start to feel like you have ingested a stick of butter (and you’re probably well on your way), but if there are more flapjacks in front of you, or even in a tin on the top shelf that’s meant for a party tomorrow, you simply can’t say no. I’ve seen it happen many times – my mother will offer around a plate of seemingly innocent oat bars, and suddenly people don’t know what’s happening to them. I call it Flapjack Madness.

My mother’s recipe follows, with my interpretation of her personal techniques in parentheses.

English Flapjacks

4 oz butter

2 oz rolled oats

2 oz. self-raising flour (my mother uses pancake mix)

4 oz. brown sugar

1 tbsp. molasses or golden syrup

3 oz. any kind of crushed corn flakes or cereal (whatever cereal people haven’t been eating fast enough)

2-3 oz. raisins and/or sultanas

2-3 oz. nuts (walnuts, almonds, pecans, hazelnuts) to taste

Melt the butter and mix with molasses and sugar. (Perhaps it doesn’t seem buttery enough. Add a few more tablespoons.) Stir in rest of ingredients. (Forget whether you’ve added the flour. It should be obvious, but somehow…it isn’t. Oh well, nothing wrong with them being extra buttery. Add some more cereal just in case; no one likes this kind for breakfast anyway.) Spread in greased square 9-inch pan. The trick is to spread it thinly enough to get crisp without disintegrating into crumbs. (But don’t worry about it too much, crumbs are still edible.)

Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes. (Or take them out when you suddenly remember you put them in before doing several loads of laundry, after you realize you have no idea what time you started anyway.) Score into squares about 5 minutes after taking out of the oven. (Observe results. Are they crunchy? syrupy? oozing with butter and golden syrup? Don’t dwell on how the choices you made on this particular occasion might have affected the outcome. Then you’d learn something to apply to the next batch, and that would make life less interesting. Just eat them.)

Places I've Been Meaning to Try: Kombit

I’ve often left restaurants with a to-go box filled with something too filling to finish in one sitting but too delicious to leave behind. Last night was the first time I’ve left a restaurant with a raw specimen of the main ingredient of a dish I’d ordered, and instructions on how to prepare it. But this gift was only one of the many delights that comprised my dinner at Kombit, a Haitian restaurant in Prospect Heights.

Kombit is just a few doors down from my apartment, and for months I’d been passing it and occasionally stopping to look at the menu to attempt pronunciation of the exotic Creole names, and to ponder ways to fit the Lambi (conch simmered in tomato) or Goat Tasso (fried chunks of marinated goat meat) into my starving-student budget. So when it came to choosing a place for a family dinner after my college graduation – it needed to be a place I had wanted to try out for a while, but one that was representative of the neighborhood and something that my parents (maybe) wouldn’t find at home in Berkeley – Kombit was the logical answer.

While waiting for our parents who were lagging behind, my sister and I decided to order drinks. Kombit has an impressive list of cocktails, but I chose a glass of Malta, a Carribean soda made of barley, hops, and water. I had heard it tasted like beer (which makes sense given the ingredients), but it reminded me of the instant Horlicks my mother used to make, with the creaminess of milk replaced by the refreshing zing of carbonation. My sister ordered Jus Corosol, made from the soursop fruit, which despite its name, as a waiter pointed out to us, is far from sour. It has a mildly sweet taste that seems to combine pineapple, guava, banana – basically every tropical fruit you can think of.

When it came to ordering, our waitress ascertained our unfamiliarity with the Haitian cuisine pretty quickly, and helpfully started constructing a meal for us according to our preferences. One question had to be answered first: “Are you hungry, or hungry-hungry?” Based on our responses, and taking my sister’s vegetarianism into account, we decided to start with Fritai Lakai (assorted fried root vegetables, including plantains and sweet potatoes), Akra, a traditional appetizer made of yautia, a staple root vegetable in West Indian cuisine, which is pureed and fried to resemble something like large tater tots. It is served with a spicy cabbage slaw whose freshness perfectly balances the decadent satisfaction of perfectly crisp-fried root vegetable.

The more we munched on the fritters, however, the more we wondered about the nature of the particular vegetable that composed them. The menu mentioned that yautia is also called “edo” on some islands in the West Indies, but neither name sounded familiar. We eventually asked our waitress if she could describe the vegetable, but she had a better plan: she reappeared from the kitchen a few moments later with a raw, unscrubbed yautia tuber rolling around on a small plate. She explained the tedious process of removing the tiny hairs that sprout from its thin dark brown skin, and how to make the white flesh into a pulp in a food processor. It sounded like quite an undertaking. “We like to say that a lot of love goes into Haitian cooking,” she said, “but it’s a lot of work.”

The tuber was placed off to the side when our main dishes arrived: Legume San Viand (stewed vegetables with rice and beans), Legume Bef (vegetables with beef, rice, and beans) and Rara salad (beets, corn, and other vegetables in a creamy dressing). Once again our waitress was on hand to demonstrate the best way to eat rice and beans: make a flat bead of rice on your plate, scoop some stewed vegetables on top, and spoon bean puree over the whole thing. Make sure to get some of each component on each forkful. This is an excellent method in my book, but the stew was delicious on its own, too – its subtle spice and the way the flavors of the cabbage, carrots, and lima beans had melted together was obviously a product of slow and laborious Haitian-style cooking.

As we left the restaurant, I was ready to book a flight to any tropical country where I could sip Jus Corosol and enjoy a slower pace of life, and of course the effects this has on cooking. But knowing that this was probably not going to happen, I was comforted by the bag in my hand, full of leftover plantains and the raw yautia, waiting to be cooked with the container of spice mix that our waitress had generously included. Plus, while the West Indies are a little far, Kombit is still down the street, and I have to go back to try the Goat Tasso.