Winemakers’ dinners usually offer some technical insights into the wines tasted. Earlier this month I had the opportunity to attend one hosted by Bill Hardy who is a brand ambassador for the wines that bear his family’s name. Mr. Hardy and those stand out as having colourful that go well beyond harvest dates, time spent in barrels, and residual sugar statistics.

From the viticulture perspective the big story in Australian wine has been about increasingly warm summers caused by a changing climate. It takes a (more or less) fixed amount of time from bud break to harvest for grapes to produce the compounds that define varieties and set one wine apart from another. The amount of sunshine, heat, and dryness to which the grapes are exposed during this time affects how much sugar they will have at harvest.  In turn more sugar can mean more alcohol.

The Hardy's HRB Shiraz

If you’ve noticed Aussie wine with alcohol well above the standard 12% (and sometimes even hitting 15%) you’re familiar with one side of this story. The other, which Bill Hardy explained, is that winemakers are shifting attention to cooler parts of Australia, like Tasmania.

To match this practical story Mr. Hardy also offered an entertaining one. In its early days the Australian wine industry served as a sort of pseudo-domestic producer of fortified wines for the British market. Eventually tariffs caught up and made it significantly cheaper to import a barrel of table wine. To work around this Hardy’s shipped something like four barrels at 12% and then one at 40% and had their London agent blend it on arrival. Unfortunately, when the Hardy’s proprietor of the day went to check on the system and spoke directly foreman at the warehouse he was told they’d being selling the 12% wine in London and sending the strong stuff to the miners in the Midlands.

The Eileen Hardy Shiraz matched with a course of local cheese.

Enough anecdotes more wine, you say? Okay. Two that we tasted and I particularly enjoy were the Hardys Butchers Block Gold Shiraz Sangiovese and the Hardys Eileen Hardy Shiraz. The former is smooth-drinking read whose fruit is balanced by the complex tannins from the Sangiovese and at $15.05 is a fantastic value. The latter isn’t currently in the LCBO but is one of those McLaren Vale Shiraz–only made in selected vintages that perfectly

For more photos and notes head over to Spotlight Toronto and have a look at J.D. Ney’s post about the event.

“Seriously you have to try these olives”

“There good enough to make a true believer out of any olive hater”

“I never ate an olive before these but now this is all I eat.”

I’m paraphrasing (and exaggerating a bit) but that’s the passion that our London hosts have for the marinated olives at their local pizza joint, Pizza East Portobello. We tried them–a medium dish, also including Marcona almonds goes for three pounds–and they do deserve the superlative praise.

Over a couple of his visits to our table I managed to butter the manager-proprietor up enough (playing the “we came all the way from Canada” card didn’t hurt) that he gave me the recipe.

Small mixed olives, rosemary, and slivered garlic went into two containers and were covered in olive oil.

It is: Soak un-pitted Sicilian olives, garlic, rosemary,  and maybe a little lemon rind in olive oil for two to three days. He was sure to stress that the olive oil must be extra virgin.

I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest super-taster but I’m not without some faculty in the area and in so many applications that involve high heat, long times, or strongly-flavoured ingredients ingredients (like garlic, rosemary, and lemon rind) I can’t taste the difference extra virgin makes. Still, claiming its vital necessity comes as second nature to anyone who considers themselves even vaguely connected to the cuisine of an olive-oil-producing country.

An obvious situation for a side-by-side test, I’d say.

I combined about a cup of small, mixed olives with three roughly-slivered cloves of garlic and a scant half teaspoon of dry rosemary. This mixture was divided into two containers. One was filled, to barely cover the olives, with high-quality extra virgin olive oil from Italy, the other with Gallo brand “pure” olive oil of uncertain origin. I used tall, narrow water glasses to try and reduce the amount of oil I’d need.

After two days of soaking I tasted olives from both containers and had two suspicions confirmed. The oil marinade doesn’t just add flavour from the aromatics but it also leaches bitterness and salt from the olives. Also, I can taste absolutely no difference between the regular and the extra virgin oil.

There are two categories in my mind for the reasons why I’d choose not to use regular olive oil and opt for extra virgin oil instead: either the regular isn’t interesting enough for the application (like dressing salad, roasted vegetables, or risotto) or the regular that is at hand is bitter or unpleasant. The best solution I can see is to find a regular olive oil that tastes decent-to-good and then read instructions like “fry in a litre of best-quality extra virgin olive oil” as “be sensible and use a litre of your quite passable regular olive oil for frying.”

The restaurant critic for the New York Times, Pete Wells, announced on Twitter last week that his newspaper has changed their style guide’s spelling for hot peppers to “chile” from “chili”. I don’t always perfectly land the proper execution but the debates that involve spelling are catnip to me.

I’m just as keenly interested in using somewhat-scientific tests to compare two dishes or two ways of preparing a recipe to improve my understanding of why things taste a certain way.

In this case I found myself with a large Mason jar of dried peppers that I grew last summer, and smoke-dried in the wood-fired oven last autumn. They taste delicious and smell even better (it wasn’t until the middle of January that I finally broke the habit of opening the lid and sticking my nose in for a consuming, smoky whiff). I worry, though that we’re not eating them fast enough.

I’ve been pulling the stems off, shaking the seeds and most of the middle part back into the jar and crumbling the milder tips into stews and various egg recipes. Still it’s difficult to get just the right amount of capsaicin-heat this way. A liquid application seemed like the solution.

Most hot sauces use vinegar as a base; both Italian and Asian restaurants of a certain type feature jars of (semi-sanitary) chile oil on the tables for customers to use. I wondered (out loud, on Twitter) which–oil or vinegar–would do a better job of carrying chile flavour?

Responses varied but tended more towards the case (a good prima facie one at least) that fat’s culinary job is to carry flavour.

So, into each of two very clean 500ml Mason jars I put a handful of the dried peppers and added vinegar to one and oil to the other and left them for a couple weeks while we went on vacation. If you’d like a more formal recipe here you go.

Dried smoked chiles that I grew last summer, further preserved in oil and vinegar.

Chile Oil

• 300 ml oil of choice (I used standard olive oil)
• one handful (maybe 15 small-medium) dried chiles, stems pulled off but seeds left in

Chile Vinegar

• 300 ml vinegar of choice (apple cider for me)
• one handful (maybe 15 small-medium) dried chiles, stems pulled off but seeds left in

This test is a bit more unscientific than usual because I used apple cider vinegar and olive oil. Sure, distilled white and a light vegetable oil would have given a more neutral testing ground but I was just as interested in using the result as in answering the question.

A bit to my surprise, it’s the vinegar that does the less subtle job. Just opening the lid releases a noticeable dose of smoky, chile aroma. It’s flavour is much hotter but also preserves the fruity and wood-flavoured characteristics.

I think the oil has a milder flavour because of fat’s other principal characteristic: It coats the tongue and interrupts our tastebuds’ ability to sense. The advantages it has over vinegar are that the flavour takes longer to build, changes subtly as you swallow, and lingers longer. Also, the oil will store longer and catches up flavour-wise when the food is hot–like pasta or toasted bread.

Both of these very simple condiments do just what I wanted by giving me access to the smoky chile flavour in small doses. And if you just can’t shake the impression that “chile” isn’t the right way to spell the pepper it’s probably because you’re under 40 and the band is still the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The Works Gourmet Burger Bistro chain* has opened their first location in Toronto. They’re opening this week on the Danforth across from Square Boy and down the street from the current pub-burger champ (by my estimation, at least) Allen’s on the Danforth.

To mark the grand opening this Thursday, May 3, 2012 their entire menu (alcohol excluded) will be free. In exchange they’re collecting monetary donations from diners for the nearby Pape Food Bank. The promotion runs from 11 AM to 2 PM for lunch and from 5 PM to 8 PM for dinner.

The giant menu for The Works Danforth. (Click for a larger version.)

Choice is king at The Works. Six different patties are topped with seventy different topping combinations–each with a cheeky local name. Some, like the Benny Piggenbeef or the Sexy Sarah Polley–named for Ben Mulroney and, uh, Sarah Polley–take the local connection a step further and connect with local celebrities.

At the media preview yesterday The Blaze of 1849 (avocado, salsa loco, sour cream & jalapeno peppers) was my favourite of the three combinations I tried. Look for options that include avocado as it does a decent job of combining with the extra lean beef.

All the usual check-boxes for starters and sides are ticked in somewhat unusual, over-sized fashion. The onion rings come in a tower (with their dipping sauces held to the side) and poutine hits the table in a galvanized metal bucket. Not to be outdone the milkshakes are served in half-litre glass measuring cups.

Like the other outlets (the first one opened in Ottawa in 2001) the Danforth outpost features a rustic, industrial decor and a classic rock soundtrack.

*I’m told they prefer “network”.

Every container of alcohol sold in Ontario has a small deposit added to the price to encourage consumers to return their empties. That’s an easy thing to do if you can collect them in your garage and then drive to the Beer Store. For me, I’m not sure an apartment that smells of stale beer or  the jangliest of ten-minute bike rides is worth the two and a half bucks.

Still, it annoys me to just throw the bottles in the recycling bin and I’m intrigued by useful ideas of how to reuse or recycle them myself. On a web site called Green Power Science that’s run by Dan Rojas I found this video of what looks like a very effective method of turning empty bottles into drinking glasses and other containers. I ordered the tool and have had great success with it so I thought I’d share my version of the procedure here.

Positive feedback on my first shot at stop-motion video and the fun I had making it have inspired to use the technique again. This time I’ve narrated the video and I hope that makes it easier to follow.

The music in the video is “Avenger” by Nicwillu and it can be found on Soundcloud. The bottle I’m using is one of the ones from Beau’s Brewery outside of Ottawa, ON.

With a couple minutes of sanding the cut edges of the bottom and top are smooth enough to drink from. As I sort of allude to in the video’s opening sequence, I can see making use of the tops as covers for tea light candles.

As Dan mentions in his original video this method is really easy to use and has a high success rate. So far, I’ve only had one of about eight bottles not break cleanly.

Let me know what you think of the video, what your experience is with cutting glass bottles, and if you have any creative ideas for how to use this technique.

Open just long enough to build a devoted following and a deafening buzz the brothers behind Banh Mi Boys closed their restaurant for renovations over the winter. The much slicker and more colourful space has reopened this week and I don’t think they need to worry that closing dampened anyone’s excitement.

The five-spice pork belly banh mi.

If anything, the original menu options have improved a notch or two from my visit back in December. For instance, they’ve found the right balance between meat and veg for the five-spice pork belly banh mi ($5.99). Items held over from the previous menu have the same prices except the grilled chicken banh mi that has ticked up a notch to $5.49.

The Banh Mi Boys menu now features new items like kimchi fries and beef cheek steamed bao.

Pause before you order and consider some of the new menu’s offerings. The squid taco ($3.99) and fried chicken steamed bao ($3.49) are both mouth-watering options that I’ll have to try on a future visit. Yesterday, I stuck with the beef cheeks steamed bao ($3.49) and was rewarded with large chunks of savoury, just-chewy enough beef.

The beef cheek steamed bao. A delicious new menu item at Banh Mi Boys.

The kimchi fries ($5.99) also seemed wildly popular, presumably because anything with kimchi must be healthy, right?

Their four-man assembly line has improved its efficiency but at least for now traffic is heavy. If you live or work in the area and can avoid the peak meal-time rushes you won’t wait as long. While winter holds on by his fingertips I’d avoid the front table that is bathed in cold air every time the door opens.

For an in-depth profile of the owner-operators, David and Phil Chau see Karon Liu’s story on The Grid’s website.

Banh Mi Boys: 392 Queen Street West, Toronto; @BanhMiBoys and their Facebook page.

There are restaurants that are difficult to describe in one sentence. They balance (sometimes successfully) between doing different things for different people. This is clearly not the case with Don Don Izakaya which is about uncomplicated fun at a louder-than-normal volume.

It took a couple of false starts but it seems restauranteurs have figured out the right sort of izakaya for Toronto. At both Guu and now Don Don loud greetings combine with modestly-priced, small plates of delicious salty food to fuel appetites for more drink.

On my first visit to Don Don I happened to sit at the bar beside two gentlemen who had a friendly conversation with head chef Daisuke Izutsu (the former chef-owner of Kaiseki Sakura). With eavesdropped menu recommendations at my disposal and the experience of two visits I think I’ve been able to hit the menu’s highlights. 

The hay-smoked salmon beside one of the black croquettes.

First, we shouldn’t miss the eat-with-your-eyes-first specialties that one would expect from a chef whose last stop was Kaiseki Sakura. The black croquettes ($7) have the eponymous unusual colour and accomplish that necessary croquette-ish feat of crunch-crispy on the outside and warm and gooey on the inside. The hay-smoked salmon sashimi that is passed through foot-four flames as a crowd-pleasing spectacle at the kitchen bar also delivers on the plate. Especially when combined with a bit of its paired coarse salt this fish manages to be both more subtle and robust than other smoked salmon.

The Tokyo style hot dog. "Peaking out" is never a good look for a hot dog. More delicious than it looks.

Whatever the main culinary tradition behind a drink-lots-and-eat-good-food spot it seems that Korean food has to get into the mix somehow. Fwhat Fwhat pork ($8) ticks the obligatory pork belly steamed buns box in a way that demonstrates an attention to food detail that goes far beyond being trendy. The Tokyo Style Hot Dog ($5.20) is a trashy indulgence but delicious as well.

The housemade kimchi from the hot dog is fantastic–more pungent and spicy than most store-bought–and they’ll bring a side bowl of it for two dollars.

What would a beer-soaked izakaya meal be without fried chicken? Don Don Izakaya’s Ginger Fried Chicken ($6.80) is light, crisp, and properly seasoned. My only complaint is that the mayo dipping sauce suffers from that over-acidic thinness of flavour that kewpie mayo always seems to have.

A giant mug of Sapporo with a glass of sake for scale. To get an image of the quality and size of their respective selections at Don Don, reverse the two.

True to form Don Don Izakaya serves their Sapporo and other draft in the giant mugs we’ve come to expect. I wish they’d devote as much attention to the beer selection in this respect as they have to the massive sake (by the bottle and glass) list.

Obviously, I can’t finish this post without a comparison to Guu, Toronto’s reigning izakaya champ. Don Don adds a taiko drum to the loud, every-guest greeting in Japanese  but also higher ceilings and more irregular floor plan and that makes conversation possible. I’m sure that because Don Don doesn’t have the line-ups or the oppressive crowding that make Guu feel like a can’t-miss frat party some will avoid it as not cool enough. I’m happy that will leave tables available for me to enjoy the equally-good and slightly-cheaper food at Don Don Izakaya.

Don Don Izakaya: 130 Dundas Street West, Toronto; 416-492-5292; Mon to Thurs 11 AM – midnight, Fri 11 AM – 1 AM, Sat noon – 1 AM, Sun noon – midnight; @dondon_izakaya. Reservations for parties of eight or more only. (Be warned that their otherwise alright website–hours are other details are right up front–automatically downloads a 22 MB Quicktime movie.)

Today at more than 250 of their stores across Canada Loblaw Companies will be aiming for a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. I remember a simpler time when that book was a slimmer volume. The picture of the gentlemen who had made it into the pages by growing his fingernails for decades (go ahead and Google, I’ll wait) still reverberates in my memory. Progress marches on and new record categories seem to be largely about food on a giant scale and today’s attempt fits that bill. More than 300 wheels of authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese will be cracked at once starting at noon eastern time.

Getting prepared for the record-breaking attempt in front of the cheese wall at Loblaws Maple Leaf Gardens. (Image: Loblaw/rock-it

Parmigiano-Reggiano is one of Italy’s most delicious food products (and that’s a very competitive class) but it is also surrounded by a satisfying quantity of what I’m going to call “nerdiderata”. Much of that wealth of knowledge is catalogued in Jeffrey Steingarten’s excellent “Decoding Parmesan” (reprinted as a chapter in It Must’ve Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything). Naturally, I re-read the article before yesterday’s media preview lunch at Loblaws Maple Leaf Gardens, to which I was invited by rock-it promotions. That book really should be on the shelves of anyone who is interested in reading about food but in the interim and because the Google books excerpt has some strategically important pages excised I’ll offer a rough synopsis.

Tom Filippou, Executive Chef and National Director President's Choice Cooking Schools, at work behind the split round.

On Naming: Even the name is multi-layered. The authentic issue is called Parmigiano-Reggiano and certified by the consortium that controls quality and protects the DOP. The cheese’s unique texture with the rice-sized crystals is called grana and from there other similar Italian cheeses get names like Grana Padano. Parmesan is the English-adopted French word and is not protected or controlled and that’s why you sometimes find it on those green tubes of salty sawdust.

On Timing: Steingarten goes through a fascinating investigation into when is the best time of year for Parmigiano-Reggiano. My crude summary is that in the winter and summer the grasses and other forage fed to cows aren’t nearly at their best and therefore the fat in the milk is lower. In the late spring the grass is lush and the milk is creamy but most of the fat has to be skimmed off because the level of casein protein is lower then. But in the autumn, September, October, and November the protein is at its peak and therefore the cheese can hold more of the fat that allows for longer ageing and more complex flavours.

We can put this to use quite easily since each 84 lb. round of Parmigiano-Reggiano is stamped with the first three letters of its production month. So, look for “SET” for Settembre, “OTT” for Ottobre, and “NOV” for Novembre. The photo at the top of the post is of the round we saw opened at the preview yesterday. “GEN” is for Gennaio or January in Italian and the “10″ is for 2010. Loblaw brings in Parmigiano-Reggiano that has been aged for 22 to 24 months so start looking in the late summer.

In a strange twist of food knowledge coincidence that information comes via Steingarten from Leo Bertozzi, the gentleman that travelled from Italy to represent the Parmigiano-Reggiano Consortium at yesterday’s media preview lunch for the record-breaking attempt.

The splitting wedges are into the round of Parmigiano-Reggiano.

On Cutting: One of the distinctions about Parmigiano-Reggiano and more specifically the record attempt that Loblaw is making today is that unlike other cheese it isn’t really not cut but rather split or broken. A line is scored in the top and then almond-shaped knife-wedges are driven into the score line to encourage the cheese to split. The round is flipped over and the process is repeated on the other side to finish the job. Because this is a much more specialised process than running the cheese through a band-saw Loblaw had to train someone for each of the 300 or so rounds.

The current record, set in 2008, stands at 176 rounds and I suppose the idea of aiming for nearly twice that is that one doesn’t want to get into the whole cell-tower arms race of the tallest building folks. But beside the record the important message here is that Parmigiano-Reggiano is one the world’s most delicious products and as is mentioned in that Cook’s Illustrated youtube video in this post it really does make a difference to buy your piece from a store that breaks it from a whole round.

Also take a look at my head-to-head comparison of the Carlton Street Loblaws vs. Longo’s across some hard to find ingredients.

Not many of my recipes here are vegetarian for a couple of reasons. I should stress that none of those reasons is that I don’t ever eat vegetarian food. Tofu doesn’t do it for me in pretty much every form but that doesn’t stop me from aiming to have three or four meat-less meals (on top of just about every breakfast) a week. Rather, I think I see myself as a better meat cook. I also put a lot more thought and planning into meat meals and tend to treat the vegetable-heavy ones as filler.

I’m working on changing these levels of expertise and attention and am using Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes From London’s Ottolenghi as my principal guide at the moment.

A small chain of popular restaurants with devoted fans is a good place to start from when considering a cookbook. Ottolenghi builds on that with large collection of well-tested and beautifully-photographed recipes. Also, we’re telegraphed the message that it’s a serious cookbook that the publisher thought was going to be a seller with the now de rigueur (for cookbooks of that type) soft, padded cover. (I don’t know why they’d care but this seems like a ploy to keep us from immediately throwing out the dust jacket.)

One of the first recipes to catch my eye was Plenty’s quinoa salad with dried Persian lime. Those dried limes are a fantastic ingredient. They add the essence of lime to dishes without the acid or liquid and are welcome in many dishes from cuisines between, say Sicily and Hawaii. Also, if kept cool and dry they last forever. They definitely aren’t stocked everywhere but I find The Spice Trader on Queen West is a good source.

Plenty has an interesting method for cooking quinoa that I can really get behind. Instead of treating it like rice and figuring out the ratio of water to grain and also trying to hit the timing exactly you cook it like pasta. (But with more rinsing.) Rinse the quinoa in a fine-mesh strainer, get a big pot of boiling going, put in the quinoa, cook for nine minutes, and drain it.

The weather was a large part of what inspired me to adapt the salad into a sort of stuffed sweet potato skins. A couple weeks ago when it was merely spring-like instead of absolutely summery we headed across the street to the park for our first picnic of the year. In that context an edible serving utensil (the sweet potato skins) is indispensable.

For my second food truck profile on Food With Legs I’m taking a look at the Caplansky’s deli food truck. Like the Smoke’s Poutinerie truck (and unlike most of the other GTA trucks) Thunderin’ Thelma operates in addition to the traditional restaurant on College Street.

Reserved parking for the Caplansky's Truck. The City of Toronto is trying to move them out of this location by the end of March.

Don’t think that by adding wheels to the deli they’re able to totally get away from the occasional cantankerous customer. On my last visit the older gentleman who jumped in line in front of me left with nothing but a grunt and dismissive hand wave when he was told they had run out of onion buns.

• Caplansky’s Truck a.k.a. Thunderin’ Thelma
• Hometown: Toronto
• Most-Talked About, Signature Dish: The smoked meat sandwich with a pickle ($7).
• 

  Smoked meat poutine from the Caplansky's food truck.

  Try If You Get the Chance: They change their daily specials fast enough that it would be tough for me to recommend just one. They’re usually worth a look and I’ve also enjoyed the smoked meat poutine.

• 

  The Caplansky's food truck menu on the day I visited.

  Lunch Location and Hours: The parking lot at 72 Queen Street East at Dalhousie. But they’ve been told by the City that they have to vacate the spot by the end of March. Weekdays from 11 AM to 3 PM.

• Time to Place Order: 7 minutes
• Time to Get Food After Placing Order: 5 minutes
• Established: July 2011
• The Added Touches: The idea of a food truck played a critical role in Zane Caplansky’s path from his days at the Monarch to the present. Corey Mintz has the full story in the Star (longer version on his blog) and a less-than-complimentary postscript. Despite the nickname the Caplansky’s truck is one of the quieter ones on Toronto’s streets and this makes waiting for food a more pleasant experience.
• Web site: www.caplanskys.com/thunderin-thelma.
• Social Media:@CaplanskyTruck and the general Facebook page for the deli.

To see my methodology and description of each of these categories as well as all of my Toronto food trucks profiles visit the Food With Legs food trucks page.

The first in a series of Toronto food truck profiles on Food With Legs is the Toasted Tangerine truck.

• Toasted Tangerine
• Hometown: Mississauga
• 

  The Toasted Ravioli from the Toasted Tangerine Truck.

  Most-Talked About, Signature Dish: Toasted ravioli ($7) that are crispy on the outside with a cheesy filling.

• 

  The Toasted Tangerine truck has found a winner in my books here by combining smoked salmon and bacon.

  Try If You Get the Chance: The Smoked Salmon BLT ($9) combines two of my favourite salty, smoky meats with both smoked salmon and bacon. Also the 5-grain rye bun at least makes it feel healthy.

• Lunch Location: Recently they’ve been visiting Toronto on Wednesdays at lunch and parking in the lot on the southwest corner of Queen and Jarvis.
• Time to Place Order: No lineup on a recent visit.
• Time to Get Food After Placing Order: 5 minutes (I enjoyed this fast service on a recent visit but be warned that the wait can be longer.)
• Established: November 2011
• The Added Touches: The owners of the Toasted Tangerine truck, Adrian and Alyssa Tangerine are such hardcore devotees of classic rock that they chose one of Led Zeppelin’s best as their married name. True to this form, theirs is the only truck I know of that has built-in speakers to provide classic rock entertainment for customers while they wait. Also to their credit the Toasted Tangerine truck supports the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and promotes that fact with a big JDRF sign.
• Web site:thetoastedtangerine.com and the curbside menu.
• Social Media:@ToastedTangerin on Twitter and their Facebook page

To see the methodology and description of each of these categories as well as all of my Toronto food trucks profiles visit the Food With Legs food trucks page.

I really should have called this recipe “End of Winter Soup”. The idea is to make something delicious from those last hearty roots that are still sticking around and garnish it with a bit of sliced green onion that might be coming up in some hoop-houses near us. Behind the romance of that description is the reality that these are the vegetables who were loitering in the bottom of my vegetable drawer and looking a bit past their prime.

The technique for the soup was very roughly adapted from the Caramalized Carrot Soup in Modernist Cuisine. I heard Dr. Myhrvold speak at the Isabel Bader Theatre last November and have made my approximation of his recipe pretty consistently since then.

Dr. Myrhvold is notoriously protective of his patents and copyrights and that’s one reason to be careful but there is definitely another that my recipe is only loosely connected to his. You see, there is the little matter of the fact that I don’t own a centrifuge or even a juicer. Without that equipment it’s much more difficult to follow the original recipe exactly.

A pressured cooker and increasing the pH make these before and after possible in twenty minutes.

The really interesting feature of the technique is that by adding baking soda the pH is increased and that brings the temperature at which the sugars in the vegetables will caramelise into pressure cooker range. Sure, you could roast them in your oven but I find that I often miss the ideal time to flip the veg. One of soup’s few failings is that one small bit of burnt food can make the whole pot taste acrid.

The key to this soup is be careful about how much baking soda you add. You want to weigh the vegetables you’re using and divide by 200. Again, be careful that you’re putting in 0.5% of the vegetable weight in baking soda. Not five percent. You need five grams of baking soda for one kilogram of vegetables.

Most home scales struggle with accuracy below five grams. So for 500g of vegetables you’re aiming to put in 2.5g of baking soda but I don’t think you’ll taste the difference between 2, 3, or 4g (I haven’t) but accidentally put in 25g and it will be a different story entirely.

I’ve now made this recipe with various combinations of carrots, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, butternut squash, potatoes, parsnips, and onions. I can’t see any reason it wouldn’t work as well with any vegetable that is typically roasted before being made into soup. All of asparagus, broccoli, mushrooms, and red peppers are on my to-try list when they come into season later in the year.

This recipe is vegetarian and gluten-free. You can use only water (and no milk) and omit the cheese garnish but I’m not sure how to avoid the butter to make it dairy-free. I’d worry that using oil instead would change the amount of liquid in the pressure cooker (butter is less than 80% fat) but if anyone has tried it that way please let me know it the comments.

End of Vegetable Drawer Soup

I don’t post many cocktail recipes here. The last couple of years I’ve been drinking (and therefore writing about) mainly beer and wine. But, we served these at a dinner party we hosted a couple weekends back, they were a big hit, and I think are excellent alternative to the very worst holiday drink of all: green beer.

Roughly speaking, the Emerald should be a sort of Irish take on the Manhattan. As in Irish whiskey stands in for rye. Trying to concoct an Emerald that looks like it’s name by mixing in blue Curacao, green creme de menthe, or even worse–much worse–melon liqueur is an abomination.

As I usually have found Dave Wondrich at Esquire knows what he’s talking about when it comes to cocktails so I used his recipe (along with this one) as my guide.

Oh, and yes there is orange in my St. Patrick’s Day cocktail of choice but if it makes you feel any better note that the orange is bitter. Also, it just makes the damn thing taste better.

The folks who run the Gorilla Cheese truck have what is easily one of the most popular food trucks in southern Ontario. I really like to see nice people do well but have to admit that their popularity annoyed me.

Grilled cheese sandwiches are probably the first meal I learned to make on my own. Why would anyone want to line up for an hour for something that fifteen-year-old me could make when instead, without waiting, they could have any of a score of more complex dishes? I watched just that happen at last summer’s third Food Truck Eats event and was flabbergasted.

The idea that these are more complex creations started to dawn on me after I attended the opening for Cheesewerks, a bricks-and-mortar competitor for the gorilla. But really it wasn’t until a month ago when I tried The Bubba at the Gorilla Cheese truck that I came full circle. That is one delicious sandwich.

Delicious enough that I was inspired to make it at home with my own substitution for the pulled pork they use.

Ribs are essential to the summer food rotation but they can be tough to estimate portions. Because they always come in racks even the most delicious recipe will almost always have a few left over. Still delicious the next day, but by then they’ve usually lost their visual appeal. The obvious solution is to pack them inside a sandwich.

Ninety-three percent of the time that ribs are served coleslaw is as well (not a real stat) so you’re likely to have some of it left over as well. As I learned from tasting that Bubba of a few paragraphs ago it provides crunch, really lightens the texture of a grilled cheese sandwich, and brings enough acid to cut all that fat in the rest of the ingredients.

Two very easy techniques will improve your grilled cheese sandwiches immensely. The first, general to all grilled cheese sandwiches and courtesy of Alton Brown, is that the cheese should be grated, not sliced. I’m not sure if it’s about organising proteins into an arrangement more like melted strands or about making the pieces smaller and therefore more quickly heated but it definitely works. The other trick, specific to sandwiches that are more than just bread and cheese, is to mix the ingredients in a bowl. Melted cheese is like the mortar that holds the delicious, brick house together but it can only do it’s work if you distribute it evenly.

The Polish mountain cheese is something I picked up a few ago and discussed at some length here on Spotlight Toronto. I bet only a tiny fraction of you will be lucky enough to have an Eastern European deli at your disposal, the rest can substitute the most assertively smoked gouda or cheddar they can find.

We all read that Barry Estabrook article in The Atlantic a few months ago, right? The one that made a solid case that organic food production can feed the world. I’m sold on that point but in my mind the question remains: would an organic diet be delicious?

Food is about choices that sacrifice one variable for another. When producers choose to limit chemical inputs (inorganic fertilisers and pesticides) my back-of-the-envelope guess was that taste often suffers. I know from gardening at home that when I select a certain seed because I’ve read it produces uncommonly delicious tomatoes I have to accept that they won’t be “heavy croppers” or resistent to four types of wilt.

I’m just as unsatisfied with my random guesses as you probably are so moved on to a more objective test.

I’ve noticed over the five years or more that I’ve been a Cook’s Illustrated subscriber that their monthly taste tests of ingredients or prepared foods often feature a few organic options. I wanted to get a sense of the overall record between the organic and conventional options.

Jack Bishop, Editorial Director of the PBS show and Executive Editor of the magazine runs the tasting lab and presents the results on America’s Test Kitchen with Chris Kimball as a sort of taste-test straight man. You can get a sense of the methodology from this clip of a parmesan taste test.

Of the nearly 400 taste test results posted on their website (a subscription to cooksillustrated.com grants access to their top-notch recipes, equipment reviews, and taste tests at an affordable price) in late February, 2012 seventy-five of them returned results when I searched for “organic”.

The taste test archives stretch back to January 2002 and span categories from pantry items (a lot of these) and prepared food, right to dairy products and meat.

When the taste test results are printed they’re listed in order of preference and given a recommendation level that is either “highly recommended”, “recommended”, “recommended with reservations”, or “not recommended”.

I put the results from the 75 tests into a spreadsheet and to make comparisons using these two variables (rank and recommendation) at the same time easier I converted each result to a score out of 100. The first–easy part–is twenty points for each rank (so 80 for highly recommended, 60 for recommended, 40 for recommended with reservations, and 20 for not recommended). The other twenty are assigned with the formula 20 – ((x/y) * 20) where x is the rank and y is the number of entries in the test.

As an example let’s say that a particular brand of pinto beans was ranked second in a field of four and fell in the recommended category. That’s 60 points for recommended and 10 for second place for a total of 70.

Or pretend that a certain cottage cheese was not recommended and finished second-last in a field of seven. That would be 20 for the bottom category and 2.9 points for sixth place for a total of 22.7.

Obviously, in a particular taste test the scores drop off quickly and the recommendation category is much more important compared to the rank, which are basically just tie-breakers.

On the top line the organic food options (126 of them) scored an average of 49.23 points versus the conventional food average (for 431 items) of 54.62. The scores remain fairly close by category where the organic average was higher in 36 of the categories versus 39 where the non-organic had a better average.

Only looking at averages gives us a good picture of what all of us would get, given lots of options and little information or care about our shopping choices. But there is a limit to how realistically that represents outcomes for individuals. After all, if we’re making chili we don’t use parts of four different cans of kidney beans. We pick one brand–sometimes with information like the recommendation from an authority like CI–and either enjoy or suffer the results.

So, for the rest of the comparisons it will help to picture an olde tyme store where Jack Bishop is the grocer. You ask him for what you want (filet mignon, whole wheat lasagna, olive oil, whatever), tell him whether it should be organic or not, and he’ll give you what he thinks will taste best. (We don’t have these stores but we do have smartphone apps that can lend the same expertise to grocery shopping.)

Pretend you’ve moved, are restocking your kitchen, and ask for one of the best from each of the 75 food categories; 60 will be conventional and only 15 organic. If you say to Jack, “give me your finest organic option” he’ll be able to beat the average score about 57% of the time–naturally the flip side of that is that 43% of the time the best organic option is below the average for the category. Unfortunately, 14 times he’ll probably hesitate before sliding something across the counter that ranked Not Recommended and finished in the bottom third of its category. Five times the best he’ll be able to do, if you want organic, will be the option that placed dead last in its category. The non-organic side only had these last two distinctly negative showings twice–both in frozen fruit categories.

I’d worry just as much about the number of times that choosing organic precludes a great option. Twenty times non-organic products received the rare “highly recommended” designation but that only happened once on the organic side. From cheese to chickpeas; yogurt to butter that’s a lot of instances where you’d be excluding the remarkably delicious ingredients by eating strictly organic food.

We haven’t even considered the more than 300 taste tests where there wasn’t any organic option good enough, or available widely enough to make it into the tested field.

I suspect for some, these results will come as no big surprise: They assume organic food is for hippies and rabbits, not serious eaters. Others who lead an organic lifestyle and are evangelical about that choice will be up in arms–and please throw out your objections in the comment section and I’ll respond in a future post. I was (just slightly) surprised both how poorly organic did in the aggregate and conversely how many times an organic option floated to the top of a large field. Solid confirmation, I suppose, that when you put taste and flavour first, other characteristics suffer and that choosing delicious food requires a good amount of care.

It’s Oscars time and I don’t always do seasonal posts but this time (for whatever reason) I felt the inspiration. I considered doing a list of recipes that are each shoe-horned into representing one of the nominees for the Best Picture Academy Awards.

After I finished chuckling at the thought of the outrage at War Horse Tartare I put this idea aside. If that’s your thing though see the Serious Eats Punny Oscars Menu for 2012 (it’s horsemeat free).

Instead I’ve compiled some ideas from previous posts for what you should bring to the Oscars party you’re going to tonight.

• Buffalo Chicken Dip: I made this one originally for a Super Bowl party but I think it would stand up just as well in the hoitier toitier gatherings.
• Deep-Fried Pickles with Cheese and Bacon: Along the same lines, these will be at home at all but black tie affairs.
• Beer Cooler Chili: The timing is running tight on this one for tonight but any food table for a large gathering is well-served when anchored with chili. My recipe cooks the meat in a beer cooler (naturally).
• Punch: Is the first and the last word on party drinks. This recipe is stiff enough that no one will be tempted to spike it.
• Bacon Blondies: A Food With Legs classic these will definitely cover the dessert category.

All great ideas I’d say but this year I’m slightly working another old FWL recipe. With some minor adjustments I’m making Porky Pop, or bacon caramel corn, this time with peanuts and walnut pieces.

As a kid I don’t think I had particularly weak ears but I downed my share of amoxicillin and developed the usual distaste for artificial banana flavour. That’s why I have some trepidation about offering two posts in a row that feature the flavour of childhood ear infections.

This is a short and simple (and I submit delicious) use for the leftover banana bread and banana cream from yesterday’s post.

There are recipes out there –including the one from Food & Wine that I used–for the Nutella dip but really this is something so elemental that measuring doesn’t make sense.

If you really want to fancy things up, your Nutella dip will be improved with the addition of a wee shot of Kahlua (or “coffee liqueur” but if we’re not bothering with the pedantry of “chocolate-hazelnut spread” why not call a spade a spade?). I think mixing chocolate and raspberry is an abomination but since I know almost all of you disagree you might try subbing Framboise.

Be generous with the cream between the slices of toasted banana bread.

The rest is just toasting (and any bread that is a day old is improved by some butter and dry heat), smothering, dipping, and eating. The banana cream gives flavour support it’s delicious custard-like texture and with help from the chocolate doesn’t taste at all like a day home from school.

February 23 is my Personal I Haven’t Had Banana Bread in a While Day. I’m not sure exactly why, but banana bread seems to be a summer thing for me. That doesn’t make much sense given that there are so many other fruits that are in season and lend themselves well to things like peach cobbler, cherry pan dowdy,  or blueberry grunt.

It seems more appropriate that banana bread is a winter recipe given that bananas seem to be equally available all year. (Do they still have a season or has the global banana conglomerate managed to plant them widely enough for that not to matter?)

Wanting to make my unique contribution to the science of banana bread I considered how I could improve on the standard classic. To reduce the number of concerned notes I get from my parents I’m trying to avoid filling everything with bacon so I skipped over that idea. Banana bread can always use a little insurance against being too dry so a pudding like sauce seems in order.

As bananas ripen their starch is converted to sugar. If it looks too speckled and brown to eat out of hand it is perfect for banana bread.

I struggled for a while trying to figure out how I could bake a tube-shaped filling hole into the loaf before settling on the simpler, more elegant solution of just serving the banana pastry cream on the side.  If you have any bright ideas on how I could have accomplished that original goal please comment below.

Chocolate chunks ready to be folded into batter.

I have also followed my usual inclination to leave the nuts out. They break up the bread’s smooth, moist, sweet texture and chocolate is clearly the banana’s preferred dance partner. Chips are okay but really some good quality discs or squares (either coarsely-chopped) are better.

After he left the Black Hoof Café it has only been on rare occasions that we’ve had the chance to taste chef Geoff Hopgood’s cooking. Now Hopgood’s Foodliner on Roncesvalles has opened the days of limiting ourselves to the occasional Sweet Slippery Bobkin* are over.

The menu at Hopgood’s Foodliner is a comfortable mix of Canadian East Coast favourites like donairs with sweet sauce joined to modern, inventive dishes like the crispy pork shoulder with scallops. Given the propensity of Maritimers for living in places other than the Maritimes a restaurant like this seems like it was a long time coming. And when you combine Torontonians who established an East Coast appetite while at Dal with those Atlantic transplants it’s not hard to imagine a line-up forming before the doors open at six.

The Hopgoods Foodliner menu, click for a larger version.

On a visit last Saturday we started with the Halifax Donairs ($12) and the appetiser special that featured a live scallop (including its coral) on the shell, covered in a generous heap of their deliciously rich crab dip and then baked. (Chef Hopgood mentioned on Twitter that he’ll also leave the scallop raw for those that request it that way.) The donairs with their soft pita or the crab dip with Triskets sounded like the smart money choices for those sitting at the bar and contemplating their appetite while working through the top-notch cocktail, wines-by-the-glass, and beer list.

With those compressed and crisped cubes of pork that act as podiums for the scallops  and sit beside broccoli three ways Hopgood’s take is at the opposite end of the high-low spectrum from the example set by a similar recipe in the Joe Beef cookbook. But it was really for the tiny sausage and sweet bread stew ($19) that we engaged in fork fencing. The stew’s sauce reminded me of the tomato sauce in Pizza Pockets–but with fresher, herbed flavours and now that I’ve mastered some degree of patience no scalded tongue. We both can’t help but marvel at how crispy the dusted and fried sweet breads managed to stay.

The Hoof Café was ground zero for the Toronto’s brunch addicts and it sounds like they’re working on a brunch menu that could launch as early as the spring.

Unlike both outposts in the Hoof offal empire Hopgood’s takes reservations, but for weekend bookings call at least a week in advance. I didn’t and we were in a “we need the table back at X” situation but that was fine given our plans later that night and (more particularly) the smoothly professional service crew that features some familiar Black Hoof faces.

Hopgood’s Foodliner and their neighbour Barque Smokehouse are leading a wave of dining change for their strip of Roncy. The young families, established older locals, and trekking foodsters seem more than happy to welcome Chef Hopgood and his tight meat-and-seafood menu balanced on East Coast traditions.

Hopgood’s Foodliner: 325 Roncesvalles Avenue, Toronto; 416-533-2723; Thurs – Mon 6 PM – 11 PM, closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays; @chefhopgood.

Fried chicken and waffles, like they do it at The Stockyards, are a classic duo that I wanted to see if I could improve upon. It’s pancake Tuesday this week and waffles would be a fine stand-in–whether as a last indulgence before the deprivation of Lent or just for the breakfast-for-dinner thrill–but I’m not sure they’re an ideal pair. Perhaps weekly eaters of fried chicken and waffles have developed some especially delicate approach. I haven’t and halfway through the meal it looks like a toddler has had an especially vigorous food tantrum.

Also waffles are light and crisp and need to be eaten quickly. Fried chicken has bones and is a finger food and that doesn’t match well with waffle’s buddy syrup.

Not only do I think pancakes would be a better match but I wanted to find a way to make fried chicken (of all things) more indulgent. Why not take the work out of it and focus on the best part by crusting and frying only the skin? A gluttonous version of popcorn chicken.

Well, the first reason why not is that it’s surprisingly difficult to buy chicken skin. With all the boneless, skinless breasts that our modern food culture gobbles our way through you’d think that there would be a glut of the by-product. At the grocery store I was met with (the quite predictable) blank stares and even usually dependable butchers only had a “sorry we don’t sell that” for me.

Naturally the next-best solution (having a bag in your freezer that you slowly fill with off-cut chicken skin over several weeks) is to make our own chicken skin. For this I turned to the chicken’s skinniest part, the wings. I de-boned the wings and saved the bones and wing tips for making stock. There was some flesh in there so this wasn’t just skin.

I’ve had good luck with Chef Thomas Keller’s fried chicken recipe (Suresh has an adaptation of it on Spotlight Toronto) that leans heavily on an overnight brine and a quick buttermilk dip before the flour. But this time I decided that a tip of the hat to the classic dirty bird, Kentucky Fried Chicken, was in order. Without having to worry about adding flavour to or preserving the juiciness in big pieces of meat concentrating the flavour in the crust is entirely appropriate.

On ehow Josh Ozersky has a good video where he details his recipe for the Colonel’s fried chicken. Josh seems convinced that the 99x poultry seasoning sold by Marion Kay is the original 11 secret herbs and spices. That may be but I wanted chicken now and didn’t really want to contend with stored two pounds of seasoning that I might use a tablespoon and a half at at time. Instead I think the seasoning I add to the flour mix will get you close enough.

This amount of fried chicken will be perfect for adding to and garnishing enough pancakes to feed six. I used the recipe from cooksillustrated.com and find that scaling it to one egg for every two people works about right.

(I guess in that these pieces of fried chicken are about as small as they can get this recipe is the opposite of my last post about fried chicken where I fried whole birds.)