April

Food Porn #1: Half-Sour Pickles

This is my best friend, Tracey, very sexily enjoying a pickle at Cozy Soup ‘n’ Burger on Broadway in the West Village, my absolute favourite burger joint in the entire world.

Or pretending to enjoy it, at least. That’s because Cozy, like most other New York City diners, serves half-sour pickles. These are pickles that have been cured in a lower-salt brine so that they don’t ever become full-on delicious dills but remain nearly cucumbers.

Cucumber-lovers seem to like half-sours because they taste sweeter than the regular full-sour pickles you find in stores. But for people like me who only dine on cukes in sushi joints because they’re less gross than fish, a pickle in limbo is not a pleasant thing.

Bacon Candy Bar

I really hate that loving bacon has become such a trendy thing–i.e. Josea in the Bacon is a Vegetable t-shirt in last season’s “Top Chef”–but I do love that I can now basically find it everywhere and in everything.

Case in point: Mo’s Bacon Bar by Vosges Haute Chocolat, modeled here by my boyfriend and fellow smoked meats fan, Kamran:

We spotted it amongst the coffee-flavored beer and the tofu jerky at Whole Foods, and since my co-worker Tim is always raving about his bacon-flavored gum, we went for it. The website directs you to “rub your thumb over the chocolate bar to release the aromas of smoked applewood bacon flirting with deep milk chocolate” and to “snap off just a tiny piece and place it in your mouth, let the lust of salt and sweet coat your tongue”. (Comma splice and all.)

We, of course, gobbled the thing without savoring a minute of it, but let me tell you–we still felt pretty lusty. It wasn’t just slices of pork dipped in chocolate like I’d feared (and like Kamran had wished) but was a solid bar of dark chocolate with tiny, super-crispy chunks. Initially, it was sort of like biting into a Nestle Crunch, because all I got was texture. But then the saltiness hit. And then the slightest bit of baconness.

So what I’m saying is that if you like red meatstuffs, your reaction will be along the lines of this:

But if you aren’t fond of the idea of flesh in your desserts, Mo’s Bacon Bar will still likely not completely gross you out. At $8 ($7.50 on the website), though, you may just want to throw some salt on your Hershey’s and call it even. Or try out the completely vegan and hilarious-in-a-confusing-way bacolicio.us, which my extra-meaty friend Mike brought to my attention this weekend.

Restaurant Review: Sakagura

The sign outside of Sakagura is a perfect representation of the restaurant as a whole: to use one of my favorite clichés, it’s like putting pearls on a pig. Maybe I’m squeamish, but I had my doubts about the place when I discovered I had to walk through an office building, past a security guard, and downstairs to the basement through a cinderblock hallway to get to the dining area. The restaurant was nicely decorated, with lots of bamboo and spot lighting, but I couldn’t help feeling that the dark look was less trendy and more meant to hide the fact that we were sitting in a dank back room.

From the moment the bottle of sake arrived, though, it didn’t matter. My dinner date, Kamran, and I had settled on what was supposed to be some milky, nutty, dense sake that I’d hoped would sit on our stomachs like a glass of Guinness, but our server steered us away from it and instead suggested their seasonal sake. After seeing the giant spread for it in the sake menu, I figured she was just required to push it, but it turned out that light, sweet, and springy was totally befitting to the meal we were about to have.

If anyone can read that label, please do and get back to me.

I was glad our friend had taken us to a genuine sake joint a while back and taught us to drink from boxes, or this would’ve been completely befuddling. In case you’ve never had sake served this way, your server will overfill the box, letting some sake slosh into the bowl. Without looking like a cheapskate, you can totally tip the contents of the bowl back into the box and finish it.

Our first dish was a quad of tori tsukune or chicken meatballs ($6), which I’d really like to become a connoisseur of. I’ve had them from at least five different Asian joints at this point, and I love each more than the last. These were much more meaty than bready, just the way Kamran likes them. (I, on the other hand, am a carb glutton and want everything to taste entirely refined.) But dipped in salt, I could’ve made an entire meal of these things:

Our second dish was the entire reason we went to Sakagura in the first place: the jaga dango, described as “mashed potatoes coated in sweet donut batter fried crisp” ($6). This was real, live donuts 4 dinner:

And it was good, of course, because everything doughed and fried is good. The problem was that the dough overpowered the mashed potatoes. It ended up being one flavor, one color, and one texture:

And I’m not complaining! But I guess I just wanted some butter or some truffle oil thrown in. You know, to make it completely un-Japanese.

Our next dish was not for the faint of heart. It was listed on the menu as “buta kakuni, Sakagura’s special stewed diced pork” ($4.50), which had me expecting a measly spoonful of pork bits, but all of the reviews suggested it was the best thing on the menu. What arrived was a two-inch by two-inch by two-inch square of what resembled brown gelatin. But it was actually a thick layer of fat with a thin layer of pork underneath. Followed by another thick layer of fat and another thin layer of pork. For someone raised to cut every bit of gristle off a hunk of meat, this seemed devilish.

And it tasted it, too. The dab of spicy mustard on the side of the bowl, the sprinkling of microgreens on top, and the sweet liquid the pork was resting in formed one of the most mind-blowingly delicious dishes I’ve ever had. Some of that mind-blowingness may have come from the shock that it didn’t taste as disgusting as it looked, but I can’t argue with the fact that the fat literally melted in our mouths.

When my dumpling was finished, I tried to drink the remainder of the liquid, but it was just too intense for me. And I’m the kind of girl who likes chocolate bars made with 85% cacao, so intense is something I do well. It was just so porky yet so candied, so savory yet so sweet. I asked Kamran to finish my bowl off for me, which left him with this look of delight on his face:

Next, we had the gyu miso nikomi, which was “shredded beef back ribs stewed in miso topped with grated daikon radish” ($6.50), and it was another pleasant surprise. I like beef, and I like radish, but I had no idea what grated radish wetted with some miso broth could do for the texture of some tender beef. And the shisho leaf! I could have eaten that alone by the poundful.

The final savory dish was the tori karaage, “deep fried chunks of chicken marinade in sake and ginger infused soy sauce” ($7). Had it been the only plate we’d had, it would’ve been great, but after fatty pork and radishy beef, it just couldn’t compare. Although I certainly appreciated the lovely lemon sculpture:

After all of that food, we really didn’t have room for dessert, but there was black sesame crème brûlée with black sesame ice cream ($7)!

It was a sort of thin sesame cookie/biscuit/brittle over sesame ice cream over a very complex crème brûlée, but it was all oddly un-sweet. In a way that we liked. It wasn’t a dessert for everyone, certainly, but I doubt that any of their desserts are. Coffee gelatin, anyone?

Truly, it was a fantastic experience. We raved about it for hours and then days and can’t wait to go back.

Re-Ment Sushi Miniatures: the Only Fish I Don’t Actively Hate

Since I was a little girl, I’ve been fascinated by things that are miniaturized. I think it all goes back to a family vacation to Walt Disney World when my dad took me to the hotel gift shop and told me to choose anything I wanted; the cutest little black-and-white spotted pig caught my eye and became my most prized possession, and after that, my dad was always surprising me with miniature everything.

One afternoon while my boyfriend, Kamran, and I were busy stuffing our faces with French fries in paper cones at Pommes Frites, we decided to stop in the Japanese toy store next door despite the fact that it was up a dark, unmarked stairway. Most of the store was comprised of glass cases filled with every imaginable Be@rbrick, a collectible sort-of plastic bear that confused us sooooo much, but the entire wall of boxes with pictures of miniature food on them had me mesmerized.

Except for the safety warning, all of the writing was in Japanese, so I had no idea what I was really getting into, but a sign on the wall scolded people for opening the boxes, so I got the feeling their contents were supposed to be a surprise. I had a tough time choosing between the boxes covered in cakes and pies and the boxes covered in sushi, and even though I don’t care for fish in real life, I’ve been secretly coveting the salmon stapler I bought Kamran from The Brooklyn Museum a while back. Plus, with my intense love of baked goods, I was a little scared I might actually try to ingest the things.

I settled in with my surprise box at home,

Hooray! A photo that totally clashes with my layout!

and found a long strip of plastic with separate pouches for each of the pieces:

I was so, so pleased to have chosen the set with both a handroll

and a couple of shrimp, even though that’s basically the last thing I’d ever order in an actual sushi joint:

There was even dessert!; I mean, if you count melon as dessert, which I totally don’t:

I arranged them carefully in Kamran’s apartment (against his wishes), as if I was going to partake with three of my closest miniature friends:

And then I . . . umm . . . put everything back in the box, because that’s pretty much all you can do with it.

But how fun!, right? I can’t wait to be a crazy old cat lady who fills her house with Japanese food miniatures. Check out Re-Ment International to drool over all of the other sets, and stock up on plenty of them for me for Christmas. At $3.99 per box, you can buy a hell of a lot of them with all that money you were going to spend on the Nintendo Wii you didn’t get me last year.