Roasting vegetables changed my relationship to them forever. Sautéed or steamed, they were mild and sweet and kind; we were friends. But after a roasting, getting a little singed around the edges, more intense for their scarring, all hot and sexy, I wanted them. OK, maybe that metaphor was a little TMI.
Anyway, the point is that once I discovered how much a ripping hot oven will complicate, concentrate and caramelize both carrots and cauliflower, I realized that you can roast pretty much any vegetable — broccoli, asparagus, string beans, whatever — with the same method, with fantastic results.
All you need is salt, pepper and olive oil and two things to keep mind: HEAT and SURFACE AREA. Heat and surface area. Heat and surface area. There are no more typographical ways for me to emphasize this, but imagine there are, and imagine I'm using them. Because the relationship of heat and surface area pretty much define 75 percent of cooking, and 100 percent of the time you're talking about browning something.
Heat: Heat, of course, cooks your food. At a very high temperature, sugars will caramelize (and proteins will brown), which is really what you want out of roasting vegetables. (And at an even higher temperature, of course, they will burn, which is what you really don't want out of roasting vegetables.)
Surface area: The more surface area you have directly touching the roasting pan or the hot air of the oven, the more caramelization you're going to get, because it's the outside of a piece of food that gets the most intense heat. So this means two things: 1) don't pile your vegetables on top of one another — lay them out in one layer. And 2) how you cut your vegetables really matters. Tiny pieces will have more exposed surface area relative to their insides than big chunks. And an elongated shape, like a domino, for instance, will have more surface area than a cube.
So, keeping these two things in mind, you can always adjust what you need to do get the results you want. You'd like more browning? Turn the heat up or cut your vegetables smaller. You'd like your vegetables more cooked and tender? Cut your vegetables smaller and turn the heat down. Like that roasted flavor, but not too much? Cut your vegetables bigger and/or turn the heat down. You're smart people. You're picking up what I'm puttin' down.
OK, so what vegetables can I roast?
I really think most any specimen likes a nice, high-heat zap in the oven. Very few come to mind that don't: mainly very watery ones like celery or leafy greens, or dense, tough ones that need extended cooking time, like mature beets. And potatoes kind of deserve some special attention and particular tricks I'll get into another time.
But here's a list of some of my favorites, and how I like to cut them for optimal browning and tenderness:
Asparagus: Leave whole; peel if necessary.
Bell peppers: If not roasting over an open flame, cut these into 1-inch chunks.
Broccoli: Cut into 1- to 1½-inch diameter individual florets, the tips of which get charred beautifully crisp. Peel, then halve or quarter thick stems (which are delicious!).
Brussels sprouts: Halve them.
Cauliflower: Treat like broccoli.
Corn: Cut into kernels; will cook very quickly and you may only want to brown one side.
Carrots: Cut a 1-inch chunk off the top end at a 45-degree angle. Roll the carrot a quarter turn and repeat. This weird oblique shape gives you lots of surface area to caramelize its abundant sugars. ½-inch coins or half-moons also work well.
Eggplant: Cut into 1½-inch chunks.
Fennel: Cut into 1-inch pieces.
Green / string beans: Really! They're great. Just make sure they're tender; old, tough ones get tougher in the oven. Leave whole, stems removed.
Onions: Cut into 1½-inch wedges, and break apart into individual layers.
Parsnips: Treat like carrots.
Radishes: Leave whole if small, about 1 inch in diameter; otherwise cut in 1-inch pieces.
Sweet potatoes: Cut into 1-inch pieces.
Tomatoes: Cut 1-inch-wide wedges or ½-inch slices. They won't really brown well but can have a nice concentrated flavor.
Turnips: Cut into 1-inch chunks.
Zucchini / summer squash: Cut into 1-inch chunks, or oblique-cut like carrots.
OK! Get to the method, already!
And to serve:
Mostly I'll just serve roasted vegetables as is, but you should feel free to fancy it up. A sprinkle of good vinegar is always nice, a brightness to contrast with the deep, dark caramelized flavors. Or toss in some toasted nuts for richness, or maybe some raisins for a little sweet-tart action. Fresh hearty herbs, like thyme and oregano, are killer; adding them while the vegetables are still hot will help to bring out their flavor. And shaved Parmigiano, of course, is a strong move.
I didn't think much of Biggie Smalls while he was alive. He had a few hits, he had ridiculous sunglasses, he was the opposite of a handsome man and he rapped about his girl-stealing suavity with a mushy mouth. But after he died, after I wondered why there were marches in the street for him, after my friend Eric handed me a cassette with the words "Best of Big" scrawled on the label, I came to love him, in that way where the best artists become, you hope, a part of you. He rapped about the life of a street hustler-turned-playboy, about blunts and broads and sex in expensive cars, but along the way he taught me who I would be as a writer on food.
Biggie's rhymes hum with complicated life. He took the invisible details of his world -- the cry of a killed rival's baby daughter; a lover's orgasmic shouts of "You chicken gristle eatin' motherf**ker!"-- and made them glow so that, in between head-nods to sick beats, anyone could see his stories. And for me, never having killed a man, never having had sex good enough to require that kind of name calling, it was the little things Biggie shared that invested me in the lives lived in his rhymes. "Born sinner, the opposite of a winner, remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner," he rapped in his breakout hit "Juicy." The scenes and characters he crafted were vivid and real.
But when I heard him rap about cookies in "Sky's the Limit," Biggie Smalls became to me something truly greater than a just a wit and storyteller:
Here comes respect:
His crew's your crew, or they might be next
'Look at they man eye! BIG, man, they'll never try.'
So we rolled with 'em, stole with 'em.
I mean loyalty: n**gaz bought me milks at lunch.
The milks was chocolate; the cookies, buttercrunch.
He was bragging about being harder than you, tougher than you, even when he was a child in school. But he was still a child. He loved his chocolate milk. He remembers the flavor of his favorite cookies. The Notorious B.I.G., this spinner of murder rhymes and playboy fantasies, made himself vulnerable. "Sky's the Limit" is a song about how far he'd come from the street life, but it's also a song about the innocence he lost even when he was trying hard to never be innocent at all. Under all his bluster, under the killer braggadocio of "Hunt me or be hunted: I got three hundred fifty seven ways to simmer, sauté" ("Unbelievable"), he still had his throat exposed to the world. Usually you couldn't tell because he was rapping, straight-spittin', but sometimes, you could see underneath and it was fleshy and soft.
There's much more in that song -- stories of how he sewed fake Izod logos onto his shirts to seem richer than he was -- but it was the cookies, buttercrunch, that made me understand food's potency as a symbol, its ability to bridge enormous gaps between him, his characters, and the listener, whether that listener hustled on his corner or was a Chinese kid from the suburbs. Everyone can imagine the horror of hunger, the anger it can engender. Everyone, no matter how hardened, can remember the foods that defined their childhood. And everyone knows, whether you are eating sardines or lobster, that what you eat and what you want to eat says much about you.
For years, I tried to listen to other tapes in my little suburban family sedan, but I would just keep going back to the Black Rhinoceros of Rap, listening to him drop unexpectedly like bird shit. He died 13 years ago today. He was 24. I knew then I would never get to see him grow as an artist, and only years later would I realize how I'd learn from him. I just kept playing him in my car, and I let my tape rock until my tape popped.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A collection of Biggie's finest food rhymes
Biggie was a funny man, and he mastered the silliness of sex and food. Back to "Juicy":
The Moet and Alizé keep me pissy
Girls used to diss me
Now they write letters 'cause they miss me
I never thought it could happen, this rappin' stuff
I was too used to packin' gats and stuff
Now honies play me close like butter played toast
From the Mississippi down to the East Coast
And he built a legacy in masterpieces of carnal seduction like "Big Poppa":
We can rendezvous at the bar around two.
Plans to leave, throw the keys to Lil' Cease.
Pull the truck up front and roll up the next blunt,
So we can steam on the way to the telly. Go fill my belly –
A T-bone steak, cheese eggs and Welch's grape.
Conversate for a few, 'cause in a few, we gon' do what we came to do.
Ain't that right, Boo? (True.)
I mean, if he can make your girl leave you for that level of romance, what couldn't he do? Outside of sex appeal (when "b**ches used to go, 'Ewww!'") Biggie also rapped often about his fabulous wealth, invoking culinary luxuries, like here, in "Hypnotize":
I can fill ya wit real millionaire shit: escargot.
My car go
160, swiftly. Wreck it, buy a new one –
Your crew run run run; your crew run run.
And just imagine him, all 300-plus pounds, lazy eye and top hat, rollin' through his English gardens, contemplating seafood as he does in "I Love the Dough":
Country house, tennis courts, and horseback
Ridin', decidin': cracked crab or lobster?
Who says mobsters don't prosper?
His language was his weapon against the world, and so he bragged with ferocious skill. No detail, no material, ever escaped his eye or its place in his quiver. He was a rapper who didn't have to rely on street slang because his eye for detail in the larger world was so acute. This is from a freestyle with DJ Mister Cee:
All it's taking, is some marijuana and I'm making
MCs break fast, like flapjacks and bacon.
But he was always clear on his relationship with hunger. This is from "Things Done Changed":
If I wasn't in the rap game
I'd probably have a key, knee deep in the crack game
Because the streets is a short stop
Either you're slingin' crack rock or you got a wicked jumpshot
Shit, it's hard being young from the slums
Eatin' five-cent gums not knowin' where your meal's comin' from.
You've got to figure that any review of a little Hong Kong dumpling shop known for being the cheapest place in the world to earn a coveted star in France's rarified Michelin Guide is going to have a comment or two about the level of service being below that of, say, The French Laundry.
But reading the piece on The Sydney Morning Herald's website, I was a little surprised to see this:
"Two hours!" she barks, then shouts something in Cantonese into a tiny microphone attached to the register.
I edge outside, mystified. It's hard to believe I've just made a reservation at a Michelin-starred restaurant. It feels more like dropping off a shirt at the dry cleaner's.
A dry cleaner's? Really? You went to a Chinese restaurant and got treated so bad you thought you were at Ching-Chong Chan's No-Tickee-No-Washee Laundry? C'mon, you couldn't find any socially awkward computer geeks in Metaphorland?
I'll be honest. It's not really big enough a deal for me to be actually offended: no one's getting passed over for a job, no one's getting beaten in the street. Maybe the writer happens to go to a traumatizingly gruff dry cleaner, and the racial stereotype wasn't even intended.
The (coincidentally) Australian arm of KFC took serious heat a couple of months ago for an ostensibly racist commercial that had a white man making peace with hostile black Caribbean cricket fans with a bucket of fried chicken. It wasn't really a fair controversy -- the racial stereotype of blacks as going goo-goo for fried chicken doesn't really exist in Australia or in the Caribbean. Sometimes totally innocuous jokes go over poorly in other parts of the world. Baggage sometimes gets found in translation.
But early Chinese immigrants in Australia did, in fact, work in clothes washing before graduating to other industries. (In the UK, as well; the piece was originally published by the London Telegraph.) Someone out there's going to be unhappy about this. I mean, could you imagine, "The cooks in that Jewish deli were so bad, it's like they were busy making loans, not pastrami!"?
Clams are the strong, silent type of shellfish. They're not sexy like oysters and they're not dying to be everybody's friend like scallops. (And, believe me, when seared scallops are your pride and joy, it's hard to feel cheaper than the moment you realize that a one-armed monkey can make them as delicious as you can.) But what clams lack in scallops' melodic sweetness and oysters' ringing finesse, they make up for in rich, earthy minerality and bass-drum brininess. They're versatile, great on their own and pairing beautifully with both subtle and blockbusting flavors.
And as a bonus, they're about the easiest things on the planet to cook: They take just minutes, they tell you when they're done, they make their own broth, and you can dress them up or down. And if you just remember a basic framework, you can make them in any number of variations.
Below is a phenomenal recipe, clams hot and fragrant with more black pepper than you ever thought possible, rounded out with a touch of sugar and Chinese oyster sauce. It's a presentation inspired by a traditional Malaysian way to serve crab, a dish I learned from Susan Feniger and Kajsa Alger, the chefs of Los Angeles' wonderful, globally inspired restaurant Street.
But the lesson of this recipe is in its basic elements: fat, aromatics, liquid, acid and fresh herbs, each of which does its own trick with the saline, earthy flavor of clams. The fat rounds the edges of the saltiness, the aromatics give fragrance and context, the liquid creates steam to cook the clams and dilutes their salty brine, the acid cuts through the heavy earthiness, and the herbs give the dish freshness, a brightness that lifts the flavor. In this case, we're using oil and butter for fat, garlic and black pepper for aromatics, water for steam, lime juice for acid, and cilantro for the herbal note.
But you can sub in whatever ingredients you want. A classic Italian way to steam clams, for instance, is to go with olive oil (fat), garlic (aromatic), white wine (liquid and acid), parsley (freshness), and sometimes a touch of hot chilies for more of the fresh, elevating effect. The dishes taste continents apart, but both follow the same basic principles. Once you read through (and, I hope, make!) the recipe below, you can pretty much make amazing steamed clams however you want, using this framework.
One last note about flavor: Like any bivalve, clams will taste different depending on where they're from, how much rain there's been, how they've been purged of sand after harvest, etc. One batch might be very mild and another very salty. So, while I usually believe in adding a little salt all through the cooking process, with clams I try to keep as much salt out of the dish until after they've given up their liquid and I know how salty it's going to be. If "Cuisine or Death" is the chef's motto, "taste and fix" is the cook's.
Malaysian black pepper clams
Serves 2 as a main course with steamed rice or noodles
2-2¼ pounds small clams, like little necks (If you're using little necks, that's about 2 dozen)
4 cloves garlic, minced (about 2 tablespoons)
2 teaspoons black pepper, freshly and finely ground. Measure after grinding. Yes, it's a workout
½ cup water
1 tablespoon sugar (palm sugar is great, if you have it)
2 teaspoons oyster sauce (usually available wherever you get soy sauce)
1 lime, halved
1 tablespoon butter, cold, cut into 2 pieces
4 sprigs cilantro, roughly chopped
1½ tablespoons vegetable oil
The Last Chinese BBQ
Originally published in Gourmet, August 2009
Behind me came the clack of the oven latch, a rush of scorching air, and then the rolling grumble of metal track as Si-fu hauled out 80 sizzling pounds of hot pig swinging from a hook. He twirled it around like a dance partner, eyeing its skin carefully for bubbles threatening to form. I looked hard. I couldn't see what he was searching for, but I knew they had to be found: If they appear early in the roasting, they will puff, burst, and burn. He tapped the skin with carpenter's nails, piercing it just enough to release pressure but not enough to let the juices escape. He threw arcs of salt as if casting rice at newlyweds and sent the pig back into the oven.
As I broke down barbecued ducks, smelling richly of fat and five-spice, Si-fu concentrated on the nearly inaudible crackle coming from the oven, waiting for the pitch that would tell him it was time to take another look. I heard the clack of the latch again, the grumbling of the rail, the tack-tack-tack of nails, the scratch of steel wool scraping at too-dark skin, the rustle of a basting brush. Over and over I would hear these sounds when he worked the pig, for hours at a time, breathing in thick heat.
I'd been working with Si-fu for a week at Ho Ho BBQ, a tiny shop in a nondescript strip mall in suburban Toronto, learning how to roast meats in the Cantonese style. It was work that was supposed to be steeped, for me, in flavors of childhood, in memories of Chinatown walks with my parents. But charming memories don't get you very far when you're pushing around carcasses hanging like heavy bags in a boxing gym.
The pig was done. It was a good one, meaning that the bubbles were all trapped inside the skin, making it crackly but also incredibly light, with a texture like Rice Krispies. It threw its heat around the room as Si-fu took a breath and hoisted, squeezing his bony frame through the narrow shop toward a display case. Ideally, he would have waited for it to rest, but the customers were wild-eyed and he came back to it with a big blade and intention. He knelt, only this wasn't a devotional act. He performed an awkward upward stroke with grace, cleaving one half from the backbone, and began cutting off customers' orders. The knife sailed through meat and skin, making a sound like walking on potato chips.
After the rush, he cut me a piece and I saw what all the work was for: crisp yet dissolving skin, tender meat, and lush, velvety fat. Textures in perfect balance and contrast. The flavor, too: Earlier, Si-fu had me cure the splayed-open pigs, massaging them with fistfuls of salt and sugar until the carcasses looked like snow at the moment you realize there'll be no school tomorrow. The cure has only a few hours to penetrate, giving each bite a heavily seasoned side and a clean, juicy side. The flavor was sweet, salty, complex, and then mild and pure, as fascinating as it was delicious. Si-fu looked at me. "Quality," he said.
When I was a kid, I'd ditch the TV and run to help my mother on the nights she brought home a Styrofoam box from Chinatown. Inside there would be duck like this, pork like this; half of it would be gone before the rice was cooked. It always felt like some kind of reward, but later I realized that it wasn't about me. It was about convenience. It was about being cheap and easy for Mom.
But the taste of that barbecue is mostly a memory. The places my mother used to go to have all either gone away or gone downhill. One night a few months ago, my great-uncle shook his head as we left Ho Ho. "It doesn't taste this good anywhere else anymore," he said. He talked about China as it was a half century ago, a place where everyone knew how to roast ducks so that they were as rich as these, how to roast pigs so that they were as crisp as these. I am never careful enough around nostalgists. I went back inside and asked Jacques Wong, the owner, to let me work with him for a while. He said yes so casually I didn't think he meant it. Then he said, "You know, it gets hot in here."
I learned a lot cooking at Ho Ho, but maybe most of all this: Whatever it was for Mom, none of this is easy. Not learning to see invisible bubbles or hear inaudible noises. Not standing in the heat of an oven twice the size of a refrigerator. Not butchering and butterflying whole animals. Not scalding ducks and pigs with heavy kettles of boiling water to tighten up their skins. Not hoisting pigs up the stairs, your knee hitting the backs of their heads and them hitting you right back. But Jacques Wong has been doing these things nearly every day for almost 30 years, the last 10 in this shop. I called him Si-fu, Cantonese for "master," at first out of convention, then quickly out of genuine respect.
Quality was the first thing Si-fu talked about when I arrived at Ho Ho BBQ. It's an idea that has a grip on him. He insists on buying nothing less than the best ingredients, on doing things the hard way, the right way. He tells me about the steps others will skip, the cheaper meats others use. But he is fixated on quality, and I suspect it's because his skills did not come to him easily.
When Si-fu fled China for Hong Kong, he learned to cook from chefs who kept secrets. For years, he plied them with food and drinks in return for lessons, sometimes spending a fifth of his meager pay. A sated cook would show him how to marinate meat; a hungry one would send him scurrying to scrub ovens. There was no complaint in his voice when he told me this, but he also said: "Of course, you have to end up better than your si-fu. You have to take what they teach you and add to it." His dedication to technique, to quality, is fueled by a fierce pride.
Customers came in spurts, and in the slower hours Si-fu had time to chat with them, handing out extra tidbits—a hock here, pieces of tofu there. Earlier I had watched him drop blocks of that tofu into the fryer with speed, showering his arms with hot fat. Now he's just giving it away. A regular came in for some bright red cha siu pork and offered Si-fu a lemon cake she'd baked. Si-fu cut himself a slice and urged others to do the same. "You should try some," he said to a customer who claimed not to like Western sweets. "You don't have to eat it if you don't like it. But you should taste someone else's culture." He offered to buy coffee for his staff, to go with the cake, and reached into a Styrofoam cup he keeps filled with cash for just this purpose. He reached in again for a little more to buy a lottery ticket.
Once, while waiting for a pig to start sizzling in the oven, Si-fu asked me why I hadn't written a book about Chinese food to coincide with the 2008 Olympics, when everyone would be interested. I admitted I hadn't thought of it. He shook his head with gentle disappointment. "You can't be lazy," he said. "You always have to be thinking if you want to make money."
But his own numbers seem hard to figure out. He pays a lot for his pigs, he admits, but he likes the quality he gets. "The guy I buy from's got a family to feed, too," Si-fu said. "Hell, maybe he has a couple of them." But after all the cutting and the curing and the scalding and the resting and the lifting and the roasting, if he manages to sell the whole thing, he nets $30.
It's a cruel irony that people are increasingly willing to shell out for artisanal foods, and yet for so many cooks plying their traditional crafts in immigrant communities, the numbers don't really add up. For Si-fu, it's a brutal calculation, and it's fine by him that his children don't want to take over when he retires. He doesn't want them to, despite his pride in his work. "You see how tired I am," he said. "This is not what my children go to school for." He just told the story of the immigrant in one sentence.
Still, I protested. What about all your hard-earned experience? Who will carry on this craft that you've learned? He smiled and pointed toward the notebook in my hand. "Besides, I learned to cook," he said. "When I retire, I can just relax and cook for myself and my friends. Cooking for them is the most satisfying thing I can think of to do." Then, I understood why he cut me good pieces from the pig all day long, why he hands out the tofu. His work is hard, but he also gets to give.
Back in the basement, I stared at 40 pounds of pork in the sink before pouring on the marinade that will turn it into cha siu. It was like a kiddie pool full of meat. I dug in with my hands, intensely aware of the cold pork, the salty grit, the slippery liquid. I tossed and folded at first, as if working a delicate dough, but then with an animal urge sank down to the elbow and stirred with my arm. I could feel my biceps warming, grinding through the resistance. I could feel my muscle working in this muscle, heard with satisfaction the sloshing and gurgling of so much meat and moisture. Behind me, Si-fu hauled out a massive propane stove and set water on to boil.
I ran upstairs to deliver a chicken and noticed that the case was nearly empty. There was hardly any pork left, a few bits and pieces, and I ran back down to report. Si-fu looked at the clock, a few hours from closing. He leaned on the table and thought. "Let them sell out. We'll just close up." He took a beer from the fridge and got back to work, showering hanging pigs with boiling water. Then he added, "It's not worth the gamble." By that he meant roasting one now and risking its not being sold. He doesn't sell leftovers. "I only sell fresh. You have to do things 'number one' if you want people to come back," he said. "That's why every step matters. That's why how you season matters. How you brush on the sauce matters. Sewing the ducks up so no marinade comes out matters."
Just then, I noticed one of the ducks springing a slight leak from its braided flap and pointed it out to him. He took a swig of his beer, his eyes glassing over with tiredness, and aimed his kettle full of water at another pig. "To hell with it," he said. No, I thought, his kids are not going to school for this.
Ho Ho BBQ 3833 Midland Ave., Scarborough, Ontario (416-321-9818)
For further stories on Si-fu Wong and his son, click here.
I don't live in a particularly creepy neighborhood, but it's a little curious when you get home to your apartment building and see someone staring intently into one of your neighbor's windows.
I couldn't tell what the man was looking at since he was trying to peer into one of the upper floors, but he stood stock still in the harsh glare of the security spotlight, looking like he was about to get sucked into a UFO by a tractor beam.
"Excuse me," I said. He came out of his Close Encounters of the Third Kind stare and I realized I willed myself to say something before I knew what to say. So I went, "Uh ... can I help you?" sounding like someone trying not very hard to sell him a television.
"Oh, hi," he said. Then, realizing why I was approaching, he said, "Oh, I live here. I'm just waiting for my girlfriend to toss some takeout at me."
"Excuse me?" I asked. "Someone is going to throw dinner at you?"
Just then he looked back up, and out of the glare of the security lamp, I could see the silhouette of a woman's head poke out from a window. She waved. "Hi, Babe!" she called in a dulcet tone while dangling a package much larger than I am comfortable seeing seven stories above my head.
When she let go of it, I felt that slight, disembodied panic you feel when there is something very strange happening right in front of you, but you kind of can't believe it's for real. The bag sailed down, more leisurely than I thought it would. Caught by the wind it bounced off the security lamp and landed - ploosh - into a small bush.
"We order takeout a lot," the man said to me. "And I hate having all these plastic containers piling up that the city won't recycle. So we bring them back and reuse them. I like the Thai place around the corner."
"Yeah, their papaya salad is great," I said.
He started walking away. "Yeah, we get it every time."
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