noodsletter #.0050
Tim Walz's hotdish hot mess; banchan; bitter melon redux.
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Book Bit
Where did it start? The iron roar of the market,
with its crescent moons of Mohammedan melons,
with hands of bananas from a Pharaoh’s casket,
lemons gold as the balls of Etruscan lions,
the dead moon of a glaring mackerel; it increases
its pain down the stalls, the curled heads of cabbages
crammed on a tray to please implacable Caesars,
slaves head-down on a hook, the gutted carcasses
of crucified rebels, from orange-tiled villas,
from laurels of watercress, and now it passes
the small hearts of peppers, nippled sapodillas
of virgins proffered to the Conquistadores.
—From Omeros by Derek Walcott. Had to look up the sapodillas.
Work Stuff
The summer of torturing me, specifically, continues at ChefSteps, with an epic, nothing-like-it-on-the-internet recipe for Texas-style barbecue brisket from Joe Yim, replete with full guides for planning the whole process, trimming raw brisket, wrapping brisket, and slicing smoked brisket. The best part, for you (maybe), is you can do it on a charcoal grill; the worst part for me is I don’t have a charcoal grill! (This all comes on the heels of a steakhouse package that I can’t really take advantage of because the other members of my family don’t like steak.)
Joe also gave us a nifty smoked brisket burger recipe to use up the trimmings, and we’ve got a smoked spareribs recipe coming down the pipeline. (Yup, both require a charcoal grill.) (The guides are all free; the recipes are paywalled.)
I have never wanted to eat barbecue I’ve made myself as much as I do right now.
Tim Walz’s Turkey Trot Tater-Tot Hotdish Recipe
I avoid talking about politics in this newsletter (for good reason—no one wants the political opinions of someone who named their newsletter “noodsletter”), but sometimes duty calls.
This recipe, posted by Governor Tim Walz on the bad social media place, is no good. It is, in the fullest sense of the term as its currently used, a hot mess—attractive, but sloppy.
Let’s start with the ingredient list. There are very few rules to recipe-writing, but a longstanding and eminently reasonable convention is that ingredients should be listed in the order of their appearance in the recipe. Not so for Mr. Walz; his green beans live on an island; the bacon and garlic seem lost at sea; and the ingredients for the roux appear precisely opposite of where they should be. If the ingredients were reordered to match the recipe steps, and the other recipe-writing convention of listing them in order of greatest quantity of ingredients to the least was observed, the list would look like this:
1 lb ground turkey
1/2 cup green onions
1 egg
1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
2 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp sage
1 tbsp. olive oil
1 lb green beans, diced
4 slices of bacon
6 tbsp. butter
1 1/2 cup chopped baby bella mushrooms
5-6 tbsp. flour
2 1/2 cups whole milk
1/2 cup half and half
3 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese
1 package tater tots
I’ve retained the way the recipe indicates amounts, which aren’t standardized in any way. Why the period after “tbsp” but not “tsp”; why is the cup plural for milk but not the mushrooms? And I’m almost certain that Mr. Walz does not mean “diced” when referring to cutting up green beans.
Ok, big deal; the ingredient list is a mess. But what about the recipe steps? Sorry, but they don’t make sense.
The bacon…cook it first! (And just break it into pieces with your hands; have you ever chopped crispy bacon?) Then fry the turkey sausage-thing in the bacon drippings; there’s no need for the olive oil at all. But wait, will you just put a meatloaf into a skillet and cook it until it hits 165 degrees internal? No, no, you will stir it around and break it up, to improve browning, to hasten cooking, and so your hot dish doesn’t have a single, swart layer of turkey meat as its base.
(A note on seasoning: If Mr. Walz uses table salt, the turkey meat mixture is seasoned quite well—at 6 grams for 450 g of meat plus 50-70 g of eggs, that’s nicely above a 1% salinity. 50 imaginary points for House Walz, unless he’s using kosher, which clocks in at about 3 g per tsp, in which case…straight to jail.)
Transfer the browned ground meat to the dish; great, now you have drippings in the pan you can use to sweat and brown the mushrooms. Heck, you can still add the butter. (More points for House Walz—let’s say an imaginary 60—for letting the foaming subside before adding the mushrooms, which indicates the butter has split and risen above 212 degrees F.) But wait, what is this “browning point” he speaks of? What does it mean to cook something 2 minutes past the browning point? I have no idea. Negative 80 imaginary points!
Shall we double back to the green beans? Does Mr. Walz not know what “blanch” means? Two to three minutes for cut up green beans is an error; two to three minutes for cut up green beans being thrown into a casserole is an atrocity. (What few points he might have accrued for shocking the green beans in water is subtracted and multiplied because it is, ultimately, a useless step. They’re overcooked, and going to end up being even more overcooked, so why waste the effort?) (Let’s say…negative 5, times 10, so a net negative 50.)
The rest seems okay to me, other than adding large bits of raw onion to the finished roux. Negative 30 points because Mr. Walz doesn’t take the time to sweat ‘em down.
All that being said, I’d probably crush the heck out of this if it was at a potluck. Mushy green beans don’t actually bother me, and large bits of near raw onion… you know, if you topped the whole thing with finely diced raw red onion, chopped chilies, chaat masala, chopped cilantro, and a big squeeze of lime, it would probably be amazing.
However, we must love the truth better. The verdict? Negative 50 imaginary points, and that’s not even taking into account the ingredient list.
(I want to note that I thought about doing the same assessment of Vice President Kamala Harris’s roast chicken recipe, but there’s far less objectionable stuff in there, even if I have my quibbles.)
Little Banchan Shop in LIC
I was lucky enough to be treated to a meal at Hooni Kim’s Meju in Long Island City by my book editor. It was one of the best meals I’ve ever had. I’m planning on sending a little write up to paid subscribers, but while I was there I stumbled onto something that’s far more useful for the vast majority of the people: Kim’s Little Banchan Shop is incredible.
It’s all there in the name: it’s a small shop that sells banchan, the side dishes that complement any Korean meal. The one drawback is that the stuff’s pricey, but the quality more than makes up for the cost. I went a little nuts after dinner because I was so thrilled (some of the banchan sold at the shop accompanies the meal at Meju), so the money I saved on dinner went straight out the window, between the cab fares and the bill for all the banchan. Do I regret it? Not at all!
The kimchi in particular is worth making the trek (if you live in Queens and Manhattan, they deliver)—the radish top kimchi was out of this world, but it’s a seasonal item and I’m unsure of its availability. The baechu kimchi was better than others I’ve bought.
Far and away the star of the selection for me was the watercress muchim; I could eat it by the bushel. The garlic scapes in doenjang were also very good.
What do you do with banchan? Eat them with rice! But I discovered they’re also a perfect complement to a crisp dosa…acid, salt, and greasy and crispy fermented rice batter…amazing.
Black Smoke at the NYT Dining Desk
As everyone knows by now, Pete Wells stepped down as the NYT restaurant critic, and a search is (presumably) on for his replacement.
Priya Krishna served as a pinch hitter this last week with a review of Bungalow in the East Village; a note suggests that Krishna and Melissa Clark will tag-team the reviews as interim critics.
Who knows how the Times fills this position. The last three critics—Frank Bruni, Sam Sifton, and Wells—have all come from within the paper, and it’s clear that prose style is important for the position. Maybe the Times has another ringer food critic toiling away in some bureau somewhere, or on the editing desk in, I don’t know, Metro.
However, when I was reading Helen Rosner’s latest review at the New Yorker—about Strange Delight—it seemed to be about as well-written a review as anyone, anywhere, could ask for. (I liked the “slinky, stinky wisp of anchovy” in this little run: “Smartly, the menu’s culinary homages are more riffs than facsimiles. Galatoire’s oysters Rockefeller, broiled with the expected spinach and dash of Herbsaint, are deepened with a hint of dill and a slinky, stinky wisp of anchovy.”) She seems to be firing on all cylinders at this black-smoke moment.
Bitter melon (again)
I’m back on a bitter melon (or bitter gourd) kick, mostly because I’ve been ordering vegetables semi-regularly from Suzuki Farms. Bitter melon is one of my more level-headed purchases; I also bought a $29 (!) musk melon from them, which is still sitting on my counter ripening five days after delivery. All the stuff is top notch—cucumbers and turnips and long onions are regulars in my cart—but the bitter melon has to be my current favorite.
When I previously talked about bitter melon, I focused on removing the bitterness—a fool’s errand, as it turns out, because the bitterness is the whole point. I now skip the maceration step, and I simply remove the seeds; I don’t spend much time worrying about scraping out the pith.
I do, however, still blanch them very briefly; 30 to 45 seconds in a lot of salted water. I don’t shock them.
The blanch is just so they soften (a little, they’re still a little crunchy) in the quick stir fry I’ve been doing, which is very simple: Sear the bitter melon half moons (in batches, if necessary), then bloom some minced garlic and a Szechuan-ish spice mix (cumin, a petal or two off a star anise pod, Szechuan peppercorns, white peppercorns, black peppercorns, and several facing heaven dried chilies) in the oil and liquid left in the pan, toss the seared bitter melon back in, and then season with tamari and fish sauce. The amount of spices…I just eyeball the ratios (about 1:1:1:1 for the cumin and peppercorns) but try to make enough that each half moon has at least a pinch coating the exterior—so, quite a lot. This last time I added a healthy amount of hanegi at the end, which was delicious.
I still think the key is using more oil than you think is necessary (and more salt). The only problem with this preparation is my wife and I fight over the leftovers.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the “health benefits” of bitter melon. If you can trust the internet (you can’t), this stuff is a miracle, and it kind of tastes like a miracle, too!
“News”
Paula Forbes is working on a barbecue cookbook, which I found out from Paula Forbes’s newsletter about cookbook news. Phew.
Not sure how I feel sharing a name with the priciest sushi spot in town. (The subject of this newsletter was “The $1,000 Thrill of Sushi Sho.”)
I regret to inform you I am now subscribed to Leafhopper. I really don’t need any more hobbies, let alone food-adjacent hobbies. But Max is always an interesting read.
Toward an evolutionary understanding of stuffed pasta.
The changed climate junk food bonanza.
People actually DO give out meth as candy! (In New Zealand.)
This chain that basically rips off the concept of Le Relais de Venise L'Entrecôte (one cut of steak, fries, and salad on the menu, and that’s it, other than dessert) is opening up. I sort of want to go to both the chain and Le Relais and do a side-by-side comparison review of sorts, but… I don’t know, seems pricey and sort of pointless. At the very least, I think the new chain ditches the weird French maid outfits on the servers.
Inflation and a weak yen spells doom for ramen restaurants in Japan.
This Italian-inflected Chinese place doesn’t sound very appealing.
This Twitter thread that documents how a woman imported the chocolate muffins served at the Olympics for a pop-up in New York, despite having literally zero experience doing anything of the kind, is well worth your time!
This new pho ga spot sound so good, but if/when I go I’m almost 100% going to get the beef pho.
This article on abuses in the sugar industry in India is so horrific. And of course multinational companies know about it all.