Category Archives: Cuisine

BOOK REVIEW: Made in Chicago by Monica Eng & David Hammond

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Made in Chicago: Stories Behind 30 Great Hometown BitesMade in Chicago: Stories Behind 30 Great Hometown Bites by Monica Eng
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon.in Page

Release Date: March 21, 2023

Chicago is a food city. Once famous for its stockyards and still a major transit point for the products of America’s breadbasket, the city is home to a diverse people, a gathering of migrants and immigrants who brought a wide variety of foods from their homelands and put the necessary twists on them to make them salable to Chicagoans while using available ingredients. This book features entries on thirty foods and beverages that are products of Chicago ingenuity, be they dishes that were wholly invented in the Windy City or one’s that have a distinctive Chicago-style variant. Foodies know exactly what is meant by Chicago-style hot dogs, pizza, or tamales.

If all you know about Chicago cuisine is that ketchup on a hot dog is considered a sin, you’ll learn about some colorfully named Chicago inventions such as: “the Jim Shoe,” “the Big Baby,” and “the Mother-in-Law,” as well as many others that are more prosaically named, if equally calorically dense. One also sees the mark of Chicago’s immigrant story in the Akutagawa, Flaming Saganaki, Gam Pong Chicken Wings, the Maxwell Street Polish, and Chicago Corn Roll Tamales.

Each chapter discusses the nature of the respective dish, its influences, the [often contentious] origin of each item, where one can obtain said dish, and (for most) includes a recipe for making one’s own home variant. So, it’s mostly food history, but with a bit of cookbook, as well. There are pictures throughout, of the foods and in some cases of the location that invented or popularized each dish.

Be forewarned, while Chicago is a city that loves food, it’s not a place that’s wild about nutrition or moderate serving sizes. In fact, I feel certain that many people attempting to consume every item in this book in, say, one month’s time would drop dead of a coronary shortly thereafter (if not during.) Most of these dishes are foods done fast and served with an allowance of fat, sugar, and / or meat suitable for a family (for several days.)

If you’re a traveler (or a Chicagoan) and want to know more about quintessential windy city foods and where you can sample them, you must read this book.


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BOOK REVIEW: Real Food Fermentation, Revised and Expanded by Alex Lewin

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Real Food Fermentation, Revised and Expanded: Preserving Whole Fresh Food with Live Cultures in Your Home KitchenReal Food Fermentation, Revised and Expanded: Preserving Whole Fresh Food with Live Cultures in Your Home Kitchen by Alex Lewin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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Out: December 21, 2021

This is an expanded edition of a book that explores the process of fermenting a wide range of foods and beverages, including – new to this edition – sourdough bread. It’s a great book for a neophyte such as myself as it covers all the basics without getting too arcane (though it does include natto and some other regional foods that may not be widely familiar.) The book provides step-by-step instructions for making sauerkrauts (and variations such as Kimchi,) yoghurt & kefir, fermented fruit condiments, beverages (alcoholic and non-,) bases / starters (e.g. vinegar,) and sourdough products (including, but not limited to, bread.) It describes some of the challenges one may run up against as well as showing what equipment one will need. It also proposes some of the ways a curious person might experiment with variations.

Color photos are used to clarify the production processes as well as to show appetizing finished products that will whet one’s appetite.

If one is looking to get into a narrow domain of fermentation, e.g. making beer or other alcoholic beverages, one may want to look elsewhere for a more specialized and in-depth guide (of which there are many.) However, this book may introduce one to ideas for brewing adventures one wouldn’t have otherwise considered.

This book is an awesome choice for someone looking to get into or to expand their food fermentation activities. It’s well-organized, beautifully presented, and – as I mentioned – not overwhelming. With the mounting evidence of the benefits of fermented foods, this is a great guide to learn more about how one can best begin producing such foods at home.


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BOOK REVIEW: Dare Eat That by Divya Anand

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Dare Eat That: A Guide to Bizarre Foods from Around the WorldDare Eat That: A Guide to Bizarre Foods from Around the World by Divya Anand
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amazon page

 

This book takes one on a journey, sampling exotic foods of the world. The author describes experiences eating bizarre dishes in nine countries: the US, India, the UK, Luxembourg, Thailand, Australia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Singapore. The foods include insects, balut, reptiles, game animals and fowl, and a wide range of seafood (including blowfish, a type of sushi prepared with surgical precision to avoid tainting the meat with a lethal poison.)

The book is organized by country in the order listed above. Some countries have many sub-chapters and others have as few as one depending upon how extensive the travels and how much unusual food was on offer. The book presents tables for each dining location, showing the cost, taste, and “fear factor” for each of the exotic dishes. Of course, the taste and fear ratings are inherently subjective. I know, among the items I’ve eaten, my subjective ratings would often be a little different. However, there is an inescapable cultural — as well as individual — bias to such ratings. By cultural bias I don’t just mean at a country level, but if you grew up in a coastal region versus a landlocked one, your ratings would probably vary considerably. That said, I thought it was a nice way to give the reader a quick insight into the experience of each food.

The biggest disadvantage of this book is that the experience is once removed. That is, the author is mostly reporting her spouse’s experience. As a vegetarian who shifted to eating chicken, she tried very few of the foods first hand (though, among those she did try was durian melon – proving she’s not a coward, because durian is nastier than much of the insect, seafood, and game food.) Still, because of this distance from the experience, the description could probably be more vivid in places. On the other hand, there is an amusing tension created between the husband who is an intense bizarre food foodie and the author who is squeamish about meat markets that adds to the entertainment value of the book.

Besides the aforementioned tables, the book is loaded with pictures — including a section of color plates — and has maps and diagrams as well.

I found this book interesting, readable, and – as a traveler – a potential reference source. If you’re a traveler and / or interested in exotic cuisine, you should check it out.

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BOOK REVIEW: Food: A Very Short Introduction by John Krebs

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Food: A Very Short IntroductionFood: A Very Short Introduction by John R. Krebs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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This volume in the Oxford University Press AVSI series examines human eating habits. The first chapter puts the human diet in the context of evolution, reflecting upon how we got where we did in terms of food consumption. Here one gains insight into where the Paleo-diet fad is flawed, and one learns how cooking had a huge influence on human evolution.

The second chapter delves into the issue of likes and dislikes in food. We see that there are species-wide commonalities, but there are also differences both at an individual and cultural group level. e.g. Why is spice so common in the tropics and so rare in the great white north?

The third chapter looks at the ways food can do us in and what we’ve done – besides [and including] the aforementioned cooking – to reduce the threat of food gone awry. The penultimate chapter examines nutrition and how we get what we need from food.

The last chapter takes a bit of a turn, but investigates the fascinating topic of how (and whether) we will continue to feed our species. Readers will likely remember the name Malthus from either history or economics classes. He was an economist who suggested humanity was in dire straits, vis-à-vis food. Malthus noticed that population was growing geometrically while agricultural output grew arithmetically, and he reasonably noted that this was unsustainable. Of course, Malthus failed to foresee the huge technological advances from fertilizer to mechanization. However, that doesn’t make his concerns forever moot – perhaps just tardy. It remains far from clear whether the limited land space and resources can take billions more humans – especially without killing off all the other species. (Especially, if we aren’t willing to give up eating resource-intensive foods like cow in favor of less intensive one’s like grasshopper.)

The book has some graphics as well as both a “references” and a “further reading” section.

If you’re interested in food in a general sense, I’d recommend this as a great way to take in the outline of the topic.

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5 Awesome Street Foods [You Should Have Already Tried]

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5.) Vada Pav (Potato [fritter] on a bun): India

Tip: Try it in Mumbai. While the one’s shown above were fine. The legendary Vada Pav is to be found at a stall across from Flora Fountain in Bombay.

 

4.) Pad Thai (Noodles Thai Style): Thailand

Tip: Vegetarians beware. Fish sauce is a standard ingredient in this dish. So if you order it vegetarian, it’s not just the prawns and / or chicken one needs to be wary about–depending upon how strict one is. Soy sauce is the substitute.

 

3.) Kürtőskalács (Chimney Cake): Hungary

Tip: It can be found at little stands in or near Christmas markets during the winter season. Buy it hot when it’s cold outside, and it will actually steam like smoke rising from a chimney. If  you’re in Hungary during the summer or you want a savory street food, try lángos .

 

2.) Banh Mi: Vietnam

Tip: Try this sandwich on a baguette from Banh Mi 25, a famous cart at 25 Hàng Cá, Hàng Đào, Hoàn Kiếm in Hanoi.

 

1.) Momo (Dumpling): Tibet, Ladakh, and anywhere displaced Tibetans reside.

Tip: Try the spinach and cheese momo of The Wok Tibetan Kitchen on Main Bazaar Road in Leh.

 

Bonus: Masala Dosa: India, particularly in the South

Tip: If you ask for a “Paper Masala Dosa” you’ll probably get something too big to fit on a plate (as shown.) It will be very thin and the potato-based filling will only be in the central part. (So it’s not quite as insane an amount of food as it may appear.)  This one is from Airlines Hotel in Bangalore. Dosa is just the Indian version of a pancake, and it can take many shapes and forms. There are a few varieties, but often it’s a rice & lentil-based rather than wheat-based flour.

 

BOOK REVIEW: The World’s Best Street Food by Lonely Planet

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The World's Best Street Food: Where to find it and how to make it (General Pictorial)The World’s Best Street Food: Where to find it and how to make it by Lonely Planet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amazon page

 

This is a combination guide to street food and cookbook. Each of the 100 entries consists of two pages. The first describes the food, how it’s eaten [that’s not always as self-evident to outsiders as one might think], its origins, where one can find a quintessential or famous example of the food, and whether there are any variants on the recipe. The second page is the cookbook entry, which lists the ingredients and describes the process by which they are combined to create the dish in question.

The foods are divided into broad categories of savory and sweet. The savory category is the larger by far, comprising 80 of the dishes—leaving 20 sweets. The dishes represent about 50 different countries of origin. A lot of these countries are well-known street food cultures such as Thailand, Vietnam, India, Mexico, and the US, but there are also a number of locales with which readers may be less familiar– such as Ghana, Malta, and French Polynesia. The dishes include a number of my favorites, such as Vietnamese Banh Mi, US Breakfast Burrito, Indian Masala Dosa, Thai Pad Thai, Hungarian Langos, and Singaporean Hainanese Chicken Rice. However, I also learned of new dishes that I’m eager to try, such as Croatian Cevapcici, Burmese Mohinga, and Chilean Sopaipilla.

WARNING: While I didn’t deduct stars for it, I will warn readers that this isn’t a good book to get as an e-book—at least unless you have a high-end tablet. It was a bit of a pain to read on my Kindle Touch, and the graphics (which I assume are beautiful in the print edition) were largely useless on my device. One could blow up the text easily enough (within limits, at least,) but the pages got grainy if one blew them up too much—and some of the text remained small when expanded.

There are photos. As I mentioned, on my device they were largely useless (grainy black-and-white) but your results may vary.

I found this book to be interesting and informative. While I wish the e-book had been easier to read, it was well-organized and offered a broad selection of dishes from a large number of countries.

I’d recommend this book for street food lovers and foodies.

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DAILY PHOTO: Bombay Vada Pav Stands

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Taken in November of 2015 in Mumbai

Taken in November of 2015 in Mumbai

 

This row of street food stalls is located across the street from Flora Fountain in Mumbai. They don’t all sell Vada Pav, but the most popular one does. (Alternative spellings: wada pav, vada paav, or vada pao)

FYI: Vada Pav is a delicious deep-fried, spiced potato ball served as a sandwich on a fluffy dinner roll style bun. It’s a Maharashtra specialty. There’s a video below if you’d like to see how they’re made or to make your own.

 

Learning Indian Cooking in Bangalore

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I'm stirring the pot.

I’m stirring the pot.

The thing about Indian food–with its penchant for pureed gravies–is that I find it delectable, but often have no idea what I’m eating or how it got to me looking, tasting, and smelling like it does.

 

That is until recently. A couple of weeks ago I attended a cooking class at Manju’s Cooking School in RT Nagar in an attempt to rectify (or at least reduce) my ignorance. Manju’s offers a wide variety of classes (Indian and non-Indian, veg and non-Veg, cooking and baking, etc.)

 

I attended with a group of friends, and we constituted a class unto ourselves. We, therefore, got a quick and dirty introduction to a number of common / typical Indian foods (veg and non-veg, and both North and South Indian.) The menu we prepared consisted of two breads (kulcha and Malabar parota), dal makhani, paneer butter masala, and kadai chicken.

 

The class took 2.5 or 3 hours, and ended in a banquet of the foods we hand prepared.

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Some of the fun facts that I learned include:

-“Kadai” in the name of dish just means that it’s wok-cooked.

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-A Kulcha is essentially a naan of a different thickness.

-Dal makhani requires a lot of prep, even if you have access to a pressure cooker.

-There’s a lot of finely chopped onion in these gravies that often goes unnoticed.

-One can cook with the pot upside-down. This is how we cooked Kulcha. In a restaurant it would be cooked in a Tandoor oven, but at home you can cook it stuck to the bottom of a deep pot.

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-Lastly, the key to a the flaky goodness of a Malabar parota is lots of fat… who’d have thought?

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Me&Parota

 

DAILY PHOTO: Food Street Bangalore

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Taken on April 12, 2014 in VVpuram, Bangalore.

Taken on April 12, 2014 in VVpuram, Bangalore.

Made another trip to Bangalore’s Food Street in VVpuram (near Sajjan Rao Circle) for Rumali Roti and Mysore Masala  Paneer Dosa. Both were excellent, and the street was packed with humans, bovines, canines, and felines all living harmoniously.

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