If your Chinese food vocabulary consists of “General Tso’s” and “orange chicken,” then it’s time to open your eyes to see what the world’s most populous country really has to offer. Lilly Chow, Jonathan White and Iain Shaw—three friends who met six years…
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by Ryan B. Patrick Befitting Toronto’s large size and multicultural makeup, the types of cuisine one might find in the energetic northern metropolis are as diverse as they are flavorful. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the city is home to an impressive range of soul food options—as far as…
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An Olympian pop-up supper club opens in London
The Olympics opening ceremonies are nearly upon London, and as the city makes its final preparations to host the world for the games, many creative projects are popping up around town to celebrate the event. Taking the international spirit of the Olympics to heart—by way of the belly— the pop-up restaurant Global Feast has opened in Stratford Town Hall near Olympic Park with an astonishing 20-night lineup of exceptional cuisine from across the world.
Global Feast is a collaboration between architect Alex Haw of
Atmos and celebrated underground supper club chef
Kerstin Rodgers, AKA MsMarmiteLover. Together they have curated a delicious culinary adventure that showcases the best of supper club culture. Top supper club chefs from across London and further afield have been selected to host one night each, with their menus celebrating the delicacies of their chosen part of the world.
Global Feast also marks the realization of Haw’s long-held ambition to seat people at the tallest table in the world. He describes his Worldscape design as a “voluptuous, CNC-carved landscape, a vast, 3D model of world terrain, seating 80 people on its ocean contours to dine off its coastlines, illuminated by its cities, enshadowed by its mountains.”
“Our culinary journey starts, like our species, in Africa—on the Western tip of Senegal, opening alongside the first Olympic event (football),” says Haw about what diners have in store. “Traveling east, we land at home on the opening night of the Olympic ceremony, with fireworks visible from our courtyard, to celebrate the best of host nation Britain. We continue east through Europe and onwards past Asia, from old world tonew, to end our entire journey the night after the last Olympic event by passing on the baton to Rio de Janeiro—with a climactic fiesta of Brazilian Carnival.”
Global Feast kicks off 25 July in London, and traveling gourmands can choose to attend for both the opening and closing ceremonies of the games, or any night in between.
Mastering a good egg on the ground or in the air
On the ground or in the air, properly cooked eggs present a challenge to be mastered. Helen Davey worked for many years as a Pan Am stewardess, and her account of a harrowing experience making fresh scrambled eggs for an entire plane yielded impressive yet hilarious results. The good news: the passengers claimed it was the best breakfast on a plane they had ever eaten. The bad news: while Davey was able to crack and cook 350 eggs, she later left the plane covered in the ones that splattered during the intense turbulence that hit while she was in the middle of her seemingly insurmountable task. Davey arrived home to find more of the spilt egg had even made its way into her bra.
In professional kitchens of the on-land variety, chefs have turned cooking eggs into precision maneuvers. Heston Blumenthal’s method for perfect poaching involves a fresh from the farm egg, a ceramic dinner plate in a pan of precisely heated water, a slotted spoon, and some careful finesse. Many 63° and 64° eggs cooked in sous vide water ovens have made their way onto the menus of everyone from Michael Voltaggio (63°) to Ludo Lefebvre (64°). Precision is key. In the world of Modernist Cuisine, Nathan Myhrvol’s egg techniques includes a Modernist Tea Egg with a liquid center and marbling created from beet juice. He also developed a new process for laser etching images onto an omelette (in the video the printing process reveals Jimmy Kimmel’s face).
With all of these precise preparation recommendations, how can a flight crew even attempt serve a properly cooked egg to a large number of people on a long haul flight?
Understanding the anatomy of an egg reveals some helpful hints. The Exploratorium in San Francisco encourages playful investigation of science, art, and human perception. Their Science of Cooking project explores how egg proteins change when they are beaten and mixed with other ingredients. Eggs that are mixed to be scrambled or prepared as an omelette have added cooking challenges, because the eggs have now “formed a network of interconnected proteins”. When eggs are cooked at high temperatures for too long, the whites can becomes rubbery. For eggs that are being served on a plane, the added the challenge of tight quarters in an airline kitchen and high altitudes, the goal of serving fluffy eggs becomes a near impossible task.
Only first-class cabins are equipped with enough kitchen space to store chilled eggs and crack them fresh for breakfast. For the rest of the plane, most egg dishes must be pre-made in catering units with special techniques to ensure the eggs remain creamy, like folding in bechamel sauce to the basic recipe once it’s been chilled. For a fresher alternative, some airline kitchens prepare fresh pasteurized liquid egg into cardboard cartons that are kept in chilled stwage in the first class galley. Despite careful methods of preparation, cooking scrambled eggs at 30,000 feet still poses a challenge, and cabin crew members are therefore trained to make fresh scrambled eggs under limited, unpredictable conditions. One technique involves a bain marie, created by putting two smaller foil containers into large foil tray filled with water. Fresh pasteurized mixed eggs and cream are poured into the smaller trays, carefully loaded into the oven, and mixed every three minutes, then hit with a dash of cream at the end, proving that creamy scrambled eggs with a fluffy consistency can be made even in the tiny galley of a plane.
The new German restaurant sets an elegant table in a former Jewish girls’ school in Berlin
You can’t spit in Berlin without landing on something of historic interest, and the site of Pauly Saal—the new restaurant opened by the team behind the well known Grill Royal—is no different. The former Jüdische Mädchenschule, or Jewish girls’ school, was built in Mitte in 1928 and was taken over by the Nazis as early as 1930.
The courtyard, a charming brick patio where you can eat lunch in the afternoon or sip a cocktail at night, was used for deportations until 1941, after which the school passed through a series of owners, eventually standing vacant for decades until the fourth Berlin Biennale used it in 2006 and, most recently, restauranteurs Stephan Landwehr and Boris Radczun remodeled it for their latest culinary venture, Pauly Saal.
You can’t get to the dining room without walking through the Pauly Bar, which might as well be the set of a 1930s gentlemen’s club with its dark green walls, buttery brown leather chairs and Persian rugs. The dining room, too, is a throwback to a more refined time. Murano chandeliers light the lush green cushioned seats and white tablecloths in golden tones. Against walls covered with locally made ceramic tiles, a life-size, red and white rocket spans the entire width of the room. It’s mounted over windows that separate the dining room from the kitchen, where executive chef Siegfried Danler calmly prepares traditional Weimar cuisine completely from scratch.
Your meal starts with a basket of deliciously chewy graubrot, literally grey bread. Somewhere between a weiss (white) brot and a schwartz (black) brot, graubrot is made using grains with the hull removed, so it retains the softness of white bread with all the richness and nuttiness of a darker loaf. Served alongside slabs of cold, salty butter, it’s a good sign of things to come. Danler cooks with as much from the restaurant’s small garden as he can, and he gets a good hunk of the meat he serves from his father. Given the amount of pork, beef and veal on the menu, Danler’s dad must keep busy. Since its opening in February 2012, Paul Saal has offered suckling pig, braised veal, offal and their signature dish, veal heart. Big parties can even order a large cut of meat and have it sliced by their waiter and served up table side.
When we went for lunch the tasting menu (a starter, main and dessert all for the affordable price of €32) featured asparagus salad (the big white kind was in peak season), haunch of roe buck with mushroom pasta and marinated fennel and strawberry sponge cake with yogurt cream and an elderflower jelly for dessert. We opted for a few staples from the regular menu and started with crayfish consommé and a salad with fried asparagus and marinated roast of organic pork. A whole crayfish, cut lengthwise, bathed in the thin, savory broth, and though the pork was a little on the greasy side, the perfectly roasted paper thin slices melted on your tongue.
We followed that with the crispy-skinned, sinfully buttery perch entree and the bell pepper and lemon-glazed veal shoulder with potato dumplings and spinach.
Here we need to pause and pay homage to the rich, slow roasted hunk of veal so juicy and tender we didn’t even need a knife to cut it. The paprika-spiced sauce made its way down the plate to four perfectly tender, just-made gnocchi.
We finished with the strawberry dessert on our waiter’s recommendation. The small square of layered sponge cake and strawberry yogurt cream made for a light finish to a truly indulgent lunch.
Reservations for the two-hour dinner service are highly recommended. Pauly Saal is open at noon daily.
British Airways dedicates itself to great cheese from the UK and beyond
The great cheeses of the world are made by passionate artisans who have learned the craft of transforming milk and cream into one of the most sought-after delicacies. Marking an important component to their recently launched Height Cuisine program, British Airways has made a clear commitment to offering a carefully selected assortment of cheese on their flights. The British Airways chefs that create Height Cuisine in-flight menus work with Tom Badcock of the Cheese Cellar, who directs the cheese program for British Airways. Tom provides access to some of the best cheese available—from local, UK-made products to international imports.
Badcock grew up on a farm in Warwickshire, England where, he says, “My mother taught me to milk goats and to make cheese.” Later Badcock earned a degree in food technology and dairy technology from Seale Hayne agricultural college in Dartmoor, and his technical expertise is matched only by his deep-seated passion for the craft.”I get quite keen on trying to support cheese makers, to keep this very small and fragile industry going,” he says. “Often you find cheese-makers just with one or two people making the cheese, and they need all our support. I make sure that people like British Airways are aware of their existence. They are dealing with something utterly unique. It almost takes food into an art form. I deal with something very precious, very rare, and rather wonderful.”
British Airways has been working with Cheese Cellar for more than 20 years. When it comes to the airline’s dedication to cheese as an important part of their culinary program, Badcock suggests, “I think they have caught this provenance bug, just like I have. It endears you to the product. You see the people behind the food. We try to put in artisan cheeses that have got the highest provenance.”
Among the current cheese offering on British Airways flights is Barber’s 1833 Vintage Reserve, a cheese with a rich history from the UK. “Giles Barber’s work is making cheddar and he is the guardian of British cheddar bacteria,” says Badcock, enthusiastically describing the Barber legacy. “That might sound a bit odd, but he has the starter culture of the definitive English cheddar. How does a cheese-maker tell the world that his bacteria is best? Taste the cheese. Barber’s 1833 is a fantastic two-year-old vintage cheddar.”
The altitude and special environment on an airplane affects your ability to taste the cheese, and it affects the cheese itself. All of these factors must be taken into account when curating the selection. “When you are up in the air, you can’t really serve mild cheeses because the flavor disappears,” explains Badcock. “Your hand is kind of forced to select stronger cheese.” At the same time, strongly scented cheeses aren’t always a welcome addition in closed quarters, so careful consideration must be made to strike the right balance.
Serving cheese in-flight presents certain challenges, and Badcock supervises the proper packing and portioning of cheese. “We have the dubious pleasure of cutting cheeses that were never designed to be portioned into little 25-gram servings,” he says. Cheeses are fed into ultrasonic cutters to cut servings with minimal waste, and his team needs to prepare them in perfect condition often at very short notice. Cheeses being prepared for flight are stored under a gas that stops fungus from growing. “In another world they might have frozen the product, Badcock adds. “In my world the gas is used to keep the cheese fresh and beautiful, just as the day that it left the dairy to get to British Airways.”
To learn more about British Airway’s Height Cuisine program visit their Facebook page
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