noodsletter #.0036
Japan! A salty update! Test a recipe for me will ya?
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No “real” recipe this week—got a marinade I’m thinking about turning into a recipe, more on that below—but as promised all the recipes ever published in noodsletter have been archived in the very first noodsletter, which you can find here.
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Book Bit(s)
He had never had any money for candy with the Dursleys, and now that he had pockets rattling with gold and silver he was ready to buy as many Mars Bars as he could carry—but the woman didn’t have Mars Bars. What she did have were Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum, Chocolate Frogs, Pumpkin Pasties, Cauldron Cakes, Licorice Wands, and a number of other strange things Harry had never seen in his life.
Harry’s mouth fell open. The dishes in front of him were now piled with food. He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, fries, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup, and for some strange reason, peppermint humbugs.
When everyone had eaten as much as they could, the remains of the food faded from the plates, leaving them sparkling clean as before. A moment later the desserts appeared. Blocks of ice cream in every flavor you could think of, apple pies, treacle tarts, chocolate eclairs and jam doughnuts, trifle, strawberries, Jell-O, rice pudding…
From Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling.
It doesn't make sense to me that the wonderful wizarding world of Harry Potter has a bunch of magic-infused candy, but then has the most humdrum selection of real food. It's like you get Willy Wonka on the train but then you get stuck at a British Sizzler.
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The proposal is a little more nuanced than that, and its goal is to fundamentally alter the way fish harvesters view their catch and its revenue potential. Really interesting stuff.
Also picked up a copy of this new Anna Hazel cookbook Tin to Table: Fancy, Snacky Recipes for Tin-Thusiasts and A-Fish-Ionados solely because it has a clam dip and clam garlic bread recipe I want to make (the clam garlic bread is essentially this one, but with double the clams: sold). Fun book for canned fish people. (Do people really age their canned fish?)
Japan!
We went to Japan for a week while my kid’s school was on spring break. It was my first time back in six years, in part because of the pandemic, in part because we couldn’t afford it. (Before that, I would go back to Japan at least once every two years.)
Here’s some snaps of food I thought you might find interesting:
One of my favorite parts of Japan is the convenience stores (“konbini”) all have natto rolls: Cylinder of rice stuffed with natto, with a sheet of nori encased in plastic so it stays crisp. Two of these are the ideal breakfast for me.
I think at this point, this is my favorite bowl of ramen in the world. It’s got nostalgic value (I’ve been eating it for about two decades); it’s steps away from my grandmother’s house; it’s from a true mom-and-pop ramen shop run by a husband and wife team; it’s “kodawari ramen,” that is, every element is finely crafted by the cook—the noodles are hand-cut (“teuchi”) and hand-massage (“temomi”), the soup uses crazy good dried seafood, everything is made with crazy good technique, including the stir-fried vegetable topping; it’s ethereally delicious. My ramen-nut kid said her shoyu ramen was the best she’s ever had, and it’s really freaking good, but the one I like is the “shio tanmen,” which means salt-flavored ramen with stir-fried vegetables. Just a fantastic bowl of noodles.
Miso soup with shijimi is my preferred version of miso soup. Shijimi are brackish water clams that have an inimitable flavor, and it’s so, so, so good when combined with miso and dashi.
Everyone in my Japanese family uses a miso produced by one of our in-law’s families (say that three times fast). It’s an awase, or mixed, miso: red and white, and I bring back a bunch every time we visit (during the six year hiatus, I got it shipped in a couple times—prohibitively expensive). My grandmother used to use a fresh niboshi dashi (a dashi made with kombu, katsuobushi, and niboshi, or dried infant sardines) for miso soup; I was shocked to discover that my aunt uses dashi granules for her miso soup. It was pretty tasty, but… this is a perfect example of generational culinary knowledge being lost! Anyway, this miso soup is amazing.
These are all examples of “sansai,” or spring mountain vegetables. Fukushima is more widely known in Japan for its hills and forest, and in fact it has a relatively small coastline compared to other prefectures; I sort of never really understood this since my family’s area is a port town and is a five minute walk from the Pacific. These things are kind of a specialty, although I believe all of the ones I tried were cultivated. The really good stuff is foraged wild.
The first is urui, just sliced and blanched, we dressed it with a sweet miso dressing. Sort of like endive? Delicious. The second snap is a mix of wakame, young bamboo shoot tips, and the tops of yama udo, or mountain asparagus. The bamboo was boiled, wakame was just briefly simmered, and the yama udo was raw. Only the lightest seasoning, but the combination was incredible, both in terms of texture and flavor. Very hard to describe. (The bamboo was much tastier than the bamboo I made myself and documented in the last noodsletter.)
This is katsuo (skipjack tuna; bonito) sashimi. This is young bonito (the older bonito that comes in autumn is called “returning katsuo”), so it’s quite lean; the returning bonito is super fatty and rich. They both have their charms. This sashimi very meaty, almost steak-like. Katsuo sashimi is dipped in a mixture of grated garlic, grated ginger, and soy sauce, since the flavor is quite strong. It’s really delicious!
There’s not much to do in Yotsukura, so one day we went to an all-you-can-eat strawberry greenhouse—you can eat as many as you want while in the greenhouse, but you can’t take any with you, and it costs like 10 bucks. It’s pretty hard to eat a ton of strawberries! Also, after I posted about it on Instagram, my old colleague Maggie sent me an article about these operations; they burn kerosene during the winter to create an artificial spring so they can produce these insanely beautiful strawberries before actual strawberry season. Pretty whack!
I also managed to squeeze in six bowls of ramen while there, and posted a couple to my IG. They were all pretty good, except for one; one was godawful. I present to you one of the worst bowls of ramen I’ve ever eaten in Japan (the worst was one in Nagano, filled with those spring mountain vegetables):
If you ever find yourself in Shinagawa, do not go to the closest ramen shop to Shinagawa Station.
Selected Photos of Food and Drink From Inside the Splash Mountain Ride at Tokyo Disneyland
Salt
Thank you to everyone who weighed out their Diamond Crystal kosher salt and sent me their results. I love that you did it, even if the little experiment revealed that I am not a smart man; in fact, this was very humiliating to me, personally. I half-heartedly emailed Cargill/Diamond Crystal with my results and some questions, but they never got back to me and I didn’t follow up because…well, you’ll see.
Basically, I guess I must have been on some seriously bad drugs for 10 years or something, because both the “old” and “new” Diamond Crystal weighs the same: 1 teaspoon is 3 g, and 1 tablespoon is a little over 9 g. I swear I have weighed this freaking salt many, many times over the years, and I swear it was 4 g per teaspoon and 12 g per tablespoon, but I guess swearing doesn’t make anything true.
These averages were from 5 noodsletter readers (THANK YOU!) and myself, with a total of 23 different measurements, averaged out. Obviously, this is not exhaustive, but how much more do you really need?
Again, for emphasis:
1 teaspoon of Diamond Crystal kosher salt = ~3 g
1 tablespoon of Diamond Crystal kosher salt = ~9 g
To anyone with whom I have argued about the weight of salt in the past 20 years, you were probably right (unless I was arguing that 1 teaspoon is 3 g; I must have taken both sides of the argument over the years…which is, incredibly, 100x more irritating!): I’m sorry!
“News”
Wild food media news, 1 and 2:
Longtime Saveur staffer Kat Craddock bought(!) the magazine. Seeing what happened to Saveur was sad, curious to see how this unexpected turn of events works out.
The weird, fancy recipe videos on those new screens on subway platforms in NYC are just bait.
I, too, am convinced Toad from Super Mario Bros. is Asian, but I have to take issues with “you don’t often hear about peopling maining Toad in Mario Kart.” Granted, I never played the 64 version, but back in the day I ethered everyone in Mario Kart using only Toad.
I clicked on this link because of the photo of the cocktails with the wrung out lime halves, which seemed like an odd styling choice to me, but I’m linking the article here because I am honestly not sure that people understand what a douchebag is, and why it sounds very weird in the context of mixing drinks: “This drink combines rhum agricole with a combination of three ingredients that became known at the Franklin as the “douchebag split”: fresh lime, elderflower liqueur, and Aperol.”
This is the worst advice for picking a restaurant in the world. The menu descriptions? Pfui. Guy has never read the menu at Yunnan Flavour Garden.
In other odd food writing things, what’s going on with this lede?
The first time I visited Manhattan’s new lunar landing-themed hot pot restaurant, it felt like walking into a house party whose host wouldn’t pay for Spotify Premium. I was carrying a bodega bag of loose Sapporo beers — I excused myself after discovering the restaurant was BYOB — and a house remix of the 2013 indie rock sensation “Sweater Weather” was playing over the speakers.
Was it the first time he visited if he walked in, walked out, bought beer, and walked in again? I guess it really depends on when he excused himself after discovering it was BYOB, but it either was or it wasn’t the first time he visited when he was carrying the beers. It all just reads like, “The music is repetitive and btw I drink Sapporo.”
While I’m picking nits about writing, here’s a piece about Japanese sweets, and yes they are referred to multiple times as being super old/ancient/thousands of years old/age-old. Imagine if we wrote about flatbread or tortilla or frying fish like this!
Penzey’s really doesn’t have time for Republicans.
HellGate is so good: “Why Does a Plastic-Wrapped Turkey Sandwich Cost $15 at the Airport?”
This piece by Paul Theroux about lunches and the literary life is so well-written, even if Theroux reveals himself as a not so very nice person.
Eating meat as culture war fodder.
Take a food disgust test!
The purest coffee.
Legalese about food is the best legalese:
Over 125 years ago, the Supreme Court decided whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. See Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304, 307 (1893) (the answer: a vegetable). In a more modern iteration of this legal genre, we today decide, in effect, whether the product “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! Spray” is a butter or a spray. The question turns out to matter because the plaintiff consumers contend that the product’s label makes misrepresentations about fat and calorie content based on artificially low serving sizes.
Russian woman tried to poison U.S. doppelgänger with tainted cheesecake after allegedly killing a woman in her native country
The mini empire being run by the people behind Ayat is so impressive (they briefly opened a butcher in my neighborhood, and the quality—and pricing!—was amazing).
Review of Ramen del Barrio, a Mexican/Japanese ramen spot in Austin, Texas.
Cube-shaped fish-like creature found in Hong Kong.
Science confirms that cranberry products do in fact help prevent UTIs.
The subhed of this is “the rice cooker has been perfect since 1955” and I find it odd that they start off this otherwise unobjectionable article with a lie. (The single-button rice cookers weren’t perfect!)
“I Tasted Honda's Spicy Rodent-Repelling Tape” — This is Dennis Lee-level excellence of content. The photo of the bloody Mary? That’s elite internet content, baby.
Speaking of Dennis Lee, I know I say this all the time, but he outdid himself…again. Who knew that if you boiled pizzle sticks they revert to looking like penises.
This sushi terrorism epidemic is no joke. Really messing with the culture! (My aunt kept talking about it lol.)
Every year I want to try shad, every year I miss the season, and now it might be gone forever!
Obit for Rhagavan Iyer, pioneering Indian-American cookbook author.
Fascinated by eating dog meat, which is causing controversy in Korea. Sort of seems like the cultural hangups of the West have infiltrated Korean culture, but I don’t know enough about the history of the practice to say one way or another.
The hype for hard-to-get reservations has never made sense to me. It’s just a restaurant!
More meat-packing unions, says me. Probably the only path to reform in the industry. (And, you know, not having child laborers cutting up our meat.)
It is not the Champagne of beers; it is the “champagne” of beers.
Sorry, what? 20% on top of 20%? While this is a useful bit of food service writing, are we really expected to tip on top of a service charge? That is insanity.
This “how to cook all the characters in the Little Mermaid” is a great idea, but you gotta serve the flounder as sashimi (along with its frilly engawa), come on!
Chicken Marinade Recipe Test
I’ve been fiddling with this marinade for chicken for a bit. It’s soooort of got the flavor profile of chicken fried in pandan leaves (Gai Haw Bai Toey), but I basically threw it together with that flavor in mind without consulting any sources, so it’s a little different.
I’ve used it with skin-on, bone-in thighs and drumsticks (roasted), wings (flats and drumettes, fried), and boneless, skinless thighs and legs (which I then wrapped in pandan leaves and fried). It’s delicious every which way. I want to do a full recipe that’s a mashup between chicken fried in pandan leaves and “paper chicken,” where marinated chicken is placed in parchment paper and deep fried, usually (as I remember it) with a slice of shiitake and a bit of scallion in the paper package.
Before I do that, though, I was wondering if some of you might like to give this marinade a whirl. Great for kids! (Or, at least, my kid.) If you coat some chicken thighs in it (stab through the skin 8 times or so with a paring knife so the marinade can penetrate and to prevent the skin from getting leathery while it roasts) and roast them at ~375 degrees (350 with convection is better) for about 30 minutes, or until they reach an internal temperature of AT LEAST 175 (I like to “overcook” my chicken to render out more of the fat), they’re great with rice. Pop them under a moderate broiler to brown the skin a bit more if you like.
For the best, easiest results, you should use a mortar and pestle, but you could buzz it with an immersion blender (or just mince the veg and stir it all together).
If you do make it and you have the wherewithal/interest in doing so, I’d appreciate it if you weighed the ingredients.
13 White peppercorns (0.5 g)
25 Whole coriander seed (0.25 g)
Pinch of salt
3 Cilantro roots, cleaned (10 g)
1 Lemongrass stalk, bottom tender 2-inches or so, thinly sliced (8.5 g)
1/2 Shallot, thinly sliced (30g)
5 Garlic cloves, thinly sliced (8.5 g)
1 teaspoon Palm sugar (6.5 g)
1/2 teaspoon Shrimp paste (5 g)
2 tablespoons Chinese dark soy sauce (30 g)
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon Fish sauce (20 g )
Add peppercorns, coriander seed, and salt to a mortar and, using the pestle, grind the spices into a fine powder.
Add the cilantro roots, lemongrass, shallot, and garlic cloves, pounding thoroughly between each addition until ingredient is turned into a paste.
Add palm sugar and shrimp paste and pound until completely incorporated.
Add dark soy sauce and fish sauce and stir with pestle to combine.
This should make enough marinade for 6 chicken thighs, or 3 chicken legs’ worth of thighs and drumettes, or about 12 whole wings.
If you want to grill the chicken over more direct heat, I suggest butterflying the thighs/legs a bit, enough to expose the bone completely on one side, which will let you use much higher heat and get some char while ensuring that the internal temperature will hit around 165 before anything starts to burn.