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Kick Ass Kunoichi
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Speaking of tea in food, from the NYTimes Magazine this week:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/ma...WLfTY+VUjSC1Eg
Quote:
Food: The Way We Eat
Steep Increase
By DANIEL PATTERSON
Published: December 17, 2006
Most people think of cooking as a creative profession. But when you (that is, I) spend your days yelling at your fish purveyor, becoming trapped in interminable meetings and then scrambling to cover for a cook who had a bike accident or developed a mysterious skin condition, it leaves little time to ponder new ways to cook a carrot.
At moments like these, the modern chef reaches for a familiar recipe with one hand and, with the other, into a pantry well stocked with rare, obscure and expensive foodstuffs: a little black truffle to tart up a mayonnaise, a touch of argan oil to accent potato soup — or better still, ingredients that aren’t associated with cooking at all, like tea. For chefs who are restlessly searching for an edge over the competition but are still bound more closely to what they know than they often care to admit, tea provides an easy way to dress up their offerings. With little expense or effort, it allows them (ahem, us) to transform ripe litchis into litchi-jasmine sorbet or a simple custard into green-tea crème brûlée. As with many of our culinary “innovations,” there’s a bit of cultural philandering involved: in Asian countries, the concept of cooking with tea is almost as old as tea itself and has engendered a few clichés of its own (think tea-smoked duck).
Tea may be a flavor shortcut, but a gimmick it is not. When I hired a pastry chef from New York several years ago, it wasn’t the yogurt foam or the Indian-spiced desserts that grabbed my attention — it was that inspired combination of litchis and jasmine, two ethereal flavors that encircled each other like a gustatory double helix. Huh, I thought, what an interesting idea. Cooking with tea. I could do that.
And I did. I’m not a tea drinker, so I was happily surprised to find good-quality teas readily available that bore scant resemblance to the unpalatably grasslike or fruity blends I avoided growing up. While the selection in specialty stores is dazzling (both in price and quality), supermarkets also carry plenty of teas good enough for cooking.
I treated brewed tea like a quick, flavorful stock, using jasmine or Darjeeling to cook rice and black tea to braise pork, which I finished with prunes and orange zest — southern France by way of China. Tea’s slight astringency makes it a natural partner for sweet-and-sour ingredients, like the honey-and-lemon-glazed turnips that I paired with cod crusted in pistachios and powdered green tea. I fell hard for Lapsang souchong, a smoked black tea, with which I flavored everything from duck jus to chocolate bread pudding.
Tea has a way of making the most mundane dishes feel exotic and new — for example, chicken soup infused with green tea. No tea can save a badly made stock, but it will make a good one better, adding a nutty dimension. The technique is easy: simply add about a tablespoon of tea leaves for each cup of hot (just below a simmer) liquid. As when brewing a pot of tea, the intensity of flavor and bitterness are controlled by the length of time the tea spends in the liquid, so keep tasting, then strain when it tastes right.
Desserts are particularly partial to tea’s charms, whether combined with fruit or infused into custards, ice creams and sorbets. You might be one of those people — and I’ve talked to a few — who feel that mucking up a perfectly good chocolate bread pudding with smoked black tea is a cheflike conceit, but the proof is, well, you know. The tea lends the creamy chocolate a rich, smoky decadence, its darkness buoyed by the cheerful tropical warmth of the accompanying mango. Eventually, I moved on to herbal teas, like chamomile, which I ground and added to almond cake to delightful effect.
Tea is not, however, an infinitely forgiving ingredient. The oolong-citrus broth I excitedly made to accompany a fillet of steamed snapper? Not so good. It tasted like a parody of nouvelle cuisine. But that same oolong, ground and used to season seared scallops, was transformative. The tea gave the scallops an earthy, vaguely mushroomlike aroma, its bitter and floral qualities making a terrific foil for the intense sweetness of the shellfish. Combined with a bright citrus sauce (this time tricked out with a generous helping of butter), it’s a 10-minute recipe that will impress the most discerning dinner-party guests.
And maybe even a few restaurant customers.
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If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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