Pie to Cupcake: Time’s Up

The tall pecan pie with a deep-brown crust from Diner in Brooklyn. More Photos »

By JULIA MOSKIN

Published: November 16, 2010

THE idea for a pie-centric restaurant came to Trevor Logan in the California desert. He was in the midst of planning an ice cream parlor when he had what may have been a flash of insight, a stroke of genius or a psychic message from his 90-year-old grandmother in Oklahoma: “Maybe I shouldn’t just be doing ice cream,” he thought. “We have The Pie.”
The Pie was the most popular dessert at his first restaurant here, Green Chile Kitchen. Now it has become the cornerstone of the menu at his second place, Chile Pies and Ice Cream, which he opened in March in the Western Addition district. Apples are layered with roasted green chilies, made savory with Cheddar cheese in the crust and sprinkled with a streusel topping of walnuts and brown sugar.
Green chilies and melted cheese are two basic elements of New Mexican cooking, said Mr. Logan, who went to college in Santa Fe and said that he opened Green Chile Kitchen to ensure that he had a steady supply of the food he missed after moving here.
Savory and sweet, earthy and spicy, Mr. Logan’s green-chili apple pie is an irresistible example of the lengths to which young pie makers are going to make their mark.
Pie had been lurking below the radar in recent years: taking cover during the ice cream trend, perhaps waiting to see which way the macaron tide would turn. (For proof that the cupcake craze has gone too far, consider the new turkey cranberry cupcake with gravy in the batter from Yummy Cupcakes in Los Angeles.)
Suddenly, New York and San Francisco are national centers of pie innovation. In Brooklyn, a pair of sisters from South Dakota are integrating sea salt and caramel into their apple pie and inventing aromatic fillings like cranberry-sage and pear-rosewater. In the East Village, at Momofuku Milk Bar, the pastry chef, Christina Tosi, has transferred the buttery, caramelized flavors of apple pie into a layer cake, with apple filling between the layers and crumbs of pie crust in the frosting.
Some of the experimentation has led to oddities including pie milkshakes, pies baked in canning jars and a monstrosity called the cherpumple: three pies (cherry, pumpkin, apple) baked inside three cake layers, all terrifyingly stacked together with cream cheese frosting. (Yes, it is a turducken for the dessert course.)
At Hill Country Chicken in the Flatiron neighborhood of New York, there are pies modeled on the flavors of cocktails and cookies and an extraordinary banana cream pie that improves upon the classic by adding Nilla wafers.
At the other end of the purity spectrum, Mission Pie in the Mission district here draws many of its employees from local youth advocacy groups, who learn about pie from the ground up. The all-pie cafe also sells organic flour that is grown at partner farms (such as the not-for-profit Pie Ranch), and makes delicious walnut pie — never pecan — to make use of the vast crop of local walnuts.
But amid the innovations, some truly useful discoveries in pie are coming from the trenches of pastry kitchens, made by professionals who bake all day, every day. These are changes not just in pie flavor and ideology, but in engineering.
To streamline operations in the pastry kitchen at Diner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the restaurant’s pastry chef, Avery Wittkamp, devised an enormous solution, which can be easily adopted by home cooks and Thanksgiving hosts. She bakes her rye pecan pie in a 10-inch springform pan, using a thicker, stretchable crust that can line the deep sides; it stays in place even when the pie is unmolded. Impressively, the tall bark-brown crust rises over a filling as wide, majestic and mahogany-brown as a redwood tree.
“It’s just as easy to make a big pie as a small one, and more efficient,” Ms. Wittkamp said.
She bakes this pie longer than usual to fully brown the crust, and gives it a higher crust-to-filling ratio than a traditional pie. She also deconstructs the traditional pecan pie filling into three strata: the custard, the chopped nuts and the whole nuts, each one delicious and distinct.
“The goal is to take the pie and elevate it without changing it,” Ms. Wittkamp said. Once a food editor at Martha Stewart Living magazine, she now works 12-hour days at the restaurant, starting between 5 and 6 a.m. “Making food for people is totally different from making it for photo shoots,” she said. “I wanted to feed a community.”
Pie seems to bring out the sentimental side of bakers. For Esa Yonn-Brown, the touchstone is her mother’s recipe for crust, so lumpy with butter that it would never pass inspection in a professional kitchen. At her Butter Love Bakeshop in San Francisco, it is baked to a gnarled, delicious brown with an almost bitter edge.
The pie Ms. Yonn-Brown has staked her reputation on is called Butter Pie. With its caramelized filling of butter and brown sugar, it belongs to the same gooey tradition as sugar pie, chess pie, shoofly pie and, in recent years, Ms. Tosi’s Crack Pie.
Butter Pie is the signature product of her shop, which is a bake shop in the same sense that Amazon is a bookshop: it functions online and via delivery only.
Pie has also proved its mettle by being neatly adaptable to the local-seasonal ideology of many modern kitchens. (Pumpkins, the Thanksgiving classic, are among the last vegetables to be harvested in the autumn.)
“Our grandmother didn’t make pumpkin pie in July or cherry pie in December,” said Emily Elsen, who opened Four and Twenty Blackbirds, a pie shop in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, with her sister Melissa in April.
The women grew up working in their mother’s restaurant in Hecla, S.D., where about 400 people lived at the time.
“We were the only game in town,” Emily said of the Calico Kitchen, which served breakfast, lunch and dinner. “But even a small town in the Midwest can get through a lot of pie.”
When the sisters opened their shop in a post-industrial corner of Brooklyn, the pair expected to make 10 pies a day to keep up with demand. Already, on each weekend day, they need 40.
Last weekend, the sisters also made extra pie for 200 people: a wedding pie, an increasingly common alternative to wedding cake. (Emily recommends “slab pies” for large gatherings: double a normal recipe, use the crust to line a sheet pan with sides, and cover the filling with more crust or a crumble top.)
“There’s really nothing new in pie,” Emily said, citing a long history of experimental pie making in the Midwest. “Farm women have tried everything before,” she said, though that may not be true of the grapefruit-and-Campari custard and strawberry-balsamic fillings that have been among her shop’s most popular.
Mr. Logan, who spends many weekends away from The Pie working toward a degree in spiritual psychology at the University of Santa Monica, is not a typical restaurateur, even for San Francisco. But he is a fairly typical pie entrepreneur: young, eager to make his mark in food and with a Midwestern pie genius lurking in his ancestry.
Since his dessert place opened in February, he has refined not only the apple green-chili pie but chocolate red-chili and also walnut-honey. He has recently branched into pie shakes: a slice of pie, a scoop of ice cream, a slosh of milk and a powerful blender. Hill Country Chicken also makes pie shakes.
Mr. Logan has not yet managed to create a dessert version of Frito Pie, a Santa Fe classic of meat, chilies, cheese and onions poured over (and served in) a small bag of Fritos. “That would be the ultimate pie accomplishment,” he said.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 17, 2010, on page D1 of the New York edition.

Habaneros

A Perk of Our Evolution: Pleasure in Pain of Chilies

William P. O'Donnell/The New York Times

By JAMES GORMAN

Published: September 20, 2010

 Late summer is chili harvest time, when the entire state of New Mexico savors the perfume of roasting chilies, and across the country the delightful, painful fruit of plants of the genus Capsicum are being turned into salsa, hot sauce and grizzly bear repellant. 

Festivals abound, often featuring chili pepper-eating contests. “It’s fun,” as one chili pepper expert wrote, “sorta like a night out to watch someone being burned at the stake.”
In my kitchen, as I turn my homegrown habaneros into hot sauce while wearing a respirator (I’m not kidding) I have my own small celebration of the evolutionary serendipity that has allowed pain-loving humans to enjoy such tasty pain.
Some experts argue that we like chilies because they are good for us. They can help lower blood pressure, may have some antimicrobial effects, and they increase salivation, which is good if you eat a boring diet based on one bland staple crop like corn or rice. The pain of chilies can even kill other pain, a concept supported by recent research.
Others, notably Dr. Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania, argue that the beneficial effects are too small to explain the great human love of chili-spiced food. “I don’t think they have anything to with why people eat and like it,” he said in an interview. Dr. Rozin, who studies other human emotions and likes and dislikes (“I am the father of disgust in psychology,” he says) thinks that we’re in it for the pain. “This is a theory,” he emphasizes. “I don’t know that this is true.”
But he has evidence for what he calls benign masochism. For example, he tested chili eaters by gradually increasing the pain, or, as the pros call it, the pungency, of the food, right up to the point at which the subjects said they just could not go further. When asked after the test what level of heat they liked the best, they chose the highest level they could stand, “just below the level of unbearable pain.” As Delbert McClinton sings (about a different line of research), “It felt so good to hurt so bad.”
I have to agree, although by true chili-head standards, I am a wimp. I can tolerate only a moderate degree of pain, perhaps because I came to chilies late in life. My son was quite impressed with an in-law who grew up in Mexico and ate habanero peppers whole, so my wife suggested a father-son gardening project. The first year only one plant survived the woodchucks and deer. But what a plant — it produced a bumper crop of killer orange habaneros. Nothing ate them. In my mind I still see that plant dangling its little orange heat grenades in front of the deer and growling, “Bite me, Bambi.”
Habaneros are very hot, although there’s a lot of variation. On the standard Scoville heat scale (Bell peppers 0, the hottest Indian jolokia peppers 1,000,000) orange habaneros run 100,000 to 350,000. By comparison, jalapenos can go anywhere from 5,000 to 50,000. Two percent capsaicin bear spray is advertised at 3.3 million units, and pure capsaicin — the chemical that causes the pain — hits 16 million.
This is the kind of plant that endears itself to a teenage boy. These weren’t vegetables, they were weapons! And it was legal to grow them. We started planning the next year’s garden at once.
The garden grew, year by year, and led to the bottling of hot sauce, and then to my first hesitant steps into the capsaicin demi-monde. I met some pain junkies at work. I bought the T-shirt with the capsaicin molecule on it. I marveled at the uncountable number of artisanal hot sauces on the market, and at the frequency with which the words “death,” “nuclear” and “devil” were used in the names. I have to say that I drew the line at getting a capsaicin molecule tattoo. And I did not buy the T-shirt with the flaming red mouth and the legend “Pain Is Good.”
This chest-beating may be particular to the United States, where one hot sauce maker actually markets a limited edition of pure capsaicin. In places like Central America, Asia and the Indian subcontinent, hot chili peppers are an integral part of the cuisine. Only the commercial genius of American marketing could come up with a product that is marketed on the basis that you won’t be able to use it.
End of Life Hot Sauce! So Painful You Will Die! Visa, MasterCard, Discover or PayPal accepted. Well, darn, sign me up for that.
How did this happen? The story of how chilies got their heat is pretty straightforward. A recent study suggested that capsaicin is an effective defense against a fungus that attacks chili seeds. In fact, experiments have shown that the same species of wild chili plant produces a lot of capsaicin in an environment where the fungus is likely to grow, and very little in drier areas where the fungus is not a danger.
The fact that capsaicin causes pain to mammals seems to be accidental. There’s no evolutionary percentage in preventing animals from eating the peppers, which fall off the plant when ripe. Birds, which also eat fruits, don’t have the same biochemical pain pathway, so they don’t suffer at all from capsaicin. But in mammals it stimulates the very same pain receptors that respond to actual heat. Chili pungency is not technically a taste; it is the sensation of burning, mediated by the same mechanism that would let you know that someone had set your tongue on fire.

 

But humans took to them quickly. There is evidence that by 6,000 years ago domesticated Capsicums (hot peppers) were being used from the Bahamas to the Andes. Once Columbus brought them back from the New World chilies spread through Europe, Asia and Africa. Jean Andrews, in the classic “Peppers: The Domesticated Capsicums” (in which she made the comment above about pepper competitions and being burned at the stake), tracks the spread of peppers by early writers. By the mid-1500s, they were known in Europe, Africa, India and China.
No one knows for sure why humans would find pleasure in pain, but Dr. Rozin suggests that there’s a thrill, similar to the fun of riding a roller coaster. “Humans and only humans get to enjoy events that are innately negative, that produce emotions or feelings that we are programmed to avoid when we come to realize that they are actually not threats,” he said. “Mind over body. My body thinks I’m in trouble, but I know I’m not.” And it says, hand me another jalapeño.
Other mammals have not joined the party. “There is not a single animal that likes hot pepper,” Dr. Rozin said. Or as Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist, puts it, “Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture and so on. I’d stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.”
That’s from Dr. Bloom’s new book, “How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like,” in which he addresses the general nature of human pleasure, and some very specific, complicated pleasures. Some, like eating painfully spicy food, are accidental, at least in their specificity. A complicated mind is adaptive, but love of chilies is an accident.
And that is what I celebrate behind my respirator as my son and I dice habaneros, accidental pleasures. A taste for chilies has no deep meaning, no evolutionary value. It’s just a taste for chilies. I might add, though, that since it takes such a complicated brain and weird self-awareness to enjoy something that is inherently not enjoyable, only the animal with the biggest brain and the most intricate mind can do it.
Take heart, chili heads. It’s not dumb to eat the fire, it’s a sign of high intelligence.

Pechugas más sabrosas y jugosas

 

The Minimalist

For Moister Chicken, Tuck the Flavor Inside

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Chicken negimaki, thinly pounded chicken breast rolled around scallions. 

EVEN the best white-meat chicken has two main drawbacks, both stemming from its low fat content: it’s not particularly flavorful, and it dries out as you cook it. Grilling helps with the first problem by contributing smoky flavor and a nicely browned exterior, but unfortunately it makes the dryness problem even worse.  

Grilled chicken breast stuffed with herb butter

This problem is typically addressed by bathing the meat in an oil-based marinade before grilling, the idea being that this tenderizes the meat and seals in or even adds moisture. But not only does it take time, it also doesn’t work: the meat absorbs none of that fat, and the olive-oil coating simply contributes to flare-ups and the likelihood of burning. (Ironically, chicken skin is often removed, but it is a better “marinating” agent than anything else.)
The simplest way to keep breast meat moist and make it flavorful is to put fat and flavor inside — to stuff it. At its simplest, this means cutting a slit in bone-in chicken breasts and spreading a little butter or drizzling a little olive in the incision, an undemanding task that improves the meat’s flavor and texture immensely. When you mix the butter with fresh tarragon, basil, chives, roasted garlic or whatever other flavoring you like, you upgrade the results significantly.
But bone-in breasts aren’t the best vehicles for a substantial stuffing because you can’t fit much filling in a slit. If, however, you start with boneless breasts (or tenders, or cutlets or whatever you call them), and pound them to an even thickness, you can treat them as a wrapper for heftier fillings.
To pound, lay the meat between two sheets of plastic wrap, then whack at it with a mallet, rolling pin or the bottom of a heavy skillet until it is about a quarter-inch thick. If you’re not interested in a fancy presentation, just pound the chicken until it’s moderately thin. Then fold it over the stuffing of your choice the way you would fold a tortilla over taco fillings, and secure it with a skewer. I love using olive tapenade as a stuffing; it packs a salty punch and contains plenty of fat to keep the meat moist.
For something a little fancier, pound the chicken as thin as you can manage and try a take on negimaki, the Japanese dish of thinly sliced beef rolled around scallions.
Briefly cook the scallions in soy sauce and mirin before wrapping the chicken around them. Then baste the chicken with more sauce while it’s cooking, so the salty-sweet glaze permeates the chicken from both inside and out.
It takes a little time to pound and roll up chicken cutlets, but not nearly as much time as marinating, and the results are not only more functional but also far more interesting.

A version of this article appeared in print on August 18, 2010, on page D2 of the New York edition.

Ghana

Papaye

UTENSILS OPTIONAL At Papaye in the Bronx, the waakye combination plate includes rice, beans, fish, goat and spaghetti.

By DAVE COOK

Published: February 10, 2010
FINGER FOOD at the Ghanaian restaurant Papaye may challenge your expectations as well as your dexterity, but it can be deeply satisfying.

Consider fufu, a thick paste made from plantain and cassava and shaped into a ball, and the similar omo tuo, made from pounded rice. Each is served floating in a soup flavored by peanut or palm nut or red pepper, with bony chunks of goat or chicken or fish ($10 to $13, combos vary from day to day).

To eat fufu or omo tuo as they do in Ghana, pinch off a bit with your right hand, indent it with your thumb and dip it in the soup. The meat and fish are plucked from the soup separately; the goat, in particular, illustrates the preference of many West Africans for chewier cuts.

Denser starches, such as the fermented cooked corn dough called banku, are matched with heavier dishes like okra beef stew ($12). Beside skin-on slabs of tilapia or croaker, palaver sauce — a stew of spinach and egusi, or ground squash seed — can be scooped up with chunks of boiled yam ($12). If you’ve been to Quebec and twirled a French fry in a mass of cheese curds and brown gravy, you’ve got this move down.

Familiar utensils and plenty of paper napkins are always available, or hold the fufu and request plain white or tomato-flavored jollof rice on the side. Another option is the rice-and-beans plate called waakye (WAH-zhay, $8 or $10), kitted out with fish, goat and, in a twist, spaghetti. (Called talia in Ghana, it’s a common addition to rice and beans.) Accompaniments include gari, or ground cassava, and the potent fish-scented hot sauce called shito. It’s a lip-smacking medley, and the most fun you can have at Papaye without eating with your fingers.

Many of the city’s Ghanaian residents live and work in the Bronx, in a huddle of back streets east of the Grand Concourse, or in the shadow of the elevated No. 4 train to the west.

Managers of two large African markets in the neighborhood enthusiastically recommended Papaye, a year-old restaurant owned by Osei Bonsu and managed by his nephew Kwame Bonsu, who have a five-year-old place of the same name at 196 McClellan Street. This latest one is on a sunny corner of the Concourse, within eyeshot of the giant baroque Loews Paradise Theater.

The restaurant (the name means to be virtuous, or to do good for yourself, in the Ghanaian language Twi) is as sparingly decorated as the Paradise is ornate. No kente cloth, no African drums, except those on the persistent pop soundtrack. Subdued artworks hang on the pale yellow walls, outshone by a flat-screen television that might be tuned to BBC News but, more likely, to soccer. English can be heard — it’s the national language of Ghana, a British colony until 1957 — but many conversations at Papaye (pronounced pah-PIE-yeah) are in Twi.

A typical meal is a one-course affair consisting of a soup or stew, with the aforementioned dunking. (Hence the sink in the dining room itself, in the corner beside the potted plastic plant, for washing up before the meal.)

The picture menu behind the counter, also in English, offers little that might pass for an appetizer — the best are stubby goat kebabs ($2), rubbed with dried red pepper and onion, then grilled — and nothing resembling a salad.

Drinks are self-service, from a refrigerator case. They include bottles of a ginger beverage, with different-colored caps for different levels of pungency.

Since Papaye doesn’t offer dessert, you may prefer Malta Guinness, a syrupy, sweet (and nonalcoholic) barley drink. Or walk north on the Concourse to a well-known doughnut chain, for a more familiar kind of dunking.

Papaye

2300 Grand Concourse (East 183rd Street), Fordham Heights, the Bronx, (718) 676-0771, papayediner.com

BEST DISHES Goat kebabs; fufu or omo tuo in soup; okra beef stew; palaver sauce with croaker and boiled yam; waakye.

PRICE RANGE $2 to $13.

CREDIT CARDS Cash only.

HOURS Noon to midnight daily.

WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Dining room and restroom are accessible.

RESERVATIONS Accepted.

it is important to note that pigskins were never used to make American footballs.

For the Big Game? Why, Pigskins

Theresa Cassagne for The New York Times

READY FOR THE PARTY Pork cracklings at Cochon in New Orleans. More Photos >

By KIM SEVERSON

Published: February 2, 2010

BEFORE we return to the regularly scheduled cooking portion of our program, it is important to note that pigskins were never used to make American footballs.

The term comes from an archaic English sport called mob football or, among the more academically minded, medieval football. The basic idea was to move an inflated pig’s bladder between neighboring villages, sometimes kicking it onto the balcony of an opponent’s church. The rest, with some help from enterprising people like Charles Goodyear, who developed vulcanized rubber, is history.

But sportswriters and fantasy football fans still like to call the ball a pigskin. And in the age of nose-to-tail eating, cooking pigskin for the Super Bowl party — in the form of crisp fennel-scented porchetta or the pork fat explosion of a Cajun crackling — makes at least as much sense as another bowl of guacamole.

Rinds in a cone at Cochon in New Orleans.

“It’s just fat and salt and crunch,” said Lester Ayala, a cook from Connecticut who had dropped int o Porchetta in the East Village for the first time last month to try a sandwich with a good ratio of soft, lean pork to fatty, crispy skin. “What’s better than that?”

Sara Jenkins butchers a pig carcass at Porchetta in the East Village. She’s fussy about the skin she roasts.

To be sure, fat, salt and crunch should always be invited to a Super Bowl gathering. Adding a porky layer of fried skin not only gives heft and flavor to the snack menu, pigskin is just sort of fun to serve at football games.

Pigskin is no longer a food best left to Southerners and late-night partiers. It had a good run during the last decade. As a stand-in for potato chips, croutons and bread-crumb coatings, pork rinds enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity, peaking in 2003.

Like all fads, the trend faded. Sales of pork rinds (call them meat skins or pork skins, if you must) have dropped by $31 million since 2004, when they reached $134 million, and now make up barely more than 1 percent of the salty snack market, according to Packaged Facts, a market research company.

But the resilient pigskin was not out of the game. With a good slice of the country still deep in its pork worship period, pork rinds have been revived as a snack for people with food tattoos and absinthe budgets.

Ryan Farr, a self-taught butcher in San Francisco, is making good money selling pork skins fried in rice oil to the food elite at the Ferry Plaza farmers’ market. April Bloomfield, the chef at the Breslin in New York, fries up skins she calls, in the British manner, scratchings, and sells them as little snacks for $5 a bag.

This is not to say the particular joy of eating pork rinds is a recent discovery. It’s hard to find a pork-eating nation that doesn’t have its share of crispy-skin worshipers. The crunchy, salted skin from a pig cooked Cuban style; chunks of the Chinese pork belly called siu yuk; vinegar-dipped lechón at countless Filipino weddings; chicharrón folded into tortillas; and perfect squares of suckling pig capped with crackling skin at the best Manhattan restaurants all rest on the same basic truth: crisp pork skin is delicious.

In the kitchen, though, it can be an ornery ingredient. Many recipes call for days of salting or elaborate rituals involving trimming, rolling, freezing and then thinly slicing the proper ratio of skin and fat. It’s no picnic to slice, even with impeccably sharp cutlery. In fact, a utility knife with a fresh blade works best.

Sometimes, the skin can turn out more chewy than crisp, with natural gelatin lending a disappointing gummy finish. The crisp crackle that comes from the heat of a professional-grade oven or the steady temperature of a commercial deep-fat fryer can be elusive for the home cook.

People come to Porchetta, the slip of a sandwich shop run by the chef Sara Jenkins, just for the skin, which she sells for $25 a pound. The trick, she said, is a special oven and good pork. She uses the middle sections of Niman Ranch pigs at a rate of about 20 a week, making sure the skin looks clean, healthy and fresh. (Cooks who use a lot of pork skin say the fresher the skin, the better the crackle.)

She roasts the pork in a combi oven, which blasts waves of heat, first moist then dry. The powerful combination produces spoon-soft meat and crisp skin faster than a home oven.

“Nobody but Kelly Ripa has a combi oven at home,” Ms. Jenkins conceded. So, for home cooks, she developed a kind of cheaters’ porchetta.

Once you find a boneless pork shoulder with the skin (Whole Foods, the Greenmarkets, neighborhood Italian butchers and some Mexican meat markets are good sources), you score, season and tie the meat. It then roasts in a very slow oven for almost five hours. That gives you lots of time to prepare the rest of the game-day snacks.

Among those snacks should be cracklings, which are a fun pigskin party trick. Cracklings are the American cousins of the French grattons and the chicharrón common to Latin America. In its perfect form, a crackling offers a square of skin that cracks when you bite into it, giving way to a little pocket of hot fat and a salty layer of pork meat.

Donald Link, a chef and an owner of two restaurants and a butcher shop in New Orleans, loves cracklings almost as much as he loves the New Orleans Saints. He was on the 40-yard line during the National Football Conference championship game against the Minnesota Vikings.

He thinks seafood gumbo is the perfect Super Bowl food, although he advises frying a few batches of cracklings, too. That’s because around the bayous of Acadiana where he was raised, cracklings are always appropriate.

“Some people bring wine to dinner,” he said. “In Cajun country you bring boudin and cracklings.”

With his recipe, a few pints of peanut oil, a deep pot and some pork belly can produce results that will make your friends think you a minor god. Mr. Link recommends deep-frying the cracklings in a two-step method like French fries and then coating them in a peppery Cajun spice mixture.

They are so good you might want to make that guacamole after all.

“Half of them aren’t going to make it out of the kitchen to your guests,” he said. “Probably none of them are.”

Sushi a la Catalana

Go Back To Home (NYT)

Global Tables | Stellar Sushi in Barcelona

Food, Travel

|

By ALEXANDER LOBRANO

| January 8, 2010, 6:07 pm

encantadisimo For Catalans, sushi is another take on two of the foods they love best — rice and seafood.

Since Catalonia has no important historical connection with Japan, and Spain’s main Asian colonial fandango was with the Philippines, the recent rabid popularity of Japanese food in Barcelona may be a little puzzling at first.

During a visit to the Fundació Miró, though, it started to make sense. The Zen simplicity of Joan Miró’s drawings reminded me of the recurring Catalan fascination with a certain poignant minimalism, and reading a local newspaper in the metro on the way home, an article pointed out that Catalonia has a considerable Japanese expat population because of that country’s substantial investments in the region. Then the 1992 Olympics officially interred the sad Franco-era insularity of this once-drowsy Mediterranean port, and brought on an onslaught of tourists with cosmopolitan palates.

More recently, the influential Tragaluz restaurant group has boosted the popularity of Oriental eating with a handful of trendy tables, including Elj Apo Nes, Negro-Rojo and La Xina, that rebooted local perceptions of Asian food in a city where Asian cuisine used to mean a meal at one of the dodgy Chinese places in the formerly seedy (now hip) El Raval neighborhood. And a band of lieutenants from Ferran Adriá’s kitchen have lately opened a small but brilliant constellation of sushi-meets-tapas bars, including Albert Raurich’s Dos Palillos and Paco Guzman’s Santa Maria.

encantadisimo The Koy Shunka kitchen.

I was still mulling over the Catalan passion for Japanese food when I arrived at Koy Shunka, a new and wildly popular restaurant that opened in the Bárri Gotic a few months ago. Seated at the wooden counter bordering its open kitchen and watching one of the 10 chefs carefully make a nori-wrapped roll of rice and salmon, I finally got it. Of course the Catalans love sushi, since they’d inevitably be fascinated by another take on two of the foods they love best — rice and seafood — and be attracted by a cuisine that prizes pedigreed produce as much as their own does.

The menu at this sleek spot, an offshoot of the Tokyo-born chef Hideki Matsuhisha’s Shunka, an address fervently recommended to me by Ferran Adriá, goes way beyond its sublime sushi and sashimi with a variety of spectacularly subtle dishes that show off an intriguing mingling of the Japanese and Catalan kitchens. The best way to discover them is with the 60-euro tasting menu, which changes daily but might include sea cucumbers and shiitakes in a ginger-spiked dashi broth, plum-glazed eel, tuna tartare with porcini mushroom shavings, and black sesame panna cotta, among other dishes.

On the other hand, ordering à la carte lets you get at the stunning miso soup with tofu and lobster, Manila clams steamed in sake, flash-fried Palamos shrimp on rock salt, and magnificent toro with sea urchin, this latter dish being the best sashimi I’ve eaten outside of Japan. It was stunningly good with a glass of Albariño wine, the suggestion of the friendly Catalan couple next to me, who told me they come here “Cada Dissabte.” If I lived in Barcelona, I’d come to Koy Shunka a lot more often than “every Saturday,” though, because the sushi and sashimi are not only the best I’ve ever eaten in Europe, but the Japanese-Catalan dishes are also such fine food for thought that, even three weeks later in Paris, I’m still thinking about a particularly brilliant dish of Palamós shrimp, sea cucumbers and rossinyol and shiitake mushrooms in a sauce of sweet miso and sake.

Koy Shunka, Calle Copons 7, Barcelona: 011-34-93-4127939. koyshunka.com.