Hungry In Hogtown

Ravioli without borders, Part II: Liquid mango ravioli with coconut foam and toasted rice

Inspiration is everywhere in Toronto.  The dish that inspired these mango spheres with coconut foam and toasted rice powder is a dessert Rachel and I have eaten countless times, Salad King's mango sticky rice.

Salad King is one of Toronto's most popular Thai restaurants.  Nestled just off Yonge Street, it's a popular hangout for student and office worker alike, who fill every last seat around Salad King's gleaming stainless steel cafeteria tables to devour some of the best cheap eats in town.  I'm partial to the panang curry and Thai basil noodles; Rachel reserves a special spot in her heart and stomach for green curry.

For years, we've finished our Salad King meals with our favourite dessert, mango sticky rice.  It's a charmingly simple, almost rustic dish: just some savoury steamed rice, sweetened coconut cream, and ripe mango, a perfect send-off before the brisk trip home on a cool night.

After eating this dish for the umpteenth time, I began to toy with the idea of deconstructing it.  It's not as easy as it sounds.  There are only so many ways to reconfigure rice, coconut milk, and mango.  As my interest in molecular gastronomy blossomed, my exposure to ever more ingenious ways to deconstruct flavours and dishes made reinterpreting the coconut and mango elements a less daunting task.  For the coconut I turned to my trusty iSi cream whipper, having already made a decadent coconut espuma for el Bulli's piña colada, although I adapted a different foam, which includes heavy cream, from El Bulli: 1998-2002 for this dish.

Nachismo: el Bulli's Doritos croquant polvoron

Some members of the fooderati look down their noses at Doritos and other junk food, but let's be honest here: Doritos rule!  Salty, cheesy, and mildly spicy, they are flat out addictive. There are times (and perhaps it's best I not elaborate on what times I'm talking about), when the craving for a Dorito is so strong I swear I can hear the siren song of a large bag of Sweet Chili Heat beckoning me to crash on its crunchy shores.

So you've got to love the cojones (by the way, how do you say "balls" in Catalan?) of Ferran Adria for even thinking he can improve on the humble Dorito.  Adria's solution: polvorones.  What's a polvoron?  It's a Filipino dessert made by mixing toasted flour with melted butter, powdered milk (or baby formula, apparently), and a little lemon or vanilla extract, then molding the mixture into bite-size cakes using a polvoron stamper.  For an overview of the process, click here.  For a recipe, click here.

Nutella, not just for the bedroom anymore, Part III: Nutella powder

Looking for a truly novel way to serve Nutella?  Tired of smearing it on a slice of bread, baking it in a cake, or swirling it in ice cream?  Well have I got a solution for you.  Sprinkle it.

Crazy, I know, but thanks to the alchemy of molecular gastronomy anyone can take a blob of Nutella and turn it into the powder you see here.  A powder so fine and dry you can grab a handful and watch it tumble through your fingers like sand from a tropical beach.  Eat it, however, and it quickly turns back into a paste that sticks to the roof of your mouth.

Fine ham abounds: Newsom's aged Kentucky country ham

It never ceases to amaze me that the centrepiece of North American holiday meals is a bird chosen by a group of people who dedicated their lives to avoiding pleasure.  I know, I know, it's tradition, they were starving, blah, blah, blah.  But c'mon, this has gone on long enough.  Do you really love turkey that much?  Of all the edible fowl, there's not a single one that ranks below the turkey in terms of taste, juiciness, or convenience, and yet everyone insists on it for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. Rather than enjoying the simple elegance of a roast chicken, the succulence of a medium rare magret de canard, or the gamey bite of quail, people turn to the inferior gobbler.

To eat turkey is to be underwhelmed.  Since many of my friends seem willing to stab each other over the breast, let's start there.  A modern turkey breast is nothing more than a bowling ball of protein.  If it were merely dry and stringy, that would be one thing, but those shortcomings are compounded by the fact that a turkey breast has a taste profile only slightly more complex than iceberg lettuce.

As if it weren't bad enough that turkey fouls our plates twice a year, the relentless waddle of the turkey army continues apace. Some would now have you believe you should eat it out of season, replacing the beef and pork with turkey in your burgers and sausages.  Those with no shame now advocate turkey breast instead of a roast.

It's insane, and I'm doing all I can to stem this tide.  Every year I plead with Rachel to remove turkey from our holiday menu, and every year I'm denied.  I cope by devising ever more elaborate schemes to render this blandest, driest and stringiest of meats palatable.  Forget brining, I devoted more than a day of my life to making a Thompson turkey the Christmas before last.  I was told all that effort would be worthwhile.  "The juiciest bird you've ever eaten," they said.  Damn lies!  And don't even get me started on the week-long, Sisyphean torture that is turkey leftovers.

(Note from Rachel:  I have to intervene here and rebut some of Rob's points.  I quite like turkey, and decent cooking plus a good bird equals a delicious meal.  It doesn't have to be elaborately prepared.  Let's face it, someone who loves to experiment with molecular gastronomy is naturally drawn to the Byzantine complexity of a Thompson turkey -- and I helped him with it.  AND I've made excellent pot pie with leftover turkey, among other tasty dishes.  The man is simply unreasonable.)

Then I stumbled upon an alternative I knew Rachel couldn't refuse.  Last year, she reviewed a wonderful paean to the glories of the pig, Pig Perfect, by Peter Kaminsky.  Kaminsky criss-crossed the globe searching for the finest porcine delicacies.  One of the jewels he unearthed is Colonel Bill Newsom's aged Kentucky country ham.