mission chinese

i was looking for a shirt and found, as well, the new york location of mission chinese food (on orchard street, a few blocks south of houston; conveniently close to doughnut plant, where the filled square doughnuts are the only things worth getting and they are very much worth getting). at 2pm on a thursday afternoon, there was no line. if you are planning to visit, bring a crew of at least four people. the food is good and everything inside is tinged with red from the aggressive lighting programme.

mysteriously, the manhattan mission chinese is better than what i remember of the original in san francisco. and even though it is its own entity on the east coast, the chinese name printed out front is that of the dingy lung shan chinese food shop that it shares space with on mission street. these refinements combined with traces of history, i suppose, are how legends grow.

nearly there

[from the archive]

R&D in food is frustrating in ways that are not obvious (or, perhaps, even frustrating) to anyone outside that quite small domain. above, a new dish when it was "90% there."

one of the chefs had made particularly rapid progress: just a few days of work and a couple of flashes of intuition had brought his side project from an offhand remark by the head chef to a refined set of preparations with unusual but complementary flavours. everyone thought it was on the verge of being polished enough to make it onto the regular menu: an astonishingly quick development process. being so close, why not try it out for a visiting Important Chef of great renown dining in the restaurant tonight?

there is great excitement, and much needs to be done to prepare enough of the ingredients to serve everyone in the Important Chef's party. our protagonist, the R&D chef, comes in early on his day off to prep and will stay through dinner service to personally cook the dish. there is stress, there is pressure: the Important Chef is Very Famous in some circles. our protagonist feels the mixture of privilege and dread from having an opportunity to show his quality to "someone whose food i've idolized for years." mid-day, the head chef joins our protagonist and the rest of the R&D team to work out the presentation and plating of the dish. after an hour, they have gotten nowhere. no presentation seems to work, and they are running out of the laboriously prepared ingredients. there is no time today to make more.

several other special courses have been prepared in Important Chef's honour and, with less than an hour to go before he sits down to dinner, the team decides to pull this new dish from his already overstuffed menu. so that the ingredients are not wasted, some friends of the house who are also dining tonight will get it at their table instead. the word "crestfallen" is not inappropriate in this situation. our protagonist is packing the prepared ingredients from his R&D lab bench to bring them over to the service kitchen. as he walks out the door, he calls over to me: "in your notes, you could write down that 'he was a little upset at burning his day off to not cook this new thing for the Man Himself."

nearly there, but no cigar.

be here now

midway through the first annual nordic food symposium, the kitchen sent out two large bowls of tiny, ripe june-bearing strawberries scattered with anise-scented wild herbs, with cream from pastured danish cows. this is the best new nordic cuisine—perfect products, simply prepared. such rigorous and complex simplicity, done well, conceals the experience and maturity necessary to produce it. choosing food at the height of its flavour takes knowledge and experience; serving that food simply prepared and mostly unadorned takes confidence and self-knowledge.

simple food conceals its complexity. take, for instance, the foraged wild plants that now show up everywhere, especially in the nordic countries. thorsten schmidt, host of the symposium and chef behind malling and schmidt, showed us a few of the fields and forests from which he gathers wild vegetables and herbs for his restaurant in aarhus. learning about the culinary uses of these plants has been a multi-year exercise in trial and error, schmidt said. "i wanted to use more of the plants that grow in jylland than the farmers grew at the time but we had no local foragers to gather them for us. i had to learn how to identify and use these plants myself ... it was slow to start with,” he says, “but i now use more than 180 plants from around here to accent my cooking.”

he discovered early on that botanical field guides are useful for survival but not gastronomy. they often indicate if a plant is edible but almost never explain how plants might be used by cooks interested in their flavour or texture. they also rarely describe how plants look like as they grow through the year. over the last few years, schmidt has developed a network of experts who help him discover the wild foods around aarhus. one of these is a botanist with a particular interest in edible plants. "i send him a photograph of the plant,” schmidt says, “and he tells me how much i would have to eat for it to be poisonous. then i start experimenting with it, picking, tasting, and cooking with different parts of the plant every few weeks."

a slow, trial-based, experimental approach like this is critical because knowing what to eat is mostly about knowing when and how to eat a particular food. this is especially true when the seasons are as dramatic and change as quickly as they do this close to the arctic circle.

bo bech, from geist in copenhagen, was also at the symposium. the dish he made for dinner on the second night featured grilled baby leeks. "we forget that things change through their lives," he explained. "no one in denmark, maybe no one anywhere, harvests baby leeks this small. these are just a few days old and they will surprise you." he handed me a baby leek to illustrate. it was an unpromising vegetable, looking like a cross between a weedy tuft of grass and and a very slender scallion. but grilled for just a few minutes on one side over a very hot fire, the leeks became soft, sweet, and juicy on the charred side, pungent with the green flavours of garlic and white onions on the raw side.

grilling a baby leek on only one side is about cooking in the moment: a leek is young enough to be cooked like this for only a few days in its growing cycle. after that it is a regular leek, too big and fibrous to eat without long, slow, moist heat. cooking in the moment means learning not only that a leek is good to eat for this vanishingly small window of its life, but also that it is delicious cooked in a way totally different from how leeks are usually cooked.


warmed smoked eel, crème fraîche, char-grilled baby leeks, raw nasturtium leaves, carbonized garlic, by bo bech. (photo by claes bech-poulsen.)

"something we have had to do is learn how to use the products as they change through the seasons, to appreciate something for what it is right now instead of wishing it was something else, to be willing to reorganize the menu completely when a particular ingredient suddenly goes out of season because of the weather," schmidt says. "it takes a bit of rethinking on the part of the chef and diner. we have to learn to eat things as they are and figure out how to make them the best for what they are instead of wanting something that is out of season."

committing to cooking in the moment, especially when the moments are as fleeting as they can be in the nordic region, requires that the chef gives up the predictability that buying produce from all over the world offers.

schmidt says that "it takes a while to learn to subdue your ego and get used to not just letting yourself take the easy way out and ordering whatever your purveyors have, whether or not they're in season. you learn to cook whatever is available. when you're lucky enough to have beautiful ingredients, your responsibility is to do the work to find out what they are, when to use them, and how to cook them as simply as possible." in exchange, the chef grows comfortable with responding in the moment and eventually develops the knowledge and confidence to seek out the best products and then serve things at the peak of their ripeness almost completely unadorned, as schmidt did: perfect, perfumed strawberries accompanied by nothing more (and nothing less) than a shower of herbs and pale gold cream smelling of fresh-cut grass.

doing it right

in our relentless pursuit of making everyone satisfied that they have "done their best" and that everyone is a perfect snowflake, we often lose sight of how there are right ways to do things and thus, conversely, wrong ways to do things.* someone who is adroit follows an elegant and effective course of action, like odysseus, whose cunning and shrewdness (metis) led him to do the right thing (not a coincidence that droit in the original means right or law). a good printer, a good builder, a good furniture maker—all are adroit in their practice. the same holds for the cook. i found this passage from zhuang zi in the most unlikely of places (fuchsia dunlop, for those who care):

庖丁为文惠君解牛，手之所触，肩之所倚，足之所路履，膝之所倚， 砉然响然，奏刀豁然 ，莫不中音。合于桑林之舞，乃中经首之会。文惠君曰：“嘻， 善哉！技盖至此乎？” 庖丁释刀对曰：“臣之所好者道也，进乎技矣。始臣之解牛之时，所见无非牛者。三年之后，未尝见全牛也。方今之时，臣以神遇而不以目视，官知止而神欲行。依 乎天理，批大郄，导大髋，因其固然。技（枝）经肯綮之未尝，而况大骨乎！良庖岁更刀，割也；族庖月更刀，折也。今臣之刀十九年矣，所解数千牛矣，而刀刃若 新发于硎。彼节者有间，而刀刃者无厚，以有閒入无厚，恢恢乎其于游刃必有余地矣，是以十九年而刀刃若新发于硎。虽然，每至于族，吾见其难为，怵然为戒，视 为止，行为迟，动刀甚微，然已解，如土委地。提刀而立，为之四顾，为之踌躇满志，善刀而藏之。” 文惠君曰：“善哉！吾闻庖丁之言，得养生焉。

fortunately for you (and me), here is the least egregious of the translations of this passage:

His cook was cutting up an ox for the ruler Wen Hui. Whenever he applied his hand, leaned forward with his shoulder, planted his foot, and employed the pressure of his knee, in the audible ripping off of the skin, and slicing operation of the knife, the sounds were all in regular cadence. Movements and sounds proceeded as in the Dance of the Mulberry Forest and the blended notes of the King Shou. The ruler said, 'Ah! Admirable! That your art should have become so perfect!' (Having finished his operation), the cook laid down his knife, and replied to the remark, 'What your servant loves is the method of the Dao, something in advance of any art. When I first began to cut up an ox, I saw nothing but the entire carcase. After three years I ceased to see it as a whole. Now I deal with it in a spirit-like manner, and do not look at it with my eyes. The use of my senses is discarded, and my spirit acts as it wills. Observing the natural lines, (my knife) slips through the great crevices and slides through the great cavities, taking advantage of the facilities thus presented. My art avoids the membranous ligaments, and much more the great bones. A good cook changes his knife every year; (it may have been injured) in cutting. An ordinary cook changes his every month; (it may have been) broken. Now my knife has been in use for nineteen years; it has cut up several thousand oxen, and yet its edge is as sharp as if it had newly come from the whetstone. There are the interstices of the joints, and the edge of the knife has no (appreciable) thickness; when that which is so thin enters where the interstice is, how easily it moves along! The blade has more than room enough. Nevertheless, whenever I come to a complicated joint, and see that there will be some difficulty, I proceed anxiously and with caution, not allowing my eyes to wander from the place, and moving my hand slowly. Then by a very slight movement of the knife, the part is quickly separated, and drops like (a clod of) earth to the ground. Then standing up with the knife in my hand, I look all round, and in a leisurely manner, with an air of satisfaction, wipe it clean, and put it in its sheath.' The ruler Wen Hui said, 'Excellent! I have heard the words of my cook, and learned from them the nourishment of (our) life.'

from the inner chapters, translated by james legge

this passage describes action marked by elegance and economy of means, made possible by extensive and intensive knowledge and a particular approach to action. this approach also permeates dôgen's instructions for chef monks; these tenzo kyōkun (written "as instruction for accomplished practitioners of the way in the future") are worth reading.

cooking with fire and clay

L-R top row: garden furniture, unidentifiable magazine, pot with stew, bolivian peasant wood stove, firewood, pot with beans, max's surfboard.
L-R bottom row: some rocks, bricks.

michael pollan is such hot shit, cooking mindblowingly delicious multicourse collabo meals over the span of more than a day with nothing more than an enormous wood-fired oven, a bevy of experienced baker-folk and chef-types*, apparently vast quantities of local seasonal produce and carefully raised meats, specialty equipment (including a real, live salamander, shown here to great advantage hovering above apricot and saffron gratin), and untrammeled access to a palatial country estate in napa, calif.

while pollan and his gang did that last weekend—and in fact completely unaware at the time that we were recreating his experience in microcosm—a few of us were doing something quite similar but on a scale befitting our stations in life.

caitlin's fieldwork brings her often to bolivia from whence she has, over the course of several visits, amassed a sizeable collection of clay pots and other cooking apparatus in which she now does most of her cooking. she returned from her latest excursion with a bolivian wood stove which is elegant in its absolute simplicity. this object, which you see in the photograph above, inspired chris and caitlin to convene us for a saturday afternoon exercise in atavism: to return to the humans that we all were in the dark backward and abysm of time by cooking a meal with fire and clay.

our interdependent cooking configuration:

1. clay pots, wood stove, and mad cooking skillz from caitlin; 
2. more mad cooking skillz, lamb shoulder, plus general aura of cool from max (who makes music, works for the food project, and surfs);
3. bricks, firewood, and knowing commentary from chris; 
4. big talk and giant scarlet runner beans from mexico by way of steve sando (by way of me).

to reduce to almost zero the risk of a runaway conflagration, chris and caitlin constructed a platform of bricks upon which the stove would sit. we were momentarily nonplussed by the firewood (clearly too long to fit completely in the stove) but decided to go for it anyway since we didn't have a saw to cut things up. max and chris started the fire with damp leaves from under the tree in the back yard while i scraped at a piece of firewood with a kitchen knife in an unsuccessful attempt to generate the tinder that we didn't have.

an open question: the stove was painted bright red to start and then turned black right after the fire got lit. will chris and max die tragically young, their promise unfulfilled because of toxic fumes inhaled while lighting a fire in a bolivian wood stove? only time will tell. but before describing what went down in each of the pots, let's backtrack an hour or so before the lighting of the fire, to when we cheated slightly by using the gas stove to boil gallons of water, brown many pieces of lamb in a cast iron skillet, fry up onions for the beans, and set off the smoke detectors for the entire building. to caitlin's landlady and her numerous neighbours, we say "sorry!"

in the big pot: a lamb stew traditional (read: unbelievably labour-intensive) bolivian style. the lamb was large chunks of shoulder from animals raised by max's dad, which max first browned slowly in a large cast iron skillet. i only infrequently have the patience to brown meat thoroughly, so it was a pleasure to watch someone else do it right and apparently effortlessly. after we shut off all the smoke detectors, the browned pieces of meat went into the clay pot with their deglazed pan juices and enough water to cover, and we set them to boil hard on the wood stove. meanwhile caitlin put on her special cooking hat and started to make the chili paste. this incredibly laborious process begins with toasting a large quantity of aji amarillos in a dry skillet, then simmering them with some water, then seeding them and blending them with some onions, garlic, and parsley stems. midway, ask your toiling lascars to dice some yellow onion finely and brown those in oil before adding them to the blender. the result is a brightish yellow paste with a hint of smoke, which you fry in oil until it darkens considerably. she stirred many large spoonfuls of this paste into the stew for the final 90 minutes of cooking, during which we micro-managed the fire so that the stew stayed at a gentle simmer. the stew took 3 hours on the fire, by the end of which time all the collagen had fully hydrolysed, leaving the lamb spoon-tender. 

in the small pot: rancho gordo scarlet runner beans cooked with onions, cayenne, cumin, and a bay leaf for 4 hours on a gentle simmer with water to cover. a load of finely chopped garlic went in for the last 30 minutes, followed by bunch of bitter, sugarless bolivian chocolate. cooking these beans is a walk in the park by any standard, but especially so when compared to a traditional bolivian lamb stew (see above). i futzed with them too much, but you cannot screw beans up. this is why i like beans so much.

   

some observations about clay (old hat for caitlin who cooks in nothing but clay): 

1. once properly seasoned and cured, you cook with clay pots just like you would with metal ones. 
2. conductivity in clay is much lower than in metal, so a variable heat source is much less problematic than you think. clay and wood are built for each other. 
3. food cooked in clay tastes earthy, in a good way. earthy food is both not new and also quite new.
4. no clue about comparative heat capacity and thermal mass.
5. heat control on this little stove thing (accomplished by pushing in or pulling out flaming pieces of wood) is surprisingly good.

having started cooking just after noon, we got down to eating at 5pm. beans with a dusting of chopped cilantro and onion, and lamb stew with a squeeze of lime and a salad-y garnish of halved cherry tomatoes, chopped parsley, and olive oil. i normally use a single aji amarillo as a flavour note in a large pot of beans or rice, so the large quantity of chili paste in the stew came as a surprise. the toasting and slow cooking made the chili mildly smokey and much sweeter than i usually experience it. good eats are often about an interplay of textures and temperatures: lamb shoulder soft enough to fall apart at the touch of a spoon but not mushy, a rich and distinct aroma of lamb, smoke, and sweet chilies, the herby crunch of parsley and cilantro, sugar and acid from the limes and tomatoes, beans with a texture almost meatier than the lamb and with some bite from the chocolate. a killer lunch.

here's how we stacked up against team pollan:

1. they took 36 hours to cook their meal; we took 5. 
2. they were in napa, calif.; our operation was in somerville, mass.
3. they used a custom-built wood-fired oven; we used a bolivian peasant woodstove (or at least i think it's a peasant stove).
4. they made a massively multicourse meal featuring many brightly coloured food items; we made beans and a lamb stew, both of which were brown with brown highlights, though the garnishes did feature green and red bits.
5. they cooked meat raised with care; we cooked meat raised with care by someone we know (one step removed).
6. "never once [did they have] to run out to the store for a missing ingredient"; we did two separate runs for garlic, dried aji amarillos, onions, tea, sugar, limes, and a taco for max. 

reflecting on the meal beyond the food is now mandatory in any writing about food but i usually find it deeply tiresome. fortunately, one of michael pollan's numerous gifts is the ability to reflect incessantly on the meal beyond the food without ever seeming to weary of the task. i leave you with his conclusion from his 36-hour wood-fired goat-cooking odyssey, which conveniently is applicable also to our humble experiment on this other, colder coast:

I realize I’ve gotten at least as much pleasure from working together to create these meals as I have from eating them. Sometimes producing things is more gratifying—and more conducive to building community—than consuming them, I decide. ... there’s something special about the camaraderie of the kitchen crew.

* including chad robertson, who is half of the team behind tartine, a bakery in san francisco i lived regrettably close to. their croissants have a special place in my heart and on the walls of my arteries.