Writing With My Mouth Full

Sullivan Street Bakery’s No-Knead Bread

Last November, The New York Times published this no-knead bread recipe from Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery and food bloggers everywhere went berserk. But it requires some time and I couldn’t squeeze in a day and a half to try it myself last year. Fast-forward five months later and I’ve adjusted the recipe according to the trials and errors posted on the Web and finally tried it at home this past weekend when the summer weather called for my own homemade bread.

As you may or may not know, I’m scared of baking. I’m a better cook than baker because with cooking, I can adjust ingredients and steps by taste. I feel like with baking, I can never turn back. Baking makes me afraid of making mistakes while cooking allows me to make room for circumstances that may be beyond my control. So you can imagine when I tried this recipe and it came out looking like, well, bread. I was squealing with delight! I sat down with my mother, opened a bottle of Chateau de La Chaize and ate it with cheese and anchovies, pintxos style.

Ingredients:
3 cups all-purpose white flour, more for dusting
1/4 tsp instant yeast
1 1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups water

1. In a large glass bowl, combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 1/2 cups water and stir with a wooden spatula until blended. Your dough will be sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.
2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it. Sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest for about 15 minutes.
3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour. Put dough on the towel and dust the top of the dough with more flour. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for another 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.
4. At least 30 minutes before dough is ready, heat oven to 450Âº. Put a large Dutch oven in the oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Gently place dough into pot. It will still be a little sticky. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed. It may look like a mess but it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake for 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a chopping block.

Mercat

45 Bond Street between Lafayette and Bowery
212/529.8600
$120 for two, with 3 drinks, with tip
â™¥ â™¥

It was a Monday night and Mercat has only been open for three days, yet the decibel level made it seem like it was a Thursday night. The place is packed; the white tiles immediately reminded me of Cal Pep in Barcelona. One of the bartenders gave me a long-stemmed pink rose to alleviate my 25-minute wait for a seat at the bar in front of the restaurant. (I saw later that every woman in the house was holding the same rose. I wasn’t so special after all.) The sausage and cheese station was manned by one doing all the slicing and plating and was surrounded by the curious also waiting for the bathroom to free up. In the back, the open kitchen was being watched by the more important people who sat at the chef’s bar. Everyone seemed to be in good spirits.

We started with the crispy sweetbreads on a bed of fennel, orange and capers. It was a light and delicious appetizer to an unexpectedly heavy meal. The grilled sardines were great with salsa verde even though I was picking small, thin bones off my mouth the entire time. What made my night, however, was the braised pork belly served with crosnes, my latest favorite vegetable. Never mind that it also came with asparagus which seemed pretty boring compared to the sauce that made the dish special: a dollop of preserved cherries. No one should be afraid of eating their meals with fruit; I could have eaten this all night with my glass of cava.

The mushroom dish will mostly likely leave Mercat bankrupt. For only $12–and I can’t believe I’m saying “only” here–I think I tasted sautÃ©ed morels, hen-of-the-woods, shiitake and crimini mushrooms on my plate. The last time I stopped by a Whole Foods, morels were going for $60 for a pound. A very earthy and filling dish served with crunchy strings of potatoes and topped with a fried egg was hard to resist even if the egg was a little overdone. They ran out of razor clams by 10pm and I totally missed the blistered Padron peppers from the top of the menu, so we finished with the snails and chorizo skewers. It sounded promising but what happened to this dish? The snails tasted like they’ve been in the bottom of an aquarium for days. The chorizo-tomato salsa could not even cover the algae taste that we decided to leave the dish unfinished.

From my experience at Cal Pep, the meals got better as the night wiled away. At Mercat, the night started inspiringly, but after I ate the snails, all I wanted was to rewind my experience back to the pork belly and back to Spain.

Adobong Pusit, Braised Squid

Cameron asked me what else she can do with squid. Xe Lua does a really great crispy squid appetizer but most restaurants treat squid like shrimps–they overcook them until they’re chewy and rubbery. And really, calamares can’t be the only way. I once read that you either cook squid for two minutes or two hours. Once you cross that overdone threshold, you have to keep cooking it to soften it.

For this Filipino adobo recipe, you cook the squid for about ten minutes. My father would tell you that you just know when to turn the heat off. Don’t be afraid to poke them with your fork to check the tenderness. At least I can tell you how to clean the squid: slice across the tentacles near the eyes to pull out the innards and the plastic-like spine. You’ll see a small pocket in there which holds the ink. I keep a couple of them intact for color. Discard the rest but keep the tentacles. It’s okay for the tentacles to completely separate from the body. Rinse thoroughly.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 pound fresh squid, cleaned
1 medium head of garlic, peeled, crushed
2 tbsp white vinegar
1 tsp whole black peppercorns
salt

1. In a saucepan, bring squid, peppercorns and garlic to a low boil for 5 minutes. The squid will make its own juice from the ink pockets you left intact, so no need to add water. Do not stir.
2. When squid is tender, add vinegar and bring to a second low boil for about 5 minutes. Do not stir. Season with a little salt. Add a little more vinegar to taste.

Spicy & Tasty

39-07 Prince Street, Flushing, Queens
718/359.1601
â™¥ â™¥ â™¥

The pain didn’t take effect until five minutes into our meal. When I say pain, I’m talking about our tongues going numb, beads of sweat starting to dot our foreheads, a ringing sensation behind our ears and ooze starting to form in our small noses. All were good pain, mind you, and even as they got worse, we kept eating. If you like your Sichuan Chinese food, you know what I’m talking about and if you venture to Flushing, Queens, then you know that spicy and tasty are enough adjectives to describe the Spicy & Tasty buffet.

We were in Queens to check out the panorama of the City of New York in the Queens Museum. We hardly take the number 7 train so when we found ourselves in the city’s largest borough, the most ethnically diverse county in the entire United States, we decided to continue on to Flushing and look for a late afternoon meal. We’re not familiar with the neighborhood at all so we stopped by Duane Reade to steal a glance inside one of the city magazines. Unfortunately, there was always one restaurant listed under Queens, but luckily, Spicy & Tasty was the one selected by The New Yorker. The restaurant was only an avenue away from the subway so we took the quick hike, feeling very determined to eat spicy Chinese food.

The Dr. grew up in Los Angeles and if he misses a cuisine more than Korean, it would be Sichuan Chinese. We have several Shanghainese Chinese restaurants in New York, but only a few good Sichuan places. He would recall to me trips to Monterey Park eating spicy dish after spicy dish flavored by fagara peppercorns. In fact, the last time I went to Los Angeles without him, I went to his favorite Sichuan restaurant and finally understood why a good sweat is sometimes appeciated and even necessary. To my delight, his eyes lit up as soon as we walked in Spicy & Tasty. He wanted to order everything behind the glass. We pointed and picked three dishes and added a soup and a bowl of dan dan noodles to our bill from our table.

The culprits were the spicy root vegetable, the crispy tendon salad and the dan dan noodles. We took turns picking the pieces with our chopsticks, blowing through our tongues and stuffing our mouths with the smoked tofu and celery to ease away the numbness. When the pork and squash soup was served, it was like water to two quenched survivors. I found myself playing with the Filipino upo in my mouth to dilute the spicy and garlicky combination of the dan dan noodle sauce. There was laughter, imagining how we looked like that moment, and then the laughter turned into quiet, happy tears.

FreshDirect Rosa Mexicano Microwavable Meals

Most of our group lunches at work are ordered via FreshDirect. Every New Yorker has also seen their delivery vans all over the city–albeit not in my part of Harlem–but I’ve never ordered from them until today. The New York Times announced this week that chef Roberto SantibaÃ±ez of Rosa Mexicano has collaborated with FreshDirect to offer Mexican microwavable meals to its customers. I’ve never been to “New York insitution” Rosa Mexicano because I try not to eat Mexican food from restaurants deemed “upscale and authentic.” I never buy TV dinners either but the spiel was that these Fresh Dining Meals contain no butter, very little cream and only vegetable-based oils are used in their sauces. The prospect of a healthy-sounding Mexican dish in “revolutionary microwavable containers” was intriguing.

I signed up on FreshDirect.com, ordered six of the Rosa Mexicano Fresh Dining Meals and had them delivered to work. An hour after the estimated delivery time and $78.93 later, four co-workers signed up to be my guinea pigs.

1. Beef Short Rib Enchiladas with Salsa Mestiza and Cactus, $9.99
I loved how spicy it was but I didn’t really taste the short ribs nor remember the cactus. I did appreciate the real parsley garnish. Cameron thought that the beef was a little bland. She agreed that it was spicy but she also thought that it just didn’t have a lot of flavor. The tortillas were falling apart which made them the “most Mexican.”

2. Chicken in Ancho Chili Adobo with Green Beans and Shiitakes, $8.99
Luc said the chicken was too hard. He felt that he was eating something very healthy, but later added that his comment meant that he was still hungry.

3. Halibut in Tomatillo Herb Mole with Red Bliss Potatoes and Asparagus, $13.99
I really liked the vegetables because the short ribs were too salty from the other dish that I took comfort in eating the zucchini from this. Cameron said the sauce tasted very fresh. She was really impressed with the softness of the fish because she expected less from a microwavable meal. She also said that there was a nice meat-to-sauce ratio although the vegetable choices–red potatoes, asparagus and zucchini–weren’t very Mexican. She thought the potatoes were too heavy with the fish and would have prefered rice or grilled scallions or piquillo peppers.

4. Shrimp in Red Bell Pepper and Chipotle Cream Sauce, $10.99
I was surprised that the shrimp was clear and wondered whether I did not microwave the dish long enough. I actually ended up liking this dish because of that fact. I usually do not order shrimps because most of the time, they are overcooked, tough and chewy. Cameron thought they were just undercooked. Aaron said he didn’t even notice because it was “yummy to my tummy.” Aaron liked the sauce that Cameron called “too creamy for Mexican food,” although she liked the spice. Out of the three things she tasted, she said that this is the one dish she will not order again. Aaron just felt bad.

5. Turbot in Veracruz Sauce over Achiote Rice with Asparagus and Chayote, $9.99
Taste was overall average for Ben. The fish was a little overcooked but “pretty good for a microwavable meal.” The asparagus was too soggy and the rice was too mushy, both of which he attributed to the sloppy sauce, which was just “okay.” He thought there wasn’t enough rice and he found himself looking for more as he ate the fish. He said he would put it slightly higher than Trader Joe’s microwavable meals, but at $10, he expected much more. He would not buy it again and will stay loyal to Trader Joe’s because they charge $5 for theirs.

6. Grilled Chicken in Tequila-Mushroom Cream Sauce with Snow Peas, $8.99
It was only after I tasted this dish that I understood Luc’s description of the chicken being too hard. This dish contained a huge breast of chicken, complete with grill marks, and I needed a real knife to properly slice through it. The snow peas were so crunchy, they may have been raw, which was not a problem to me. Like all the others, this was also smothered in sauce. The combination of tequila and mushrooms made the sauce taste a little nutty that at first taste, I thought there was some peanut butter in it. I added my own rice to this and I enjoyed it more because it kept the saltiness at bay.

As for the packaging, the containers looked snazzier than the ones I can buy from regular grocery stores. After heating up, though, the tab was very difficult to pull back. We all ended up poking them with our plastic forks–not provided by FreshDirect–to open. It only took four minutes to heat up each container and I thought that was so convenient.

We work downtown in New York City and we’re all used to paying at least $8 for lunch, but we wanted more. An hour later, I was snacking on Ritz crackers.

I also had to order at least $60 worth of items to qualify for FreshDirect delivery. The delivery fee was a steep $14.99 but they did come in the next day, twenty-four hours after I ordered online.

The overall taste verdict? FreshDirect Rosa Mexicano Fresh Dining Meals are a little over-salted and saucy, but not so bad in taste in terms of microwavable food. In terms of Mexican food, however, all of us say, “so-so.”