noodsletter #.0055
Crab brulee, Thai egg salad, wonton noodle soups
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Book Bit
He had reached up to touch the figurine’s arm as it was borne through the circle; with it entered a sweet and unmistakable odor. I recalled the agoutis served at our masking banquets, with their fur of spiced coconut and their eyes of preserved fruits, and knew that what i saw was just such a re-creation of a human being in roasted flesh.
From The Claw of the Conciliator, by Gene Wolfe.
For all the sci-fi heads out there, if you haven’t read Wolfe (or if you have!). This quotation is from a scene that depicts an odd bit of cannibalism.
Book bit from reader Katherine, who says, “I feel like you might vibe with Muriel Ruykeyser (1968).” (I do! Timely. The “devices”… Rukeyser had no idea!)
Work Stuff
We published a very in-depth package about Chinese dumplings for Lunar New Year. Even if you don’t subscribe to ChefSteps, strongly recommend you check out the guide to dumplings, which we’re all very proud of. It’s got video demonstrations and graphic instructions for folding 12 dumpling shapes!
The recipes, of course, are incredible, the latest bit of brilliance from my brilliant colleague Tim Chin. But you’ll need a Studio Pass subscription to access them.
(FYI, even if you DO NOT have a subscription, you can watch the videos at the top of the page; lots of good information in each one!)
Pork, Shrimp, and Cabbage Dumplings
The Ultimate Guide to Chinese Dumplings (Jiǎo Zǐ)
We also threw up a stripped down super cut of the package on YouTube, where the comments are predictably deranged:
you can keep that shrimp well away from my dumplings! terrible dumpling ingredient. great video tho guys i miss you you dont post as often
We also published a couple cool takes on tiramisu:
Here’s a YouTube link on the ultimate—it’s a crazy bit of confection alchemy, molded and sprayed with melted chocolate. I made the quick and easy version (it’s very good, pricey because of EGGS, which I pasteurized using my Joule. We’ve got a more classic version coming out this week that I’m definitely going to make, too.
Have an Egg: Yam Khai Do
Sometime this last week I realized that I chose the worst possible time in history to do a little egg initiative, in light of the supply chain issues and prices of eggs! Never thought of noodsletter as being geared towards the 1%, but here we are. (Yesterday—2/16—I bought 18 eggs for 12 bucks because 12 eggs were…12 bucks. Not some fancy free-range-organic-nice-diet-we-treated-the-chickens-good eggs; these were the we-made-factory-farms-so-you-could-eat-eggs-every-day cheap ones!)
That said, if you are going to splurge on the luxury of a dozen eggs in this economy, the best thing you could make with them to justify their outrageous expense is yam khai do: eggs fried hard and dressed with fish sauce, lime juice, and a bumper car of herby aromatic stuff.
While I was at Serious Eats, we worked with Derek Lucci to produce a raft of amazing Thai recipes (a project that was the brainchild of my current boss, Sasha Marx), including yam khai do. You could follow that recipe to the letter and you’d be all set. However, I make it (or something like it) all the time, and since I do not have reliable access to good lemongrass, I almost always skip it. It has also become enough of a staple that I don’t follow the recipe at all and just sort of wing it every time, and I can report that so long as you fry those eggs hard and have a dressing with some herby stuff, shallots, fish sauce, and lime, it’ll be incredible no matter what.
What I want to focus on right now is just that whole “hard” frying; it is the best way to cook an egg. (If you are one of those people who insists that fried eggs have to have soft whites through-and-through, with no browning at all, know that I am with you up to a point; that’s a very nice way to cook a fried egg, particularly for eating with toast, but it is in no way, shape, or form the best way to fry an egg. What would be frying it hard.) (As irritating as it is to read, and write, these italics, the emphasis is warranted.)
What does frying hard mean? You heat much more oil than you need until it’s smoking, then pop the eggs in—it’s shallow frying, but as hot as can be. You want to hear the eggs sizzle and pop; the whites need to form alarmingly large bubbles that seem, at any moment, ready to direct a jet of hot oil into your eyes; and in about 30 seconds the bottom side of the whites should look like it’s threatening to burn while the tops are still nearly liquid.
Because of the massive heat differential between the bottom of the pan (and the pool of oil) and the top of the eggs, you need enough oil in the pan that you can tilt the pan and easily submerge a wok spatula or spoon into it, so you can baste the tops of the eggs with the hot fat. This will cook the tops even as it causes a lot more alarming bubbling of the whites. As long as you stop cooking the eggs and can slide them out of the pan before the yolks set up hard, you’ve succeeded, and the crispy, glassy, lacy crust on the bottom is basically guaranteed.
I used to spend a fair amount of effort trying to get the eggs out of the pan without transferring a puddle of oil; if this is a real concern for you, you can set a strainer over a large metal bowl and just dump the contents of the pan in the strainer, or you can plop the eggs on a plate lined with paper towels. But nowadays, I view the extra oil (along with the liquid oil) as being a necessary component of the “sauce” that builds on the plate; the salt in the fish sauce and the acidity in the lime juice is tempered slightly by the extra grease.
I Ate an Egg: Crab Brulee
One of the perils of being a more or less public-facing food shitposter/tinkerer is that people will send me some very odd things, and more often than note these missives are colored by an implicit command: Make this, and let me know how it goes.
I don’t mind this; content is king, after all. But I often have regrets.
The other day, one of my longtime Instagram followers who has impeccable taste in Persian carpets sent me this reel:
Canned crab, Old Bay, an egg, cream, and a bruleed top? Sure, why the hell not?
Inasmuch as I have zero issues with many types of canned seafood—I am actually a huge fan of bad canned clams, as I’ve written about before—I admit that I have never eaten canned crab, and it left a lot to be desired. I’m sure there are good canned crab products, but this Bumble Bee White Crabmeat is not one of them. It’s not disgusting or anything—it’s just not very good, watery, tiny shreds of meat that have just a faint whiff of all that’s great about crab about them. (Also lots of miniscule shell pieces.)
I don’t keep Old Bay around—honest question, who does? What else is it used for other than boiling crabs and making crab cakes, and how often does anyone do either of those things to sustain a market for a seasoning?—but I did have some sorta trashy sambar masala lying around (the brand is reputedly notorious for having elevated levels of heavy metals in its mixes), and the combination actually sounded great to me.
Pity about the egg and cream, because that’s where this thing goes awry. While it’s baked in a water bath and so is technically a custard, it is in fact just a watery, creamy, eggy mess. The bruleed top just makes it sort of disgusting; not sweet, per se, but sweeter than it has any right to be.
(The spice mix with crab? Amazing.) (Although one of my Instagram followers noted that MDH is notorious for having elevated levels of heavy metals in its spice mixes; be warned.)
So, don’t make this. You know what would be better? Crab chawanmushi. Funny thing about that is I’ve got just the recipe for ya: Dungeness Crab Chawanmushi.
Another idea: Indian-style scrambled eggs with sambar masala instead of garam masala, dressed with a crab and tomato salad.
Wonton Noodling
I finally made it to Maxi’s Noodle, after having gone three weekend in a row to Chinatown (Manhattan) to give it a whirl.
I had heard the rumor that Maxi’s was opening a Manhattan location and I guess they’d registered it with Google Maps before they opened, as it showed up when I searched. I took the train in and swung by, but no luck; it was closed. Then Chris Crowley wrote a piece about how it was opening imminently, and I went back, without realizing that the piece clearly stated “next week”; yup, it wasn’t open.
Third time’s a charm, right? I made plans to go with my brother and niece, and they ended up waiting for 15 minutes in line on a very cold and blustery day; I was late, and showed up literally as they were being told that the table might have to be given up—whoops! But we made it in, ordered, and everything was great.
I got the wonton noodle soup with added housemade fish balls. Verdict: Everything was good, but I am a little skeptical about all the superlatives people throw around about wonton noodle soup in NYC. Is Maxi’s “the best”? Maybe. Sure, okay. It probably has the edge on HK Wonton Garden (super solid option) or Uncle Lou’s (also quite solid)—the soup is better than at both those places. The wontons are impressively stuffed with shrimp, and little else. But I’m not sure if that’s what I prefer in a wonton?
When I was living in HK (well, visiting my parents over successive summers in college), there was this one, tiny wonton noodle soup place in the basement of one of the many mini department stores in Causeway Bay that I ate at almost every week. Simple, yet delicious, beautifully balanced soup, small wontons with diameters a little larger than a quarter, plump with shrimp but also rich with lard and ground pork, plus the standard firm and crinkly alkalized egg noodles. I preferred the bowl from that place over everywhere else, including from the super popular chain Crystal Jade (which had, to be fair, an excellent wonton noodle soup, but it was fairly generic, with tiny wontons) and placed that were raved about (there was one spot that was famous for their huge wontons, each of which contained a clutch of five whole shrimp, packed into the skin in such an orderly arrangement that recalls the perfectly alien order evident in crab lungs).
All of which is to say, I have a specific idea in mind when I think “best wonton noodle soup,” and I’m not saying it’s right, just that none of “the best” wonton noodle soup spots I’ve tried in New York have approached the quality of “the best” wonton noodle soups of my mind (which I ate in HK). Maybe I make too much of my (likely apocryphal) memory. However, several years ago, when I was working at Serious Eats, I took it upon myself to test and “improve” Kenji’s recipe for wonton soup, only to discover after making it that it was great and needed no improvement… and I liked it more than any of the wonton noodle soups I’ve had in the States. Buy some wonton noodles at a Chinese grocery store and throw them in, and you’re all set.
(The reason I brought up the cold, blustery day and the wait in line before was, after we were done eating, I asked my niece if she’s come back. She said yes, but not if she had to wait in line.)
That said, after eating at Maxi’s, and thinking about it for a week, I got a hankering for wonton noodle soup, so I made the ramen version: wontonmen!
Given the similarities between the two (wonton noodles are basically ramen, since they’re alkaline noodles, but with egg in the dough; ramen is basically Japanese-style Chinese noodle soup), it’s sort of incredible how different they are.
The noodles here are straight semolina (a version of the recipe is in my book). The soup’s a pork/chicken stock with a bunch of dried seafood (mussels, scallops, niboshi, kombu), shoyu tare with a bunch of the same dried seafood, and the wontons are just pork. Oh, and there’s a bunch of garlicky chicken fat in there.
“News”
Everybody, including Kenji, is getting in the egg game at the wrong time!
Marian Bull on Rancho Gordo is quite funny (I feel sort of similar, but the beans I eat I buy mostly at Indian grocery stores). Clams and sausage and beans recipe sounds good, but “2 lbs of small clams” seems either like too little (littlenecks/quahogs) or too much (manilas)?
Sort of related, but one of the best clam stew recipes is this one from Eric Ripert: Chicken bouillabaisse. The aioli + bread dipped in the broth is life-changing.
Sietsema on foodies and the aughts.
I keep meaning to “get back into” sourdough; if/when I do, I’ll be following Andrew’s levain upkeep advice.
I hope all of you already subscribe to Food Is Stupid, but after this headline, how can you not?
Maxi’s is decent, though I prefer the smaller versions that seem to be only available in HK.
Have you tried Authentic Xi’an Flavor in Mott Street eatery? Really solid Xi’an style noodles and dumplings.
Wow. That book bit. So rough.
Our grocery store actually has signs about an egg shortage and you're limited to two boxes per visit! I'm like at that price? No problem.