Delicious Coma: July 2009 Archives

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July 31, 2009

sapp vs. ord

Taking pictures of noodles.

I was jet-lagged after a four-day trip to Massachusetts, tired from a late-night arrival and subsequent full day of work, and cranky after a long search for parking. But there was no way I was going to pass up the Thai boat noodle battle organized by Tony C. of Sinosoul, a soupy showdown in Thai Town sure to satisfy my craving for real Thai food. (An ill-advised visit a couple days before to Thai Place in Salem, MA -- not my idea and not recommended -- had only sharpened my craving.)

Jade noodles.

In one corner: Sapp Coffee Shop, made famous by its appearance on No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain. Our table of eleven annexed the center of the restaurant, but the staff was smiling and calm despite the big group. At my end of the table, Jessica, Louise , Maya and I chowed down on jade noodles -- a tangle of pale green soup-less noodles dotted with peanuts, herbs and chunks of barbecued pork -- while waiting for our boat noodles.

Sapp's boat noodles.

We didn't have long to wait. We moved our plates aside for the steaming bowls of thin rice noodles and dark broth, the table quickly filling up with orders of #2 (boat noodles) and #3 (boat noodles with offal). In Thailand, where boat noodles (kuaytiaw reua) were once sold from boats floating in the canals in the central region of the country, you are given your choice of noodle type and meat. What anchors the bowl is the intensely dark, chili-flecked broth which, if made well like Sapp's, hits you with a wave of beefy flavor that just keeps going, deep and endless as the ocean. (Mmm...boat noodle ocean...) As an added bonus, the bowls at Sapp are garnished with chicharrones, which soak up the broth and turn into beautiful little sponges of juicy, chewy porkiness. Before I knew it, my bowl was empty and it was time for round two of the showdown.

Dad finishes the noodles.

But first Tony came around to check on us. One thing I really enjoy about eating with Tony is that afterward he inspects your plate to make sure you ate everything and urges you to eat more if you didn't. He's like a Chinese mom. But at Sapp he also turned into our dad and finished off the noodles that didn't get eaten, head bent over the bowl, intent on not wasting a single noodle. It was awesome.

Ord exterior. Ol' Grumpy Jackson is inside.

After a brief stop at the dessert shop next door, we walked down the street to the second competitor: Ord Noodle. With its peeling white Eames shell chairs and chartreuse walls, Ord looks a bit like a down-at-the-heel Pinkberry, young families and tattoed Thai kids filling the tables and posters of weird comedy acts covering the walls. Unfortunately the staff seemed none too pleased to see such a large group walking in about 15 minutes before closing and we were grumpily told to wait while they pushed a few tables together. Most of us were already pretty full, but luckily Ord offers boat noodles in both small and large sizes. They also give you a choice of noodles, so I tried the wide rice noodles for variety. I wouldn't bother specifying a spiciness level, though -- while distributing the bowls, the waitress responded to "Is this the medium spicy?" with "It's the same thing!" while stalking moodily back to the kitchen. Excuuuuse me, Crabby Gabby.

Ord's boat noodles.

Ord's broth was quite different from Sapp's: sweeter and spicier with a more pronounced star anise flavor. It was also murkier, settling into layers after sitting undisturbed for a minute, and missing that mile-long finish. I liked the slippery bounce of the wide rice noodles, but the tripe and beef slices didn't seem as fresh as Sapp's, and let's be honest: noodle soups are all about the broth. From a brilliant stock comes brilliant broth, and I am not alone in my obsession with the ideal stock; in Le Guide Culinaire a certain Mr. Escoffier writes, "Indeed, stock is everything in cooking...Without it, nothing can be done. If one's stock is good, what remains of the work is easy; if, on the other hand, it is bad or merely mediocre, it is quite hopeless to expect anything approaching a satisfactory result."

Sounds so dire, doesn't it? It is quite hopeless to expect anything approaching a satisfactory result. HOPELESS.

If you couldn't already tell, Sapp's boat noodles were the big winner for me, as were the panchi from Bhan Kanom we got on the way back to our cars. Crisp and toasty on the outside, warm and soft on the inside, these sweet little cakes of griddled taro and coconut were just the right finish for our boat noodle battle.

Thanks to Tony and the other bloggers/eaters not mentioned above -- Alexandria, Marie, Pauline, Rick, Sook, Wesley -- for a fun night of noodle gluttony!

Sapp Coffee Shop
5183 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90027
(323) 665-1035

Ord Noodle
5401 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90027
(323) 468-9302

Bhan Kanom
5271 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90027
(323) 871-8030

Posted by anjali at 2:31 PM | Comments (5) | Categories: Hollywood | Restaurant

July 29, 2009

ok, twitter. i get it.

After several months of feeling vaguely irritated by the existence of Twitter, followed by several months of having a Twitter account and having no idea what to do with it, I have finally embraced the little blue bird. Add @deliciouscoma to follow my daily eats. Look, I even have a button!

Posted by anjali at 12:12 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: News

July 17, 2009

the food of a younger land

So I wish I could say I celebrated our American culinary heritage on the 4th of July by eating Georgia Possum and Taters or Mississippi Molasses Pie or Washington Aplets and Cotlets, just a few of the regional dishes written about in Mark Kurlansky's new book, The Food of a Younger Land, but in fact I did not. Instead, my cookbook club assembled on just a regular old Sunday to eat old-fashioned food, drink mint juleps and discuss the fascinating dishes that once filled the American plate.

The Food of a Younger Land is a collection of essays once destined to be a book put out by the Federal Writers' Project, an arm of the Works Project Administration created to employ out-of-work writers during the Depression. The FWP dissolved before the book was published and the five boxes of raw material -- essays, recipes, photographs -- sat quietly in the Library of Congress until Mark Kurlansky stumbled onto them while doing research for another book. He has edited together "the chaotic pile of imperfect manuscripts" into a collection of surprising depth and variety. Some essays read like short stories, others like anthropological reports. One is simply a list of "New York Soda-Luncheonette Slang and Jargon." (A favorite: "14" means Look at the beautiful girl, while "14 1/2" means A beautiful girl, a little on the plump side.)

Unfortunately for those who want to recreate the recipes, the one trait all the essays share is a certain impreciseness, a tone which implies you probably know exactly what "Don't have the solution too strong" means when you are preparing lutefisk (cod soaked in a lye solution for 15 days, if you didn't know) and you find the instructions "Cook until done" perfectly clear. Not only did America once eat differently; America once cooked differently too.

Looking for a little more guidance, I turned to a recipe in Saveur for my Florida Shrimp Pilau, the Caribbean variation of a Middle Eastern pilaf. Others in the group used recipes from their grandmothers or just winged it. After loading up my plate, I realized suddenly how mushy everything was, all soft grains and smooth purees, food meant to be easy on those with bad -- or fake -- teeth. America once chewed differently too, it seems.

My favorite of the day was Oklahoma Kush, a sort of cornbread stuffing written about in what may be the most sparse essay of the book. It's just a single paragraph:

"Kush," popular dish among pioneers: Take cornbread and crumble it up, cut up some onions, add black pepper, a pinch of salt, a little lard or butter, put it in a pan, pour boiling water over it (add eggs if desired), then put in the oven and bake.

Lily also added mushrooms and herbs to her kush, which made for a moist, perfectly seasoned hash I would happily eat straight from the bowl with a big spoon.

One particularly tasty surprise was the Depression Cake, apparently the invention of some sad housewife who needed to make a cake but had no butter or eggs. Instead she used bacon grease, stewed raisin juice and lots of spices (to mask the taste of bacon grease and stewed raisin juice). Jessica was a little terrified of her creation, but it was like a yummy gingerbread: tender, not too sweet and deeply spiced. Does the bacon grease PR team know about this yet?

To drink we had Mexican Coke in bottles, emulating the Coca-Cola parties in Georgia, a "simple, inexpensive form of entertainment [which] is particularly popular with the young matrons and young girls." To really drink, there were mint juleps being made on the spot by Erin, who offered two types, as explained in the essay "The Mint Julep Controversy":

There are, broadly speaking, two schools of thought regarding their preparation -- the don't-crush school and the do-crush school. The don't-crushers austerely contend that an abundance of mint sprigs in the top of the glass, to give the partaker a fragrant aroma of mint as he sips the drink, is sufficient. The do-crushers insist that the mint should be bruised and crushed so that its flavor is incorporated in the drink itself.

Do-crushed or don't-crushed, the drinks were potent. You'd think the two mint julep schools would just forget their differences after a couple rounds.

Or maybe embrace them. There was a time when you could drive across the country and not see a single Outback, Applebee's or Red Lobster -- which today sounds as mythical as unicorns roaming the plains. More than anything else, this book is a reminder of how beautiful regional food differences are, and how fleeting.

Now go cook something your granny used to make!

Posted by anjali at 7:05 AM | Comments (3) | Categories: Cookbook

July 10, 2009

snapshots from seattle

In 2003, after fifteen years in the sleepy San Gabriel Valley town of Temple City, my family packed up and moved to India. (You can read more about that experience here.)When they came back to the U.S., instead of returning to Southern California, they decided to settle down in Seattle, where the skies are gray and the breathing is easy.

The bad part: I only get to see them twice a year. The good part: I get to visit Seattle twice a year!

The day I arrived my sister and her boyfriend took me out for Cuban sandwiches at Paseo, an appealingly Third-World-looking shack in the Fremont neighborhood. I got the Cuban Roast sandwich, a fat baguette stuffed with slow-cooked pork, slippery caramelized onions, pickled jalapenos and a scattering of cilantro. It's a drippy, porky beast on the plate, the kind of sandwich you have to roll up your sleeves and tuck your hair behind your ears before facing. I ate about half of it before admitting defeat, belly full, pork juices streaming down my arms. I can see why people line up for this sandwich.

The baker at work at Cafe Besalu.

They also line up at Cafe Besalu, a small bakery in Ballard, and THEY ABSOLUTELY SHOULD. The cafe's strawberry danish and cardamom pretzel were possibly the best pastries I have ever eaten on U.S. soil. (France and Japan have their own special categories.) I dove into the danish right away, alongside a very good cappuccino, and wondered why no one else thinks to fill pastry dough with cubed pieces of fresh strawberry. Whole strawberries are so unwieldy, but the manageable pieces in this pastry ensured I had a bit of fruit and pastry cream in every bite -- without getting glaze or danish flakes all over my face. Success!

The cardamom pretzel was less like pretzel and more like a buttery, cardamom-scented slice of heaven twisted into a pretzel shape. I unwrapped it after my post-cafe trip to the ultra-cool Ballard Library and even after spending a few hours in my purse, it was still chewy yet tender, with a slight crunch from the coarse sugar sprinkled on top.