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Breakfast in Myanmar: Making Noodles for Christmas

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Photojournalist Diana Markosian on a communal meal in a conflict zone

Breakfast in the conflict zone

Diana Markosian

Breakfast in the conflict zone

Under cover of night, two soldiers in a beat-up black SUV collected me from a border town in southwest China and smuggled me into Myanmar's Kachin State, a half hour's drive away. I'd come as a photojournalist to document the civil conflict there—the primarily Christian state has asserted its autonomy from the largely Buddhist nation for more than 50 years—after contacting the P.R. representative for Kachin's Independence Army (yes, the army has a P.R. team). I wanted to begin my trip photographing scenes in Myitkyina, the state capital, but the army had other plans. My escorts dropped me off at an office building, where I was kept under watch for a week, only allowed outside after dark, and only then in a hat and sunglasses.

A week later, near Christmastime, I was driven to Myitkyina. I'd been able to spend some time capturing scenes of the revolt at the front lines near the border, but had no idea what to expect when we arrived in the capital at daybreak. In front of one of the city's Christian chapels, I came upon a huge congregation of churchgoers, and the tension I'd felt before vanished. A handful of Kachin nuns were preparing a hot breakfast for anyone who was hungry, pulling freshly cooked noodles from giant cauldrons and using scissors to cut them into individual portions. On top went a thick, flavorful meat sauce, packed with garlic and chiles.

We all stood around the church, savoring the scent and flavor of the hot noodles steaming in the chilly December air. After days of hiding away, of living in a precarious position in this precarious place, I'd stumbled upon an unforgettable moment of warmth and welcome.


More Myanmar


Have You Tried This Neon-Colored Colombian Soda?

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Why Cartagena goes crazy for Kola Román

kola roman

Allie Wist

Denit Vallejo, Teresa Zurek Román’s housekeeper and close family friend, presents a bottle of Kola Román at Casa Román.

In Cartagena's Old City, heat presses into alleyways and sunlight streams over cobblestones. People move languidly and salty ocean breezes slip past handsome colonial buildings. Ducking the high-noon humidity, city dwellers seek respite in cool bakeries. There is a saying here that goes something like this: “All a man needs are pan y Kola Román.”

Bread and Cartagena's beloved, omnipresent soda. Despite its frivolous appearance—tapered glass, flashy logo, crayon-pink hue—Kola Román is deeply embedded in the rituals and identity of Colombia's Caribbean coast.

Watch: A Kola Román Commercial From 1985

“It's become knitted into our society,” says Sergio A. Londoño Zurek, a descendant of the Kola Román founder and the keeper of his family's archives. “This is an important part of our culture, and an important part of Cartagena.”

In 1834, while on his way to Peru, Manuel Román was shipwrecked off the coast of Colombia. Saved by local fishermen, he made his way to Cartagena, where he fell in love and decided to stay. In the colonial city center, Román opened Laboratorio Román, a pharmacy that introduced Colombians to the European fad of flavored carbonated waters around the turn of the 20th century. At the time, soda was considered a remedy meant to heal everything from fatigue to indigestion. The pharmacy sold Dry Kola, ginger ale, and a “champagne” soda called Kola Román, which was originally sourced from the United States. But in 1934, Henrique Román, Manuel's grandson, redeveloped the recipe into the vanilla-flavored soda that today can be found everywhere from beachside stands to high-end restaurants in the Old City.

cartagena colombia

Allie Wist

Cartagena's Old City | Sergio A. Londoño Zurek, the Román family's archivist

Here, along the coast, Colombians drink Kola Román straight or mix it with beer in a cocktail called refajo. Some even cook with it in dishes like platanos ententación: plantains simmered in soda with clove and sometimes whole vanilla beans. At Casa Román, the family's lush, Moorish-style mansion, Sergio's mother, Teresa Margarita Zurek Román (Manuel's great-great-granddaughter), cooks a platter of radiant platanos—sticky, salty-sweet tropical comfort food brightened with the vanilla-scented fuchsia fizz. “For me,” says Sergio, “this flavor tastes like home.”

Kola Román Family - Colombia Cartagena - soda factory

Allie Wist

An archival shot of a Kola Román "laboratorio" in Cartagena

“You're Not Going to Find a Paella Like This in a Restaurant”

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Matt Goulding on Valencia's essential melding of rice and Spanish culture

paella

Matt Goulding

 

The following is adapted from Grape, Olive, Pig (Harper Wave/Anthony Bourdain Books).

So fundamental is the role of paella in Valencian life that an entire language has developed around it. To pagar una paella, literally “to pay a paella,” is to make a bet. When kids are acting up or being indecisive, parents might say: ¿Què farem, paelleta o arròs caldós? “What should we make, paella or soupy rice?”

Most important of all is the word comboi, which Valencians use to describe the entire paella experience: the ritual that surrounds cooking and gathering to eat, drink, and be merry. To fully understand comboi, you need to be born into the culture, a luxury life never afforded me, so I did the next best thing: I befriended Salvador Serrano, a native Valencian, and begged him to take me home with him.

I have lived in Spain for six years, but it isn't until I enter his mother's kitchen in Xeraco, Valencia, where she's just about to scatter rice into a bubbling pan of meat and vegetables, that I begin to understand its rice culture.

Mercedes Caballer Tarin represents the best of the Valencian character: huge-hearted, opinionated, hospitable, as devout in her faith as she is in paella.

What makes Spain home to one of the world's most underrated rice cultures is its remarkable breadth of rice-based dishes—from soupy, seafood rices of the coast to the rabbit- and snail-studded dry rices of Alicante's interior. Paella, though, is the undisputed king of the Iberian rice world. Here, it's a way of life. Baptisms, weddings, family reunions: They all are powered by paella.

Born and raised in Alzira, 30 miles south of Valencia, Mercedes cooks a version true to her town: Beyond the traditional base of sofrito, chicken, and rabbit, she adds pork ribs, blistered red peppers, and meatballs peppered with caramelized pine nuts and suffused with the scent of cinnamon.

The rice itself is a textbook study of taste and texture: firm but swollen, generously seasoned, not the rusty color of restaurant rice, but the brighter yellow of Valencian homes, where a few shakes of food coloring is obligatory.

I've had near-perfect restaurant paellas, soul-soothing soupy rice, highfalutin arroz meloso made by Michelin-celebrated chefs. But this is different: tradition forged in the comfort of the home, a communion between food, friends, and family.

“I must say, I'm pretty happy with how it came out,” she says, pulling out her smartphone to take pictures of the empty pan. “You're not going to find a paella like this in a restaurant.”


How to Make Your Own Paella

Inside the Buttery Pastry Mashup That's Rewriting the Rules of Greek Dessert

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In Greece, where food often clings close to tradition, the emergence of a mashup dessert isn't just another bakery playing to a viral trend; it's a genuine window into a fast-changing food culture

The rest of the world is finally catching on to what Greeks have always known: Athens may be the country’s capital, but Thessaloniki is where you go to eat. That’s no small feat in a country that’s remained painstakingly true to its traditions for centuries; over in Thessaloniki, there’s room to breathe, and restaurants such as Ergon and Pizza Poselli are allowing the country’s cuisine to develop beyond the constraints of tradition.

Estrella is another one of these restaurants. It sits catty-corner to the beautiful Agia Sofia, whose history can be traced back to 795 A.D. And it sells a wildly popular pastry you won’t find anywhere else: bougatsan, a hybrid of a croissant and the traditional Thessaloniki bougatsa. It is a flaky croissant sliced in half, oozing creamy custard from all sides. It’s delicious, but also a buttery bellwether. Viral-engineered hybrid foods might be commonplace elsewhere in the world, but in tradition-bound Greece, where some recipes are viewed as immutable, the bougatsan is a sign of the value of change.

Chef and author Diane Kochilas describes the original bougatsa pastry as "a hand-held phyllo pie made with very thin, very elastic and buttery phyllo that is wrapped and re-wrapped around spinach, cheese or custard." Estrella's version transforms it from a self-contained pie to an oozing, single-serve dessert, but the original bougatsa has been part of Greece’s culinary repertoire for almost 100 years, the result of cultural diffusion from the many groups that have traveled through the region. Kochilas explains, “[Thessaloniki] is a multi-cultural city where the earthy foods of northern Greek farmland co-mingle with the influences of the Greeks of Asia Minor.” Refugees from the Ottoman Empire settled in northern Greece in 1922, and as Kochilas says, “[Northern Greek] cuisine is rich with all the spices of the East, and it's an urban cuisine, sophisticated, rich, sometimes influenced by French affectations. Many of the dishes we know as Greek classics came to Greece with them, i.e. moussaka and, yes, bougatsa.”

But while the bougatsa can be traced back to some of Greece’s earliest residents, the bougatsan was born through social media only two years ago, thanks to chef and food blogger Dimitris Koparanis. He posted a photo of his first bougatsan to Instagram and it became an immediate hit. “I think it had something like 100 likes in the first 30 minutes,” says Koparanis. Koparanis found instant Instagram fame, an unusual feat in a country where food doesn't always gain social media recognition, but he didn’t know how to push the pastry further—making one is a different story from baking enough for a restaurant. “The problem was that I didn't have the actual product,” said Koparanis. So Estrella started by selling 40 pieces every Sunday, with lines around the block. In the last two years, they’ve sold over 35,000 pastries.

The original bougatsan at Estrella restaurant in Thessaloniki

Dimitris Koparanis

The original bougatsan at Estrella restaurant in Thessaloniki.

The rest of the food on Estrella’s menu also veers drastically away from horiatiki and souvlaki. In addition to gooey crusty breakfast foods, Koparanis has come up with a breakfast pizza, a colorful mix of egg, bread, and beetroot sauce. But while it looks nothing like the typical salad and meat combination you find in most Greek restaurants, you can still find traditional local ingredients put to work in new aways. They use Koulori, a Greek bread ring resembling Turkish simit, a Gruyère-like cheese from Naxos, and honey from nearby Chalkidiki. Kochilas believes staying true to these original ingredients is part of the process of reinventing Greek food. “Presentation changes, food lightens up, new ingredients are woven into classic dishes. All that works, in my humble opinion, if the soul of a dish stays intact.” This reinvention has proved so successful that Estrella recently opened another restaurant in Athens.

The restaurant itself is different from the typical tavernas found on Thessaloniki’s narrow side streets. A muralist painted the inside, and owner Kostas Kapetanakis says they occasionally had DJs that would play for diners. And it’s packed with young people, even early on a weekday. They stand over their tables, taking photos with their phones. I hear some discussing the meal, bringing up a word that is new to some Greek diners: “Is it lunch?” “Breakfast?” “No, it’s brunch.”

Where SAVEUR's Editors Traveled in November

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Field notes of doughnuts in Boston, oysters in San Francisco, and perfect pasta in Rome

At SAVEUR, our obsessive quest to unearth the origins of food and discover hidden culinary traditions sends us from our test kitchen in New York City to all the corners of the globe. From doughnuts in Boston to pasta in Rome, here are all the ways SAVEUR editors ate the world in November.

Portland, Oregon

Mussels at Måurice

Adam Sachs

Mussels at Måurice

Sometimes the simplest things really are the nicest. Big and bold, new and nowish—that’s all fine but sometimes what you really want is just a familiar dish done exceptionally well. I was in that fine food-happy city of Portland, OR, to help host a James Beard Taste America dinner and didn’t have any plans for lunch. I texted Chris Cosentino, also in town for the Beard event, to make him eat with me and pick the place. He directed me to Måurice, a twee tiny sliver of a luncheonette in pale shades of Scandinavian white.

Cosentino showed up a few minutes later with a fresh haircut, signature Elvis Costello glasses and a T-shirt that said OFFAL! There was nothing resembling organs on the Måurice menu so we ordered quiche and it was the best quiche. We ordered a savory eggy clafoutis with a poached egg and it was the best (and maybe only) savory clafoutis. And, almost as an afterthought, we ordered some mussels. But these were not afterthought mussels. They were holy-shit mussels. Or, more specifically, salt springs mussels from British Columbia, in a shallow winey pool of crème fraiche and fresh bay leaf. They were so sweet and light and good we stopped talking in words and just went ooooorrrmmmm and gaaaaahhhh. A server walked by and I asked her to take our picture. She did and pronounced us “smitten.” Which we were—with the mussels and the unfussy perfection of un-fucked-around-with food and a nice easy unplanned lunch. — Adam Sachs, Editor-in-Chief

London, United Kingdom

turmeric coconut pancakes

Courtesy of Banh Banh

Banh khot from Banh Banh

As a New Yorker travelling in London, it’s easy to draw comparisons between various neighborhoods in the two cities: Midtown and the City of London, Union Square and Covent Garden, Williamsburg and Shoreditch. So in my search for the across-the-pond equivalent of Bushwick, I started to explore Peckham Rye, located south of river and generally considered to be off the beaten path. Filled with ethnic grocers, new-school eateries, and multi-concept warehouses—I kid you not, there was a building that housed a nightclub, café, African gospel church, pottery studio, and crossfit gym all in one—it seemed like the perfect fit.

But of all the delicious, and sometimes questionable, things I encountered in Peckham, I was most pleasantly surprised to find a fantastic bowl of pho. Owned and operated by five first-generation British-Vietnamese siblings (with help from mom and aunties, of course), Banh Banh serves a traditional take on the noodle soup, with fresh flat rice noodles soaking in a steamy, perfectly-seasoned broth alongside rounds of tender, thinly-sliced beef. The menu also offered tough-to-find regional specialties like bun bo Hue, a spicy noodle soup, and banh khot, savory turmeric-coconut “mini-pancakes” cradling tiger prawns. Served in casual but polished digs, dinner at Banh Banh was a welcome reprieve from slurping noodles under fluorescent lights on Shoreditch’s old-school “pho mile.” — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

San Francisco, California

Zuni Cafe

Kristy Mucci

Zuni Cafe

I took a very brief trip to San Francisco last month. I treated myself to a leisurely lunch at Zuni Cafe (I was in the mood for a lot of their classic dishes). I had a sunny table to myself, felt extra indulgent and ordered oysters, and hung out with a book until it was time to meet a friend for afternoon sweets around the corner at 20th Century Cafe. I didn't have the self-control to wait long enough to take a photo of our treats, but here's the aftermath. The honey cake is a thing of dreams. Don't miss it. — Kristy Mucci, test kitchen associate

Montreal, Canada

Hof Kelsten

Michelle Heimerman

Hof Kelsten

A location shoot in Montreal had just wrapped up, my flight wasn't departing for a few hours, and I came to the conclusion my time would be best spent eating as much as I possibly could around the Brooklyn-esque neighborhood known as Mile End. Starting off at St. Viateur bagels, I snagged one of their hot sesame bagels fresh from the wood-fired oven to go, and hopped a few blocks down to wait in line with the Saturday morning crowd at Cafe Olimpico for one of their signature lattes. Next up was Willensky's, the old school lunch counter that's barely changed since opening in 1932 and serves old-fashioned soda fountain drinks with hotdogs wrapped in an onion bun, a slice of swiss and some mustard. With a few extra minutes to spare, the last stop was Hof Kelsten to try out one of the newer bakeries in the neighborhood, opening a few years back. Known for their bread, they serve brunch on weekends with specialties like the challah fresh toast with veal pancetta.

The entire distance was just under a mile and took less than two hours total, so the challenge here is more about how far you can stretch your stomach rather than how far you'll have to walk. — Michelle Heimerman, photo editor

Boston, Massachusetts

Blackbird Doughnuts

Alex Testere

Blackbird Doughnuts

I was very, very hungover. But it was for a good reason at least; the night before was Boston's James Beard Taste America event at the Langham Hotel and a friend and I spent the evening chatting with local chefs and drinking way too much bourbon. I may have attempted to start a dance circle at the afterparty, fortunately, to no avail.

But in morning, at least, there was a doughnut. Not just any doughnut, mind you, but a glazed chocolate cake doughnut from Blackbird Doughnuts on Tremont Street. It weighed as much as five doughnuts probably and was the darkest, densest ring of cake I'd ever seen. I sat on a bench out front and a small, fat bird watched me eat the entire thing. It was exactly what I needed. — Alex Testere, associate editor

New Orleans, Louisiana

grilled sardines toast

Allie wist

Grilled sardines on toast at Bacchanal

There's schlepping, and then there's ladies-schlepping-in-heels-who-really-need-wine. I was in NOLA with my sister this past weekend, and after a long day of hunting for biscuits and raging through the streets with the city's Second Line parade, we had sore feet, and a massive craving for bubbly wine. Enter: Grilled sardines on toast at Bacchanal. A gorgeous garden full of alcohol and cheese and jazz music and that beautiful, glinty late-afternoon sunshine. We immediately cozied into an outdoor table with a bottle of Spanish cava. Their grilled sardines on toast were phenomenal, as was cow's milk blue cheese. A rather indulgent respite.

Coopersburg, Pennsylvania

Taco Thanksgiving

Katherine Whittaker

Taco Thanksgiving

I've hit the road to go home twice in two weekends for two Thanksgiving extravaganzas. One was the typical turkey-stuffing-mashed-potato business, and the other was the taco (and tequila) Thanksgiving, which sounds more lackadaisical but actually involves just as much work and prep as regular Thanksgiving. This year, taco Thanksgiving included everything handmade, from slow-cooked with dried chile peppers for an excruciating but awesome burn, to a similarly spicy selection of hot sauces. There were bright purple pickled onions and globs of guacamole, bowls of chunky queso and fresh salsa. We went through several pitchers of mango margarita with jalapeno-infused tequila, which may be the only way I take my tequila from now on. — Katherine Whittaker, assistant digital editor

The Berkshires, Massachusetts

Red Lion Inn

Red Lion Inn

Finding the platonic ideal of something simple—a martini, a chocolate chip cookie, seltzer water, really reliable take-out Chinese—is a great comfort when living in a bombastic, unpredictable city like New York. Knowing that you can return it over and over again and—if it maintains—it will be just as good as the first time is so damn satisfying. This weekend, I found the platonic ideal of an old New England inn that—when the city gets a little too loud and crowded—I'll be returning to forever.

On the border of eastern New York and western Massachusetts is The Red Lion Inn, a rambling guesthouse that has been offering shelter to travelers passing through the Berkshires since the late 1700s. Its walls are crooked, its hallway floors wavy as a backyard bocce court, and it creaks and groans like one might imagine a 200-year-old building would. There's a fireplace, a giant chessboard, a subterranean bar, a gift shop full of useless knick-knacks, rooms full of colonial antiques, a little tavern with wide pinewood floorboards, and a formal dining room that serves prime rib and lamb shepherd's pie. And it's quiet. Quiet like one might imagine a weird, old, rambling inn in the Berkshires would be. With the exception of the occasional creak and groan, of course. — Leslie Pariseau, special projects editor

Rome, Italy

Checchino dal 1887

Stacy Adimando

Checchino dal 1887

My husband had a big birthday coming up this fall, so we used it as an excuse to get ourselves back to Italy. It was one of those trips where you hardly plan anything, but every excursion (and almost every restaurant you try) turns out to be magic. When we arrived in Rome on a weekend with no reservations, however, we spent a frantic first night being turned away from a few iconic restaurants we had hoped to try.

So on the second night, I mustered up the best of my mediocre Italian and called Checchino dal 1887, a nearly 130-year-old mecca of old-world Roman cuisine in the city’s Testaccio neighborhood. We were the first table to arrive (whoops—Americans) but we stayed for hours, watching from our corner seats as Italian families in the double digits rolled in under the arched ceilings and filled the old farmhouse chairs. For my secondi, I ordered the spaghetti alla griccia. Undeservingly stuck in the shadow of Rome’s slightly more famous pasta dishes—carbonara, amatriciana, and cacio e pepe—this often overlooked pasta is made with guanciale or cured pork jowl, nutty and salty Pecorino Romano, and spicy black pepper. Fat rendered from the guanciale makes the noodles just saucy enough to cling to these flavors—something I also did for the remainder of our trip. — Stacy Adimando, test kitchen director

Andover, Massachusetts

chocolate apricots

Chocolate-covered apricots (not from Sweet Mimi's, but also good)

Few tastes are more made-in-New-York than chocolate-covered dried apricots, a staple of appetizing stores' candy aisles and old school bagel shop cashier counters and, thus, my childhood. It's candy that pretends to be health food, which means my worrywort parents and grandparents let me eat as many as I wanted as a kid. But any chocolate-apricot connoisseur knows that real and proper chocolate apricots are more glacé fruit than dried snack—they should be candied and rich with a deep caramel verve that jives with the dark-but-not-too-dark chocolate.

I wasn't expecting to find chocolate apricots at Sweet Mimi's in Andover, let alone especially good ones, but this darling neighborhood chocolate shop—which imports confections from across the U.S. and as far away as Paris—has some excellent ones. Plump, deliriously apricoty, with a thick chocolate shell that's properly cocoa, not sugary shellack. As good as any you'll find in the best of New York sweets shops, and hey, it turns out proprietor Mimi does indeed get these lovelies from a New York distributor. — Max Falkowitz, executive digital editor

Meet the Fanatical Families of Switzerland's Great Gruyère Schism

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In L'Etivaz, a group of cheesemakers disillusioned with Gruyère's modernization created their own appellation with its own strict standards. Today, their descendants keep the tradition alive, making highly sought after cheese in copper kettles over wood fires, high in the breathtakingly beautiful Alps

letivaz cheese

Christopher Bagley

Pascal Guenat, the director of the L'Etivaz cheese cooperative and the region's one-man cheese police, inspects a finished wheel.

Every summer day, cheesemaker Stéphane Henchoz and his 55 cows have a routine.

It begins at 5:30 a.m. in his seasonal chalet high in the Swiss Alps, when Henchoz wakes up and turns on the 20-watt bulb in his kitchen. (Utility wires are nonexistent here at 5,800 feet, so a small generator provides the power.) After a breakfast of bread and heavy cream that he eats straight from the pot, Henchoz heads off to round up the cows. The animals graze and sleep farther up the mountain, in meadows blanketed with shaggy wild grasses and iridescent wildflowers, some of which grow knee-high. Once Henchoz and his border collie have guided the herd back into the stables, he and his girlfriend, Natasha, begin milking. They fill a huge copper vat that hangs over an open flame, and spend the next hour heating, stirring, and straining, until the liquid is transformed into three 50-pound wheels of L'Etivaz cheese.

letivaz switzerland

Christopher Bagley

The Rozats' mountain hut in the Alps near L'Etivaz. At this altitude, Wi-Fi, restaurants, and the distractions of daily life are scarce.

If you've ever tasted L'Etivaz, you might have guessed that it's crafted over a wood fire using a technique that has hardly changed for centuries. A little bit smoky and a little bit flowery, this rich, raw-milk cheese is an old-school cousin of Gruyère, the better-known Alpine brand made in much larger quantities a few miles up the road. In 1932, a group of families from the hamlet of L'Etivaz (from where the cheese takes its name) founded their own producer's cooperative; later they broke off from the Gruyère juggernaut and established their own strict standards, and in 1999 L'Etivaz became the first food product in Switzerland to be granted A.O.C. status (it's now called A.O.P., for appellation d'origine protégée). For Henchoz and his fellow L'Etivaz producers, this means adhering to exacting protocols.

The cheese can be made only at altitudes between 1,000 and 2,000 meters (3,280 to 6,560 feet), in the mountains near L'Etivaz in southwest Switzerland. Production must take place between May 10 and October 10 while the cows graze in the pristine meadows surrounding the cheesemaker' chalet d'alpage, a sort of mountain hut—farmhouse. The milk itself must be stored for no more than 18 hours and must never leave the property. In Henchoz's case it travels a distance of roughly 20 feet, from the barn to the main house. Every few days, he delivers a dozen or so cheese wheels to a vast communal cellar in the village, where they will soak for 24 hours in a brine bath before being aged in three different rooms, at three different temperatures and humidity levels, for a minimum of 135 days.

Anyone who's ever seen a perfectly symmetrical Swiss haystack, to say nothing of a Breitling chronograph, knows that the Swiss have a thing for order and precision. Even the woodpiles in this part of the Alps are marvels of obsessive exactitude, the logs seemingly cut and stacked to the millimeter. The L'Etivaz cheesemakers' cooperative follows a long list of guidelines down to the type of fabric required for cheesecloths (100 percent linen only, please). “It's how we maintain quality,” says Pascal Guenat, who runs the cooperative and is L'Etivaz's one-man cheese police. He is often seen prowling the storage cellars in a white lab coat.

Yet as I witnessed this summer while spending time with a half-dozen cheesemaking families, L'Etivaz's magic ingredient is a certain handmade, homey realness. Even in Switzerland, there's a limit to how much one can regulate something as natural and complex as an artisanal cheese. Currently, 72 families produce L'Etivaz, following the same rules, but the final product inevitably varies from household to household, due to minute differences in technique or terroir. Guenat, who every November grades each cheesemaker's output on a scale of zero to 20, makes no attempt to suppress the inconsistencies. He jokes that a well-trained palate might be able to pinpoint the exact pasture where each wheel of L'Etivaz originates. (Extra smoky with a hint of dandelion? Must be Pierre's. Creamy with top notes of moss? Jean-Luc's, of course.)

“In the end, a lot of cheesemaking is about instinct and feeling,” says Frédéric Chabloz, who has been producing L'Etivaz for three decades in a small, fragrant room off his kitchen. “If you get too worried about the rules, then people will taste the stress in the cheese, and that's not good.”

letivaz swiss

Christopher Bagley

Each spring, Frédéric and Marina Rozat and their three children relocate to a mountain house where, for three months, they make cheese to L’Etivaz’s exacting standards.

I arrive at the chalet of Frédéric and Marina Rozat just in time for breakfast. The Rozats are in their 30s and blond, with three even blonder children. Their main house is in the nearby town of Châteaux-d'Oex, but every year in late spring they relocate to this tableau of dreamy Alpine rusticity, complete with antique brass cowbells hanging from a rafter. The Rozats' living quarters and stables occupy the same building, so the family sleeps just above its herd of shuffling, sighing cows. While Frédéric tends the fire under a cauldron, Marina sets out some just-skimmed cream (a 50 percent fat product called crème double) that we eat from a handmade wood pot, called a diètzè, using hand-carved wooden spoons that have hung in the kitchens of L'Etivaz cheesemakers for as long as anyone can remember. Skimmed off the previous evening's milk, Alpine crème double doesn't keep long or travel well, and it solidifies when refrigerated, but when served fresh and slightly chilled, it's a velvety, buttery wonder.

As I move from chalet to chalet, I begin to see why the production of L'Etivaz has always been a family operation: With its massive equipment and finicky fabrication method, it's not something anyone could ever attempt alone. The local school district allows cheesemakers to pull their children out of classes a few weeks early every May so that the whole clan—parents, kids, animals—can head up the mountain together. Some families have two or three chalets, at varying altitudes, so they can move their cows higher as the summer snows melt and delectable wildflowers sprout. And in many households the kids start pitching in at the cauldron around the same time they tackle their first Asterix comic book.

When I knock on Blaise Chablaix's door, his milk has just reached the required 134 degrees and the curds have attained the right level of squeakiness when chewed; I watch as he hoists three massive sacks of steaming white mush into cheese molds, with the help of his 8-year-old daughter, Alice. She tells me she's already decided she's going to be a farmer when she grows up, then offers to give me a tour of the barn. There I'm introduced to the calves, the pigs, and the black Pekin chickens. Alice says they're her favorites “because they make good eggs, and because they walk funny.”

swiss cheese fondue

Christopher Bagley

Henri-Daniel Raynaud, a L’Etivaz cheesemaker, stirs his fondue de chalet over an open fire.

For all its idyllic attractions, the life of an Alpine cheesemaker requires sacrifices. “We're always happy to head up the mountain every spring, but we're also happy to return home in the fall,” says Marina Rozat. Wi-Fi, restaurants, and neighbors, among other things, are scarce at this altitude. Guenat tells me that this past June, the day after Switzerland tied France in the European soccer championship finals, the entire country was dissecting the match play by play. “But when I stopped by one chalet, the cheesemaker barely knew that there had been a game. He said, ‘Oh yeah, who won?’”

There are some significant upsides to the isolation, as I see when I join Henchoz on his spectacular herding route, which overlaps with some of Switzerland's prime hiking trails and offers endless panoramas of snowy peaks and piney valleys. This is a cow's version of paradise, with unlimited green things to munch on and nary a fence in sight. Henchoz tells me that many cheesemakers rent extra cows—some that have never experienced mountain-pasture living—from larger farms to supplement their summer herds. Upon arrival they're put through a three-week detox to ensure their milk is L'Etivaz-pure; for some, walking up and down the upper Alps' steep paths is a challenge. “They adapt, but it can take a bit of time,” says Henchoz.

People hailing from non-Alpine areas have their own adjustments to make, particularly if they're not accustomed to eating cheese and pure cream three times a day. I'd heard that the Swiss consume more cheese than anyone else in the world—47 pounds per capita annually—but that's undoubtedly a lowball figure around L'Etivaz, where fondue remains a staple even in high summer. The classic fondue blend contains 80 percent L'Etivaz and 20 percent Vacherin Fribourgeois, plus a touch of dry young chasselas or another white wine from the Vaud region, an hour to the west.

swiss cheesemakers

Christopher Bagley

In Switzerland, Alice Chablaix, the daughter of a L’Etivaz cheesemaker, handles a batch of curds. | For three decades, Frédéric Chabloz has been making cheese in a small, rustic room off his kitchen.

Unlike Gruyère producers, who continue making cheese through the fall and winter—while feeding their cows hay instead of fresh grass, among other sacrileges—L'Etivaz cheesemakers must find alternate ways to earn a living during the off-season. Many continue farming at their main houses down in the valley; others work as carpenters or mechanics. And while they all tend to enjoy good food and drink, they are not culinary snobs or big talkers. It's only after a few glasses of wine that you might catch one of them describing L'Etivaz as a way of life as much as a cheese.

During dinner at the picnic table in Henchoz's tiny kitchen (his squat cement-and-stone chalet, reachable only by cable car, is one of L'Etivaz's most remote), I meet Romain, a 27-year-old family friend who began pitching in at the chalet when he was seven. Now a building contractor, he comes back for a few days every summer to milk cows, stack wood, and spread manure, because he wants to. “It's just another world up here—no cars, no real stresses,” Romain says. Our meal, a sublimely creamy vegetable soup called soupe de chalet, is a reminder of the direct correlation between simplicity and contentedness: Henchoz places the pot in the middle of the table and we each dip our spoons in, holding a slice of bread with the other hand to catch the drippings.

As we slurp our way to the bottom of the pot, it occurs to me that I haven't yet heard what one might expect of a tradition-bound place like L'Etivaz: that the old ways are gradually dying out, the younger generation fleeing to the nearest dynamic city—in this case, Lausanne—to launch production companies or fondue-delivery apps. In fact, whenever a chalet here comes up for sale or rent, there are multiple offers, including some from locals in their 20s.

Frédéric Chabloz once considered moving away, and even scouted farms in the United States where he was wowed by agriculture's scale and high-tech prowess. (“South Dakota—so much wheat, unbelievable!”) In the end, though, he came back to L'Etivaz for good.

swiss cheesemakers

Christopher Bagley

Claude-Henri Favre, a L’Etivaz cheesemaker in his chalet. | Making L’Etivaz cheese is as precise as a Swiss woodpile.

“The life up here is not for everyone,” he says as he tightens an iron press to perfect the shape of the morning's cheese. “It's a lot of work, and many people would get bored. But you're in this beautiful place, you're surrounded by nature and your children, you're listening to the cowbells all day long.” He pauses. “And you're free.”

My last stop is the chalet of Henri-Daniel Raynaud and his wife, Aimée, a stone refuge at 5,400 feet, with views as far as Mont Blanc. Before lunch I watch as he and his two dogs herd cows down the steep path behind the house, his shouts of “Allez, op-op-op!” echoing off the rocks. (His grandkids have nicknamed him Op-Op.) I'm here to taste Raynaud's fondue de chalet, a recipe that's been in his family for generations. It's a heavy dose of both cream and cheese, and eaten with spoons instead of fondue forks, since pieces of bread are mixed straight into the iron pot as the cheese melts. When Henri-Daniel steps into the fire pit in his rubber boots and starts stirring in huge handfuls of cheese, he laughs and says, “Does it look like we're a bunch of cavemen?”

swiss hotel letivaz

Christopher Bagley

In L’Etivaz village, the Hotel du Chamois, run by the same family since 1888.

Indeed, cooking doesn't get much more elemental than this: Not only is the whole dish made in one pot, but its ingredients come almost entirely from cow's milk, and the technique consists of one thing: nonstop stirring. Is it a coincidence that this is the most satisfying meal of my trip?

Twelve of us sit at the kitchen table, including a cousin and two family friends, plus a young Ecuadorian who's here studying sustainable farming. After Raynaud says grace, the conversation topics range from Pokémon Go to the finer points of wood stacking; there is also some gentle mocking of French people, Gruyère makers, and vegans. (“Animals were not put on earth just to be looked at,” Aimée says.) By the time dessert comes out—chocolate cream pudding and meringues, both topped with double crème—I'm no longer thinking dark, cardiovascular-related thoughts. I have surrendered to the stupor of dairy overload and am simply asking for second and third helpings.

Raynaud smiles as he fills everyone's glass with a shot of eau-de-vie. A light rain falls, the cows are in the barn, and his granddaughter is trying to climb onto his lap with her favorite stuffed rabbit. Most days, he and Aimée run their farm on a fairly strict schedule, but he knows that if his afternoon tasks are delayed by an hour or two, or even three, all of Switzerland will not implode. “Today,” he says, “I might even take a nap.”


How to Cook With the Ultimate Swiss Cheese

This Scottish Bovine Beauty Queen Is Some of the World’s Best Beef

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Meet the Highland cow, a long-haired, slow-growing breed of cattle raised for meat prized across Europe

Near the small hamlet of Strathcarron in Scotland’s western highlands, a striking redhead with wavy, windswept bangs lounges in the grass, just off the main road. She weighs 1,200 pounds and she’s chewing her cud in the sunshine, impervious to the blustery wind and the wet ground.

She’s a Highland cow, a contender for one of the most beautiful and delicious bovines on Earth.

Beauty queens like her (note: the boys of the breed are just as lovely) are raised mainly for their meat, which is among the most sought-after beef in Europe. They are slow to mature, so the meat gains tremendous flavor over time, and their extra-thick coat means they need hardly any back fat to stay warm during the winter months. The result is relatively lean yet well-marbled cuts of beef, which, according to the Scottish Agricultural College, contains more protein and iron than other commercial beef, and significantly less fat and cholesterol. It’s meat that tastes like the moors: lush and rocky and peppered with wild heather.

Driving northwest from Edinburgh, it’s not long before the city’s stone structures make way for undulating hills of viridian green, perpetually dewy and glistening because it’s almost always raining. As ancient and breathtaking as it is, the landscape isn’t quite what you’d call hospitable. The constant damp sinks into your bones, and in my case, my shoes, but the inhabitants up here in the highlands know better than to sport a pair of cracked-sole city sneakers on their daily travels. It’s wellies every day, particularly in late fall and early winter, and hotels like The Torridon have boots for borrowing in (nearly) every size for witless foreigners like myself, plagued by soggy socks.

scottish highlands

Alex Testere

The Scottish Highlands are notorious for their misty green hills.

Highland cattle, however, have been thriving in these wide, misty hills for the past 1,500 years. Early archaeological records put the breed in Scotland in the 6th century, though it’s still unclear as to whether the cows originated here, or were perhaps a product of early Norse Viking settlements. One prominent cattle historian hypothesized that the Highland cattle we know today are a hybrid of two Asiatic breeds that started making their way west from Mongolia nearly 8,000 years ago. The Highland Cattle Society has been keeping meticulous registries in their herd book since 1884, placing them among the oldest registered cattle breeds in modern history.

The Scottish Highland cow (or Heilan coo, to the Scots) is an absolute sweetheart. They're known for an impressive set of horns and an even more impressive set of bangs, forever draped over their eyes like an angsty teen’s. They range in color but are usually cinnamon orange, black, or brown, with long double coats of hair; millennia of exposure to the cold and damp has granted them personal insulation systems that do away with any need for barns or shelters. And don’t even get me started on their eyes—when the wind tosses their hair back, one look from their baby blues will melt even the hardest of hearts.

highland cow

Alex Testere

Just look at those eyelashes.

At Monachyle Mhor, a blushing pink farmhouse hotel abutting Loch Voil in Scotland’s Trossachs National Park, chef Tom Lewis doesn’t shy away from the more macabre details of raising these handsome animals for their meat. “This year we killed two Highland cows, both at nine years old,” he tells me—the vast majority of cattle bred for beef are slaughtered before they reach the age of two—“and the beef was some of the best I’ve ever had. It was so tender and succulent, I sent our butcher friends some to show them how good it could be.”

Lewis has always used native breeds, though over the last six years has raised exclusively Highland cattle. “They’re slow to mature,” he says, “and can develop a great flavor over time.” Feeding exclusively on local flowers and sweet grasses, the beef boasts a rich depth unique to the Scottish hills, and with its excellent marbling is equally as good pan-seared as it is braised.

Since the mid 1900s, farmers in North America, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, and beyond have also found reliable and productive livestock in the original Scottish breed. But while you can purchase high quality, grass-fed organic Highland beef from small farmers across the globe, only in Scotland will you find the truest expression of it. The Highland Cattle Society lists a plethora of local farmers across the UK, but if you drive any direction for long enough, you’re bound to spot a Heilan coo of your own, languidly soaking up the landscape. So if you can’t eat ‘em, join ‘em.

This New London Hotel is Basically a Gin Theme Park

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The Distillery has two bars, a gin museum, and a 'Ginstitute' where you can learn how to make the sprucy spirit

The Distillery

Courtesy of Portobello Road Gin

The Distillery hotel

Move aside, whiskey. This month, London’s Notting Hill district welcomes The Distillery, a hotel dedicated to the production, consumption, and history of gin. Brought to life by the team behind Portobello Road Gin, it will also be home to the company’s distillery, two bars, a museum, and the already popular gin-making experience The Ginstitute.

Consider it the next step of an interactive distillery tour. As spirits producers look to ways to bring consumers more into the booze-making process, sleeping and eating in one may be the next logical step. Visitors can look in on the 400-liter copper alembic still located on site, and following the design-centric approach of boutique hotels these days, the three guest rooms, each designed by one of the company's founders, come fitted with handmade record players and a minibar that skips the standard bottles for a focus on local craft spirits.

Portobello Road Gin

Courtesy of Portobello Road Gin

Portobello Road Gin

The hotel's ground-floor bar will have more than gin (though there will be plenty of limited edition blends). Think experimental spirits like avocado- and olive-oil-infused vodkas, and barrels for aging spirits hanging right over the bar. A second bar takes a Spanish approach "gin tonics" served in the typical balloon-shaped goblets and plenty of Spanish small plates.

Still thirsty? Gin veterans may be interested in The Ginstitute, the famed immersive experience that allows guests to make their own personal blend of gin. There’s also a museum, which will showcase artifacts like the first-ever English cocktail book, and an on-site shop selling gin-soaked memorabilia and, of course, bottles of the stuff.

The Distillery may be the most gin-focused hotel in the world, but it's far from the only drinking-centric hotel concept. Across the Atlantic in Louisville, Kentucky, which is to bourbon as the city of London is to gin, there's no shortage of bourbon-themed hotels and B&Bs for thirsty travelers. And in Uruguay, Francis Mallmann's Bodega Garzon is a hotel and restaurant combo all about open-fire cooking and opening your mind to Uruguayan wine.

The Distillery opens on Friday, December 16th at 186 Portobello Road. You can join the mailing list for a chance to nab one of those three rooms ahead of time.


The Secret Life of the Fanciest Fruit Shop in Brooklyn

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Midwood's The Orchard specializes in fresh, exotic finds from around the world, with produce so prized that customers are willing to spend nine dollars on a single apricot

American Airlines Cargo Building 79, John F. Kennedy International Airport, Jamaica, New York: 5 a.m.

Mitch Spitz is waiting for his apricots.

“A box of fruit is like a woman who goes out at night,” Spitz says. “She puts on her jewelry, her makeup, but in the morning you know what you've got.”

A forklift deposits a pallet of fruit at his feet with a thud that echoes through the dreary, industrial space, the cavern hung with signs warning against elemental hazards: in bound dangerous goods…look out for forklifts…spill response kit. Spitz is on the lookout for subtler perils.

“Some sellers, they pack the nice stuff on top,” he says. “The only way to tell if it's good all the way through is to turn it over and check from the bottom.” He opens a box, holding a lightly blushing specimen gently up for inspection. The apricots, almost cartoonish in their plumpness, their sunrise colors, seem the Platonic ideal of all apricots down to the bottom of the box. A small quick poke confirms they have just the right firmness.

“The fruit you find in big stores, in your Whole Foods, your Fairways?” Spitz asks, rhetorically. “It's bred for the store buyer, not the consumer. It looks good on the shelves. It's hard, good for piling into displays, but it's taken away too early from its mother.”

He opens up a box of seedless grapes and delicately lifts out a bunch. “But this, this you gotta handle like a baby.”

Behind a chain-link fence, other huge containers await pickup. “Shoes from Italy, bodies, who knows,” Spitz posits wearily. Guns N' Roses' “Hell's Bells” plays angrily over the speaker system. Snug in their boxes, those perfect apricots exist in a little cocoon of apricot perfume. They were on a tree, soaking up the northern California sunshine, just 48 hours prior.

Watch: A Day in the Life of Mitch Spitz

The Orchard, Coney Island Avenue, Midwood, Brooklyn: 11:30 a.m.

Mitch Spitz, 56, cellphone glued to his ear, is walking a loop around the center fruit display of the Orchard, the small but beloved fruit purveyor his father opened in 1957. He's talking to a customer, his patter like an auctioneer's: “Yep, firm, very sweet nectarines…some orange honeydew, very good, very good…multicolored radishes, yes, yes of course.”

Mitch's father, Danny Spitz (aka Danny Pineapple), was an orphan who grew up in a group home and then bopped around foster care before taking a job in a local grocery store and, over the years, working his way up in a series of specialty food shops.

During a trip to California, he happened upon the food of the gods: a baby pineapple, nothing like the standard canned Dole slices on the shelves of his local corner store. Moved by what he'd tasted, the purity and promise of it, he flew straight to Hawaii with nothing but the clothes on his back, went to the market, and ate them at their source. A born businessman living in the jet age, he saw an opportunity and in time was flying crates of the pineapples direct to the East Coast. In 1957, having expanded his network of producers, he opened the Orchard, specializing in the best-quality fruit the world could offer—blueberries from New Zealand, specialty melon from the Caribbean. Long before locavore was a word, before people cared about carbon footprints, Danny Pineapple's only requirement was that his customers get the finest produce available, and it's a guiding principle that his son—32 years in the business and, after his father passed away recently, now the only Spitz at the helm—upholds daily.

california apricots

Matt Taylor-Gross

Apricots, on their trees in California just two days prior, snug in their boxes

Standing by a display of buttery avocados, blueberries the size of quarters, plums with flesh the color of a Crayola purple marker, Spitz plays equal parts big-talking salesman (“I can tell you the quality of a piece of fruit from across the room”) and produce gumshoe (“There was an article in the Times saying no one could find greengage plums? I found 'em”).

On this particular Friday, the store is bustling, rows of neatly packed brown bags ready to go out for delivery, a ravaged spread of bagels and schmear set out in the back for the employees (“It's a tradition I like to keep alive for my dad,” says Spitz), phones ringing, UPS guys dropping off mangoes and berries, a revolving door of customers greeting Spitz with a hearty handshake and leaving with a “Good Shabbos.” (In recent years, the neighborhood has become increasingly Orthodox.)

“That's Mark,” Spitz says, noting a neighborhood regular. “He likes his grapes to be firm and crunchy, and his melons super sweet. After all these years, I know exactly what my customers want.”

Produce is a challenging, low-margin business, even if you're hawking cheap, last-off-the-truck, woody asparagus to clientele who don't care much about quality. Selling perfect specimens of fruit, be they $25-per-pound cherries from Australia or $20-per-pound soursop from the Caribbean, requires the alignment of myriad unmanageable factors—weather, water levels, and airport schedules being just a handful. The product must be moved efficiently, and customers must be willing to pay a pretty penny (or one thousand of them) for it.

“It's expensive, sure,” admits Spitz. “But these days, a pack of Twinkies will run you a few dollars, and that's not even natural.” Most people who taste his fruit don't leave empty-handed.

There have been a few disasters. Years ago, in the depths of winter, melons from the Dominican Republic arrived at JFK and mistakenly sat under the heat lamps in the cargo building, resulting in thousands of dollars lost and pallets of cooked melon jam. But after decades in the business, Spitz seems to have things running pretty seamlessly. It doesn't hurt that many of his customers remember him from when he was a young boy helping out at the store, or that they rush to praise his dad.

customers at the orchard brooklyn

Matt Taylor-Gross

As the store’s neighborhood has changed over the years, its clientele has become increasingly religious

One regular, Moshe, wearing a yarmulke, glasses, and full gray beard, comes in for three packages of kiwi berries around noon. They'd arrived the day before from Washington state, tiny baby kiwis tinged with red.

“I've been coming here for 10 years,” says Moshe. “The fruit is the best in Brooklyn. Mitch's father, well, his father was a wonderful guy.” Searching for the best way to praise the Pineapple Prince, he adds: “He held the fruit very delicately.”

At around 1 p.m., Arthur Schwartz, Jewish food authority, arrives with a friend who had requested an impromptu food tour of the neighborhood. The Orchard was a no-brainer stop for Schwartz.

“Would you look at the size of those blueberries?” he asks no one in particular. Nearby, a local, long-bearded Talmudic scholar pays for four perfect apricots ($37.50) with a $100 bill.

Half an hour later, a young doctor (red hair, scrubs) runs in, breathless, to place an order for berries and melon after his shift at a local hospital. He's been away all summer, and it's his first time back in a while.

“Welcome home!” Spitz booms.

People in Toronto Are Lining Up for Brunch at a Pop-Up Restaurant Run by Syrian Refugees

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Get your ticket for a meal at Newcomer Kitchen before it sells out

The hottest new brunch in Toronto doesn’t come from a Michelin-starred restaurant, and it doesn’t feature a trendy pastry mashup. It’s a pop-up staffed by Syrian refugees.

Filmmaker Kelli Kieley has been documenting Newcomer Kitchen since she met its co-founder, Len Senater, earlier this year at the project's beginning planning stages. “At the time it was just such a beautiful story,” she said. “I just started going, and I didn’t know exactly how amazing this project was going to be, but I knew that it was beautiful, and it has been growing so quickly.”

When Senater heard about the growing refugee population in Toronto, his first thought was about their kitchens. How could they cook for themselves, he wondered, if they were staying in hotels for weeks or months? Senater, who founded event and kitchen space The Depanneur, thought that he could give them access to a kitchen so they could cook for themselves and their families. “We invited these ladies, and they cooked this amazing food,” he said.

The food was so compelling he figured the rest of Toronto would love it. “I thought, what if these Syrian ladies could do Syrian brunch? It would be delicious and fun.” The pop-up saw its first customers in April, selling seats through reservable tickets. Senater says every seating has completely sold out, and tickets for the newly added Saturday meals are almost all spoken for as well.

The pop-up is the first of its kind in Canada, and something of a rarity for Syrian restaurants anywhere. In Syria, women run home kitchens while men tend to operate restaurants, but at Newcomer, the women are decidedly in charge, and they bring dishes and perspective frequently lacking from Syrian restaurants overseas. That includes dishes like salutet sabaneh, a mix of spinach, chickpeas, mushrooms, and onions topped with a fried egg, and helawiyaat, figs and dates stuffed with walnuts and almonds, topped with syrupy grape molasses.

Of course, the endeavor isn’t without its challenges, including getting home cooks—albeit incredibly capable ones—to adapt to restaurant needs. Senater says, “When we tell them we need to make bread for 20 people, they just pour a bunch of flour into a container and say that’s enough for 20 people. They don’t know how much is actually in there, they just know that that’s enough for 20 people. We have to go and scoop it back out to figure out how much is actually there.”

Senater adds that even though the cooks are always exactly right in their portioning, he has trouble managing their inventory and ingredient requirements.

Kieley and Senater both have strong feelings about the positive impact of the pop-up. In Senater’s experience, the project has shown him a cuisine that he wouldn’t have otherwise found in Toronto, and he hasn’t only gotten to taste it, but also learn about its importance and place in global cuisine. “This is an incredibly ancient culinary tradition,” he says, which means that giving these women an outlet to cook and continue practicing their culture is all the more important. “What happens to all that accumulated cultural knowledge and wisdom if there isn’t a place where they can showcase regional differences...it’s important that they are allowed to continue.”

For Kieley, the takeaway is also about how people will view refugees more broadly. About her documentary, she says, “I certainly would like for it to open minds and hearts, so that you see the humanity of people and have the courage to open your door, open your eyes, be willing to reach out to someone.” She said that the news surrounding refugees can cause people to shut down a bit, but Kieley firmly believes action is needed. “Take the time to do what you can,” she said.

Kieley’s full film, Groundbreaking Bread, will be released in 2017. Read more about Newcomer Kitchen here. To reserve tickets, check out this Eventbrite page.

Why You Should Skip St. Lucia's Tourist Spots to Wander Through its Central Market

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Meet the people and fresh flavors that make up one of the busiest food destinations in the Caribbean

It’s Saturday evening nearing midnight, and while tourists are swinging back their last splash of rum before calling it a night at one of the many beachside resorts dotting the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, Sylvia Baptiste’s day is just getting started.

Six days a week she makes her way into the capital city of Castries to the enormous open-air market, down a narrow alleyway that by midday is bustling with merchants selling the day’s catch of seafood, local spices, and fresh fruit. In her small kitchen stall, Sylvia’s Place, she’ll prep noodles with salt fish and vegetables, beef bouillon, cocoa tea, and other local favorites before sunrise to sell throughout breakfast and lunch.

Caribbean market St. Lucia

Michelle Heimerman

Nick at his food stall, Mochoko's, with accras, a common St. Lucia breakfast fritter.

The market, which opened back in 1894, is home to several family-run businesses that have lasted multiple generations, all proud and passionate to share their taste of the Caribbean with those looking to try. Here's a taste of daily life there.

Caribbean market St. Lucia

Michelle Heimerman

Mochoko and his son Nick have been working together for 14 years.

I’m taking a break from the tropical sun at the counter of my new friend Nick’s colorfully painted vegetarian food shack, Mokocho’s. His Rastafarian father (the Mochoko in Mochoko’s) opened shop 20 years ago, and Nick joined in 2002. Mochoko’s day starts at midnight; Nick’s at 2 a.m. They cook most of their menu in their home kitchen, transporting roti, fried plantain stews, and pizza to the shack for lunch It hasn’t always been easy, but the dedicated duo now enjoy having a family business that allows them to do what they love.

Caribbean market St. Lucia

Michelle Heimerman

Sylvia at her stall

With her warm laugh and generous servings, Sylvia is the Caribbean mother you always wanted. She’s spent the last 19 years of her life feeding those who find their way to Sylvia’s Place, but her love for cooking started much earlier. She recalls preparing her first dish of chicken and rice around the age of 11; it quickly became a family favorite.

Caribbean market St. Lucia

Michelle Heimerman

Jacinta Williams, left

Caribbean market St. Lucia

Michelle Heimerman

 

Jacinta Williams, who St. Lucia’s Small Business Awards recently named vendor of the year for her commitment to selling quality produce to visitors and locals, has been at the market for 21 years (since she was 7). She first started helping her mother, who now runs a textile booth next door, and eventually branched off with her own stall. On Sundays, the family often cooks together for the church, preparing pulled pork with soursop fish, avocado salad, and fish with split peas.

Caribbean market St. Lucia

Michelle Heimerman

 

Across the way from Sylvia’s, this stall’s daily menu includes beef bouillon, stewed turkey, rice, potato salad, and macaroni and cheese.

Caribbean market St. Lucia

Michelle Heimerman

Peter Butche with the day's catch

Turn the corner to the fish market you’re immediately approached by several vendors eager to capture your attention. Hanging out by the waterfront with their handpainted barrels and Instagrammable displays of the latest catch, they split their days negotiating with fisherman and cutting fish for customers. Peter Butche has an intense gaze that instantly catches my eye; I snap photos in between a casual conversation with his cousin, who comes to visit the market often. Peter, born and raised in Saint Lucia, has been involved with fishing and the market since he was eight years old.

Caribbean market St. Lucia

Michelle Heimerman

 

It doesn't take long to feel like a local around here. By my second visit to the market, several vendors recognized my face and opened up to talk for hours; we still keep in touch through What's App. It's hard to ignore the pride they take in their work; it's even harder to ignore how good all the food tastes.

American Tourists Are Causing Food Shortages in Cuba

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Basic goods like onions and peppers are going to outsiders who are willing and able to pay

Centro_Havana_2000x1500

Tegra Nuess

 

When JetBlue announced the first direct commercial flight between the United States and Cuba this past summer, many on both sides were hopeful about the notion of foreign tourism bringing money into the country—money that all Cubans would hopefully see. But now, according to a recent New York Times article, the island’s booming private tourism industry is now at odds with the basic needs of everyday Cubans, most of whom still earn their living through the state-run economy and a government that didn't prepare for a record influx of some 3.5 million visitors to an island of 11 million.

The Times interviews a handful of these citizens, like one Lisset Felipe, a government-employed air-conditioner saleswoman, who explains that she hasn’t bought a single onion or green pepper this year, and that even garlic has become a rarity. If you’re wondering, “What American tourist is going to Cuba to buy onions?,” the issue really comes down to Cuba's booming industry of private restaurants and hotels that cater solely to fat-pocketed visitors.

Of course, we can’t and shouldn’t take all the blame: The Times acknowledges there has “long been a divide between Cubans and tourists, with beach resorts and Havana hotels effectively reserved for outsiders willing to shell out money for a comfortable version of Cuba.” Furthermore, the Cuban government has failed to generate adequate supply to meet the obviously growing demand, and has failed to crack down on a growing trend of middlemen buyers employed by private businesses to scour the city for produce.

Eschewing the state-run markets, which are often filled with sub-par goods, restaurants are now employing units of buyers who scour the city’s more expensive private groceries, black-market outposts, and even go directly to the farms to obtain quality produce—leaving ordinary Cubans in the dust.

There is hope, however: As American-Cuban relations began to warm up, there’s a possibility that the longstanding U.S. embargo will be lifted by Congress, allowing Americans to invest in the Cuba’s economy the way they’re investing in its private tourism sector. But it's a hot-button issue with a long way to go for an economic experiment that's yet to be tested.

Behind the Scenes of Winston Churchill’s Super-Secret Supper Club

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At London’s famed Savoy Hotel, The Other Club asks lawmakers to put aside politics for pot-au-feu

Pinafore Room

Courtesy of Fairmont Hotels & Resorts

The Pinafore Room at The Savoy, A Fairmont Managed Hotel

Looking at the particularly nasty political landscape of today, it might be tough to imagine politicians of opposing parties convening for a carefree evening of eating, drinking, and merriment. But it was not always the case that political discourse prevented civil, intelligent conversation off the floor. At London’s famed Savoy Hotel, resident archivist Susan Scott tells SAVEUR that often times lawmakers who were enemies in Parliament may have been friends in private. Such was the premise of the non-partisan supper club founded just after Christmas 1910 by legendary British statesmen Winston Churchill along with his friend and fellow politician F.E. Smith, later known as Lord Birkenhead.

Dubbed “The Other Club”—Parliament’s home at the Palace of Westminster being the club—the group convened for supper at the Savoy’s private Pinafore Room every Thursday while Parliament was in session. At first, membership was exclusive to politicians so long as they followed a few simple rules, including “no speeches” and “no politics,” and respected that the primary mission of the club was simply “to dine.” In order to ensure an equilibrium of ideas, Churchill and Smith initially invited an equal number of lawmakers from the Liberal and Conservative parties. After World War I, membership opened up to include politicians from the rising Labour Party, and over time, it was also extended notable representatives from the fields of the art and science, barring only members of the Church.

Winston Churchill portrait

Courtesy of Fairmont Hotels & Resorts

A portrait and bust of Winston Churchill preside over the Pinafore Room at the Savoy Hotel today.

Churchill continued to attend dinners with The Other Club through World War II, during which the government food rations affected even the meals served in the hotel. His final attendance, according to Scott, was on December 10, 1964, which is also believed to be the last time he left his Hyde Park Gate home before his passing on January 25, 1965 following years of gradually declining health. Today, a bronze bust of the former prime minister is housed in the room—watching over the meetings that continue there today.

Scott explains that though rich in history, most of the information on The Other Club remains a mystery, by the club’s request, and that the Savoy offers only the closed-door location, service, and food—she also notes that it is not the only private supper club, nor the oldest, that convenes within its walls. The hotel declines to confirm who is and has been a member, except for a wall of photographs of British prime ministers who have elected to join, including Gordon Brown and Tony Blair (though it’s known that invitations were later extended to women, noticeably absent is Margaret Thatcher, for unknown reasons). A list released in the 1997 issue of UK newspaper The Times also revealed a number of other members including Prince Charles, journalist Max Hastings, and Churchill’s grandson Winston Spencer-Churchill.

Pot-au-feu Churchill

Courtesy of Fairmont Hotels & Resorts

A recipe for pot-au-feu Churchill, as appears in The Savoy Food and Drink Book (1988)

So, what did such esteemed members of Britain’s elite dine on? Scott explains that while there isn’t any archival information on the menus, The Savoy Food and Drink book contains the below recipe for Churchill’s favorite “Essence De Pot-au-Feu Churchill,” suggesting it may have been one of the dishes served during his time there (he also had his own suite during World War II, where he came to find rest from his duties). Known for his hearty appetite, Churchill also loved fine cheeses—he had a particular affinity for the stinkier Stilton and Roquefort varieties—as well as Indian curry. It was likely a better menu than what you'll find at Bohemian Grove in Sonoma County, America's antecedent to the Other Club that was founded in 1872, where the main culinary attraction seems to be a full bar in every building.

How to Survive a 40-Course, 10-Hour Italian Megafeast

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The ancient, epic tradition of La Panarda is alive and well at Philadelphia's Le Virtu

Everyday life can be ear-piercing in Philadelphia, but on some lucky Sundays, an uncharacteristic hush grips the city. If the beleaguered Eagles are scheduled for a 1 o’clock start, you can silently kick-ball-change across the busiest ZIP codes without stepping on anybody’s toes. It’s a good window for grocery shopping, gas pumping, or park bench contemplation. It’s also, as I discovered last weekend, the ideal time to embark upon a 10-hour, 40-course megafeast that’s helped me rethink what it means to be full.

This obscure Italian custom is known as La Panarda, and for the last six years it’s been celebrated in South Philly by Le Virtu. It has roots in Abruzzo, whose remote coordinates and wild, craggy topography have helped it remain unspoiled by big-box Italian tourism. Owners Francis Cratil Cretarola and Cathy Lee, with chef Joe Cicala, act as evangelists for a purist expression of Abruzzese cuisine, which marries flavors from the Apennine mountains and Adriatic Sea. Leaning on Pennsylvania ingredients, the restaurant's fish, game, and simple pastas succinctly capture the terra of two rural traditions.

30 or so convivial guests filed into the sun-soaked dining room and found seats just as that Washington football team kicked off on a small TV above the bar (Philly would end up losing). A board on the far wall featured an Italian phrase scrawled in white chalk. (“Three are the powerful: the Pope, the King, and he who doesn’t give a damn.”)

Chef Joe Cicala working just a few of the feast's meat courses

Drew Lazor

Chef Joe Cicala working just a few of the feast's meat courses

It felt necessary to embody that last archetype laying eyes on Cicala’s menu, broken into 10 stanzas and printed on long, skinny paper, like a scroll clutched by a town crier. The chef spent the better part of the preceding week alone in his basement prep kitchen. For the actual dinner, he brought in an old friend, Vern Smith, to lend a hand; they skated together on the Chesapeake Bay Chiefs, a club hockey team in suburban D.C., and both became chefs afterward.

Conversation was light as the lead volley hit the table: pickled sardines, baccala fritters, and skewered lamb jutting from a glazed caddy labeled “arrosticini.” A clean crudo led the second wave, an insane juggling act of roasted langoustines, turbot over potatoes, octopus-and-ceci stew, and delightfully murky stewed cuttlefish—an Abruzzese Christmas specialty. Cordial but focused, Cicala maintained a calm tone on his line, occasionally peeking through stacks of plates at the eager pack devouring his handiwork.

“Abruzzo is an anachronism,” says Cretarola, a Reading, Pennsylvania native whose clan originates there. He holds up the region, with its unspoiled national parks, medieval architecture, and multi-generational farmers and shepherds, as the ideal-yet-elusive Italy, the one visitors think they’re going to find but rarely do. Increasingly rare in modern Abruzzo, the Panarda is doubly esoteric, a low-key custom buried within an already cloistered culture.

Cretarola, a long-haired creative writing MFA with a Wiki-quick recall for historical ephemera, dates the Panarda back to the 1500s, though the first recorded instance came in 1657. That legend goes that the Serafini family of Villavallelonga established a dusk-to-dawn feast every January to honor Sant'Antonio Abate. A Serafini woman had prayed to him, patron saint of domestic animals, after discovering her infant clenched in the jaws of a wolf. The beast gently dropped the baby and walked away, so I guess she was like, Let’s eat!

La Panarda participants pay $300 a head for the all-day meal, which works out to a not-too-shabby $30 an hour

Drew Lazor

La Panarda participants pay $300 a head for the all-day meal, which works out to a not-too-shabby $30 an hour

That’s just one example of the inspiration behind a Panarda, which can be held at any time of year, in association with any type of event. Often, they were organized by wealthy Abruzzese landowners as a thank-you to peasants who did all the real work. They always feature 40-plus courses, served consecutively over many hours. Marathon drinking is customary, as is the expectation that guests taste every single dish.

Le Virtu held its inaugural Panarda in 2011; the team ended up planning much of the menu from a hospital room, as Cretarola awaited a stem cell transplant to treat a recurrence of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. (He’s doing well today.) The dinner’s only grown in notoriety since then, with guests paying upward of $300 a head (not exactly serf salary) to taste every trick chef Cicala’s got.

After 14 courses, the group, still jovial, took its first break, milling about the bar, breaking off into groups, pounding espresso and smoking on the patio. On these respites, I met other diners keen on taking the Panarda by the horns, like Dr. Mario Magasic, a New Jersey gastroenterologist who’s done this three years in a row; and Jim Karaszkiewicz, a medical technologist from Maryland who helped develop the diagnostic tool the CDC uses to identify the Ebola virus. Both can, and will, travel to eat.

Lee noted to me that this is typically when people start getting quiet, silently wrestling with the realization that they’re less than halfway through a meal that will end up being longer than three consecutive viewings of Avatar. No one at my table got the memo. I learned about sonnet mechanics, the history of the Kohler kitchen and bath family, the drinking proclivities of noted Abruzzese Dean Martin’s daughter, and children who love pounding chicken into paillards. Fosco Amoroso, whose Tricana Imports brought in a seemingly endless supply of Abruzzese wine for the occasion, shared a story about how his Milanese mother bullies him into letting her do his laundry every time he visits.

Crown roast of lamb stuffed with merguez

Drew Lazor

Crown roast of lamb stuffed with merguez

As a cavalcade of appetizers (capon meatball in egg drop soup), salads (Abruzzese pecorino with tempura-battered mint) and salumi (nduja, the fiery Calabrian pork spread) march under my nose, I begin overhearing murmurs heavy with a certain P-word. Watch out for the pasta. Everything’s fine...until you get to the pasta. If you can make it through the pasta, you’re home free, I swear. The. Pasta. Will. Kill. You.

Around this time, the meal’s first wine-aided cheers (“Woo!”) emerge in the air, originating at a neighboring table.

“I’m nervous about the pastas—I have no ability to pace myself,” Gabe Free, a personal trainer visiting from D.C., admits as we both snap way-too-dark photos of the timbale, a delicate crepe-based answer to Big Night’s timpano filled with sweet lamb ragu. Cicala had displayed it on a wooden slab, garnished by greens and dried chilis, in the middle of the dining room, a warning taunt for the carbo-bombardment ahead.

roasted langoustines

Drew Lazor

From the second course: herb-flecked roasted langoustines

To refer to the portions of the subsequent seven starch courses as “family-style” assumes that the Duggars are a conventionally sized American family. Spaghetti baked in cartoccio with shellfish. Taccozzelle studded with luxe Navelli saffron and black truffle. Rigatoni and a ridiculously rich veal breast Cicala casually described as being cooked in French onion soup. The whispers down the lane of this course’s ability to knock eaters on their asses were not hyperbolic. People threw their hands up and shoved their chairs out in an attempt to stretch, nibbling on blood orange-basil sorbetto made by Joe’s wife Angela Ranalli, a pastry chef who also dabbles in tarot card reading. (Guessing she probably saw this coming.)

By the time the main-course meats—gorgeous porchetta, ribeye, merguez-stuffed crown rack of lamb and rabbit marsala—start hitting the table, I’ve slowed to a bite or two per dish, determined to honor the ancient Panarda guidelines while avoiding an Augustus Gloop-like fate. I limp through the mercifully small cheese and dessert courses and am rewarded with a curious, dubious prize: a heavy pour of Centerba, a 140-proof Abruzzese liqueur the color of Ecto Cooler.

Le Virtu's crew on the line

Drew Lazor

Le Virtu's crew on the line

“So is this like Chartreuse?” I ask Lee.

“It numbs the body so you can no longer feel anything,” she gently corrects, describing its effects by referencing the animation from the old Pepto-Bismol commercials. I knock it back, confirming its effectiveness shortly thereafter.

Yes, after 40 courses of food and countless glasses of wine spread between the hours of noon and 10 p.m., I am very full and pretty drunk. But merely gorging oneself, motivated by bragging rights or abject gluttony, is not in the spirit of La Panarda. For Cretarola, the traditions of his ancestors are kept alive both by the food and by the sincere interactions it inspires—for him, any conversation in his restaurant that doesn’t involve a smartphone is a reflection of Abruzzese hospitality. “Let the ingredients speak,” he says. They have much more to say than any chef.”

A few days after the dinner, I call the office of Dr. Magasic, the gastroenterologist and hat-trick Panarda survivor, to get his professional opinion on what the hell we’ve done. “No, we should not be eating 40 courses of food paired with wine in one day,” he advises. “The quantity is ridiculous. It’s not something that should be done on a regular basis.”

Once a year isn’t regular, is it?

Rhode Island's Bishop's Belongs in the New England Diner Hall of Fame

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Get a crash course in the weird and wonderful regional cuisine of the tiniest state in the union

Bishop's Diner

Hawk Krall

 

Welcome to Hawk’s Illustrated America, a monthly series following illustrator Hawk Krall’s journeys through the back roads of the U.S. in search of our country’s most obscure and delicious regional specialties.

In the endlessly fascinating world of New England regional food, the tiny state of Rhode Island has an especially outsized supply of culinary oddities. Try “gaggers” (hot dogs). Or coffee milk (think chocolate milk but with coffee syrup). Or clamcakes, crisp little clam doughnuts. Rhode Islanders seem determined to confuse and delight the rest of America with their food, and if you want a front row seat to Rhode Island eating at its finest, pull up to the counter of Bishop’s 4th Street Diner, an old chrome-plated honest to goodness train car diner on the fringes of Newport.

The train car diner—a freestanding structure shaped like a railway car, with an open kitchen, long counter, and a few booths along the opposite windows—is a dying breed. Most these days have expanded to include larger dining rooms, or disappeared altogether. But Bishop’s is the real deal, the walls covered with bric-a-brac and the seats packed with locals chatting in thick New England accents.

Bishop’s menu reads like an all-star lineup of Rhody specialties: chourico, johnnycakes, “stuffies” (stuffed clams), Portuguese toast, coffee milk. If you’re confused about what any of those things mean, you’re not alone—neither did I until having a meal at Bishop’s. But it’s all excellent, the kind of under-the-radar roadside food find that people like me dream about.

I got the lowdown on Bishop’s backstory from current owner Nancy Bishop, who’s been running the place for over 20 years. Bishop’s began as a porcelain and stainless steel John O’Mahoney era diner, built in New Jersey in the 1950s, and installed in Swansea, Massachusetts, where it was christened the Princeton Diner, until the former owners trucked it over to Newport in the 1960s and re-named it the 4th Street, in honor of a Newport street that was planned by the city but never paved.

Nancy bought the 4th Street some 20-odd years ago with her then-husband, giving it their family name. After a divorce, Nancy stayed on running the diner, where she meet her current husband, a retired colonel who was a regular customer.

One day, that regular told her about a great old diner his grandfather took him to as a kid, where he scratched his initials into a mirror with a pen knife. It turned out that diner had been located in Swansea Massachusetts, and—you guessed it—Nancy walked over to a mirror near the restroom, and there it was, his initials still carved into the diner decades later. “I’m a big believer in fate,” Nancy says. The diner and the new husband—“It was all meant to be.”

Bishop's Diner

Hawk Krall

 

In this part of the country, close to Fall River, Massachusetts, the epicenter of America’s Portuguese population, chourico (a.k.a. shore-eetz) is everywhere. It’s a topping on pizza, meaty filler in a $3 cup of soup with elbow noodles, or the sausage in an egg sandwich, which is my preparation of choice and one that Bishop’s does especially well. Sourced from Mello’s in nearby Fall River, which drops off orders twice a week, Bishop’s chourico is sliced into thick coins that allow the casing to char just enough while chunks of paprika-stained fat sizzle out of the coarsely ground sausage.

As for the johnnycakes, these aren’t the vaguely corn-flavored pancakes you might be imagining. Light, paper thin, and crispy at the edges, Bishop’s johnnycakes are closer to crepes than anything I’ve eaten at a pancake house, and come topped with mounds of melty whipped butter. There are no exhausting doughy cores here, just thin, crisp edges with a sweet corn undertone.

Bishop’s prides itself on those johnnycakes, made exclusively with cornmeal from nearby Kenyon’s Grist that’s ground on local quarry stones from a mill that’s been standing since 1886 in neaby Usquepaug. For the full experience, wash them down with a frosty glass of coffee milk. The flavors dance to the thick accents of locals shooting the breeze.

This kind of from-scratch pride stands in stark contrast to diner trends across America. Most diners these days have long abandoned family recipes for ready-made frozen products and, faced with greater competition and narrower margins than ever, make whatever concessions to convenience they have to so they can keep the lights on. New England, though, seems to be an exception to this trend; at the very least Bishop’s sure is.

“We make as much as we can from scratch, get whole turkeys in, cut our own potatoes for breakfast,” explains Nancy, who sets the menu at Bishop’s along with a list of daily specials that include anything from fried chicken to American chop suey. “Food is really important to people in this part of the country,” she continues. “Everyone talks about where to get the best lobster rolls or johnnycakes, and people expect good food, especially in the Newport area.”

Nancy’s earned a loyal following at Bishop’s, which, despite a few appearances in diner history books and TV programs, mostly has skirted beneath the national radar. That makes the customers from Paris, Germany, and the Ukraine all the more surprising. They’re tourists staying in nearby hotels, and when they ask their concierges where they can find a legit New England restaurant experience, they’re usually sent to Bishop’s.

Hawk Krall is an artist, illustrator, and former line cook with a lifelong obsession for unique regional cuisine, whose work can be seen in magazines, newspapers, galleries, and restaurants all over the world. He focuses on editorial illustration, streetscapes, and pop-art style food paintings.


10 One-of-a-Kind Restaurants to Visit on Your Great American Roadtrip

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The best gas station fried chicken, Cuban pizza, and regional hot dog specialty finds from road scholar Hawk Krall

Our roaming correspondent Hawk Krall has been busy this year. Sussing out frybread tacos in Utah. Exploring the gas station fried chicken scene of Virginia. Hunting down the very best place to get a keema-spiced vegetarian cheesesteak in Pennsylvania. (Yes, it exists in a strip mall pizza joint in Philly, and you want one.)

On their own, each of these roadside finds is a regional specialty well worth a visit. Put them together and you have a kaleidoscopic tour of all the weird wonders of American eating, the perfect rebuttal to every time a snobby French person has said Americans don't appreciate good food. Map these places and start planning a road trip. The highway's waiting.

Southwick, MA: The Best Damn Doughnut Shop America Doesn't Talk About

mrs murphys

Hawk Krall

 

Mrs. Murphy's, the 40-year-old shop with a cult following and amazing crullers, doesn't get much attention outside its home town of Southwick. But in a town of less than 10,000 people, the shop goes through thousands of pounds of flour a week. Why? "These doughnuts transport you to that emotional holy doughnut place at first bite." Read more »

Salt Lake City, UT: Frybread, Meet Taco

Navajo Hogan

Hawk Krall

One of the best things to ever emerge from the deep fryer

"Part Native American, part Southwestern and Tex-Mex, part state fair-style deep-fried joy, frybread tacos are an oft-overlooked, sometimes controversial, and insanely delicious example of a regional American food born from cultures accidentally coming together." They're also a dish fraught with cultural baggage, as no food represents the poverty-stricken oppression of America's native peoples like frybread. But at this Salt Lake lunch spot, one Mexican-Pueblo family is reclaiming it to make something beautiful. Read more »

Ybor City, FL: The Beauty of Cuban Bakery Pizza

Scachatta pizza

Hawk Krall

 

You'll only find scachatta—the room-temp, thick-crust, chorizo-enhanced Sicilian-style pizza—in Florida, where Cuban and Italian bakeries and breads intermingle, often in the very same space. Bakeries selling pizza and pizza-like breads is a far-ranging but little discussed American tradition. Here's why it's worth paying attention to it. Read more »

Hackensack, NJ: Italian Sandwiches for Tony Soprano

cosmos

Hawk Krall

 

The sandwich triangle of North America lies between New York City, Philadelphia, and North Jersey, and Cosmo's, a barebones place where every customer looks like a Soprano's extra (the shop lies very close to many of the show's filming locations), makes some of the best Italian heros you'll find anywhere. "As with many iconic foods most associated with New York—even when those traditions are dying out there—the Italian hero thrives in Jersey." Read more »

Everywhere, NJ: A Guide to the Hot Dog Capital of the World

new jersey hot dogs

Hawk Krall

 

New Jersey is also the center of the hot dog universe, with more fanatics, hometown heroes, and regional styles than anywhere. Here's a guide to understanding the local tubesteak culture all across the state, and a case for why the best "Texas" wieners don't come from Texas. Read more »

Roseland, VA: Gas Station Fried Chicken You Need in Your Life

Mac's Country Store

Hawk Krall

Mac's County Store

A middle-of-nowhere gas station and convenience store serving incredible fried chicken? But of course. Such places are, it turns out, something of a thing in the South, so much so that many have let their standards slip to coast on their newfound fame. But not at Mac's. "It’s the kind of place where, if they’re working on a fresh batch of chicken, they’ll direct you away from the ones sitting in the warming tray so make sure you get a taste of their best work." Read more »

Philadelphia, PA: The Fusion Sandwiches of Philly

Philly Fusion Sandwiches

Hawk Krall

The full guide to fusion sandwiches.

In the city of cheesesteak and roast pork, a new breed of hoagie is drawing on the cuisines of immigrant populations to produce some utterly unique, shockingly good meals in the most unexpected of restaurants. "Think Indian egg hoagies. Middle Eastern and Korean cheesesteaks. Puerto Rican-style Italian roast pork." Here is where to get them all. Read more »

Raymond, NH: The Best Clam Chowder in New England

The Pines Seafood Chowder

Hawk Krall

 

The Pines Seafood House, on a regional New Hampshire highway in the middle of nowhere, does some singularly spectacular seafood: lobster, clams (fresh and fried), and of course clam chowder. "I’ve eaten a lot of chowder in New England, but none like what they make at The Pines. It’s rich, but from an inconceivable density of seafood, not cream or starch. No fishy funk of frozen or sketchy product. A judicious amount of potato. No thickeners; just pure seafood (okay, and plenty of butter that floats to the top in little droplets) like lobster, shrimp, whole-belly clams, haddock, and scallops, plus something the shack cryptically describes as 'chowder milk.' This is the kind of chowder that gets people to line up to buy it by the gallon." Read more »

Newport, RI: A Rhode Island Diner Education

Bishop's Diner

Hawk Krall

 

Bishop's, a train car diner originally from Swansea, MA before it was hauled over to Newport, is the epitome of the New England diner, with standout crisp-edged johnnycakes, Portuguese-inflected sausage and egg sandwiches, and tall frosty glasses of coffee milk. It's also home to what may be the most amazing meet cute we've ever heard about, a story you have to read to believe. Read more »

Easton, PA: The Great Hot Dog War

hot dog illo

Hawk Krall

A tale of family, war, natural calamity, and tube steaks.

A report from the front lines of a decades-long Jersey/Pennsylvania family fued over the rights to Jimmy's, the name and brand beyond a century-old hot dog stand that gave the town of Easton a hot dog style to call its own. Here's what happens when good sense and good manners are thrown out the window in search of frankfurters, fame, and a squiggle of mustard. Read more »

Read More: The Best of 2016

How the World Eats Christmas

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Our favorite holiday recipes from around the globe

This holiday season, take inspiration from around the world with these global Christmas recipes from around the world, from sugar-dusted Polish bow tie fritters and the Puerto Rican Christmas staple pernil asado (roast pork shoulder) to ptarmigan, an Icelandic wild grouse with a sweet-tart sauce. Danish cookie tin cookies, christmas goose recipes, and warming hot chocolate—these worldly Christmas recipes will bring a taste of different lands to your table. For even more Christmas inspiration, check out our Ultimate Holiday Guide.

Where SAVEUR Wants To Go In 2017

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From Brooklyn to Bhutan, here's where our editors will be covering the globe next year

Our editors are always planning their next meal—and their next trip. Here are the spots on our 2017 hit list.

The Open Road

hatch valley

Matt Taylor-Gross

 

I'm planning a road trip through the American south, through Texas, Louisiana, and Florida, since I've never been before and the food greatly appeals to me. —Daryn Wright, editorial intern

Provence, France

kitchen

Peter D'Aprix

This isn't Julia Child's kitchen, but it's still pretty great.

I've been wanting to get to Julia Child's home in Provence. It has been purchased by a young American woman who is turning it into a yoga and cooking retreat. Sign me up! —Kat Craddock, test kitchen assistant

Kerala, India

Mountain views in Kerala

Katherine Whittaker

 

In March, I'm headed to Kerala, the very southern tip of India, to report a story about women and cooking, and have never been more excited to go some place. Tropical and tranquil, the region is known for an abundance of coconuts and tea, Ayurvedic healing, and its diversity of religious groups that reside peacefully alongside one another. If I haven't returned by April, you'll know where to find me. —Leslie Pariseau, special projects editor

Cuba (But Not Only Cuba)

Getting coffee in Cuba

Adam Goldberg

Getting coffee in Cuba

I have a chronic case of wanderlust, and a perpetual travel wish list going on in my head at all times. Currently at the top of it: perusing the markets and in-home restaurants of Cuba, and hiking or skiing (and of course eating) in Mont Blanc and the Chamonix. I also want to dive a little deeper into the outer boroughs of NYC—Bangladeshi markets in Brooklyn and dumpling houses in Queens. That sort of thing. —Stacy Adimando, test kitchen director

Brazil

Is it weird to want to go somewhere for the express purpose of dancing each night away? If it is, I think I'm okay with it. When I'm not on the dance floor, I'll be eating and drinking everything I can and exploring the beaches up and down Brazil's beautiful coast.

Big Meesh Hits the Himalayas

The Himalayas have always been on my list, and would love to combine it with visiting a country that values happiness and tradition as strong as those in Bhutan. In the '70s they announced that 'gross national happiness' was more important than gross domestic product. One of the must-visit sites includes the Taktsang Monastery, perched cliffside at an elevation of 10,000 feet. —Michelle Heimerman, photo editor

The Asturias

Basque Ciders

Matt Taylor-Gross

Thirsty?

For the past few years I've had a mission to eat and drink my way through Spain: grocery-shop through Barcelona, roust the pigs in Andalucia, go orange-picking in Sevilla. Next year I'm ready to dive deep into one of my favorite things—cider—in one of the best places to get it: the rugged northern Asturias. Sidra is as much a part of life here as wine is in Bourdeaux, and many grower-producers are still using centuries-old methods to produce this electrifying, funky, intoxicating beverage. Sign me up. —Max Falkowitz, executive digital editor

Japan

Snack Shack; Fukuoka, Japan

Matt Goulding

A snack shack in Fukuoka

Fingers crossed, but I'm hoping 2017 is the year I finally get to go to Japan. I studied the language for a bit in college, but never got to make the jump across the (rather large) pond to put it to use. Since then, I've fallen in love with Japanese cooking and would love to do a culinary tour along the western coastline. Noto peninsula and Sado island are both calling out to me for their ancient and diverse culinary traditions, but I'd also like to spend some time exploring the new developments in Tokyo, and maybe even make it down to Okinawa if I can make the trip long enough. —Alex Testere, associate editor

Or, You Know, Everywhere

Anywhere! Everywhere! But I always always always want to go to France. —Kristy Mucci, test kitchen associate

The Best of 2016

Where We Traveled in December

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From a Tokyo adventure to a New York City staycation, here are all the ways we ate the world last month

At SAVEUR, our obsessive quest to unearth the origins of food and discover hidden culinary traditions sends us from our test kitchen in New York City to all the corners of the globe. From soba in Tokyo to barbecue tacos in Austin, here are all the ways SAVEUR editors ate the world in December.

Tokyo, Japan

Soba

Andrew Richdale

 

It’s still a sore spot for many of New York’s Japanophiles that Honmura-An quit the city in 2007—a sore spot for me especially, as the storied soba restaurant’s exit preceded my arrival by a few months. The restaurant reopened a year later...in Tokyo. I found myself there last month, so naturally I went. My friend and I ducked into their Roppongi location for lunch on an afternoon that was cold enough I lost all feeling in my fingers while google-mapping. That’s to say I settled with the warm stuff, a bowl topped with three tempura-fried curry oysters that were so satisfying I went back the next day by myself.

The second time, I sat in the back. The great thing about the back is that you have a clear shot not only of one of the cooks, who is rolling out dough in a glass room, but of the other tables when that cook starts chopping so loudly the patrons jump and hushed conversations pause. I enjoyed that view with what was my best meal of the trip (maybe of the year?): a giant bowl of cold soba topped with a pile of uni slices, a dollop of fresh wasabi, and some strips of dried seaweed. Kind of like one bite of perfect sushi that lasts a whole meal. — Andrew Richdale, deputy editor

Northern Michigan, USA

Waffles

Alex Testere

 

Last year, my parents moved from their comfortable townhouse in the D.C. suburbs to a remote log cabin in the northern Michigan woods. At least 30 minutes from the nearest town ("town" is used here generously), and a good three and a half hours north of the Detroit airport, my trips home have been far less frequent. So the hopes were high for a Christmas up north, and with my parents having all year to prepare, there was no shortage of rich, buttery, gut-sticking food: Christmas dinner was both lobster and steak pie, and breakfast the day before was a mountain of crisp and buttery buttermilk waffles, drowned in Michigan's finest maple syrup and a dusting of powdered sugar, almost as thick as the snow outside. — Alex Testere, associate editor

Frosinone, Italy

Pasta

Katie Whittaker

 

You know how sometimes you tell people you love a food so much you could eat it every day for the rest of your life? And how you always kind of laugh when they say that, thinking, "Yeah, ok, that's disgusting"? I feel that way about pasta. Seriously. I ate it every night for 3 months and never once thought, "Yeah, ok, I feel disgusting about this." So when my friend Ilaria told me she was returning to her hometown, Frosinone, outside of Rome in Italy, I right away knew I had to go. I had to get some good pasta. I spent about 4 days with her and her family, testing out my less-than-perfect Italian, downing espressos (and inhaling Pocket Coffee in between actual coffees), and eating everything. We ate a lot. One particularly memorable meal included 15 appetizers followed by two enormous, cheese-covered, pear-stuffed gnocchi and two desserts shared with Ilaria. But probably the best thing I ate was this carbonara, made by Ilaria's mother. It wasn't too creamy, it had just the right amount of pancetta, egg, and cheese, the pasta was cooked to perfection - I could go on and on, but I think you get how much I loved it. I think I know what I want to eat every day for the next month... — Katherine Whittaker, assistant digital editor

Austin, Texas

Tacos

Matt Taylor-Gross

 

You know that feeling that something just isn’t right, like you’re forgetting something, like you’re missing something? And you can’t figure it out and then one night you wake up in a panic saying “TACOS!” and you fly to Austin immediately and start a taco tour to calm yourself down. Same. I was in Austin over the holidays and spent a good chunk of my time eating as many tacos as possible. I went to all my old favorites but this trip I got to go to a new, to me, place called Valentina’s Tex-Mex BBQ. It’s a food truck in a gas station parking lot that serves some of the best tacos I’ve ever had! I had the smoked brisket taco and smoked carnitas taco and a side of their charro beans and a topo chico and I was in heaven. Valentina’s somes all of their meats in-house and word on the street is it’s Aaron Franklin’s favorite bbq in Austin (other than his). My future Austin taco tours will start and end with a stop at Valentina’s. — Matt Taylor-Gross, staff photographer

Princeton, New Jersey

Pizza

Leslie Pariseau

 

The day after Christmas (as if the holidays weren't indulgence enough) I always stop by Conte's Pizza in Princeton with my in-laws. There's nothing fancy about this long, high-ceilinged bar hall. Started in the 1930s as the Witherspoon Bar by Italian immigrant Sebastiano Conte, the barebones operation eventually began serving pizza in the 1950s. The delightfully dated décor hasn't changed since; amid carpet-covered pillars, a multi-colored glass brick bar, and burnished gold walls, pies as wide as tires and as greasy as a fry cook's apron are served to loyal Princetonians. And it's in no particular style—just a tons of perfectly browned cheese over a pool of salty tomato sauce all studded with thick pepperoni rounds filled with golden sausage grease. This is not beauty queen pie, but it's deeply satisfying (and wildly calorific) in a messy Italian-American, red-sauce-and-cheese kind of way. — Leslie Pariseau, special projects editor

New York, New York

Russ and Daughters

Max Falkowitz

 

Where did I go in December? Nowhere! Because one of the best things about being from New York and continuing to live here is not having to leave town during the most hectic travel season of the year. True, it's also the busiest tourist season of the year, but if you know which neighborhoods to avoid (Herald Square, Soho, all of Greater Metastasized Williamsburg), you can get into pretty much any Good But Normally Mobbed Restaurant you want, because all the people who normally eat there are tossing and turning in their childhood twin beds back in their sad hometowns. So I ate a lot of fish at the Russ and Daughters Cafe, at dinner, thank you very much, when it was so peaceful in the dining room you could almost imagine the place in whatever hamlet you're from.

That said, the best best thing about living here isn't the December restaurant availability. It's now, in these early days of January, when the tourists are finally leaving and the locals are still in a New Year's haze. That gentle hum you hear in the air? It's the city getting a particularly noxious infection, with days of good health back on the horizon. — Max Falkowitz, executive digital editor

Houston, Texas

Goat dumplings

Dan Q. Dao

 

Although I was born and raised in Houston, I'd never had an opportunity to sit down at one of the city's most famous restaurants, Underbelly. After hearing rave reviews for years, my family finally decided to check it out this past Christmas. The highlight of the menu was definitely these goat dumplings, an Underbelly signature, which nods to both the Southern-style take on dumplings and the spice-forward goat stews of Korea. Laced with a red, gochujang-like sauce and topped with crispy sesame seeds, the dish is masterclass on blending two culinary cultures to create a better dish, rather than a misshapen mashup. — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

Dingle, Ireland

Dingle, Ireland

Michelle Heimerman

 

My New Years resolution each year is to wake up the following morning in the furthest place possible from the massive crowds and glamorous parties that fill the city of New York. On the eve of December 31st, I found myself cozied up in a pub in Dingle, Ireland, a picturesque town situated on the most western peninsula of the country. On assignment shooting an upcoming story, this town that praises itself on local cuisine is equally talented in preserving its past. You walk into a pub like Curran's and you're instantly brought back to the 1800's. The smell of the old wood floor beams pairs perfectly with the Guinness being poured, and whiskey shares the shelves with wellies, both waiting to be sold. Live music is played often, and if you show up more than once, you have a good chance they'll be pouring your favorite pint before you even ask. — Michelle Heimerman, photo editor

Learn Some Sweet Pastry Tricks From the Masters of Thai Dessert

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Coconut soups, frankincense smoke, and lots of a beguiling herb called pandan—these are the salty, sticky, and slippery rules of a sweets culture like no other

The ingredient lists are short: rice, coconut milk, sugar, and salt. Sometimes egg gets involved, sometimes tapioca or mung bean. Pumpkin, banana, and cassava make a few appearances.

And yet the sweets at Sugar Club, a Thai cafe and grocery in Elmhurst, Queens, line almost the entirety of one long wall, 20 to 30 varieties in all. The bite-size treasures, shaped like blossoms and glossy fruits, come in shades of golden yellow, bubblegum pink, and astroturf green. There are two-bite custards in foil cups, balls of sticky rice tinted indigo from pea flowers, and fluffy steamed cakes blooming in palm leaf wrappers.

It’s all a world apart from the buttery, flaky pastries that characterize Western bakeries. Instead of vanilla, there’s fragrant pandan; wobbly puddings and steamed gels emphasize chewy textures over tenderness or crunch; blitzes of salt balance the smoky, caramel complexity of palm sugar and the nutty sweetness of coconut milk.

But the Thai dessert palate goes deeper than ingredients or presentations; it also points to a wholly different way of thinking about dessert. Which may be why, despite a rapid, ascendant rise in popularity, Thailand’s sweets have yet to gain the broader audience of Thai cuisine as a whole in America.

A Different Kind of Sweet

Sugar Club

Matt Taylor-Gross

Inside Sugar Club

Peerasri Montreeprasat, the chef at Sugar Club, recalls how her mother made black sticky rice with coconut cream almost every day. “Two or three times a week she’d call everyone in the family to help make a dessert,” and children, aunts, and uncles would spend the afternoon rolling rice flour dumplings for the warm sweet coconut soup known as bua loi.

Sugar Club acts as a surrogate mother’s kitchen for Elmhurst’s booming Thai community, selling desserts like sticky rice that, were you in Thailand, you’d only really find in family homes, alongside more baroque sweets that are the more typical domain of bakery menus and streetside stalls.

Among them is khanom tan (khanom means dessert while tan refers to palm), a spongy, malty-tasting steamed cake the color of raw sienna. It’s made from the juice of the toddy palm fruit mixed with rice flour, sugar, and coconut milk. The batter is left to ferment before it’s steamed to add some twangy complexity.

khanom tan

Matt Taylor-Gross

Spongy crepes of khanom tan wrapped around a salty-sweet pandan filling

Montreeprasat then points out a box of takoh, a coconut cream and tapioca flour pudding steamed in petite banana leaf cups. It’s a little nutty with a balance of salty and sweet, with a delicate herbal fragrance from the banana leaf. Larger banana leaf packages contain lightly sweetened sticky rice wrapped around banana. Sweeter black sticky rice comes with a balancing layer of salty coconut cream, a common addition to Thai desserts.

Some of these desserts also require special ingredients and techniques that non-Thai cooks just don’t know, which has been a problem Earl Ninsom, the chef behind several acclaimed Thai restaurants in Portland, Oregon such as Langbaan.

Staples like mango with sticky rice may take five minutes to make, but “there are other things that take a whole day of prep time for one bite,” he says, “It’s a pain to make it happen, and maybe that’s not worth it here because labor costs are really high.” Even in Thailand, he says, “usually older people with more time to spend make dessert,” while younger generations tend not to.

Sugar Club

Matt Taylor-Gross

One of Sugar Club's sweets cases

Ninsom’s personal favorite dessert is khanom chan, which has the texture of a silky, starchy gummy candy and encapsulates the wholly different vocabulary of the Thai sweet tooth. Thai cooks use rice instead of wheat, coconut milk instead of butter; the sweets are cooked in steamers or on stoves more often than in an oven. But the grammar—sweetness, fat, and carbs—is the same as it is anywhere. And in that, people will always find pleasure.

Thai Desserts to Know

Custards

takoh thai sweets

Matt Taylor-Gross

Sweet and salty steamed takoh

The world of Thai desserts includes a range of steamed custards. The simplest of these is a flan-like mixture of coconut milk, palm sugar, and duck eggs (which Montreeprasat says are traditionally favored for the rich orange color of the yolks), which might be served by the scoop over sticky rice or in slices studded with pumpkin.

The more elaborate version of the latter is sang kaya fug tong, a whole kabocha squash that’s been hollowed out, filled with custard, and steamed, then served by the slice. When Montreeprasat makes this, she sometimes carves floral designs into the pumpkin (she is an expert at Thai fruit carving), and crowns the steamed custard with foi tong, the candied egg yolk threads.

Other popular custards include khanom moa gang, a denser dessert made with puréed mung beans in the batter, and fried shallots scattered over its burnished top. Then there is khanom thuay, a sweet that gets its custard texture not from eggs but from rice flour. It’s topped with a layer of salty coconut cream and steamed in small cups, a rich two-bite snack offered by wandering vendors and served for free at boat noodle shops.

Sticky Rice Sweets

Sticky rice

Matt Taylor-Gross

Black sticky rice with salted coconut cream

Everyone knows mango sticky rice—it’s easy to make and popular, and at many American Thai restaurants it’s the equivalent of a bistro’s perfunctory flourless chocolate cake. But there are many other versions of that mildly sweet, filling dessert to know and love. There is sticky rice with custard and sticky rice with durian (the most polarizing of fruits). It might be served wrapped in a banana leaf, with a center of soft, sweet banana. Or it might be mixed with sweet red beans and coconut cream and grilled inside a hollow piece of bamboo.

There is also green sticky rice, colored and perfumed by pandan extract, and blue sticky rice, stained with largely flavorless pea flowers. Black sticky rice, on the other hand, is just a particular variety of sweet rice; it has a grain-y flavor and a deep purple-black hue when cooked. Like white sticky rice, it must be soaked overnight before cooking, but unlike white sticky rice, it isn’t always steamed. Montreeprasat cooks hers the way her mom did, on the stovetop, adding palm sugar and cubes of taro as it cooks. It’s served with salted coconut cream, which provides a beautiful contrast to the rice in both look and flavor.

Montreeprasat pulls out a half-pint container of what looks like damp rice. This is khao mak, a dessert made from sticky rice mixed with sugar and yeast and fermented until the rice begins to break down into a slightly alcoholic liquid. “Only Thai people eat this one,” says Montreeprasat. “Why?” I ask. “If you’ve never eaten it before, it tastes gross,” she replies, echoing something that Ninsom told me. Besides the fact that they take time and special ingredients to make, Ninsom thinks some Thai desserts may be hard to find in the states because “texture-wise”—and taste-wise for that matter—“they might not be what American people understand.”

Cakes

khanom chan

Matt Taylor-Gross

Khanom chan, made with layers of pandan- and jasmine-flavored batter

Thai cakes more often use rice flour than wheat, yielding textures that are more chewy than crumbly. Some are fermented and spongy, like the palm-flavored khanom tan or the jasmine-scented khanom tuay fu, which are often colored pink, green, or blue and look like bursting muffins. Some are dense, like khanom man, made with grated cassava and shredded coconut. But cakes, loosely defined, might also include khanom krok, custardy little coconut cream and rice flour hot cakes cooked in a dimpled cast iron pan.

And there’s also the ever popular khanom chan, which is made from a blend of rice flour, tapioca flour, and arrowroot starch mixed by hand with coconut milk and palm sugar until gluey. It’s steamed in a cake pan one thin layer at a time, often alternating between plain white and pandan green batter, yielding a mochi-like dessert that can be sliced into wedges.

Candies

Thai jelly candy

Matt Taylor-Gross

Crisp and soft jelly candies

The most intricate Thai sweets. Sugar Club sells doll-sized fruits called look choop, the Thai version of marzipan, made with mung beans instead of almonds. The fudgy, sweetened bean paste has been molded, painted with bright food colorings, and finally dipped into agar jelly to give it a glossy coat. Like many other celebratory desserts, the look choop have also been smoked with a tian op, a frankincense-, ylang-ylang-, and patchouli-scented wax. To me they taste like blown-out birthday candles.

Montreeprasat points me towards a series of dense, soft, goldenrod yellow sweets. Some take the form of disks pinched into ruffled flowers, some look like little bundles of vermicelli, some are the size and shape of songbird eggs. These are, respectively, tong yip, foi tong, and tong yord. Tong means gold, and here the gold color comes from duck egg yolks, which have been whipped and then poured into simmering sugar syrup to various effects.

The technique is actually Portuguese (the equivalent sweets there are called trouxas das caldas or fios de ovos, depending on shape), supposedly brought to the Thai royal court in the 17th century by Maria Guyomar de Pina, a palace cook of Japanese, Portuguese, and Bengali descent. “These are the hardest thing to make,” says Montreeprasat. The ratio of sugar to water has to be exactly right, and so does the temperature of simmering syrup. Then you have to pour the yolks in just so.

There are simpler candies, too, like candied palm seeds (which are translucent, with a watery, crunchy texture) or candied chunks of cassava. Some vendors also offer thua tat, a peanut and sesame brittle.

Soups

Thai dessert soup

Bua loi, taro, pandan, and pumpkin dumplings in coconut milk broth, then topped with shaved coconut and poached egg. Spotted in Thailand; the versions at Sugar Club are a little more simple.

The canon of Thai dessert includes a variety of sweet soups, some warm, some cold. The “broth” is often sweetened coconut milk, and the contents might be anything from chunks of agar jelly to glass noodles. Bua loi, a warm soup, includes round, colorful rice flour dumplings. Lod chong, pandan-flavored rice flour noodles, are served on ice with a hefty pour of sweet coconut milk.

For a simple soup that includes chunks of pumpkin, Thai cooks use a secret trick: they soak the pumpkin in lime mineral water (you can find little jars of powdered lime mineral for this purpose at Thai grocery stores), which helps it keep its shape instead of dissolving into mush. Montreeprasat uses the same technique on the taro she includes in her black sticky rice, and on the whole pumpkin she fills with custard.

Sugar Club
81-18 Broadway, Elmhurst, NY 11373
(718) 565-9018

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