I’m back!!! I have been terribly UM delinquent- it’s been totally crazy over here in the last two weeks, what with trying to finish up stuff at work (impossible) and packing up 6 years of my NYC life into little cardboard boxes (unfathomable).

But I’m taking some time out for the post that everyone has been waiting for- FLUSHING! I brought on Tyson as our guide- he’s a true Flushing Pro who had a meticulous agenda mapped out for us. SWEET! I had wanted to tour Flushing since our very first Umamiventure– we had walked across the street to Flushing Mall and the food court like nothing you would find at your local mall- stay tuned to see what I’m talking about.

Tyson incorporated a mall into the itinerary, as well as some stand alone shops to mix things up a bit. I was going to try to do this all in one post, but it’s pretty hefty, so I’m gonna break it up into 3 parts. Va bene? Ok.

This was a totally awesome trip, in my opinion one of the best Umamiventures we’ve had (16 people came out!). Some weren’t so enthusiastic, however… read on for all the feedback.

Most importantly though, thank you Tyson for showing us around!!! We couldn’t have done this without you!

Photos by Hamamama, Jones and Tyson.

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Chinatown to Chinatown Shuttle
Pick up is like every 5 minutes on Division, right east of Bowery.

This is so sweet- for $2.50, you get a shuttle ride from Chinatown Manhattan to Chinatown Queens (Flushing), which only takes about 30 minutes. We got to watch the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies on a flatscreen all the way there- could you do that on the subway? I don’t think so.

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$1 Pecking Duck Pancake Sandwiches
Corner of Main Street and 40th Road


A takeout window we randomly stumbled upon as we waited for people to get together, right in the thick of Flushing. Check out the neon signs- you can’t miss it.

HAMAMAMA
I can’t forget the one nice surprise that was not on the scheduled tour – the $1 warm, crispy peking duck in the little bun. What a bargain!

SONJA
Peking duck takeout was the best! Needs a little more cucumber but what a fantastic idea.

KAYOKO
How amazing is it that this is only $1? Seriously, they are made to order, the buns come right out of a large steamer and the beautifully marbled duck is nestled within.

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Qin’s Lamb Noodle
13631 41st Ave, Queens, NY
T: 917.838.1011

HAMAMAMA
The noodle shop was interesting and needed to be accompanied by someone who has been there and/or spoke Chinese as the menu was entirely in Chinese. Tried a little bit of both the lamb and beef noodle soup. Though the noodles were fresh and homemade, thought they were too thick & doughy and without the chili sauce the broth was bland… an interesting find and definitely off the beaten path.

TYSON
Delicious. I love the cloud ear mushrooms, the strips of tripe, and the unidentifiable pickled vegetables… This is the ultimate noodle (literally–it’s one gigantic noodle!), in texture and mass… I still like Lanzhou/fujianese hand-pulled noodles a lot too, but Qin’s has more subtle broth and better toppings.

YAMAHOMO
I don’t like the smell of lamb. I like to eat lamb chop, but hate the smell. I have a lot of olfactory issues. Probably I would eat a lot of cheese if I didn’t have a nose, but the smell always keeps me away from stinky stuff. The place smelled of lamb, lamb, and lamb! The fact that a place where only customers are Chinese, and no English is spoken exists in New York is quite amazing. Noodle was weird. The way the chef stretched it and dumped in the water was cool, but way too doughy. Soup? What soup? It was white, so I am thinking they put lamb bones but it didn’t taste like much. We had to put in a lot of salt and hot sauce. Toward the end, I had to evacuate from the place to breath fresh air. Failure for me.

JONES
I wasn’t crazy about the lamb noodle venue, partly because I have a low mutton-stink tolerance, and partly because I wanted the broth to be richer (like tonkotsu ramen, maybe?).

RICKY
The lamb broth didn’t have much flavor, adding pepper oil helped it. It was pretty evident that the chef cut corners by using a pressure cooker instead of simmering for hours judging by the way the lamb cubes retained shape as if they were just cut.

SONJA
I had the beef noodles that were only slightly improved by copious amounts of chili oil. Only took a few bites but it was lacking…in everything?? There was no flavor. Noodles were nicely elastic though.

KELLY
The beef noodles were just freaking nasty, and it was even nastier when you had to throw out the remains in a bucket that had a sieve on top (which was one of those cheapo neon green baskets you find at Asian marts).

KAYOKO
Like nothing I had ever had- perfect for a cold winter day. I enjoyed the broth- it was light and drinkable. The noodles were really doughy, mochi-like. I especially liked the tripe and pickle toppings. It was neat to watch the guys behind the counter pull these noodles though- they were really sweet too (even though we couldn’t really communicate properly).

I was just chatting with Kayoko online, when we started talking about my lunch at Ginza’s Sato Yosuke udon restaurant.

It was amazing. The noodles were thin and shiny. Apparently after they boil the noodles, they place them in ice-cold water to bring out the shiny sheen regardless if they are served chilled or warm in broth. It’s just like what they tell you about your hair – after you condition, give it a good rinse in cold water to lock in the shine.

Anyway, the conversation progressed into my inability to adapt into Japanese food and their excessively high carb-to-protein ratios. For example, today’s lunch set included of main dish of cold udon noodles (Goma-Miso Bukkake Udon, which is cold udon topped with a sesame miso sauce) with a bowl of flavored takikomi rice (above picture, rice on the left, udon on right).

Atkins Diet ALERT! This is pretty typical for a Japanese lunch set, noodles with a side of rice (either flavored or fried). This phenomenon of carb-overload is something I am still gradually trying to get used to – especially when a standard lunch option in California of a Grilled Chicken Ceasar Salad offers a hefty portion of protein, while the protein in my lunch today, was really only from the Goma-Miso sauce coating my noodles.

During my first year in Tokyo, I could not finish the normal portions of carbs, usually in the form of rice. I thought I grew up Japanese, but damn, Japanese people who grow up in Japan really, really eat a shitload of rice. I can handle having rice in almost every meal, but not a huge portion of it every time. So I’d get a teishoku lunch set and usually end up leaving 1/2 or a 1/3 of rice every time, while my colleagues would be getting “okawari” seconds (side note: during lunch many places offer free “okawari” for rice and miso soup).

The idea of a lunch such as today, suggests that rice is the “okazu” or side dish of the noodles. So instead of say, eating your rice and accenting it with Kung Pao Chicken, you eat your noodles and accent it with rice. Obviously, this overthrows the whole notion of the Atkins diet because I look around and everyone is really thin… What’s going on?

After three years of being here though, I am proud to say that today, I ate my whole bowl of noodles plus every grain of rice. I slurped a few bunches of noodle and broke up the monotony with a mouthful of rice. It works. I miss the generous servings of protein in America, but I can definitely have “udon with a side of rice” once in a while.

By Jane Stillwater

What do they eat in Tehran? Fast food! It’s true. I’m here in Iran and only have brief access to a computer so I’m typing as fast as I can but they do eat a lot of fast food here. Tehran is a very westernized city except that us ladies all have to wear headscarves. Pizza and burgers are popular here.

In the countryside, the food is probably more traditional, lots of lamb kebabs and yogurt. But here in Tehran, you would be surprised. KFC is now “Kabooky Fried Chicken” but even despite the sanctions, Coca-Cola is ever-present.

* Jane Stillwater is a freelance writer who recently published the book Bring Your Own Flak Jacket: Helpful Tips for Touring Today’s Middle East. Umami Mart is lucky to have her pop in from time to time as she reports from Berkeley and the Middle East. Read all about Jane’s awesome adventures on her blog.

It was my friend Jonathan’s birthday party last night at his new house. Buzzing with lots of English speakers and models from Romania, I bust open the door and there’s a naked girl on his dining room table with sashimi all over her!

If you haven’t heard of this phenomenon it’s called “Nyotaimori” (direct translation “Nyo”=Woman, “Tai”=Body, “Mori”=mound). Basically you eat sashimi off a woman lying still. Luckily there are huge bamboo leaves that are laid underneath the sashimi, so it’s not direct skin to fish contact, that would kind of gross me out. Although leaves were not placed on the boobies, they were placed to cover the privates, so there wasn’t as much exhibitionism as I had expected (there are “no leaf” kinds too).

Obviously, photography was prohibited last night for this reason. It was a spectacle all right, but I found that most people were pretty “whatever” about it – after an initial and breif”wow”. It was not as much scintillating-ly titillating as it was a novelty. It was like eating a happy meal – all about the packaging and presentation.

I had mixed feelings about the whole idea of Nyotaimori, the woman was totally objectified and I felt like I had to apologize every time I ate off of her. Once she was done and dressed, she was walking around the party and no one was talking to her. So, I talked to her, to try and erase the total objectification I had just perpetrated. Turns out she works at a restaurant in Azabu-juban, and this was the first time she had tried this. She was smart, head strong and seemed to have a voracious appetite. Apparently, her thighs were really tired from the experience. I’d imagine that is where you’d end up piling all your anxiety. Two hours of just lying there, no scratching your face if it gets itchy, and no passing gas.

Something like this image.

Traditionally every Japanese household pickled vegetables in Nuka (rice bran). The translation doesn’t cut it too well. Rice Bran is too pretty. It’s should be called rice shells in powder form. Nowadays, you can buy nuka pickled vegetables at grocery stores, so more and more people have stopped pickling their own vegetables at home.

I, on the other hand, love trying different food makings. I realized I can buy nuka in NYC as well, and one day, I thought I would give a try. When I was growing up, I didn’t care for it that much, but once I grow older, things I didn’t like in the past becomes my favorite. One’s taste palette change, I guess.

The method is very simple. To make the ‘dough’ or pickling bed, you mix nuka, salt (shit load of it), water, red chili, mustard with water. Make a paste, and that’s it. That’s the easy part. Now you have to ferment the whole mixture by pickling cabbage leaves, pieces of vegetables, or whatever vegetable pieces you find, EVERYDAY, for about 10 days.

Also you have to aerate the whole mixture at least once a day in order to grow and keep the good germs alive. This is just like taking care of tamagotchi (do you remember?) or home made yogurt. You just have to take care of it everyday. If you lack aerating even for a day, it grows mold, and sometimes you can save them, but other times you have to start it over. I’ve been mixing this every morning when I wake up, and no matter how drunk I am when I get home, I do mix them at night as well. This is called devotion!

It needs very intensive care, but the end products are pretty good. It’s hard to explain, but it is salty, sour, and pickl-y. Unfortunately they kind of smell like fart, but they taste good. It tastes and flavor is very peculiar, reminds us of our grandmas. Does this mean our grandmas smelled like fart?

Speaking of care, after you pickle a couple of times, the mixture gets loose, and you have to add more nuka. Or sometimes it gets too sour, then you have to add beer. Or sometimes it gets a bit moldy, you have to add mustard, or egg shells. Weird, huh?

Here are the pictures.

It’s like loose cookie dough. Just smell different. Good nuka mixture smell almost like miso.

You want to use air tight container because the smell is pretty distinctive.

Yesterday, I bought a bunch of radish from green market. Popular ones are cucumber, eggplants (unfortunately the ones we can get here aren’t good, even if they are called Japanese eggplants), daikon radish. I tried tomatillo, which was odd, pumpkin, which was kind of ok, if you close your eyes, cauliflower, no good. Possibilities are endless!

After washing them, you just put them in the mixture. Wait for 12-24 hours. I haven’t quite figured out how long exactly I should pickle. Thicker vegetables definitely needs longer time to pickle.

For some weird reason, when pickling radish, it loses color onto the nuka mixture. Can you see a bit of pink in this?

Once it’s pickled, you take them out, rinse them.

Aren’t they pretty in pink or what?! Also another weird thing about pickled radish is that the color seeps inside, and the whole thing becomes pink. Some weird science going on.

Unlike western pickling, when you have to wait for weeks before you can eat them, this is pretty quick and easy. You just have to remember to take care of it daily.

I’m really backlogged on stuff to write about at the moment, forgive me. The Last Supper event, Flushing Mall Circuit, Le Bernardin, it’s coming, I promise. For now, check out the events going on around town tonight:

– Alice Waters at Cooper Union tonight on a panel discussing the world hunger crisis

– Group show art opening with all works involving MEAT to some capacity, at the Daneyal Mahmood Gallery.

What’s going on in your neck of the woods? Email umamimart@gmail.com

Don’t you all play Sudoku and crossword on AM New York, Metro, NYT, NY Sun, TONY, etc? Aren’t we all obsessed with these games? That’s what I thought and came up with a program below. It is REALLY a rare opportunity to hear the most acclaimed men in puzzles world at once! Crossword Guru Will Shortz of NYT, and Maki Kaji, the godfather of Sudoku are speaking at Japan Society next Thursday. Bring all of your friends! It will be a fun evening!

Puzzling the World: Sudoku & Crosswords
Thursday, October 23, at 6:30 pm

Few puzzles have swept the world and created such passionate devotees as Sudoku and crosswords. While crosswords require specific linguistic capability, Sudoku players only need to understand basic numbers, a feature that makes Sudoku particularly transnational and global. Maki Kaji, godfather of Sudoku and President of Nikoli Company and Will Shortz, Crossword Puzzle Editor, The New York Times, discuss the similarities and differences of crossword puzzles and Sudoku as well as trends and themes driving the popularity of puzzles around the world today. Moderated by Liane Hansen, Host, Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR. Followed by a reception.

Tickets $10/$8 Japan Society members/$5 seniors & students

You can buy tickets on line here.

On Friday we went to see El Bulli‘s one and only Ferran Adria, in conversation with Harold McGee (author of On Food and Cooking) and Atlantic Monthly food editor C0rby Kummer. It was an animated, fruitful discussion, giving the audience a taste of Adria’s brilliance.

Adria spoke completely off-the-cuff, in random bits and pieces, with flailing arms and gestures, in melodic Spanish, about the food and restaurnat industry, farming, El Bulli, rising chefs, his staff, and so on. Frank Gehry was brought up on multiple occasions, and he used the word “maravillosa” (magnifiscent) to describe just about everything.

The man is hilarious. Kummer was a poor moderator, who tried to pin Adria down with mundane questions and topics, but Adria totally paved his own path and avoided him almost completely. He showed videos of his restaurant and how-to’s of some of his most intricate dishes. I would kill to have a meal there.

Ironically, when asked how many people had actually been to El Bulli, only a few people raised their hands. In a packed, 350+ sold out audience, it was unreal to see how high his restaurant has reached the level of superstardom. Perhaps rightfully so, but how would we know how good he is, given that most of us have never been, and most likely will never get the chance to go? It’s a bit perplexing, if you think about it.

If I learned one thing, it’s to never make references to his atelier as a “lab”. It’s a workshop of culinary innovation, but is also just a kitchen, if nothing else.

When asked where he dined when he is in NYC, he said that he had just been to Katz’s. But of course.

Awesome introduction by Bill Buford! Love this man- they should have had him moderate.

From left to right: Adria’s interpreter, Adria, Kummer, McGee.

It’s a little hard to hear, but I shot this little segment for you all. I think it captures Adria’s spirit and random articulance really well. The man has such a great sense of humor.

My weekend was spent cooking and baking. This is as usual, if you know me. It was nice outside throughout the weekend, but I kept myself in the kitchen. This is my stress remedy. Some people might enjoy sitting outside, go for a walk, drink their sorrows away (I do that all the time), go dancing (I did it Friday night), jog or work out (not for me), but cooking is the best way for me to feel calm.

I’ll show you what I created.

Not shown is the homemade tofu. Instead of painstakingly cooking soy beans, I bought soy milk at a Japanese grocery store. It was from a tofu store in Kyoto, and contained just soy and water, so I thought it would make a decent one. Yep, I was right. It was very tasty.

Also I made bunch of Japanese style pickles. For this, I will post a detailed method soon. Unlike western style pickling, Japanese do it a very weird way, very stinky, and uses things like egg shells, rice bran, beer, etc. Sounds fascinating, right? Behold, my obsession with pickling will be revealed shortly.

Below is umami porn. I have a party coming up this weekend, and this is one of the items I will serve. I made them and they are in my freezer waiting to be cooked. My famous dumplings. It’s just ground pork, Chinese chives, ginger, salt, pepper, soy sauce, and egg. I buy skins since it’s too much to make them. How uniformly assembled! I didn’t use Joyce Chen’s dumpling maker, FYI.

Remember my post on the Japanese vegetable delivery service? That huge daikon radish turned into daikon, chicken and pumpkin cooked in soy base soup.

Japanese green pepper (which is a lot thinner than American kind) stuffed with ground pork, with a thick teriyaki style sauce.

My friend went home to Indonesia and brought this back. Krupuk, or shrimp crackers. They are awesome. It’s simple cooking, just fry them.

When it’s dry, it’s just about, say, 3 inches.

Check out this video. It’s ALIVE!!! How it grows is quite amazing. I have no idea what’s in it, but after you fry them, the whole house smelled like fried fish… Pretty gross, and somehow, something was stuck on the frying pan, which took me like 10 minutes to clean. Normal food shouldn’t grow like this, so there must be some foreign ingredients in this. But it tastes good. Shrimp+Cracker+Fried= AWESOME!

Finally, the highlight of this weekend was making authentic New York style bagels. My cooking mind is very bi-polar. While I was making dumplings, I decided to make bagels. I don’t think ahead, and when I feel like making something, I just go buy ingredients and make them. When I was reading about New York style bagel, the key item was malt syrup. So I went to Whole Foods, where I saw Chace Crawford in front, and while I was texting that information to my friend Molly, Bobby Flay was talking RIGHT next to me. My celeb sightings for the weekend!

Back to bagel making. The recipe was something like this.
11 1/4 cups of bread flour
3 3/4 cups of warm water
3 1/2 table spoon of yeast
5 teaspoon of sugar
2 1/3 teaspoon of oil
5 teaspoon of malt syrup
5 teaspoon of salt

Mix water, sugar and yeast, rest it till it kind of bubbles up. Then add salt, syrup and oil.

Add flour, and it makes VERY stiff dough. Knead it for 10 minutes. It was VERY stiff and I almost thought it was too stiff and about to add more water, but it is supposed to be stiff, so I just kept kneading.

Finally it became the shape and texture it should be, and I put it in a bowl to rise.

After its risen, some recipe says to make a string and attach ends to make round shape, but my recipe said to make a tight ball, then put your finger through in the middle and make a hole. What a brilliant idea!

Then the distinctive part of bagel making, you boil them for 45 seconds each side in hot water and malt syrup mixture.

Bake them in 400F for 17-20 minutes, and check this out! This will make umami porn, for sure.

Maybe I have some Jewish blood in me somewhere. Come to think of it, I do sometimes talk like a nagging Long Island mother. That might be why my challah bread, as well as these bagels are pretty close to professional level!

Shalom.

I finally made my long delayed trip to Chinatown to buy a wok after the one I bought from Ikea fell apart–literally. I couldn’t wait to get home and season it for use, and figured I’d take some pictures and share the info for anyone interested in doing the same.

For those who don’t know, certain cookware (ie cast iron pans) need to be “seasoned,” usually to guard against future rusting, but often with the added purpose of creating a proper cookable surface that will ultimately add greater depth of flavor to the food being cooked.

Nowadays, most cookware that would require such a process often come pre-seasoned from the manufacturer. But when it comes to woks, especially the ones worth buying, it is the seasoning process that will transform the bare machine-cut steel bowl into a marvelous non-stick cooking surface.

With most cookware, quality does not come cheap. The wok however, is not like most cookware. While you can spend upwards of $40 on a wok depending on who makes it and how it’s packaged, the best wok you can (and should) buy is usually also the cheapest. I got mine for about $10 at Kam Man at 200 Canal St.

You’ll have to decide one a few things such as the size, whether you want a lid, side handles or a panhandle, and whether you want one that has a flat or a round bottom. I prefer a larger size so I have plenty of room to stir and move ingredients around, so I went with a large bare-bones carbon steel wok with a round bottom (superior to the flat-bottom variety) and side handles. You want carbon steel, which looks like raw, unfinished metal, because it is porous, and when heated, absorbs oil to seal the pores, which eventually has the effect of creating a sheen non-stick cooking surface that continues to improve with use.

Although the non-stick surface variety do not require any seasoning, there are several reasons why they are inferior. First, the heat transfer is better and more direct in a wok in which the non-stick surface is a result of layers of oil that has been seared into the pores. Second, similar to a cast-iron pan, the more a wok is used the more it improves, as the surface is infused and enhanced with the flavors that have cooked in it. Even the food particles that carbonize and infuse themselves into the pan’s surface add to this effect. I’ve heard it said that in Chinese cooking, the effect of the food on the wok is just as important as the effect of the wok on the food.

Lastly, the properly seasoned wok can take much more abuse and thus lasts longer than one with an artificial non-stick surface, which you have to take pains not to scratch, and thereby cannot use a traditional metal wok spatula. When a seasoned wok is scratched, it can be easily remedied by burning a few layers of oil onto the area to rehabilitate the surface. Thus an old seasoned wok is really like an old seasoned traveler, with each meal becoming a story of culinary adventure seared in its memory, later recalled and used to enhance the flavor of the next exploit.

With all that said, below is a step-by-step process on how to season your wok:

1.) Before you begin a note of caution. This process involves high heat and lots of smoke from burned oil, so you’ll want to turn your fan on high, open up as many windows as possible, and if you have an air purifier, set it on full blast. Make sure you remove all flammable materials nearby and clear the entire stove top for good measure. And don’t forget to grab some heavy duty gloves to enable you to handle a pan that eventually becomes extremely hot.

2.) To prevent rusting, carbon steel woks are rubbed with non-toxic machine oil at the factory, which you’ll have to first vigorously scrub with a brillo pad or equivalent and hot soapy water. You’re not worried about scratching or damaging the surface here, so you need not be dainty when scrubbing.

3.) You’ll need a cooking oil that can withstand high heat and not become gunky. You can use peanut or corn oil (peanut oil is more commonly preferred) or if you want to go old school and you have some available, you can use lard. In fact, I’ve read that traditionally when a person bought a wok they’d receive a piece of pig fat to season it with. Nonetheless you want to make sure you avoid polyunsaturated oils, as they do become gunky at such high temperatures.

4.) Turn the heat on high, and place the wok over the heat until the entire surface is hot and smoking, and until all of the water from the washing has completely evaporated.

5.) Brush the wok all over with a thin layer of the oil. I like to use a folded paper towel and tongs to spread the oil. You want to cover the entire cooking surface of the wok.

6.) Hold the wok over the burner and rotate the wok over the fire until all the oil is burned into the cooking surface.

7.) After doing this for several minutes, turn off the burner and allow the wok to completely cool. When the wok has reached room temperature, wipe off the excess oil. Remember, the point is to have a thin film of oil, and not a gel-like or gunky buildup.

8.) Heat up the wok again over the burner until smoking. Brush another thin layer of oil, and “roast” the oil into the entire surface of the wok again. Then after several minutes of doing this, again allow the wok to completely cool.

9.) Once cooled to room temperature, wipe off excess oil again, and repeat this process several times until a shiny, black, patina-like non-stick surface is created, each time burning the previous layer of oil in, and adding another coating. You’ll know it’s ready to use when the surface no longer looks dry.

Cleaning a properly seasoned wok after cooking is effortless, as most foods will easily fall off. It’s important to remember to never ever use soap, as it will erode the seasoned surface you’ve worked hard to create. All you need is warm water, and any stubborn pieces can be gently nudged either by the spatula or sponge.

Also, it’s not necessary to remove all the oil used in cooking, as you’ll need this oil to reseason the wok after cleaning. Instead of drying the wok with a towel, simply place it on the stove again and burn the remaining oil into the surface. If necessary, brush another thin layer of oil on, remembering to wipe off any excess that has settled after cooling. After several uses it won’t be necessary to reseason after cooking, but if time’s not an issue I prefer to do it anyway, as it will prolong the pan’s life. You can also season it in the same way if the coating ever becomes depleted.

The amazing thing about a wok is how it is the ultimate example of necessity being the mother of invention. It’s a metal receptacle meant to conduct high amounts of heat in a short amount of time- the quicker the food is cooked, the less fuel is consumed. It heats up quickly and cools down just as fast. This may explain its omnipresence in Chinese cooking over the past 3000 years, and the fact that it looks cool as hell at the dinner table probably explains its popularity today.