Who the Hell Uses Onion Juice?
markbittman.com
markbittman.com
One nice thing about his books is he has these sort of dreamlike fantasies about what a food is supposed to taste like, and pursues recipes based on this imagination. That means that, unlike a lot of cookbooks, just about every John Thorne recipe is amazing (his pecan pie is the best I've ever tried, because he directly tackled the problem of cloying sweetness and gummy texture).
Highly recommended if you care about food.
I find this to be a good approach to software development as well.
One of my favorite essays of his is on banh mi (Vietnamese sandwiches), where he's just totally baffled about how they even do that. Lucky for me, I live in the Twin Cities, ground zero for the best banh mi in the world. The essence of banh mi is basically experiencing every sensation your mouth can experience, all at the same time. It's warm, cool, crisp, chewy, greasy, sweet, sour, salty, spicy, fragrant, and ALL AT ONCE.
This is, incidentally, what a well-dressed hamburger is supposed to be. Warm — bun and patty, cool — pickles and sometimes lettuce and/or tomato, crisp — the cut/toasted side of the bun and the pickles (and sometimes lettuce or onions), chewy — the inside of the bun and sometimes the rind of the patty, greasy — the faces of the patty, sweet — the pickles, sour — also the pickles, salty — the patty and yes the pickles too, spicy — the spices in the patty and sometimes added peppers or enhanced mayonnaise, fragrant — the pickles. Mayonnaise adds creamy to that list.
edit/ For reference, I'm just an average white guy from the midwest and I married a Chinese-American woman and now live in SoCal. Through her, I've discovered, and love, most of these foods. Vietnamese fish sauce doesn't really register as "fish" sauce to me, either, rather it just tastes quite salty.
There's nothing fresh or fragrant-tasting in the average burger, unfortunately. When I think of my local favorites, they are practically veggie-free. The delicious Patrick's Cafe burger (French style), with finely chopped bacon/mushrooms/onions/ketchup fried into an almost black paste of pure umami... delicious, but not vegetable anymore. The famous Matt's Bar Jucy Lucy (yes, that's the right spelling), just meat and cheese and bun and some onions if you ask nicely. Total umami bomb, but none of the clean fresh taste of banh mi.
To make it, I just bring to boil a mix of water, vinegar, salt, sugar, and spices (usually cloves and caraway), then pour it into a mason jar with the shredded cabbage, and put it in the fridge for a couple of days.
I've tried using sauerkraut, but it's a bit too pickled and mushy for burgers, and usually drips everywhere.
An interesting alternative - and an interesting restaurant! - is Ngon Bistro in St Paul, which is basically upscale foodie Vietnamese. They do a much more, well, serious banh mi than the more trad places, with better ingredients. Debatable whether it's an improvement, but it's worth trying, and Ngon Bistro in general is brilliant.
I believe him.
They have _the_ best bread of any bahn mi I've ever had. I'm far from an authority, of course... But, my wife is Chinese-American and both of her parents grew up in Vietnam, later fleeing to the US with their families right after the war.
My mother-in-law still eats and cooks primarily Vietnamese, vacations to Vietnam almost every year, and their Westminster location is the _only_ place I've ever seen her get bahn mi. Not to mention it's a 24/7 spot and they're like $2.50 a piece. I stop by there just about every time I'm driving between LA and OC.
That particular bakery actually produces bread for the che cali restaurant in the same parking lot as well as their own store front. Living near by I quickly learned their bakeries schedule and would make a point of visiting just around the time the bread had finished cooling in the rack behind the register. I always thought they should light up a sign à la krispy kreme, but figured most local folks had figured it out like myself. 3 for $5, take that subway.
http://www.sfgate.com/restaurants/article/Old-Taco-Bell-site...
Melbourne, Australia, would give Twin Cities a run for their money for banh mis. There's a large Vietnamese community here from the war, South Vietnamese flags flying everywhere.
I can't get enough of the things. Some weekends I'll eat nothing else. When I went to Vietnam a couple of years back, I practically survived on banh mi and pho.
If you have not been, you're missing out on the best pork roll the city has to offer. I wasn't a fan of banh mi, and to be honest I don't really like Vietnamese cuisine in general, but a few minutes sitting in sweltering heat on shitty outdoor furniture on a table that rocks back and forth on a crack in the pavement by about 30 degrees and I finally understood why people might like it.
I still don't like pho though.
What's funny is that I've been eating these Banh Mi for ages from the Vietnamese bakery near work and didn't know they were called that.
I found it really interesting how every region had its own way of making them. Before I went to Vietnam, I had this idea that there was a "proper" banh mi, but the only thing they all had in common was the bread roll.
Can’t tell you where it is, of course. a) I have no idea unless I’m driving and b) the hipsters will catch on and then it’s ruined!
Go Vikings!
Edit: I see you've answered the question already, never mind. If you have suggestions for other places around town though I'm up for it.
PS this is why people think of Americans as insular.
They're much more utilitarian about it but this is basically the Cooks Illustrated/ATK approach as well. My main complaint is that it can lead to really fussy recipes though I think they've toned that down a bit in recent years.
But, as I say, I think they've also focused a bit more on prep time of late.
I had a conversation with my dad (currently in his late 60s) about what eating was like growing up and he said: "Well, we didn't have any spicy food." and I asked: "Like what? Mexican? Schezuwan? Thai?" and his answer was: "Any food with garlic".
Spicy for them was shake and baked bbq chicken. Otherwise, the main flavorings in use were salt, butter, yellow onion and microscopic quantities of pepper.
This fresh onion juice concept is thought provoking as well. Recently tried making latke and upon shredding my onions was left with onion juice but it did not occur to me that this liquid could be put to use.
The comment I replied to used the term in the context of the 5 basic tastes, not as a culinary term.
I really don't think so: 'savory' is an actual English word while 'umami' is a Japanese one. Writing 'umami' like writing 'arugula' instead of 'rocket' or 'cilantro' instead of 'coriander.'
And 'umami' isn't really any more accurate than 'savory': it's a 100-year-old neologism from the Japanese word for 'delicious.' Given a choice between two words which aren't necessarily perfect fits for the concept, why not stick with the native one?
Starch is another contender, though we are not sure about the receptor for that one.
It's a difficult taste to describe, but it's almost like chili that's "cold"/"icy" instead of "hot"/"burning".
Thank you for the reference.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Huang-Spicy-Crispy-Peanut-Ounce/dp/B0...
It's difficult to believe, but just 100 years ago a food as commonplace as spaghetti with tomato sauce was considered somewhat exotic; at the least predominately an ethnic Italian dish.
Even 50 years ago, chicken was considered an 'occasional' meat. Cornell university is famous for a basting sauce, as a result of an effort to encourage more domestic consumption of chicken.
I wonder if Pad Thai, bulgogi, or stretchy Turkish ice-cream will be considered everyday foods in another 50 years.
See: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cornell-chicken-barbec...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti-tree_hoax https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU
I'll have to try stretchy Turkish ice-cream sometime (where do you find that?) but Pad Thai and bulgogi are already everyday foods you can find on every corner of every strip mall in the part of America where I live.
The distinction seems to be: > Two qualities distinguish Turkish ice cream: hard texture and resistance to melting, brought about by inclusion of the thickening agents salep, a flour made from the root of the early purple orchid, and mastic, a resin that imparts chewiness.[citation needed]
> The Kahramanmaraş region is known for maraş dondurması, a variety which contains distinctly more salep than usual. Tough and sticky, it is sometimes eaten with a knife and fork.[citation needed]
I remember going to my great-grandparents' house with KFC, because, to them (born circa 1900) fried chicken was food you ate on special occasions.
Which makes perfect sense: Frying anything is messy work (I know from personal experience aerosolized grease stings) and if chicken is expensive on top of that, fried chicken would be doubly uncommon for the average person, especially if they grew up poor, as my great-grandparents did.
You don't make something like that at home.
They are only open during the summer (April-ish to October-ish), and fried chicken is only served on fridays. And they only make 30 servings, so GET THERE if you want some, before it sells out. There will be a line.
If you want Doug Flicker fried chicken and don't want to wait, you can also get some at Bull's Horn, his new neighborhood tavern at 46th St and 34th Ave. It's a different recipe, but still very good.
Everyone else agrees that Revival has the best fried chicken. They're wrong. Revival's chicken is a bit underseasoned imho (but excellent). Victory 44 was right up there with those two, but closed recently. Sigh.
In Minneapolis, there's a chef who calls himself the "Sioux Chef", who is dedicated to preserving pre-colonial Native American foods. A big part of this is the ingredients... no flour, no cooking oil, no refined sugar, no beef or pork, etc. The "frybread" that we think of as "Indian food" today is totally a product of conquest... when the only ingredients available were flour, cooking oil, and cheap ground beef.
I hate to even imagine what's happening to the Kentucky bbq tradition I grew up on.
As half the year makes it impossible to farm, the winter months consisted traditionally of anything that could be salted, dried, and/or pickled.
But these days we can pick up fresh strawberries in the store year round.
Two Michelin starred, too! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noma_(restaurant)
I tried this out recently and it was delicious and not at all what you would think if you're only familiar with raw garlic:
Garlic is delicious.
The Stinking Rose in SF.
Hoover promised voters 'a chicken in every pot' almost 100 years ago. 50 years ago, yard bird was a very common meal for Americans of every income level.
I guess it would depend on the individual definition of "everyday." Personally, I eat more pad thai than I do cheeseburgers. I don't eat much Korean BBQ anymore but my wife and I do stop by a Korean place pretty often to have Galbi-tang and sometimes Dolsot Bibimbap. I haven't had In-N-Out in probably 7 or 8 weeks, though, which would make it more of a rarity in my own life than: Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and Thai food.
On the positive side, a couple of Somali places and a Kenyan place in town have cracked the code, and are offering slick, friendly Chipotle-style counter service experiences with really delicious food.
The closest I think in English is how we have modified the word "spice" to be, in context, "spiced" vs "spicy".
The former implies the "herbs and spices" and the latter the "hot pepper" types. But it's not exactly consistent.
We of course have the modifier "hot" which works. And we stole piquant from the french, but that is a little different I think.
I've also heard foods described as having "bite" to indicate that they have a strong, spicy flavor, but not necessarily a "hot" one.
That's not currently a real English word. But it could be!
It's a minefield of ambiguity which a new word could easily solve. It could well be, as you say, it's only recently that hot spices have become mainstream.
I grew up in the 1960s & 70s in northern England and as a kid my parents may put some very old pre-ground pepper on the table occasionally. Garlic didn't exist to us. I burst out and enjoy hot, bitter, gnarly flavours.
Even today, I have a friend from Boston who treats ketchup as a spicy condiment, almost like midwestern friends treat Tabasco.
Other parts of the US had a spicier food culture -- the Cajuns, the Southwest, African-Americans, etc. But the wealthy parts of America liked very bland, well-processed food.
And near the center most crops are just for personal consumption. Yet no one grows garlic. I was shocked by this.
He said he'd be the first to grow garlic in the whole village. He has of course lived many years in Sweden where I was born and raised before he moved back for his twilight years.
In Sweden garlic has been very common for my entire life, since at least 1985.
I can only speculate but it's likely that I had access to garlic due to global imports.
And it's also likely his fellow villagers, many in their 50s and older, aren't used to garlic because they didn't grow up with it.
I need to get to the bottom of this.
For all our enthralled praising of ordering online, remember it's been available in some form for a long time. Massive Sears catalogs (complete houses included), daily milk deliveries, grocery deliveries, etc ... today we just have more to choose from, and can use magic glass slates to do it.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/58066/aug13_datafeat...
Oregano, and rosemary spring to mind as ones where dried is better - and in the case of rosemary mixing can create flavor dynamics that don't exist with one or the other.
Basil is an interesting one in that the flavor changes as it dries - they contribute different flavors depending on the state of the herb and how your using them.
Volatiles and oxidation aren't always a bad thing.
and in the case of rosemary mixing can create flavor dynamics that don't exist with one or the other.
I do use TJ's frozen basil cubes, which are terrific. Way better than dried, though obviously not as good as fresh. Unlike some competitors, TJ's cubes do not have added salt.
Peeling enough garlic for a 7 person dinner is actually quite time consuming.
If it takes you more than 10 seconds you're doing it wrong
So including cleanup you're talking 20 seconds
I know tamarind trees aren't native to the Western hemisphere, but that hasn't ever stopped us before.
Maybe you should try that recipe to cure your onion juice trauma ;)
I like this sentiment a lot.
[1] https://www.livestrong.com/article/287051-how-to-use-onion-a...
[2] https://www.quora.com/Has-anyone-had-any-success-using-onion...
A standard pickled recipe looks a lot like the onion juice ingredients: onions, vinegar, salt - but commonly includes some sugar (I suspect this is historically a recent addition, given the age of this preserving method and the scarcity of sugar more than a century ago).
Pickled onions (and eggs, herrings, etc) are commonly seen in British pubs - scooped out and sold by the unit as a salty comestible in the age old tradition of making your customers thirstier.
A little does go a long way. Be careful about leftovers, as it can taste stronger the second day when chilled in the refrigerator overnight in a mixed broth.
If you're really curious, there's no description I can give that would match trying it. Just don't go crazy and add the juice of a couple whole onions to a vegetable broth. Drops really will do the trick.
I got many herbs and spices in my kitchen, including little bottles of powdered, dried garlic & onion. I prefer fresh, but when I'm lazy I use that instead. There's also Tabasco for pungent/acidic taste (which also contains vinegar, like this onion juice product) whereas chili sauce here [according to my anecdata] is often 90+% sugar.
Now, the powdered, dried garlic is strong in flavour, but dried onion less so. You still miss out on the fried, caramelised taste of (stir) fried onions though or the sharper taste of fresh onion (especially the red ones). I do love either of these, but in e.g. a soup, if you don't require the bite, you're good to go with powder. Unless when you're making a French onion soup. Speaking of soup one could also check their bouillon powder ingredients. Some are just mostly salt (or, less salt + MSG), but some contain a complex mix of a variety of herbs and vegetables.
Onion itself (as well as garlic) is found and used in so many dishes in my country it is too much to mention. From herring to frikandel/frites special, gehaktbal, and even the vegetarian clone of the gehaktbal, "gehacktbal", contains it.
I'm not a food scientist, but one could say something like:
Intact alliums have no pungency, since the volatile products are only released following the interaction of the enzyme, alliinase, with the S-alk(en)ylcysteine sulfoxide (alliin, I) which occurs when tissue is damaged or disrupted (Figure 1). The initial products of this enzymic hydrolysis are ammonia, pyruvate, and an alk(en)ylthiosulphinate (allicin, II). The latter, which possesses odor characteristics typical of the freshly cut tissue, can undergo further nonenzymic reactions to yield a variety of compounds, including thiosulfinate [III] and di- and trisulfides [IV]. These compounds have slightly differing flavors and odors, and may impart a cooked note to steam-distilled onion or leek oils.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B012227055...
https://ninjatune.net/images/releases/drinks-to-try-in-this-...
https://www.indy100.com/article/4chan-onions-pol-testosteron...