London : Shindler's Dish

Hotter Than Hades

BuzzEditor — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:19:00 GMT

Chile Peppers

Photo: Phil Zrimsek

A recent story in the Telegraph told the sad tale of a fellow in Edlington, Doncaster, who accepted a bet to make a chili so hot no one could eat it. Thirty-three-year-old Andrew Lee won the bet – he was apparently the only person who could eat it. Unfortunately, he suffered a cardiac arrest and died the next morning, with only the chili to blame as he had recently been given a clean bill health.

Now, I’ve never eat a dish so spicy that I’ve had to call the paramedics. But I have come close. I like to think of myself as a tough guy with a stomach of galvanized aluminum, the kind of stomach you could put all sorts of bad news into without needing to drink a Brioschi afterward.

For those who feel the need for some real science, let me explain that hot peppers, chiles and the like are hot because of the presence of an alkaloid called capsaicin, a bitter compound with the formula C18H27NO3. The net effect of all those letters and numbers is an extreme irritant, which literally burns the skin. (Rub a hot pepper on your hand and within a few minutes you'll feel a burning sensation and your skin will redden – in scientific jargon, the effect of the alkaloid is rubefacient and hyperaemic).

Nutritionally, peppers are surprisingly good for us – they contain reasonable quantities of vitamins A, B and E, and lots of C (pound for pound, hot red peppers contain more than 10 times as much vitamin C as oranges). Eaten in moderation, they're said to aid digestion. Eaten in excess, they become a challenge to the human spirit.

It’s possible that the hottest dish I’ve come upon was a creation called Spicy With Spicy, which was served at a four-table hole-in-the-wall in the SoCal (San Gabriel Valley to be exact) that vanished many years ago. But the memory of that dish has never faded; I think I can still taste it, in the way that nightmares recur in Stephen King novels.

It actually should have been called Spicy With Spicy and More Spicy. It was basically a pile of peppers, that allegedly included pork, though it could have been almost anything for the pork was buried beneath an avalanche of peppers fresh and peppers dried, peppers pickled and peppers fermented.

There was a lot of salt in there too, though it's hard to say – my mouth went into vapor lock after the first bite. I could no longer taste anything; it completely froze my tastebuds. Which was a pity – I hadn't yet finished the last of the peanuts with anchovies. Technically I was alive. But my mouth was dead. And it stayed that way for days.

If Spicy With Spicy seems a bit hardcore for you, consider the life-changing pepper dishes at Chung King, a small storefront on the unfashionable southside of Garvey in Monterey Park, CA. The most popular dish at the restaurant seems to be Chung King–style hot chopped chicken, a plate that seems to appear on virtually every table. It’s so devastatingly hot that to eat more than a mouthful is fool hardy. Like Spicy With Spicy, it can lead to a total shutdown of the ability to taste anything.

What I found was that mixing the chicken with rice, about one part chicken to 10 of rice, created a dish that radiated heat, but was at least manageable. In general, the trick to eating at Chung King is to mix the intensely spiced dishes (which, based on the little pepper icons on the menu, are about 90% of the choices), with the handful of milder dishes – or at least with the pepper icon dishes that are less fiery than the hot chopped chicken. On the less incendiary side of things, there's the cold chopped chicken with spicy sauce, the braised bean curd casserole, the wonderful celery with ginger sauce, the cucumber in garlic sauce, the Chung King–flavored noodles, any of the soups and any of the crisp rice-crust dishes (essentially sizzling rice).

And then, there are the items listed under the headings of "Dishes with Sichuan Pickled Peppers" and "Boiled Dishes in Hot Sauce." The boiled sliced chicken in hot sauce sounds reasonable enough – but the sauce cut deep into my consciousness, a startling hotness, a dish that made me gasp with pleasure and pain. Pickling seems to quadruple the intensity of the peppers, which may or may not be an illusion.

What's not an illusion is that pickling increases the sodium considerably, making this one of the saltiest dishes I've ever tasted – even carefully separating the stir-fried fish, the sliced beef and the eel from the peppers didn't reduce the salt and spice – these peppers are that powerful. It's constantly overwhelming. It's like music played at its maximum volume; sooner or later, you long for peace and quiet. Which is why a big bowl of ice cream isn’t just a pleasant dessert; it’s an essential remedy for the peppers that ail you.

– Merrill Shindler

Breaking Bread With Its Preeminent Scholar

BuzzEditor — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:13:00 GMT

Steven Kaplan in France, where he investigated collective bread poisoning for his latest book

Photo: courtesy of Steven Kaplan

Good bread can be hard to find. At least it is if you've got the lofty standards of leading bread historian Steven Laurence Kaplan, who reveals that he tends to BYOB (bring your own bread) even at fancy restaurants. Kaplan, a Cornell professor, has written Good Bread Is Back and, more recently, Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread), about a collective bread poisoning that occurred in a small town near Avignon. He recently spoke at Breadbar in LA, and the Buzz caught up with him to glean further crumbs of knowledge. The man sure knows his baguettes, but the wonder is he knows his Wonder Bread as well.

ZB: The press release for your appearance at the Breadbar describes you as "the world's leading expert on French bread" and "the world's preeminent bread scholar." Not to be too irreverent – but are there others contending for those titles?

SK: Irreverence is an excellent posture for an interviewer. Let's call it skepticism, to be more elegant or neutral. I have worked with and on bread for 40 years. It is unlikely that there is anyone else on the planet – unless he or she lives in a cave or operates clandestinely – who has combined the practical experience in the bake-room with the infinite investment in archival research, who has articulated the practices of the artisan and the intellectual. Were you to query experts in France, I think they would concur with the Breadbar's ostensibly hyperbolic appreciation.

ZB: Did you grow up eating Wonder Bread?

SK: Yes, alas. Yuck. Powerful memories of the crystallization of a robust aversion.

ZB: Is Wonder Bread properly bread?

SK: To the extent that it incorporates flour, water, some salt and a fermenting agent, yes. To the extent that it combines all sorts of supplementary additives, technological auxiliaries, improvers, and myriad other chemicals, fortifiers, preservers, etc., and that it is manufactured in hyper-industrial conditions, to call it bread requires a magnanimous generosity of spirit.

ZB: What drew you to bread?

SK: On the sensual plane, the accident of an encounter in a Paris bakery the first day I set foot in Paris 45 years ago drew me to it. Intellectually, it was the search of a doctoral thesis "problem" or framing theme that touched on all aspects of the human experience from politics and social relations to economic growth and state construction; from religion and collective psychology to culture and agriculture, etc. The one nourished the other. The hedonic spurred the scholarly appetite. The two have operated in fruitful complement for many decades. I am convinced that truly exalting pleasure cannot be mindless. Even if one is not preoccupied with origins, influences and evolutions, bread must be good to think before it is good to eat, to paraphrase the great French anthropologist [Claude] Lévi-Strauss.

ZB: Do you nibble on bread the way others might smoke a cigarette?

SK: No. I respect bread too much to nibble on it mechanically or casually. Yet I cannot avoid tasting it and assessing it whenever I encounter it. When I buy a baguette, for example, if it is truly enthralling, I risk devouring half before I reach home.

ZB: Is there a hidden aesthetic to bread?

SK: Good bread is predicated on an aesthetic of rigor and truth that yields beauty and pleasure. It is anything but hidden. It is the mark or test of artisanal creation and realization.

ZB: If a meal without wine is like a day without sunshine, what is a meal without bread?

SK: A meal without bread is very much in the same idiomatic relation of necessity that your aphorism describes. It is more than a mere complement. It opens a whole organoleptic front. It enriches and delights.

ZB: Which restaurants have the best breads?

SK: You know, I have been spending much more time in France than in the U.S. over the past few years. Even in France, I often bring my own bread to fine restaurants. Restaurants there propose sumptuous dishes and engaging wine lists, but are often indifferent to or disdainful of bread. I take this as a personal affront. I try to shame them into obtaining better bread. Making bread is a separate craft from cooking, and is rarely done well by chefs – who are busy doing other things.

Beyond Breadbar, in the USA, I have never tasted acceptable restaurant bread.

ZB: Well, then, what are your favorite breads at LA's Breadbar?

SK: My favorite Breadbar breads are the baguette (Tour de France), the canonic measure of excellence in classical baking, and the sumptuous Millstone (or Tourte).

– Merrill Shindler

Is Free Food Worth the Price?

BuzzEditor — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:21:00 GMT

Browsing through the online edition of the Times of London the other day, I came upon a seemingly fascinating story titled "Top 10 Ways to Forage for Free Food".

It's a guide (of sorts) inspired by an interview with British food writer Prue Leith in Good Housekeeping, in which she describes the pleasures of lifting the eggs from the nest of a wild Canadian mother goose and turning them into a tasty omelette – an act the article from The Times makes clear is very illegal. ("Bad, bad Prue.")

And so, instead of stealing eggs from the nests of protected species, the article suggests a double handful of perfectly legal forms of foraging – many of which are just as horrifying, if not more so. It begins with "Squirrel Fishing," which we're told is "common in the US." Apparently, the trick is to tie a peanut to a string. The squirrel is tempted by the peanut, begins to toy with it – and is grabbed and bagged. The result is "a supper of grey squirrel."

Now, I don't know which is more horrifying – the notion of snagging a squirrel for dinner in the park…or the contention that this is "common in the US." But honestly, it seems less irksome than the notion of wild goose eggs. And it's followed by a bunch of suggestions for gathering your own food that make a burger at Mickey D's seem quite pleasurable by comparison.

We discover that 25 dandelion roots are enough to make one cup of dandelion coffee – which is caffeine-free, so what's the point? Nettle tea is apparently quite pleasant as well. (Ick!). Fresh-picked mushrooms are a pleasure – unless you pick a bad one, in which case they make for a last supper that friends and family will speak about for years. ("Remember when Uncle Morty ate the mushrooms and turned blue?") Snails are, of course, a treat – as long as you spend several days detoxing them from the Snail Death you've spread over the garden.

And then, of course, you can save a fortune on perfumes (according to the article) by making your own with rose petals. All you've got to do is collect handfuls of petals, and boil them in water for two hours. Then, strain them through cheesecloth until the mixture is clear. Add alcohol. Keep in fridge. Blackberry juice on the lips and cheeks will give you "a healthy, antioxidant flush." Which leads us to at least two realizations. Foragers have a lot more time on their hands than the rest of us. And they have a complexion that comes from a diet of mushrooms found under trees – sallow and pale.