April 2005 Archives

I love a feel-good story, and this Times feature on the Cakeman Raven is great.  I must go pay him a visit.  Has anyone tried his red velvet?  It doesn't look as cocoa-y as Sugar Sweet Sunshine's.  In fact, there's only one teaspoon of cocoa.  And he uses cream cheese frosting as opposed to satin buttercream -- I love me some cream cheese frosting. 

My pau taught me a couple of useful things about knives:

1.  A sharp knife is safer than a dull knife.  Why?  Because when you're trying to saw away at that chicken breast with your piece of crap supermarket blade, you'll probably apply more force to fight the flesh resistance.  And if the blade slips in the wrong direction, you could really do some damage.  Besides, clean cuts heal easier and faster than jagged puncture wounds.  I'm just sayin.

2.  A good all-purpose knife needs a little weight.  Simple physics, folks -- a heftier blade cuts through things with more force than a lighter blade.  So you do less work.  That's why cleavers are so heavy -- they need the weight to hack through bones. 

3.  A good knife will last many years.  You think you're saving money by buying those cut rate, plastic handled jobbies but you're really not.  For the price of one fancy meal out (or three lesser meals), you can have a good ten years (or more) of cleanly minced onions, well-defined tomato slices, and quick mirepoix. 

4.  If your knife has a serrated edge, and it is not the bread knife, you should get rid of it.  You can't re-sharpen a serrated edge.  I know the commercial told you that it stays sharp forever, but you have been lied to.  If your knife came free with another purchase, or if they gave you free things with the purchase of your knife, you have been suckered.  I don't care how many aluminum cans you cut through.  Throw them out.

I use two knives.  I love them deeply and equally.  They work for practically everything I need.  I'm not generally hacking up rabbit carcasses or filleting skate or anything, so I don't ever need the flexible boning knife.  I rarely buy whole loaves of bread, but when I do, I borrow my roommate's serrated bread knife.  Otherwise, these are my babies. 

Glestain Santoku -- 6 3/4" blade

This is the multi-purpose extension of my fingers.  It has the perfect amount of weight -- more than the Globals, less than an 8" chef's knife.  The blade doesn't rock very well, but that doesn't bother me.  There's a generous metal rest where the blade meets the handle -- essential for marathon chopping sessions.  The grooves on one of the blade's faces allow cut bits to fall right off the blade -- especially useful for sticky things like garlic. Plus, it looks really cool.  Please note -- this knife wasn't made for left-handed cooks, unfortunately.  I got mine in Tokyo at Tokyu Hands for 11,000 Yen, but it can be found at Knife Merchant for a very reasonable $139.50.

Global paring knife -- 4" blade

This little knife was forged from a single piece of metal and is completely seamless, making for super easy clean-up.  It starts super-sharp and stays sharp.  The thin blade makes it ideal for skinning an apple, while the chef's knife-like shape and 90 degree corner edge makes it great for small jobs on the small cutting board.  I got mine from Bed, Bath and Beyond for around $45.  Cooking.com carries them for $45.95.

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More on my dad and knife superstition here.

Lucy's Greenmarket Report says ramps have arrived at the Greenmarket.  My friend Julie says they're pretty small this week, but they should be bigger by next week.  Rick the potato farmer is selling them for $2.50/sizeable bunch.  Hopefully the fiddleheads will also show up on Saturday. 

Dear Crabby,

I know I'm not supposed to buy the shrink-wrapped Parmesan in the dairy section of my Key Food because it sucks.  But I went to the cheese shop today and they had two kinds of "proper" Parmigiano Reggiano -- one was a 2 year aged for $12.99/lb. and the other was a 3 year aged Vacche Rosse for $23.99/lb.  Is the latter really worth twice the money, or can I just get the 2 year aged?

Sincerely,

Udderly Perplexed

Dear UP,

First thing you should do is a taste test to see if you can tell the difference between the two cheeses.  Because look, if you can't taste the difference, then no, you shouldn't pay the extra money.  Any cheese shop worth its curd will provide you with a small slice for you to taste whatever you're thinking of buying.  For me, the difference is huge -- the vacche rossa has a crumblier texture, with plenty of salt crystal crunch in every bite, nuttier flavor and a singing finish that really excites the palate.  This is a cheese that would be beautiful on a plate with a Coach Farm triple creme and a listeria-free Point Reyes blue.

But say you're not going to just nosh on this fabulous cheese.  You just want to grate some on top of your spaghetti (or, as that Giada de Laurentiis likes to say, spa-gee-tee) and put some in your risotto or something.  It would be perfectly acceptable to use the younger cheese.  But for me, I eat parmigiano so rarely that I figure I may as well spend another $5 on a block of the fancy stuff because it will last me a while.  And when I'm not using it in soups, on salads, over bruschetta, etc., then I have something really special to nibble on.

One of my favorite summer treats -- boiled summer corn with butter, freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano, shichimi togarashi, and fresh squeezed lime.

Crabby

Got a question?  I got a smart ass answer.  Write to Dear Crabby at coconutella(at)yahoo(dot)com.

(Ice cream time late Saturday night after returning home from a party.  My roommate and I open the almost empty box of Sara Lee frozen pound cake and the half-melted but refrozen carton of Haagen-Dazs Mint Chip.  HE sees the lone piece of pound cake and starts to double over with laughter.)

ME:  What the hell happened to the ice cream?

HE:  (Falls on the floor laughing, holding his sides.)

ME:  (Laughing at HIS laughing) What's so funny?

HE:  (More laughter.)  You--  (more laughter)  --I'm laughing--  (more laughter)  --because you asked what the hell happened to the ICE CREAM--  (more laughter)

ME:  Well obviously I KNOW what happened to the pound cake.

(Side-splitting laughter ensues.  We must retreat to separate rooms.)

(and later)

HE:  Sorry for making us fat.

A really good piece of gossip on Gastropoda today:

I didn’t coin this, but “butt-girl for Eli” has a nice ring to it. Especially since inquiring competitors are gossiping that all that tame salmon actually came from the same distributor. I'm sure it's a spurious claim, but it does make you wonder why a cheese shop that hasn’t bought a certain blue for two years is making a fuss about listeria (among myriad unanswered questions). One more and it’s a trend: stories with holes big enough to drive a raw milk tanker-truck through.

And in case you don't feel like hunting down those articles, Auntie Ganda does the work for you:

The wild salmon article ($)

The cheese article

So let's be real here -- I have many Japanese (and Japanese culture-phile) friends who know their soba and take it very seriously. If you put a bowl of handmade soba and a bowl of packaged cheapo soba in front of me, I hope that I'd be able to tell the difference. But I don't know that I could; I haven't had enough experience with soba to call myself an authority by any means.

But still, it either tastes good to me or it doesn't, right? So you can take my layman's review with a grain of salt (or a drop of shoyu, I guess). Last night, three friends and I went to Sobakoh, the new soba place in the East Village. At 8:00 p.m. on a Friday night, we were expecting a long wait, but were pleasantly surprised that we got a nice roomy fourtop in the back of the low capacity but very roomy restaurant. I liked what I saw -- dark veneer tables offset by white wood in the front, and bright but not blinding incandescent light fixtures overhead, so I could see my food and my good-looking companions. To those places with little to no light, I ask, what are you trying to hide? Or what do you think I'm trying to hide? I like to be visually stimulated by my food, visually stimulated by my dining partners. And sometimes I like to read when I eat. So let there be light, dammit!

I digress. We go over the perfect-length, uncomplicated menus together as we sip what I believe is sobacha, a sweet-edged, mild cereal tea made with roasted soba bits. How could we resist the specials? Last night's list included a small bowl of perfectly cooked asparagus and a mild white sesame sauce, which was lovely and plain; a lovely, refreshing salad made with translucent ribbons of shaved daikon, with various crunchy green veggies, a touch of shaved bonito, and a soy/yuzu dressing; and a super silky crab chawan mushi that I could have eaten 5 of.

From the regular menu, we shared the miso-marinated, grilled duck breast, which came sliced and fanned on the plate with a blob of freshly grated, olive colored wasabi, and a small pile of completely unnecessary, disgusting little sprouts. But the duck was really interesting, each reddish piece with a wide toupee of fat -- as Chris said, "It's like duck bacon! I love when bacon can be made from something other than the pig." And unlike D'Artagnan's duck bacon, it had a thickness that really gave it a lovely bacon lardon texture.

Finally, our generous bowls of hot soba came out, along with a little shichimi togarashi dispenser. Sobakoh hand makes their buckwheat noodles, and the beautiful noodles have the slightest variations in uniformity to indicate it. The broth really sings, with a little soy sweetness and a slight acid finish -- it has the perfect amount of salt for a noodle soup, enough to season the noodles, but not so much that you can't drink it down alone. The little bits of mitsuba provide the tiniest bit of crunch and herbacious freshness. And the soba was fantastic, as far as I could tell -- very lovely texture. I must balk a little at the price though. The plain soba (which would be really amazing on its own) is $9.50, while the shrimp tempura soba is $18. That means that the one (albeit large) shrimp tempura floating and getting soggy in my soup was $8.50. It was pretty tough on each end too -- I couldn't quite tell if it was overcooked or just the nature of the steroid shrimp.

My dining companions ordered the fried soft-shell crab soba, which looked delicious too, but I didn't try it. Sobakoh also serves plenty of cold soba, which I hear is quite good and the way to go, but it was all about the broth for me, which I think was as good as Honmura-An's -- and the portions get you much closer to being full at the end of the meal. (Whereas at Honmura-An, while the duck soba is divine, I always have enough room for a hamburger afterwards.)

Grade: A-

Total: $33 per person, for my share of four appetizers between four people and a bowl of ebi tempura hot soba.

Will I return? Yes. Next time, as long as the weather is still cool, I'd like to order the vegetable tempura hot soba. And when it gets hot, what could be better than that cool daikon slaw and some cold soba with dunking sauce?

Sobakoh

309 E. 5th St., between 2nd Ave. and 1st Ave
212-254-2244

F Train to 2nd Ave., 6 train to Astor Pl., R train to 8th St.

Conversation between me and my roommate:

HE: (Walking out of the bathroom) So I was wondering if the white asparagus would make my pee smell.

ME: Did it?

HE: (Disappointed) Yes, it did.

Last night my roommate and I popped open my bottle of NV Billecart-Salmon Brut Rose and I thought it was fine but it didn't knock my socks off.  Which I would have liked it to because it was a $60 bottle -- not completely outrageous by champagne standards, but a lot of money for me.  It did have a nice berry finish and looked gorgeous in the Cartier flutes, but it had a lemony, mineral quality that I wasn't crazy about.

Grade: B

Price: $60

Will I buy it again?  I don't think so.  I haven't found my dream champagne yet.  The Krug was lovely but a little too smoky for me.  I have to say, I loved those first few sips of Cristal -- I know it's supposed to be overpriced and overhyped, but I still think I liked it best. 

***

Doug and I also went and had dinner at Applewood last night and shared a quite nice bottle of rose wine, Chateau Pourcieux 2003 from Cotes de Provence.  Applewood had it on sale for $19.55 for the Dine In Brooklyn special (only twice the price of retail).  I don't know jack about wine, and I don't pretend to, but I liked it -- it was placid, not sweet but not cottonmouth dry with a nice glycerin-y mouthfeel.  And it comes in a very pretty bottle, making it an excellent gift choice.

Grade: B+

Price: $9.99 at Columbus Circle Wines

Will I buy it again?  Sure.  I think this will make a lovely "looks-like-I-spent-more-on-you-than-I-did" gift for dinner parties or Christmas.  But if you get one, forget you ever read this.