no thots, head empty

My favorite Disney movie is Ratatouille; incidentally, I think this movie was a major factor in getting me into foodie culture (the scene at the beginning with Remy describing the combination of flavors is something I still cherish to this day). One of the most beautiful lines in all of Disney also comes from Ratatouille. Not to spoil anything, but Anton Ego talks about the role of a food critic in the food industry and the relative (though clearly not perceptual) irrelevance of food critics as a whole.

Though i do think food criticism is generally pretty pointless (look at all the weird vapid stuff on Yelp for your local Chinese restaurants for example), I do think there is a place for professional food criticism, though definitely not in the way it exists now. This week I’ll be talking about my thoughts on food criticism in general, and on Monday I’ll do something fun again!

Food criticism as it exists now is largely a bunch of professional writers, often trained in the culinary arts, reviewing high brow food, and occasionally modern “trendy” foods. They fall into two categories: high-class traditionalists (think Anthony Bourdain), and popular reviewers (think Buzzfeed). As much as I adore Anthony Bourdain and some of Buzzfeed, I do think this is a pretty poor way to critique food.

The general purpose of food criticism is to provide an audience a window into a world of food they might not have experienced, but would very much like to try. But each person’s tastes vary wildly and it’s not very informative if someone with wildly different tastes (or worse, tastes inconsistently compatible with your own) says something is good or bad. A better approach for food criticism is for each food critic to build up a general rapport of their own likes and dislikes and allow readers to find the critic they match up with the most; already, online we see people like J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Chef John build up a pretty solid rapport, though neither have gained the notoriety and fame of Bourdain or Gordon Ramsey.

Though I think a much more interesting approach to food criticism (and this is a path that Bourdain did pretty well and Buzzfeed does a piss-poor job of) is placing food in the context of society. I’m a pretty big proponent of the idea that food is one of the most useful ways to create cultural understanding, but only when it’s properly understood in cultural contexts (racists enjoy Chinese or Middle Eastern food too). Food critics can help provide a very useful window into how food is treated in different cultures, how different food traditions arise, and how to bring a piece of somewhere else into the here. Personally, exploring the sheer diversity in Indian cuisine in middle school was my first foray into learning more about Indian history and culture. I think a similar path can be done through Chinese food (as I hope to do someday), but also for cuisines around the world.

On a more somber note, I also think one of the most saddening forms of racism is blindly insulting certain cuisines. I also think it’s really sad the lack of culinary diversity and understanding here in the United States (my goodness the number of times of people who say that “Asian” food is their favorite…), or that a sense of false understanding of a culture’s cuisine is often created (cmon ramen and sushi aren’t all that Japan has to offer). Food critics should be that bridge for the everyman in America to the everyman everywhere else.

Today I’ll be covering how to cook the assorted ingredients you have assembled since reading the previous post about fried rice! Again, fried rice is super diverse and this guide is only one of the many ways that you can make fried rice – in my opinion, though, this is the best way to make fried rice.

I see a lot of posts out there talking about how stir frying or frying rice requires obscenely high amounts of heat and a wok or whatever, which personally I disagree with heavily since 1) that’s really only fried rice in a restaurant since most people for much of history hasn’t had the capacity to use such high heat and 2) that really only applies if you’re cooking a bunch of fried rice at once. With that misconception out of the way, let’s get into some broad steps to follow.

The first thing you need to deal with is the meat. If you’re using cured meats like sausages, it’s easy – just throw it in to the rice about halfway through. If you’re using unprocessed meats, then you’ll need to do some prep. First, you should chop the meat into juliennes or cubes; I like juliennes because small cubes freak me out. Personally, I like to use a simple vinegar, soy sauce, ginger, cornstarch, white pepper marinade just to soften the meat a little (for future reference, let’s refer it as the “Jeffrey marinade”). 

Then, you’ll need to sear the meat well, since you’ll be tossing the meat in near the end of the general cooking process. This initial-fry will be done alongside any sort of “hard vegetables” and aromatics you’ll be facing (mushrooms, cabbage, garlic, onions, etc). These should be cut in a similar shape as the whatever form the meat is cut into. At the end of the initial fry, remove everything except for the leftover fond and oil from the heat. Add as much oil to the pan as necessary, and proceed to the next steps.

There is a widespread debate on how to cook eggs in fried rice on Chinese media forums (shoutout to Xiachufang). In my opinion, there is only one correct way to do so and anyone else can fight me. Crack eggs into a seperate bowl and beat until uniform, then fry in the main pan until mostly cooked through, breaking into smaller pieces in the process, sort of like cooking scrambled eggs. Once most of the moisture is gone, add the rice and mix vigorously as to not overcook the eggs. 

About halfway through cooking the rice, add the meat and “hard vegetables” alongside some of the marinade as flavor (and extra umami-ness). Towards the end of the cooking process, add your leafy vegetables and pickles (drain the pickles beforehand!), cut into long thin juliennes so that you don’t overcook anything, almost ribbon-like. You should also be adding your seasonings and aromatics here (aromatics are separate from the rest of the “hard vegetables”). Something that’s really fun to do is to add just a little bit of vinegar, chicken bouillon, and lao gan ma to have a really deep, complex flavor to the rice. And as always, add salt and pepper to taste.

In a departure than my previous posts, today I’m going to be doing ratings of popular mushrooms (not the drug). I think mushrooms are wonderful because they provide a very unique flavor and texture profile that you won’t get anywhere else – even if sometimes it’s a disagreeable one – making it a must-have for me in most stewed and sauteed dishes when the natural flavor gets brought out the most. Without further ado, here are my ratings of common cooking mushrooms.

White Button Mushrooms

6/10 White button mushrooms are your run-of-the-mill standard mushrooms. They pretty much go well with everything with mild flavor and standard springy mushroom texture. They’re great for sautee-ing and in sauces given their relative cheapness and mildness, though using them in soups is kind of pointless since they don’t soak up flavor.

Portobello Mushrooms

4/10 I find the flavor and the texture of portobellos to be generally pretty disagreeable, like if you took the worst aspects of a white mushroom and amplified them without changing the actual flavor profile by much. They also tend to be much less tender than white mushrooms. Their saving grace is their use in Shake Shack’s vegetarian burgers which are amazing, though it does say something when the only way they’re appetizing is stuffed with cheese and deep fried.

Oyster Mushrooms

8/10 Oyster mushrooms are my go-to for sautee-ing or grilling. They’re quite tender but still have a good bite to them, like a good steak or grilled chicken, and a pleasant, almost-sweet taste – again like a good steak or grilled chicken. Unfortunately, they’re not very good in soup or stews and tend to turn rubbery when boiled, so they lose points from me there.

King Trumpet Mushrooms

7/10 Same as oyster mushrooms, but more annoying to cut because you can’t just mad slice >:(

Shiitake Mushrooms

0/10 In my humble opinion, shiitake mushrooms are the worst form of mushroom. The flavor is far too pungent and the texture is what I imagine a rotting body to feel like. The flavor of shiitakes permeates through whatever dish it’s in; I can’t even eat the skin of a dumpling if there’s shiitake in it because it’s just too strong and I lose my appetite entirely. I might have unresolved childhood issues with shiitakes now that I think about it but nonetheless, worst mushroom, worst

Enoki Mushrooms

10/10 Every soup and most sautees should have enoki mushrooms in it. Enokis have very little flavor of their own, but have incredible potential to soak up flavor from their surroundings. Their texture is what set them apart for me; there is a nice crunch and subsequent smoothness like good chewy ramen noodles that give a very nice texture component to any soup, and even sautees which generally lack good crunch to them.

Chanterelles

7/10 Chanterelles are the bougie version of oyster mushrooms, which a much richer flavor, a more tender texture, and the ability to better soak up surrounding flavor. The best mushroom I ever had was sauteed chanterelles with chicken, which yes is very bougie but oh my goodness it was so good. Unfortunately, the cost factor makes Chanterelles only a 7/10.

Morels

5/10 Morels are good in saucy dishes, but the cost factor is again a big turn-off. However, I will say that in terms of being able to soak up flavor, morels are pretty much unparalleled in the cooking world – except maybe tripe. I would give it a higher rating had I experienced morels in soup but unfortunately I don’t have that kind of money.

Truffles

I forgot to post on Thursday (oopsies), but it’s ok because 1:46AM so it’s basically still Thursday. I have also officially decided to become a filthy premed pleb. Anyways this post will be about color in food, which I think is a often-used, but poorly-used aspect of food.

What makes color so difficult to utilize in cooking, in my opinion, is not managing the color of foods throughout the cooking process (although that is indeed very difficult), but the psychological associations that color evokes in the eater. From texture, shape, and smell we can generally infer correctly what the food will feel and taste like, even if its an unfamiliar dish. But the same of color often brings up different associations in different people – green in a dish might me freshness to another person but it reminds me of stale green onions and bok choy (both of which I despise, a problem that I have had to work hard to overcome). This makes color a necessary yet highly unpredictable and frustrating component of cooking to deal with. 

I think this is where a lot of trendy foodstuffs fall off the rails when it comes to color, mistaking nice color for nice taste. You always see wacky-colored donuts or grilled cheeses, or ~aesthetic~ drinks and smoothies, and yeah they’re Instagrammable™ but they are also more art than food; quite often these sorts of foods are taste below average, more effort put into looks than to actual edibility.

A much better use of color, I think, is as a complement to shapes and composition of the dish, rather than a stand-alone attractor or as something used to immediately draw attention to a dish. The former’s obsession with color alone lends itself to throwing taste out the window whereas the latter runs the risk of flavor expectation not meeting flavor profile, which always lends itself to a dissatisfied eater.

This is not to say that color is unimportant; in fact the opposite is true. Color is the tuba of a dish, best in the background supporting the melody, but the misuse of such would be a disaster no matter how good the food tastes in a vacuum. Contrasting colors is a good general rule to follow, well achieved with fresh herbs and a varied choice in seasonings and vegetables (using carrots and various colored peppers is a good cheat code). Always brown your non-fish meats and a crust is always nice to provide both color and texture to a dish. Only herbs should be a sharp color in cooked dishes – if your potatoes are still bright yellow they’re probably not done. As always, brown your aromatics! It makes them taste better, deepens the complexity of a dish’s flavor, and is the root of most of the color of a dish. Above all, don’t be scared to experiment! Whatever looks good to you is what the best color of a dish is, and only through experimenting will you know what the best way to achieve your goals are. 

For some reason in the west, people don’t really eat offal that much; at best it’s treated as a “challenge” or a “dare” for someone to eat some blood and at worst people who eat heart are treated like monsters (boo). Aside from liver (which is also demonized heavily) or blood sausage (rare), you’d be hard pressed to find any offal in a Western restaurant, which makes me sad, since food made of offal is – in my opinion – delicious as hell (speaking from a mostly Chinese-food perspective).

Offal often gets a bad rap for being unclean and disgusting, which is fair. Offal is much harder to clean than regular meat and cooking it to taste it much more difficult (mushy liver is the worst). Luckily for me, this makes offal a super cheap option for delicious food, so in this post I’ll be talking about some of the best ways (in my opinion) to cook offal.

All offal is delicious when skewered and kebabed with heavy cumin. There’s a really tasty Hui restaurant nearby and I always get heart, gizzard, and kidney from them because the cumin helps get rid of the gamey taste that turns people off. Chicken gizzards in particular is one of my favorite foods, with a nice contrast of crunchy and tender textures. Usually I stir fry it with lots of garlic, ginger, and chili peppers, using cornstarch to make a nice gravy to pair with rice.

Intestines and tripe are delicious in soup, especially thick stews; in Chinese cuisine, 毛血旺 is a spicy stew with duck blood and intestines, though often it’s replaced with pork. Alternatively, intestines can also be stir fried, letting all the fat run out to form a crispy, extraordinarily flavor accompaniment to vegetables (I like to use chives). Out of all the offal foods, intestines are also the hardest to clean and require intensive care to make sure nothing on the insides remain. Clean them well and you get a deliciously fatty piece of offal that has pretty much no “offal” taste and feels more like chewy pork belly.

Liver and kidneys are good stir-fried, especially with garlic thick sauces that get in the crevices and enhance the flavor more deeply. The trick to cooking liver and kidneys is to not overdo it and to clean them well; most people tend to overcook these ingredients but good liver/kidneys should not be tender or mush but have a bite to them – think calamari, but a bit softer. 

Blood is good whenever, especially alongside or as a substitute for tofu (although I’m not sure when removing tofu from a dish would ever be a good idea). Cubed blood adds a certain richness to soups and stews and provides a nice medium between meats, tofu, and vegetables.

Last but not least, lung isn’t as commonly used in 夫妻肺片 anymore, but it’s still very good. I personally have an aversion to brains and endocrine glands (no sweetbreads for me), so I cannot comment on them, but from what I know brains are very fatty.

The trick to cooking offal is cleaning and not overcooking them – the same tricks as you would cook anything, just more difficult. If you practice enough, you’ll find a very cheap source of vitamins and proteins that add a lot of depth to any dish

Similar to last week’s post on textures, a sorely underrated part of a dish, this week I’m going to talk about shapes and colors, related but even more underrated (in my opinion) aspect of a dish.

No one quote me on this, but a general staple of cooking is to have similar shapes. All ingredients are either cubed, sliced, or julienned (with the small exception of garnishing ingredients like garlic, and even then they generally follow this rule). In Chinese food in particular (and probably in other cuisines, though I have much less experience), most dishes follow strictly in this line of reasoning. A uniform set of shapes eases cooking and provides a uniform sense of texture, but also provides a nice stable sense when the dish is viewed. After all, the eye eats first.

But there are much more shapes to explore than the standard cubed/sliced/julienned. A common example in Chinese cooking is diamond-shapes, which are common with peppers and larger cuts of meat, or spheres in salads (I adore mozzarella balls in a good salad). Unfortunately, I think unique shapes are often misused in modern high-cuisine.

A common trend seems to be to cut food into random shapes, then toss then all together or to make foods enormously large with no regards to how they fit together. The former problem belongs to haute cuisine, where oddly cut potatoes and whatnot are placed together in a dish. Although in theory this serves to create texture diversity, in my opinion it falters. A jumbled sense of shape creates disunity in a dish, which is fine in deconstructed dishes where each item is functionally its own dish, but detracts the eye from a cohesive item and the tongue from enjoying the texture of the ingredient itself. When the tongue is forced to evaluate the textures of the shape of each item rather than the texture of the item itself, it ultimately detracts from the ingredients used.

he latter problem is a failure of “trendy” options, where random ingredients are put in burgers, salads, pastas, pizzas, sushis, et cetera, creating a pandora’s box of diverse but uncomplementary textures. Though yes, this trend does create texture diversity, a problem emerges where flavor and textures sort of meld together to create a, paradoxically, undistinct blob. When too many textures compete to be felt in the mouth, they functionally prevent the eater from identifying any particular ingredient. 

Ultimately, texture differences from shapes should complement one another, whereas the texture of the ingredients themselves should differ in several, but not overly, different ways.

A sorely underrated component of meals is textures. It’s something we inherently recognize when eating but is generally not on the top of someone’s list of priorities when ordering from a restaurant or choosing what to cook at home (at least not consciously). Yet, when I stop to think about it, the texture of certain foods – and of the meal as a whole – often plays an important role when I choose what to eat.

In my experience, I like to classify textures in two ways: bite and tongue (don’t quote me on this, these are my own musings and not actual food science). Bite is how the food feels when you bite into it (duh) and tongue is how the food feels as chewing progress and it rests in your mouth. Pickles are mostly bite texture, ice cream is mostly tongue texture, chunky peanut butter is somewhere in the middle, et cetera.

The most obvious textures include: crunchy (mostly bite), chewy (lengthened bite), tender (low bite, more tongue), and creamy (almost no bite, all tongue), but obviously there are an infinite number of combinations. Every food item exists on a spectrum, though the descriptors for how something feels during bite and tongue varies immensely (the bite of sea snails is very different than the bite of a crunchy cookie, even though I would say in raw bite-itude they are very similar).

Just like taste, texture compounds when individual ingredients are cooked and placed with others. The alteration of these textures, in my opinion, is sorely underused. Recently there has been a big trend of putting mac-n-cheese in everything, even if it doesn’t belong. Disregarding the health risk (eugh), mac-n-cheese is overwhelmingly soft – any crusty action is negligible given how much cheese is on the inside – which means when with a burger or whatever, it shifts the texture balance way off. Normal burgers work because the crunch of the bread combats the tenderness of meat (and if you go with a smashburger, it’s better to have a softer bun)

Another example: I love noodles. Different noodles give different textures so the pairing of toppings will be different, but for the sake of argument, lets say I’m eating one of my favorites: Shanxi knife-cut noodles. The noodles have a very complex texture (springy sides with chewy middle), which makes the dishes more interesting since the accompaniment must also balance the complex noodle texture. Usually this means a stewed-like topping, where the thicc liquid helps provide a third-dimension to the noodles, and tender vegetables or meat can add a fourth or even fifth aspect to texture. For me, ground meat or suancai (which adds some nice bite) and roasted eggplant (much creamier center, but also has bite on the outside) are my favorites.

In the end it’s all about balancing textures. Though there are certainly adverse textures to each person (for me, it’s steamed bok choy), out of the nice ones, it’s also important to keep texture in mind when cooking.

Some other nice texture combinations (send in your own ideas so I can try them)

- Peanut butter and celery

- Pita and hummus

- Sticky rice and pudding

- Dry rice and eggs