The most bestest falafel in town

OK, so Maalouf’s doesn’t have the best falafel in town after all.  Hands down, Sanad’s on K Street is better.  Freshly fried falafel balls, broken up on the sandwich (this is key!), nice fresh veggies (the “traditional” has cucumber and peppers instead of lettuce and tomato), good size (small, more snack-like, but can be a lunch with one of the bomb deli offerings), and good green falafel flesh with accompanying herby flavor (out of the half-dozen times I’ve been there, the flesh was a little undercooked once).  There are bottles of good hot sauce (and a vat of free olives), which can add a whole dimension to the sandwich.  I don’t know what the sauce on the traditional falafel is, but it’s wicked good.  I’ll ask next time I go.  

In the deli case, the tabouleh, dominated by parsley, is extremely acidic but great.  The hummus is finely pureed, rich and creamy with tahini (the polar opposite of Crest Cafe’s runny, pulpy, sour but otherwise flavorless chickpea mush).  The “grilled” eggplant is not so hot: super oily, under-salted, and slices towards the stem end are tough & undercooked.  The foul (fava beans) is good.  

I like to end things on a negative note, so I’ll say this: there’s a real problem with the free water pitchers.  The water tastes so strongly of stale freezer that it’s undrinkable.  Next time I guess I’ll ask for water from the tap, so I don’t have to drink the horrible melted ice.

The best falafel in town

It is with great sadness that I report that Maalouf’s on Fulton has the best falafel in Sac, because it’s just not that great: way too much lettuce, mushy, mealy tomatoes, and falafel balls with less than perfect crust.  This means the falafel gets a little greasy and dry, rather than the crunchy outside and moist inside that a falafel ball ought to have.  Still, the balls are freshly fried, the bread is soft and tasty, and the pickles, tahini sauce, and hummus are all very good.  When will Sac catch onto this international sensation?

Long lines at Il Fornaio for what?

The “salame e provolone” sandwich at Il Fornaio’s takeout lunch counter downtown is pretty bad.  I was enticed by the menu description: salami, provolone, and mustard.  A simple sandwich, maybe on good bread (some of the rustic-looking loaves on display looked OK; I’ve only had their mediocre baguettes).  But the salami and provolone are more or less flavorless, piled thick: one layer of salami, one of provolone, another of salami, another of provolone; and the layers stick in your mouth in a really unpleasant way.  The sandwich is pre-made (at corporate headquarters?) and served on sliced white bread straight from the fridge, and the mustard is yellow, French’s style.

Bad China

Today’s New York Times reports that China and India have stalled trade negotiations due to fear about “cheap farms imports from the rich world,” a worry that is counter-intuitive to say the least.  Poor countries have cheap labor and cheap land, so how is it that rich countries can produce agricultural products cheaply enough to undercut their prices?

Researching tortillas (corn vs. wheat, specifically), I found that corn exports to Mexico from the U.S. have increased dramatically since 1994—the year NAFTA passed.  Mostly, we’re exporting yellow corn, which is used there almost exclusively for animal feed and industrial products.  The increase in yellow corn imports by Mexico is tied to an increase in animal farming (hogs and chickens, especially), which probably means clogged colons for a greater and greater percentage of the population. 

NAFTA also has led to an explosion in the market share of tortillas made from masa harina, or masa flour, rather than the traditional masa, the highly perishable dough made through the ingenious nixtamal process. Ninety percent of masa harina production is concentrated in the hands of two producers (one is Maseca, which does a brisk business in the U.S.).  50% of tortillas are apparently still made the old-fashioned way in small tortillerias from fresh masa, but an increasing percentage of these are made from hybrid high-yielding varieties, grown in relatively arid places like Sinaloa, where industrial, rather than traditional, farming dominates.  How do you suppose these developments affect the taste of the tortillas?

How can U.S. corn pull this off—how are we able to undercut Mexico’s prices?  The complete answer is too complicated and boring for me to understand.  But the short answer seems to be that U.S. exporters sell corn to Mexico for 30% less than the cost of production, made possible by the typical $5 billion the U.S. government pays annually to the corn industry.  Why are the corn farmers doing it?  Do they get some domestic pricing advantage by dumping a portion of their supply in Mexico?  Is their goal to devastate the corn growers of Mexico so that they can take over and raise prices?  Certainly, with 2 million rural Mexicans having moved away from the countryside, Mexican corn has been disrupted, if not devastated.  And worldwide corn prices are on the rise, nearly tripling over the past few years.

Is this what China’s afraid of?

Berkshire Lard

Fat plays a central role in my cooking, and in my life.  My list of complaints about other people’s cooking, which I usually politely keep to myself, is topped with Dearth of fat. The single most essential fat in my life is extra virgin olive oil, but I also currently have peanut oil, unsalted butter (without natural flavorings), duck fat, goose fat (rendered from the goose I braised at christmas), and sesame oil.  I also have lard, in the familiar green and white tub, which is hydrogenated and industrial, and which has no real smell or taste (except maybe a hint of chemicals).  The obvious solution is to render some good lard, from some good pork fat.  But it’s not as easy as I thought it would be to get good pork fat.  Taylor’s gave me some pork chop trimmings, but these were full of meat, and they rendered a foul liquor that I had to throw away.  When I asked at Corti’s butcher, I was directed to green and white tubs.  But I persisted, and the butcher produced a three-pound, vacuum sealed bag of frozen Berkshire pork fat.  It was three dollars a pound, and so I bought it and brought it home.

I love Jeffrey Steingarten’s brief account of rendering lard in his kitchen at the beginning of The Man Who Ate Everything.  But three hours in my 225-degree oven wasn’t long enough to render my lard; nor, indeed, was ten.  I had to go to bed, though, and so I drained the lard at the ten-hour mark, and threw away the pre-cracklings.  The lard, rendered with cloves and a cinnamon stick, smells beautiful, and it’s perfect in poor man’s spaghetti.

Another chance for Austria

Thomas Beisl has very expensive sandwiches. We went for a late lunch on a Monday, planning to order sandwiches, but these were the four options: two paninis (ham/meunster, peppers/feta), each $12, or viennese meatloaf or norwegian salmon with chipotle mayo. None of these sounded particularly Austrian, so we each sampled a schnitzel. M got the Wienerschnitzel (I guess this is a veal cutlet), and I got cod schnitzel. They were both surprisingly delicious, freshly fried, nicely breaded (with decent bread crumbs), and served piping hot with a delightful side of cucumber/potato salad (vinegary, not mayonnaisy), and a little bit of pickled red cabbage. The wienerschnitzel went nicely with the light but rounded Austrian gruner veltliner M ordered, and the cod was a great complement for my zippy Austrian riesling. Both wines had a touch of sweetness that made them a lot more vinegar-friendly than most. Looking at the menu, there was at most one item (some lamb dish) that would have been red-friendly. Austria!

What the fuck is up with red wines from Austria?

Between a flabby, fruity Zweigelt at a dinner at Thomas Beisl and a slightly less flabby, slightly less fruity and more earthy Pinot Noir called Juris at Wallsé a couple nights ago, maybe Austrian red is total bullshit. Granted, we fucked up by ordering a bottle of pinot for chestnut soup, boiled beef (or Kavalierspitz), and a venison chop (only the last dish had anything to do with red wine). I can start to see why whites with a little a sweetness are so treasured in this part of the world—the cuisine needs that sweetness to balance it. Boiled beef with horseradish (this dish was very good, with a line of gelatinized collagen running through the center of slices of shoulder meat) will never match a red, and it’s hard to imagine it working very well with a dry white. The chestnut soup with armagnac prunes had a richness that totally clashed with the pinot noir and would probably dwarf a dry white. The venison chop, over four inches thick, was perfectly cooked: darkly browned on the outside, and a deep, gamy red on the inside. But it seems venison meat is too lean to really deliver its own flavor (like filet mignon, but moreso), and the pomegranate reduction that accompanied couldn’t compensate for that. It was a fine match for the wine, however, which makes the dinner something less than a complete loss.
We also learned something about the pairing of wines with Austrian food (off dry whites!), and about Austrian reds generally (nasty!).

Shalom, goodbye

The Times had a feature on the Bukharian community in Rego Park earlier this year, and I was as intrigued, especially by the soup containing a single long hand-stretched noodle (called lagman) at a restaurant called Shalom. A friend with a car provided the means to check it out; when we found the address, however, the word Shalom appeared nowhere on the storefront. When we ventured closer, a woman ushered us inside; as we walked through the door, I noticed an ominous banner which read “under new management”. The space was filled with bright flourescent light. It was devoid of people. We were brought a sampling of Central Asian soda pops. They all tasted mostly like sweet. We each ordered a samsa, which is something like a samosa, and is cooked in a tandoor. These were delicious, filled with lamb and onions, and with a crust of layered dough that fell somewhere between a noodle and a pastry crust. When we finished them, we were mostly full. Then came a bowl of soup for each of us. Each soup had its own interesting broth; my lagman contained a number of short noodles (though they appeared to be hand-stretched. The Georgian style-soup with its spicy broth and chewy barley was the winner. A beef ravioli soup was very nice too: the dumplings and the broth were very mild but had a savory richness not unlike consomme. A loaf of bread like a giant bialy and a plate of pickled vegetables served as a nice complement to the soups. All this would easily have been enough food. But we had allowed ourselves to be talked into a great number of other dishes: french fries with mushrooms (fried only once, so they were greasy and stuck together), fresh green salad (out of season tomatoes and nasty onions), pilaf (short grain rice, pretty tasty, with very chewy bits of mystery meat), a couple sweetbreads skewers (tender and bland), a couple lamb rib skewers (fatty but not special), a beef kebab, and a salmon skewer. We ate what we could of this, stuffing ourselves to the point of pretty extreme discomfort. The total came to $86 for the four of us. We could easily have eaten and been satisfied for $25. I wonder if Shalom was better?

Tia Pol: just fine

Hoping for a low-key place to get a bite and drink something unusual, M and I met at Tia Pol last night.  The cuisine is “expensive tapas”, and we ordered sherry and a few dishes.  Everything was OK; nothing blew our minds.

Bacalao croquetas looked and smelled like egg-shaped fish sticks; inside, they were goopy.  The flavor was nice but the gluey texture wasn’t.  To their credit, they were fresh out of the fryer, crisp and steaming.

Patatas bravas were crisp and hot, but still nicely potatoey inside.  The standard sauce was perfect: spicy, but not too spicy, and not tasting of mayonnaise.

Montadito de crema de habitas con beyos, a fava bean and beyos cheese puree on thick slices of baguette was nice, with the musky, vegetal flavor of favas well-highlighted (though we’re long beyond fava season) by the beyos cheese (I’ve never had this, but it seems to be a chalky goat ).

Navajas y almejas (razor clams with cockles) were OK, with a flavorful garlicky broth.  But the razor clams were full of sand (they put steamers to shame), which means a lot of the pleasure is lost.  They were also cooked to a tough rubberiness.  I’ve never had a razor clam before—maybe they have to be rubbery.  Bread dipped in this broth made a nice complement to the manzanilla sherry M ordered (I had palo cortado). 

Txipirones en su tinta (squids in his ink) was pretty nice.  It was the first time I’d had squid ink, and its blackness was astonishing.  It coated the fork.  It was thick and rich like cream; cream’s shadow self, maybe.  The tiny mold of rice served with this couldn’t do much to absorb the copious ink; the squid itself was quite tender and delicious.  The dish didn’t really work as bar food.

We ordered three glasses of sherry each.  We had to.  The amount of sherry in a glass was maybe three ounces, maybe a little less.  This just doesn’t last very long.  The sherries we ordered ranged from a Gitana Manzanilla ($6.50) to a $9 Palo cortado.  At the en of the day, $80.  Tapas should be cheaper.

La Laiterie part 3

I hesitate to write about Friday night’s dinner, because it hurts me to give La Laiterie anything but a stellar review. But I’m going to clench my teeth and do it.

Our plan was to split a burger and drink a little red wine. So we ordered a bottle of Syrah from El Dorado County (the Sierra Foothills are remarkably well-represented on the wine list). This arrived first, so we had a chance to taste it a little more carefully than we often would at a restaurant (they didn’t bring bread, an oversight which was fine with me). It smelled really nice (though it wasn’t that pronounced) of earth and dark plums—but its high (15%) alcohol assaulted the palate with what I thought was a maple syrupy sweet sensation (the wine was not actually sweet, of course—sometimes high alcohol is perceived that way), and this was balanced relatively well by medium acidity and tannins. But it was not a good accompaniment to the a “locally cured fatback” and celery salad special. I love cured pork products, and the actual fatback was really good: pure lard (no muscle mass interfering with the melting savoriness of pork fat), but the toasts it was served on were too thick and crunchy, and they tore the roof of my mouth to shreds. The fennel and celery salad tasted watery—this would be OK as an accompaniment strongly flavored pork, but the pork was just lard, and it was kind of like butter. I can imagine that the dish aimed for subtlety, but blandness was achieved. Matters were made worse by the overpowering alcohol bomb we ordered (and we have no one to blame for that but ourselves).

A small asparagus plate was tasty: a bed of a grain called farrino (?-it tasted and looked like farro) was accented by cubes of cooked prosciutto and some sort of blue cheesy sauce and topped with three spears of white asparagus. It was tasty: the farro was nutty; the sauce subtle and savory; and the prosciutto chewy, fatty, and explosively flavorful. The asparagus itself was bland. It was just steamed white asparagus, and, as far as I can tell, the difference in taste between white and green asparagus is one of degree: green is more flavorful. The prosciutto made this dish a slightly better complement than the fatback for our wine, but, of course, we went there to drink the wine with a burger.

The burger looked good—in fact, it looked pretty near identical to the last burger I had at farmstead (the best burger I’ve eaten in Providence—maybe the best burger I’ve eaten anywhere). And it tasted good. Still better than any of the other burgers in town. But every component of the burger suffered somewhat since the previous burger. The bun was drier and less flavorful (maybe it was a day old?); the shallot spread tasted bitterly of garlic; and, most importantly, the beef did not have the intensity of flavor and juiciness I remembered. We weren’t asked how we wanted the burger cooked this time (we were last time), and we forgot to say we wanted it rare. The burger was more like medium rare; this, of course, means less flavor. Finally, both the burger and the polenta frites tasted like they had sat on a shelf in the kitchen for five minutes or so before being brought to the table—not cold, but also not fresh off the grill/out of the frier. By this time, I’d decided I wasn’t really a fan of the wine, though it complemented the burger reasonably well (something more tannic would have been nice).

Drunk on Syrah, we ordered a cheese plate and a couple glasses of dessert wine. The shepherd’s wheel was runny, ripe, and creamy yet sheepy (the bloomy sheep’s cheeses I’ve had have mostly been young brebis from French supermarkets, and they have hardly any flavor); the Dutch Farmstead was a nice semifirm cow’s cheese, and a comté which was supposed to be from goat tasted an awful lot like cow—confusing but good. We ordered a deliciously dark “sticky” from Australia and a fortified dessert wine from South Africa. Both were good, but they came in ridiculously small glasses (maybe one-ounce pours). That’s silly, if you ask me.

I’m still incredibly into La Laiterie—it’s still my favorite place in Providence, but this dinner was disappointing. I did learn what not to do there: order multiple courses and have a long, drawn out meal on a Friday night. Better to keep it simple: a burger and a glass of wine, and a cheese plate to finish, on a lazy Tuesday.