chez pim

Five Spice Braised Pork Belly: part I

Braised dishes are perfect for these windy, rainy days we've had recently around here. It's perhaps a nod to my Asian heritage that my favorite way to braise is not with wine or rich stock, but simply with water and Five Spice powder. Western cooks turn their proverbial nose at braising with water, as my friend Daniel Patterson pointed out in his recent article in the New York Times, but Asian cooks have been braising with water for generations.

The key, besides long braising time, is to make sure that the protein you use has enough fat and gelatin in the connective tissues to lend an unctuous quality to the resulting braising liquid. My protein of choice is pork belly, especially if I can find one with skin and rib bones still attached. When I use leaner protein such as chicken, I always throw in the neck and feet into the braising liquid as well. They are entirely edible, but even if you don't plan on gnawing at them, they provide the extra oomph you can taste in the sauce.

Browning the meat is less important, despite what Daniel told you in that article, and might even produce a less than perfect outcome. Pork skin, for example, can discolor and might even break when subjected directly to dry heat on the pan. There's nothing much wrong with that, but I love the unbroken skin which, when bitten into, resists ever so slightly before letting you into that meltingly delicious fatty layer just underneath.

One thing I highly suggest you do is make your own Five Spice powder. It's so easy to do, and the result will be vastly superior to most commercial brands available in the west, which I find too overwhelmed with anise. Should I want a purely anise-flavor braise I wouldn't bother with Five Spice in the first place. I also find that most spice blends use the cheaper and more easily available black peppercorns instead of the proper Sichuan peppercorns. And if you know anything about anything at all you'd know that those two "peppercorns" share very little besides the misleading name. Sichuan "peppercorns" are not even peppercorns, but dried outer pods of prickly ash fruits. They have an acidic note and gives a tingling sensation on the palate - both entirely absent in the ubiquitous black peppers.

Chez Pim up for the Golden Clog!

Eater reports this morning...

Michael Ruhlman and Tony Bourdain have concocted The Golden Clog Awards (Ruhlman has previously announced as much on his blog), a quirky little awards event born out of "too many beers and late night yakitori," as Bourdain explained to Eater yesterday.

The awards ceremony, or "awards ceremony," will take place this Friday at 2:00 PM in Miami Beach, as part of the 2008 South Beach Wine & Food Festival, which does lend a certain, frightening air of credibility to the proceedings. Later today we'll bring you a chat with Bourdain about the whole shebang, but at this time, may we present the official list of nominees in the first annual Golden Clog Awards (official statuette above).

And guess what...

THE STEINGRARTEN
For the writer or blogger who actually GETS it

Nominees: Bill Buford for Heat; Pim for Chez Pim; Mike Nagrant for Hungrymag.com

I am a shoo-in for this. Totally. Think about it. It will only serve to legitimize their illegitimacy to give it to the person the least deserving, hence the most deserving. My first class plane ticket to Miami should be arriving any minute now....

Actually, I must say my favorite of all the award categories is this:

THE CAT CORA AWARD
For most fame based on least actual culinary achievement

I truly and wholeheartedly wish to win it some day.....

Le "making" of Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie: the hungry blogger

Have you seen it yet? Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie covered food blogging and bloggers this week. Perhaps you're here because of the show, in which case, welcome. Besides me, the show also featured Mark of Sticky Rice in Hanoi, Josh of Cha Xiu Bao in Hong Kong, and my dear friend David Lebovitz in Paris.

I must say I wasn't so sure how it would all turn out. I had fun filming the show, but frankly it's my first time doing something like this, and I was more than a bit nervous. It, happily, turned out great. As Louisa said, my crew was fantastic and everything went smoothly despite the newbie me.

I love that the show portrayed us food bloggers as passionate food lovers who have a story to tell, rather than a gang of snarky, vindictive, camera-toting weirdos hell bent on messing up the livelihood of honest, hard-working restaurateurs. Of course we don't always have good stories to tell, to be a foodie is to have a discriminating taste, after all. What some of the blog critics have often forgotten, and my friend David Lebovitz stated quite eloquently on the show, we write from a personal point of view. We tell our stories, talking about our experience with a meal, a recipe, or our sometimes exciting and sometimes mundane lives.

Blogging is about sharing, and it proves to be interesting to hundred of thousand of readers each day, not on my blog alone but the entire food blogosphere. We love food and we love sharing it, and through the blogs you can go scouring the "gutters" of Vietnam with Mark on a search for the ultimate bowl of Pho, or follow Josh on his quest to eat a diseased crab, a delicacy of sort in the summer months of Hong Kong, and eat your heart out in the sweet city of Paris with my even sweeter friend David.

Friday Five with Chris Cosentino

Friday Five series resumes today after a week hiatus with not one but two lists of five things with Chris Cosentino, the chef of Incanto in San Francisco.

Those of you you're fans of the Search for the Next Iron Chef last Fall, you should recognize him from the show. He made it all the way to the final three. I wasn't so kind in my critique of the episode he was voted out, but, hey, he's big enough to know it's the critique of the performance and not the man.

Today we should talk about the man, whom I got to know very well, not from his appearances on various TV shows, but from having seen him around the farmers market every saturday morning for about as long as I remember. He's always there, usually at the back of the stalls or by the farmers' trucks forever unearthing unusual stuff for his kitchen. The usual etiquette at the market requires that, when running into someone you know carrying a box or a bag of something interesting, you ask them what they plan to do with it. It's almost like our "how are you". Just as no one would expect a detailed health report from a simple "how are you", no one expects a recipe out of the question "what are you doing with those Myer Lemons?" Unless, of course, the friend you've just run into is Chris. His enthusiasm wouldn't allow it. He'd spent ten minutes giving you a rundown of precisely how he plans to cook the stuff -I'm talking step by step instructions here- and how it would be served on his menu that night, pairing with this dish or that. It's adorable!

He's made quite a name for himself with his love of odd bits and gore. I absolutely agree with him, chickens are not made up of nuggets, nor are pigs made of pork chops. It's clearly more responsible to use every bit of the animals we kill for food. But you would be wrong to think of his restaurant, Incanto, as a place fit only for eating weird stuff or playing Tony Bourdain for a day. Incanto is such a lovely local place, with a menu full of comforting, delicious food. It's Italian-inspired food cooked with the local bounty of the Bay Area. It practically was my canteen the last year I lived full time in San Francisco. And I still go there now, though not quite as often as I used to.

Today, Chris is talking about the five strangest things he's ever tasted, and, to balance it with his more normal side most people don't see, he's also giving us the five most boring foods he love.

Wanna see something fun?

Click on the picture to see for yourself. I promise it's not the Valentines Worm.

If you're in the Bay Area it's happening this saturday, by the way. My girl Louisa has the rest of the schedule on her blog.

Happy Valentines, from the love archives of Chez Pim

On the day we are all supposed to be thinking about love, I am, once again, thinking of my beloved grandfather and his favorite snack, Khao Tung, rice cakes with shrimp, pork and peanut dip. I wrote about it on this day a few years ago, and the memory is still just as sweet today.

Happy day-of-love wish to you and your valentines, whoever they may be.

Michelin France - beware the Ides of March

Say what you will about the Michelin guide, it's still the one that matters to most chefs. Ask any of them. And among the many guides Michelin now publishes -the Tokyo guide being the newest addition this year- the France guide is still the one most anticipated. It's become a spectator sport in the weeks and even months leading to the publication date, with critics and insider bloggers leaking the results - some real, most imagined - earlier and earlier to beat each other to the punch.

Don't look at me. I'm so busy doing autres choses this year that I have no intel to offer. Instead, I have the intel on the intels for you, so you know whom to take seriously.

First off, you should go check out Adrian's blog - he's already got a few juicy bits up, including one that would be considered the most shocking demotion in decades if turned out to be true. I'm not going to spoil it for you here - it's Adrian who dug it up so it would be rude of me to steal his thunder. Go read it on his blog.

Fertiliser soup - soupe de cresson

Inspiration arrives from the strangest of places. This time, it came from watching a super cute animation on YouTube. In the clip, a boy tells a story about a soup his grandmother makes. He doesn't like it. It's green and it smells bad, he begins the story. He refuses to eat it, despite his grandparents' insistent that it will help him grow. Or perhaps because of it. No, I'm not going to spoil the story for you. You'll just have to watch it yourself.

I've been craving a fertilizer soup of my own ever since. Then, another inspiration struck when I saw beautiful watercress at the market on Saturday. So, I made myself a bowl of watercress soup, bright green, zingy, just delicious.

Another love letter, this time for Tony

(If you are reading this post on a RSS reader, click through to Chez Pim for the slideshow.)

I'm writing a lot of love letters these days. I'd better bring my irkable, cynical self back soon or I'd lose all my street cred. But I'll excuse myself this time, for a love letter to Anthony Bourdain. I've just finished watching his unstoppingly entertaining show No Reservations. In this episode he went to New Orleans.

It's not the kind of show that tells you where to go eat, or the kind of critique that warns you the Trout Amandine at Galatoire's was too oily. And it's certainly not the kind of article that's full of stereotypes and mean-spirited comments about the degenerating quality of the food and people in the city.

The New Orleans episode of No Reservations exposed Tony, not as the cranky, sinewy bastard he's constantly portraying himself, but as the sentimental old soul that he truly is. Tony, man, I adore you for it.

Which wok for you?

I've been getting many wok-related questions lately so here's a post to (hopefully) answer all your questions.

The first question is always what kind of wok I use. I use a simple carbon-steel wok I got from Chinatown for just about $15. It's a simple, hand hammered wok with hollow metal handle. The metal is very thin. It transfers heat well, but doesn't hold it very long. This is fine if you know how to work with it. I actually prefer using it over Western style pan with thicker metal that retains heat better, but only for stir-frying of course. That steel wok has been serving me just fine for a couple years now.

My best advice is to pop down to a Chinatown near you and find a carbon-steel wok that looks and feels good in your hand - make sure it's at least 13-14 inch wide, and light enough that you could pick up and shake it with relative ease. That pretty much rules out those absurdly expensive cast iron woks - the purpose of which so far eludes me.

If there's no good Chinatown nearby, I found two that you can order online. Amazon has one that comes with a lid, though the price is a bit steep at $31 - but the lid is handy to have and with Amazon Prime you could get it with free shipping. If not, I found one cheaper on a site selling Thai ingredients, only $15, but with round rather than flat bottom. No idea what their shipping fees are, however. Check with them before you have it shipped to Alaska or don't come crying to me later.

A wok like these ones work best on a gas stove, especially if it has high BTUs. If you're not so confident with the power of your stove, or you have electric stove, a wok is not going to work very well. I once had to endure such a disadvantage, not for long mind you, but I suffered just the same. Anyway, let's not go into my past misery, let me tell you instead about how I worked around the problem.