Fig newtons, upgraded.

A while ago, I had this whim that I wanted to try a fig. No, I've never tried one before; I didn't even know if you had to peel it. But I bought one, and it was... really good. As if to follow me up, I got another on my scone plate from Camellia Sinensis (with a good Assam Sree Sibbari--dark red, smooth, spicy, but only served in a teapot, so not worth writing about). On inquiry, however, no one else in my family liked figs. It was going to be hard to integrate them into the old diet.
However, a forgotten family staple was brought up: Fig Newtons, which my family did like. It seemed like a pretty simple combo (fig stuff and sugar-cookie type stuff). There was this cook's illustrated recipe I'd been waiting to try. Sablé cookies are basically sugar cookies, the jewel in the crown of which is their sandy texture. With the peculiar tartness and mushy texture of figs, I thought they'd be in harmonie parfaite. Fig newtons, except with fresh fig and french biscuits.

The most outstanding thing about the Cook's Illustrated recipe was that, in order to maximize sandiness by minimizing moisture, the single egg yolk in the recipe is hard-boiled and pressed through a mesh sieve. C'est assez inouï, at least for me. Except for that time-consuming step, this is a basic recipe: butter & sugar, creamed together with a paddle attachment on an electric mixer, then the flour beaten in till it's something vaguely handleable.
The added difficulty here is lack of moisture. The dough is more reluctant to doughify without at least a liquid egg yolk. My mistake here was not beating the flour enough to make it more cohesive than it was. After making two six-inch logs--with considerable difficulty, since I had to roll it parchment paper to get it to stay together--they were chilled for an hour. In theory, slicing them would result in perfect shaped circular cookies.

FAIL. Attempts to slice the first log resulted in a pathetic, mishmashed crumble of completely un-cookie-suitable texture. This was extremely discouraging. The remedy found was to dump it in a lined loaf pan and squish it to the bottom using another loaf pan. I scored in into squares for post-oven breakage. Espérons meilleure chance au prochain essai...
Que j'ai eu. Fortunatly, the second log sliced beautifully except for the very end. Reason: unknown. I got sixteen v. pretty cookies from this arrangement. Both prototypes were brushed with egg white and sprinkled with demerara (coarse raw sugar) before baking.
Hey, yum! The loaf-pan ones didn't brown very well because of the high sides, but were still delicious. And my improvised fig-coupling went deliciously. Sandy texture delivered the whole extra mile. I was actually ravi by the demerara; crunchy & flavourful. I'm considering replacing half the sugar in the dough with brown for extra sugarness.
Succesful experiment. Will repeat. À la prochaine.

Moment Montréal

Hier, j'ai mangé à un restaurant japonais/chinois (c'est un peu bizarre, mais c'est juste à coté de chez moi, alors je le fréquente quand mes plans pour souper marchent trop pas). La famille à coté parlait Français au serviteur. Lui, son Français n'était pas trop bon: probablement qu'il parlait couramment l'Anglais et le Mandarin ou le Japonais. Là, la famille continua sa conversation--en espagnol, et le serviteur donne leur commande aux cuisines dans une langue asiatique quelconque.

Where else?

Cela dit, je viens d'acheter une nouvelle théière Yixing. Puisqu'il a couté en dessous de vingt piasses, je doute fortement qu'il est en fait fait d'argile Yixing--tant pis. Suivant le conseil du Half-Dipper, je l'ai immergé dans un grand bol de puerh très très fort pour une nuit au complet. Le matin, je l'ai vidé et poli gentiment avec un bout d'éponge non abrasif, et laissé sécher à l'air frais.

Je n'ai jamais eu de petite théière d'argile non varnie avant ça. Ceci sera une expérience. J'ai l'intention de réserver ce pot au thés puerhs, dont j'ai récemment reçu un merveilleux cadeau. Je vais acheter un ensemble wenxiangbei & pinglingbei au Quartier Chinois, et je serai prête à être apprenti maître du gong fu cha. Heu, ouais. Peut-être. En tout cas, je dois garder mes expectations raisonnables (lire: bas) pour ce premier pot. C'est par l'utilisation qu'il s'améliora. Alors, aux maintes infusions que j'y ferai!

Udon Noodle Soup

Weather seems to have a sizeable effect on my cooking choices.

There was a big thunderstorm. This cooled everything right off and made the idea of soup very comforting, not to mention feasible heat-wise.

I loove udon noodle soup. I tend to get it in crummy Asian fast food places, when I have to eat there. (Not all Asian fast food places are really bad. Airport ones are, generally, but otherwise, you've a fair chance of getting good food.) In any case, it's pretty hard to botch, in general. Good sign for tentative ethnic foodie.

J soups have a basic and very all-purpose stock: dashi, made from water, dried giant kelp, and shaved dried fish (bonito flakes). When I say all-purpose, I mean it: this is in miso, won ton, anything. You can, of course, buy it powdered: hon-dashi--but no properly obsessed foodie would do that. My cookbook, this time, didn't lie about the stock being easy to make. It took under ten minutes. Nor do you need a really exceptional ethnic grocery store to get these thing. If it's Japanese, it will absolutely positively have bonito flakes, sometimes called katsuobushi, and kombu. Fear not.

(I got mine at a certain Miyamoto. Small but well-stocked Asian grocery store; it may be the only one in the Westmount area).

So that part succeeded. I was working from a recipe here from a site called Soup Song; I'm kind of in love with it. Have added to link list. The udon noodles are to be cooked by boiling water, adding noodles, then adding cold water to the pot and returning to the rolling boil. It was pretty easy. The most complicated thing was the mushrooms. Using dried Shiitake, you soak in boiling water for an hour. Then you add sugar and soy sauce to the "mushroom tea" formed, and cook it down, the mushrooms absorbing some liquid. Seeing as there were the noodles to cook, the salmon to grill (I was doing grilled salmon as a side), the broth to heat, and the mushrooms to caramelize, and I only had two burners, the result was some sad, confused burner-hopping. On the bright side, the mushroom stuff was dee-lish: the liquid gave a gorgeous flavour to the dashi and the mushrooms were good. Next time, I'll use more.

One thing about the udon was they were very starchy, turning the water white. Asian noodles are rinsed and rubbed together after cooking to remove that starch. I don't think I did this hard enough. They were a little odd, slimy maybe, and colored the dashi. Don't overlook this step.

The salmon was being served separately, although I ended up eating it in the soup: yum. So the only other component was some chives, en défaut de spring onions. Eat up! I was satisfied with this for a first try, but it had flaws, so...

Next time:
1. Mirin! I didn't season the broth with it enough. Bad. Not enough character.
2. More work on the noodle front.
3. More mushrooms; more of that whole affair.
4. More broth; my proportions were kind of messed up, and there were too many noodles.
5. No chives. They were just weird.
6. More... stuff. It was a little too simple for a one-pot meal. On the list: fried egg, à la bibimbop, nori (awesome in soups. Period), and integrate the salmon.

Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

These are hot days. You would think, what with the ferocious winters, Montreal would at least boast clement summers. Sadly, this is not the case. Even what has been a singularly cold, rainy and depressing July isn't the norm. The norm is high twenties and extreme humidity. All this to say--what better time to make ice cream?

Mint has taken over our backyard, and I wanted to try something that was not chocolate, vanilla, or fruit sorbet (I love fruit sorbet, but at this time of year I can't bring myself not to eat fruit raw). The obvious is mint chocolate chip. Yum. Refreshing, chocolatey and smooth.

Also, it uses some of the rampaging mint. But here's the catch--none of the recipes I can find use mint, preferring peppermint extract. Peppermint extract? To me, that sounds like making vanilla ice cream without a vanilla bean: a cop-out. Maybe I'm being stuck up, but I wasn't going to buy any of it. So.

Vanilla ice cream scrapes the weird little seedy sticky things from the inside of the pod into the custard (a tell-tale sign of good vanilla is little black specs) then lets the milk stand or simmer or both for something like fifteen minutes with the pod, after which it is discarded. Here, I could use the infusing plan, but bits of crushed mint-leaf didn't sound like such an appealing stir-in. (Also, beware "bits" that are supposed to give the whole a flavor; they don't magically exude taste. They explode in your mouth and overpower everything else. I had a very good brownie once at Au Festin de Babette on St-Denis, warmth and gooiness-wise. But it had bits of crystallized ginger in it, and it was really weird. I ended up just sort of avoiding them.)

Before I give the game plan, I'll go over ice cream technique. Whisk egg yolks with a lot of sugar until thickened and pale yellow. Simmer milk, cream, whatever it is. Whisk hot dairy gradually into eggs, return to saucepan, thicken, stirring constantly, until "the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon." Refrigerate till cold. Freeze. Add stir-ins in last 5min of freezing.

My original plan was to replace the sugar in the recipe with sugar syrup, which would be easy to flavour with mint. It would be like... really really sweet mint tea. Then I would also simmer the milk 5min and let stand 10min with lots of mint sprigs. I used the recipe in the ice cream book for simple syrup: equal parts sugar and water, simmer 2min. But with mint.

First modification: although the syrup was very minty, I chickened out of replacing the sugar with it because of proportion concerns (cup for cup replacement? Yes? No?) and because I didn't think it was thick enough. I ended up replacing 2 tbsp of sugar with it. It did lightly flavour the eggs, but not enough to carry the ice cream.

Second: because of this, I decided to leave the mint sprigs in the mix right up until the custard thickened. I kept adding new leaves en panique. And in the end, I wrapped some mint in cheesecloth and popped it in while the custard refrigerated, removing only before freezing.

For the chocolate chips, I chopped up a whole bunch of chocolate by hand. One or two handfuls; I didn't bother to measure, which may have been a bad idea. And the verdict...

Pretty good! The mint flavour was definitely there. It was very different, and far more sincere, than it would have been with extract.The chocolate tasted great. The ice cream was smooth. But I had a few complaints about the finished product, and these are they:
1. The mint flavour wasn't strong enough. Better, but weaker than if I'd used extract. I'd wanted something that made you go Whoa, mint! Instead of Oh, mint.
2. Too much chocolate. Though it was chopped to the right degree, and added texture to a certain extent, the crunchiness was overpowering and kind of obliterated any other texture.
3. It wasn't frozen enough--but this was solved after freezing it, out of the ice cream maker, in a container in the fridge and eating the next day.
So, for next time:
1.Don't chicken out of the syrup. I'm going adapt a recipe that calls for syrup to get the proportions right, simply adding the mint.
2. Make the milk mint-infusing simpler by making mint teabags with cheesecloth and changing them for fresh ones when the milk is added to the eggs. I doubt infusing while chilling made much difference, so I'll leave that out.
3. Decrease the chocolate by half. My guess is I used something like a cup, so I'll do half next time.
Overall, though, a successful experiment, and pretty delicious. I'll be trying it again. When I do, I'll post the finalized recipe. In the meantime, I'm going to use the mint syrup to make interesting cold drinks. Because, after all, these are hot days.

Ali Shan M. Chen 1991

Bon. J'ai l'intention de compléter ce post en Français, ou Franglais, qui serait vraiment ma langue maternelle en tout cas. Mais Camellia Sinensis (Maison de thé--je l'ai mentionnée avant comme un facteur de ma découverte du thé dit Orientale) est dans le Quartier Latin, quelques 10 mètres de St-Denis sur une quasi-ruelle. Comme son nom l'indique (Moi, en jouant Trivial Pursuit: Quel ville du monde possède un Quartier Latin? Montréal! Ce qui est vrai, mais je parie qu'ils pensaient à Paris) c'est un quartier très francophone, et je voudrais en garder l'esprit.

Pour parler un peu de Camellia Sinensis: le Half-Dipper, Britannique, se plaint qu'il n'y a pas de "tea scene" à Londres. Eh bien! Nous en avons une, et Camellia Sinensis l'est. C'est un endroit très zen, plutot petit, et très populaire, particulièrement d'un Vendredi ou Samedi nuit, lorsque j'ai déja attendu une demi-heure pour avoir une table. On vous présente un beau menu, qui offre thés blancs, verts, noirs, wulongs, et pu er, du Japon, de l'Inde, du Chine, du Taiwan, etc. Ils sont tous servis sur les petits tables de thé avec tout ce qui est nécéssaire: soit en chung, en gong fu cha, en kyüsu, ou pour les moins obsédés, simplement en théière. Le thé sélectionné est excellent, l'ambiance est merveilleux, et en tout, c'est un de mes spots favoris dans la ville entière. (De plus, les scones sont presque égaux aux miens, ce qui en dit beaucoup.)

Mais le thé. S'appelle Ali Shan de M. Chen. (Non, j'ai aucune idée de qui M. Chen s'agit. Ce thé fait partie du sélection printannier de thés, rapporté par l'équipe de thé après leurs voyages en Asie pour choisir les meilleurs thés pour l'année.) Originaire du Montagne Ali à Taiwan, c'est un wulong roulé de haute altitutude. Les feuilles sont présentés ci-haut. Moi, je trouve que les wulongs roulés ont l'allure particulièrement attrayante. Plus tard quand les feuilles s'auront déroulées, elles se revèleront grandes et fortes. Elles dégagent de beaux odeurs peu surprisants: un peu musky, mais beau quand même. L'odeur plein et frais mais pungent des wulongs est en vedette. Il n'y a à peine une indice du gazon qui apparait quant au gout.

La liqueur est jaune-vert--beaucoup plus jaune que vert. La première infusion est assez limpide, et sans couleur intense. Un peu de sédiment. J'ai fait ce thé en gong fu cha. Petite théière blanc porcelaine--je crois sans mémoire, mais je ne saurais vérifier. Se déguste en ensemble tasse odeur + tasse goût.

Alors, le wengxiangbei présente tout de suite ce que j'attendais: odeurs "hautes" de gazon et de bambou, très végétal sans être acide. Et là... grande surprise. Le végétal se désintègre dans la tasse odeur pour donner place à des odeurs dé-li-cieuses de presque-cannelle, d'une croûte de tarte dans le four, un peu de flocons d'avoine, de cône de gaufre tout frais... Ces odeurs sont basses, réconfortantes et pleins de personnalité. Wow.

Malheureusement, le goût ne ressemble en aucun point ces odeurs. Malgré étant énergétique sur les lèvres, la première qualité que je remarque est l'amertume. Très très gazonneux et très très amer. En dessous de ces saveurs, rien. Le liqueur n'a zéro présence dans la bouche, ni dans la gorge.

Mais... attends. Après dix minutes, je commence à "ressentir les effets". Et ces effets sont puissants. Ça commence gentiment, je suis plus réveillé, plus concentré, plus alerte. Là, je commence à être jittery. Mes membres vibrent presque. Wow encore.

En temps, je m'en viens à pardonner le gout un peu. Par la quatrième infusion, le thé a une présence en bouche mielleux, et très agréable. La couleur du thé se rajoute de beauté. Des traces de sucré se mèlent au saveurs en bouche. Plus de grain se présente en-dessous du bambou/pois. Mais l'amertume est loin d'être disparu.

En tout, j'ai été surpris et ravi par ce thé--exceptant son goût! Ce qui me montre simultanément que le goût n'est pas le tout d'un thé, et qu'il en fait une bonne partie. Malgré les plaisirs, ce thé est trop aggressif pour ressayer. Mais merci à Camellia Sinensis pour un session agréable et intéressante.

The First Post

Hello, cyberspace. This is Montreal Foodie. Pleased to meet you.

I'm new to the blogosphere--the active part of it, anyway. But I have read too many genius Half-Dipper and Tea Masters posts, and was too fangirl-ized by Julie and Julia, not to want to give it a shot.

So, food and tea and Montreal. Montreal is the coolest city ever. Its bilingualness is cool. Its marchés publics are cool. Its ethnic diversity is cool. Hell, even Alstom Télécité (those screens on the Metro) is cool. J'adore tout ce qui fait Montreal--pour une ville aussi cool que ça, c'est foule beaucoup. I'm thinking this blog will be bilingue in a minor way. I'm anglo bilingual, so English is my préférence. But if this blog is to be partly about this city, what good is it if it doesn't communicate a tiny part of the thrill of living in one of the only truly bilingual cities anywhere?

Thoughts on food: life is too short to eat bad food. Really. (It's also too short to use teabags and not explore your city.) I love experimenting with food, especially ethnic, via restaurants and ethnic grocery stores (ethnic grocery stores are wonderful things) and home cooking and exciting cookbooks. I can cook, or so I've been told; my skills are not in an exceptional way of things, but I'm getting better and having fun doing so, which is the point. I want to post about new stuff that I try--restaurants, recipes, spices, Chinatown markets, whatever.

And finally, tea. I've been drinking tea (technically, anyways) I suppose for five years now. I grew up with it, but a very Western brewing style. Never, ever, teabags, which I'm grateful for; we drank it from a big teapot, Twinings looseleaf, in mugs, with sugar, and pretty much Lapsang Souchong all the time. But I've grown out of that. I still do it (although, of course, without the sugar) but I'm a whole lot more savvy to Eastern brewing styles, thanks to excellent tea bloggers, to my Chinese friends, and to my favourite tea place, Camellia Sinensis. I buy tea and teapots on a semi-compulsive level. My favourite instrument is my cheap little gaiwan. I take tasting notes and make little tea setups. So, as the Half-dipper says, I am a little bit sad.

In any case, no one is going to be reading this, so I guess I will persevere writing to you, cyberspace, until I get some actual readers. I feel a bit like a maniacal monologuer, but I suppose that's the whole point. Till next post, when we will see how the actual blogging goes.