I caught the pungent odor of John Thorne's writing right away. If you dig this, he has published several books that are basically collected essays, digging into some ingredient or recipe this way (I have read Simple Cooking, Outlaw Cook, and Pot on the Fire).
One nice thing about his books is he has these sort of dreamlike fantasies about what a food is supposed to taste like, and pursues recipes based on this imagination. That means that, unlike a lot of cookbooks, just about every John Thorne recipe is amazing (his pecan pie is the best I've ever tried, because he directly tackled the problem of cloying sweetness and gummy texture).
This approximately describes my approach to game development, too. It works exceptionally well there as gamedev is all about crafting a fantasy and an experience.
John Thorne's books are good for reading just for fun, whether or not you plan to cook anything in them, or go try the things he's tried.
One of my favorite essays of his is on banh mi (Vietnamese sandwiches), where he's just totally baffled about how they even do that. Lucky for me, I live in the Twin Cities, ground zero for the best banh mi in the world. The essence of banh mi is basically experiencing every sensation your mouth can experience, all at the same time. It's warm, cool, crisp, chewy, greasy, sweet, sour, salty, spicy, fragrant, and ALL AT ONCE.
> The essence of banh mi is basically experiencing every sensation your mouth can experience, all at the same time. It's warm, cool, crisp, chewy, greasy, sweet, sour, salty, spicy, fragrant, and ALL AT ONCE.
This is, incidentally, what a well-dressed hamburger is supposed to be. Warm — bun and patty, cool — pickles and sometimes lettuce and/or tomato, crisp — the cut/toasted side of the bun and the pickles (and sometimes lettuce or onions), chewy — the inside of the bun and sometimes the rind of the patty, greasy — the faces of the patty, sweet — the pickles, sour — also the pickles, salty — the patty and yes the pickles too, spicy — the spices in the patty and sometimes added peppers or enhanced mayonnaise, fragrant — the pickles. Mayonnaise adds creamy to that list.
In theory, yes. In practice, most burgers are terribly imbalanced and simplistic (in a bad way) compared to banh mi. Too much meat! Greasy toppings! Crappy buns! Banh mi is far more vegetable-forward than any burger I've tried. Meat isn't the star of the show. Balance is.
What's missing from a burger is the deep umami flavor in banh mi that you'll smell a mile away -- the fermented fish sauce taste that smells a bit like a ripe fart and tastes like heaven.
Is Vietnamese fish sauce stronger than Thai fish sauce? My parents cook Thai food, having lived in Bangkok for a few years, and fish sauce never registered as "smelly" to me.
It depends. The typical stuff, that most people encounter, the Vietnamese "version" (called "nước mắm"), has a lighter flavor than the Thai "version" because, as was told to me by my mother-in-law who grew up in Vietnam, the Vietnamese prefer it to not smell or taste like fish. But, there's another type of fish sauce, that is Vietnamese, that is a little more rare. It's called "mắm nêm" and it has a very, very, _very_ strong fish odor and taste. I tend to steer clear of it but my wife and mother-in-law love the stuff.
edit/ For reference, I'm just an average white guy from the midwest and I married a Chinese-American woman and now live in SoCal. Through her, I've discovered, and love, most of these foods. Vietnamese fish sauce doesn't really register as "fish" sauce to me, either, rather it just tastes quite salty.
There are huge differences in quality between brands. Many people swear by Squid, which I used to love, but having had Red Boat, let me attest: you can get the amazing flavor without the awful smell.
I think it really depends on how you grew up. I grew up around plenty of ingredients in my food that are just as pungent to smell, so fish sauce smells distinct but innocuous to me. But for some reason grated parmesan smells pretty bad to me even though it's delicious.
Nicely seasoned and cooked beef can get the umami, but a leaf of lettuce and a couple of tomato slices and pickles don't hold a candle to a big mouthful of pickled carrot/daikon and fresh cucumber and cilantro in a proper banh mi.
There's nothing fresh or fragrant-tasting in the average burger, unfortunately. When I think of my local favorites, they are practically veggie-free. The delicious Patrick's Cafe burger (French style), with finely chopped bacon/mushrooms/onions/ketchup fried into an almost black paste of pure umami... delicious, but not vegetable anymore. The famous Matt's Bar Jucy Lucy (yes, that's the right spelling), just meat and cheese and bun and some onions if you ask nicely. Total umami bomb, but none of the clean fresh taste of banh mi.
When I do burgers, I'm a big fan of adding home made pickled red cabbage to them, it gives them a really good clean, sour bite, very similar to carrot and daikon in banh mi.
To make it, I just bring to boil a mix of water, vinegar, salt, sugar, and spices (usually cloves and caraway), then pour it into a mason jar with the shredded cabbage, and put it in the fridge for a couple of days.
I've tried using sauerkraut, but it's a bit too pickled and mushy for burgers, and usually drips everywhere.
I agree, what you get in stores is an insult to the name. I used to make my own burgers from scratch each morning for breakfast, it wouldn’t take more than 20 minutes and in the days they came out just right.. mmm spectacular!
Melbourne, Australia, would give Twin Cities a run for their money for banh mis. There's a large Vietnamese community here from the war, South Vietnamese flags flying everywhere.
I can't get enough of the things. Some weekends I'll eat nothing else. When I went to Vietnam a couple of years back, I practically survived on banh mi and pho.
I think the best ones I had in Vietnam were on Cat Ba Island, in Ha Long Bay. They used used a sort rotisserie kebab to cook the pork, and added an egg.
I found it really interesting how every region had its own way of making them. Before I went to Vietnam, I had this idea that there was a "proper" banh mi, but the only thing they all had in common was the bread roll.
I take it that you are also a fan of Mister Truong's?
If you have not been, you're missing out on the best pork roll the city has to offer. I wasn't a fan of banh mi, and to be honest I don't really like Vietnamese cuisine in general, but a few minutes sitting in sweltering heat on shitty outdoor furniture on a table that rocks back and forth on a crack in the pavement by about 30 degrees and I finally understood why people might like it.
There’s a really crappy place in a really crappy shopping centre near Springvale but, Jesus wept, their fried chicken variation on the bahn mi is out of this world.
Can’t tell you where it is, of course. a) I have no idea unless I’m driving and b) the hipsters will catch on and then it’s ruined!
I'm sure the bahn mi in Minnesota is great but I'd highly recommend going to the actual Saigon (HCMC) for reference before making a heavy claim like that. :)
PS this is why people think of Americans as insular.
As someone that lives in the cities and dated a vietnamese immigrant, it is good. Where are you going to get your banh mi at? I'm always looking for more good vietnamese food. Except that fish sauce that stuff is still my limit.
They have _the_ best bread of any bahn mi I've ever had. I'm far from an authority, of course... But, my wife is Chinese-American and both of her parents grew up in Vietnam, later fleeing to the US with their families right after the war.
My mother-in-law still eats and cooks primarily Vietnamese, vacations to Vietnam almost every year, and their Westminster location is the _only_ place I've ever seen her get bahn mi. Not to mention it's a 24/7 spot and they're like $2.50 a piece. I stop by there just about every time I'm driving between LA and OC.
As a child that building, which used to be a taco bell, it always caught my eye on the drive to my grandparents place. Years passed and fortunately many of those original taco bell buildings were passed on to new owners.
That particular bakery actually produces bread for the che cali restaurant in the same parking lot as well as their own store front. Living near by I quickly learned their bakeries schedule and would make a point of visiting just around the time the bread had finished cooling in the rack behind the register. I always thought they should light up a sign à la krispy kreme, but figured most local folks had figured it out like myself. 3 for $5, take that subway.
Start with Saigon (aka iPho) in St Paul. There are old newspaper review clippings on the wall. In one, an interviewer tells the (original) owner that his are the best in St Paul, and he corrects and says they are the best in the world - that he cannot get the quality of meats and vegetables in Vietnam that he gets in Minnesota.
Saigon is my reference. But a lot of people like Quang's on Eat St in Minneapolis (I think it's meh, and Lu's down the street from them is better).
An interesting alternative - and an interesting restaurant! - is Ngon Bistro in St Paul, which is basically upscale foodie Vietnamese. They do a much more, well, serious banh mi than the more trad places, with better ingredients. Debatable whether it's an improvement, but it's worth trying, and Ngon Bistro in general is brilliant.
>what a food is supposed to taste like, and pursues recipes based on this imagination.
They're much more utilitarian about it but this is basically the Cooks Illustrated/ATK approach as well. My main complaint is that it can lead to really fussy recipes though I think they've toned that down a bit in recent years.
I find this complaint very surprising - in my experience CI generates simplified, sometimes oversimplified, recipes for most things. They are geared towards easily accessible ingredients and minimal techniques, after all.
I agree the techniques are fairly simple and they tend to keep ingredients straightforward. When I say they tend to be fussy, there often seems a fair bit of cooking things different ways, using a fair number of bowls etc. It's not a big deal and I actually tend to like them as a rather mainstream if not especially exciting source of recipes.
But, as I say, I think they've also focused a bit more on prep time of late.
Cooks Illustrated was my favorite magazine, it was always interesting even when the recipes were a bit fiddly. I appreciated their ad-free format as well. Unfortunately I had to cancel my subscription when they went to auto-renewal, it just smacked too much of dark patterns to me.
I have Outlaw Cook... It is in fact the only cookbook I own, but I have yet to make anything from it. Thorne's writing is fantastic. I think I'll make something from it this weekend
What I find most interesting about this is just what a difference there is between cooking at that time and today in terms of what is 'plain', 'spicy', 'savory', etc.
I had a conversation with my dad (currently in his late 60s) about what eating was like growing up and he said: "Well, we didn't have any spicy food." and I asked: "Like what? Mexican? Schezuwan? Thai?" and his answer was: "Any food with garlic".
Ha! Great story. And to think I was disappointed the other night because I couldn't find the exact type of hot pepper I was after and had to settle for habaneros. We are living in a golden age of food. Yet wars were fought over access to black pepper.
It's difficult to believe, but just 100 years ago a food as commonplace as spaghetti with tomato sauce was considered somewhat exotic; at the least predominately an ethnic Italian dish.
Even 50 years ago, chicken was considered an 'occasional' meat. Cornell university is famous for a basting sauce, as a result of an effort to encourage more domestic consumption of chicken.
I wonder if Pad Thai, bulgogi, or stretchy Turkish ice-cream will be considered everyday foods in another 50 years.
On one hand, global shipping has made this a golden age of food. On the other, we're living through a food apocalypse, where local ingredients, styles, and recipes are being obliterated by processed ingredients, factory food, and fast food.
In Minneapolis, there's a chef who calls himself the "Sioux Chef", who is dedicated to preserving pre-colonial Native American foods. A big part of this is the ingredients... no flour, no cooking oil, no refined sugar, no beef or pork, etc. The "frybread" that we think of as "Indian food" today is totally a product of conquest... when the only ingredients available were flour, cooking oil, and cheap ground beef.
I hate to even imagine what's happening to the Kentucky bbq tradition I grew up on.
> I wonder if Pad Thai, bulgogi, or stretchy Turkish ice-cream will be considered everyday foods in another 50 years.
I'll have to try stretchy Turkish ice-cream sometime (where do you find that?) but Pad Thai and bulgogi are already everyday foods you can find on every corner of every strip mall in the part of America where I live.
By the way, since ‘Stretchy Turkish Ice Cream’ is a handful, it is called ‘Dondurma’. It is a form of gelato, but stretchier, and with a different flavour set. The city of Maraş is famous for it.
Important to note that native speakers would refer to the stretchy ice cream as "dovme dondurma", which roughly translates to "beaten ice cream".
The distinction seems to be:
> Two qualities distinguish Turkish ice cream: hard texture and resistance to melting, brought about by inclusion of the thickening agents salep, a flour made from the root of the early purple orchid, and mastic, a resin that imparts chewiness.[citation needed]
> The Kahramanmaraş region is known for maraş dondurması, a variety which contains distinctly more salep than usual. Tough and sticky, it is sometimes eaten with a knife and fork.[citation needed]
I'm a native speaker, I think it depends on the region. But yeah, "dövme dondurma" is more specific. The part I'm from did not make the distinction, however.
The requisite starch for dondurma (Turkish ice cream) is banned from export, due to the rarity of the orchids that produce it (also slow growth and very low yields). I'd be surprised if anyone regularly makes dondurma in the US.
I tried that in Turkey and it was really meh. Probably I was was way too deep in a touristy area and got the worst quality possible, but there is something about the taste of the things that make it chewy that covers the actual flavour: the pink, brown and white ones tasted all kinda the same. I'll ask for suggestions to some local friend and try again.
Yeah, and I've been seeing bulgogi marinade in mainstream Bay Area supermarkets. I use it for everything. Which reminds me that I need to call my grandparents...
See the BBC's legendary spaghetti tree hoax from April Fool's Day, 1957. A lot of viewers really were taken in by the idea that spaghetti grew on trees.
> Even 50 years ago, chicken was considered an 'occasional' meat.
I remember going to my great-grandparents' house with KFC, because, to them (born circa 1900) fried chicken was food you ate on special occasions.
Which makes perfect sense: Frying anything is messy work (I know from personal experience aerosolized grease stings) and if chicken is expensive on top of that, fried chicken would be doubly uncommon for the average person, especially if they grew up poor, as my great-grandparents did.
Fried chicken is the perfect food to eat at a restaurant. Prep starts 24 hrs in advance with brining the chicken. Breading process is messy. Lots of oil required. Difficult to get the temperature and timing just right. None of these are issues for restaurants where they are making it constantly and have enough experience to dial in the cooking. Plus, since those restaurants are usually selling large volume, it's still cheap.
The best fried chicken in the Twin Cities, the prep starts on monday and it's only served on friday. Two-stage brining process, first in a very intense salt/sugar brine, and then in buttermilk. My daughter used to work the kitchen there and has the recipe, but it's like 40 ingredients and the breading is best made in buckets.
Sandcastle. It's the food stand at Lake Nokomis Park, which is run by Doug Flicker, who created the late great Piccolo (an internationally famous restaurant), and the Esker Grove restaurant at the Walker. Amazing just how good a food shack in a city park can get when you let a famous chef run it!
They are only open during the summer (April-ish to October-ish), and fried chicken is only served on fridays. And they only make 30 servings, so GET THERE if you want some, before it sells out. There will be a line.
If you want Doug Flicker fried chicken and don't want to wait, you can also get some at Bull's Horn, his new neighborhood tavern at 46th St and 34th Ave. It's a different recipe, but still very good.
Everyone else agrees that Revival has the best fried chicken. They're wrong. Revival's chicken is a bit underseasoned imho (but excellent). Victory 44 was right up there with those two, but closed recently. Sigh.
Yep. That's the stuff. We use it all the time on grilled chicken. Best made fresh (and it's quite easy) but there's a commercial brand called "Spidie's State Fair Sauce" or similar that gets very close for those who can't wait.
>> Even 50 years ago, chicken was considered an 'occasional' meat.
Hoover promised voters 'a chicken in every pot' almost 100 years ago. 50 years ago, yard bird was a very common meal for Americans of every income level.
> I wonder if Pad Thai, bulgogi, or stretchy Turkish ice-cream will be considered everyday foods in another 50 years.
I guess it would depend on the individual definition of "everyday." Personally, I eat more pad thai than I do cheeseburgers. I don't eat much Korean BBQ anymore but my wife and I do stop by a Korean place pretty often to have Galbi-tang and sometimes Dolsot Bibimbap. I haven't had In-N-Out in probably 7 or 8 weeks, though, which would make it more of a rarity in my own life than: Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and Thai food.
Yeah, everyday food is a matter of where you live. I make a point of going out for banh mi every two weeks or so. I eat a remarkable amount of Somali food, thanks to a local restaurant I like (most Somali restaurants aren't that great, but this guy Gets It). If we had more western African food rather than just east African, I'd eat a LOT more of it... I love Nigerian and Ghana kinds of cooking.
It's interesting to see the dynamic of new ethnic food. Immigrants come and discover that their best hope of owning their own business is a restaurant where they work themselves to death to offer cheap interesting food. I'd love to see a history of ethnic food in America: Jewish, Chinese, Italian, Vietnamese, Mexican. There's a Somali restaurant near where I work, next door to a mosque, but the only thing I've been brave enough to try there is the Gyros which is quite generic. It's good food at a great value if you don't mind waiting forever while they prepare it.
Minneapolis is a sanctuary city and has a huge Somali population, so there are a lot of Somali restaurants. But Somalis haven't really "cracked the code" on how to run an American-style restaurant in terms of service, for the most part. And really, I don't think Somali food is a "great cuisine" food the way Ethiopian is (man, Ethiopians and Somalis are nothing alike!), or Vietnamese, or Thai, or Mexican, or Indian. It's more like, say, Polish food... something workmanlike that can be made excellent with effort, but lacks the ease of the great cuisines.
On the positive side, a couple of Somali places and a Kenyan place in town have cracked the code, and are offering slick, friendly Chipotle-style counter service experiences with really delicious food.
I'm not a native English speaker, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think English needs a new word related to pepper spiciness, for me sometimes is difficult to translate it. In Spanish we have "picoso" to describe pepper's hot feeling.
Since spicy in English could describe a long variety of spices, flavors and sensations. Maybe 50 years ago it wasn't necessary since they were foreign flavors, but now that your food and taste has evolved and globalized it could be necessary.
Yes, very much so. Eating a curry and saying it's "hot" can equally mean it's very spicy ( phall etc ) or it is physically too hot to eat yet. We tend to say "it's hot-hot" for physically too hot or something like "it'll blow your face off" or "this curry is really hot".
It's a minefield of ambiguity which a new word could easily solve. It could well be, as you say, it's only recently that hot spices have become mainstream.
I grew up in the 1960s & 70s in northern England and as a kid my parents may put some very old pre-ground pepper on the table occasionally. Garlic didn't exist to us. I burst out and enjoy hot, bitter, gnarly flavours.
For "spiced" we also have the word "seasoned." It has a handful of meanings, but if you're using it to describe a flavor it should be clear that's the meaning you're using.
I've also heard foods described as having "bite" to indicate that they have a strong, spicy flavor, but not necessarily a "hot" one.
As a native English speaker, we have the same problem. Piquant is used to describe the heat although most people aren't familiar with it. "Capsaicin feeling" is often referred to as well.
Spicy for them was shake and baked bbq chicken. Otherwise, the main flavorings in use were salt, butter, yellow onion and microscopic quantities of pepper.
Health cookbooks are the worst for this. They'll call for 2 lbs of beans, 2 onions, a cubic foot of leafy greens, half a dozen carrots, and 1/8 of a tsp of salt. They seem to be ashamed of flavor like it's a naughty sin that they have to hide from the decent folk.
People think salt is bad for you... They don't understand the role of salt in cooking. Let them try eating unsalted bread. It will be an educational experience.
Yes, they're not afraid of "flavor" in general (at least the ones I've encountered call for plenty of chiles, herbs, etc.) but the perceived harms of salt in particular.
Boston/New England folk cuisine was (and is) still very bland. Pot roast, baked beans, mashed potatoes, brown bread, apples, etc. Very similar to the "English cooking" that used to be derided all over.
Even today, I have a friend from Boston who treats ketchup as a spicy condiment, almost like midwestern friends treat Tabasco.
Other parts of the US had a spicier food culture -- the Cajuns, the Southwest, African-Americans, etc. But the wealthy parts of America liked very bland, well-processed food.
I'm originally from the Southwest but I went to college in the Northeast. One of my roommates was from Maine and he introduced me to the concept of a "boiled dinner" which he raved about and I was quite skeptical of.
We have a strong tradition of boiling meat and vegetables in Northern Italy. You get a delicious stock where you can cook pasta into (either standard, or filled, such as tortellini) and also very delicate, yet tasty, boiled beef and chicken. These often come with additiomal mashed potatoes and sauces based on parsley, bell peppers or mustard, sometimes mayonnaise.
In Cremona they make something called "mostarda", which is candied fruit spiced with a shitload of mustard. It's absolutely weird and burns like hell, but boy how delicious it is.
That is rather interesting to hear. I will need to have the same conversation with my elders sometime. Coming from the south garlic is in the majority of the dishes I first learned to cook.
This fresh onion juice concept is thought provoking as well. Recently tried making latke and upon shredding my onions was left with onion juice but it did not occur to me that this liquid could be put to use.
An Armenian friend of mine marinades chicken in onion juice (obtained by crushing halved onions with his bare hands), salt, and black pepper, before grilling. Delicious
My dad hates spicy foods (any peppers, garlic, etc). Ok, people can like what they like. But then I noticed he eats spicy radishes like they're nothing...
Interesting that he'd say garlic because my dad (in his 70s now) lives in his hometown in Croatia. Where most people grow crops, it's a rural community.
And near the center most crops are just for personal consumption. Yet no one grows garlic. I was shocked by this.
He said he'd be the first to grow garlic in the whole village. He has of course lived many years in Sweden where I was born and raised before he moved back for his twilight years.
In Sweden garlic has been very common for my entire life, since at least 1985.
I can only speculate but it's likely that I had access to garlic due to global imports.
And it's also likely his fellow villagers, many in their 50s and older, aren't used to garlic because they didn't grow up with it.
Well, savory is one of the five basic tastes, so I don't think that would change a lot - it's just fat. However spicy can be any type of spice, so it would likely differ even between individual families within the same block today.
Wikipedia notwithstanding, they're not really synonyms. Savory is a broader term that is essentially intended to contrast with sweet. If I make an unsweetened herb bread with sage and thyme or whatever, it would be correct to call that a savory bread even though it's definitely not umami (i.e. meaty/brothy).
Fair enough. It's almost certainly more correct to list umami as one of the basic tastes, rather than savory. (I was more commenting on Wikipedia suggesting they're the same thing when they're really not.)
> It's almost certainly more correct to list umami as one of the basic tastes, rather than savory.
I really don't think so: 'savory' is an actual English word while 'umami' is a Japanese one. Writing 'umami' like writing 'arugula' instead of 'rocket' or 'cilantro' instead of 'coriander.'
And 'umami' isn't really any more accurate than 'savory': it's a 100-year-old neologism from the Japanese word for 'delicious.' Given a choice between two words which aren't necessarily perfect fits for the concept, why not stick with the native one?
Exactly. Essentially English co-opted umami as a stand-in for glutamate-y which, we can probably agree is an aesthetic improvement. It's at least arguably a subset of savory but as I commented earlier there are clearly meanings of savory in cooking/baking that have no relationship to umami as the term is used in English.
in those days lots of kitchen shelves were not a necessity: a grocery order was a phone call away, and the milkman and the Cushman’s Bakery man came to the back door.
For all our enthralled praising of ordering online, remember it's been available in some form for a long time. Massive Sears catalogs (complete houses included), daily milk deliveries, grocery deliveries, etc ... today we just have more to choose from, and can use magic glass slates to do it.
It's a great narrative and you should read it, but if you don't want to the TLDR is that it's just what it sounds like, and was generally used wherever you'd use minced garlic today.
My aunt from Pakistan shook her head when she saw jars of minced garlic and minced onion in our pantry. She said making those ingredients from scratch dramatically improves the flavor of Indian food.
Obviously you don't have to use bowls, an old pickle/sauce jar works too. You don't really have to wash it either, just put a drop of soap in it, bit of water, shake for 2 seconds, and rinse.
Not only is garlic not always cooked, but even when cooking, it makes a difference if you slice it vs mincing it. The more you damage it before cooking, the sharper the flavor.
Trader Joes has frozen garlic cubes that are actually pretty good. I don't personally use them, but my wife does and I can't tell the difference.
I do use TJ's frozen basil cubes, which are terrific. Way better than dried, though obviously not as good as fresh. Unlike some competitors, TJ's cubes do not have added salt.
Frozen cubes? Never heard of them, but I can imagine how freshly frozen might be useful. Thanks for the good ideas! I’m going to make some myself and see how long they stay fresh... months I’d guess.
We (well my wife) grow basil in our garden. She puts gallons of pesto in the freezer all summer. Without the cheese - its so much better to grate fresh once you thaw out the basil and oil!
Oregano, and rosemary spring to mind as ones where dried is better - and in the case of rosemary mixing can create flavor dynamics that don't exist with one or the other.
Basil is an interesting one in that the flavor changes as it dries - they contribute different flavors depending on the state of the herb and how your using them.
Volatiles and oxidation aren't always a bad thing.
Sure. I expect water soluble flavors aren’t moving anywhere until the leaf is dry. And maybe the volatiles are the bad part of the flavor, not the good part.
and in the case of rosemary mixing can create flavor dynamics that don't exist with one or the other.
I don’t know why this amused me. I’m imagining selling small batch single malt rosemary to hipsters. Wanna go into business?
This reminded me, I keep wondering why the tamarind fruit has been left out of Western cuisine. You find trace amounts in Worcestershire sauce and the occasional Indian dish and you can get tamarind juice/candy at some Mexican places if you know what to look for, but by and large it's unheard of and unobtainable. Pity, too, it's got such a nice texture and flavor when prepared correctly.
I know tamarind trees aren't native to the Western hemisphere, but that hasn't ever stopped us before.
What part of the country are you from? I'm guessing not a big city based on the term "Oriental". No offense taken :) It can be found in many of the Asian markets in Los Angeles.
Most likely the UK. Here Asian means Indian subcontinent, and Oriental is East Asian, and supermarket will typically have Oriental in its name somewhere.
Onion juice gives chills through my body. When i was a kid and a bit ill, my mother made me onion juice as medicine. The worst thing i ever drank or ate. Me and my siblings usually tried to hide our cold just because of onion juice. Judt boiled onions and you were supposed to drink it because my mom read it in some magazine where it said it is good for curing a cold.
You poor one. My mother also gave me "onion juice" when I got a cold, but there was one big difference: The onions were cooked with tons of rocked candy. I have to admit that it was my favorite medicine.
Maybe you should try that recipe to cure your onion juice trauma ;)
I used to get a lot of sinus infections, to remedy this, I drank for an extended period of my life cooled "onion juice" (onion + water + honey, cooked for ~1h). My whole family was disgusted by it, but I somehow enjoyed it.
There is the "çi börek" from Eskisehir in Turkey, a fried pastry with minced meat inside, where they use actual onion juice (juicing the onion like you would juice an apple, basically) to season (and also partially cook) the meat.
It doesn't in current, cosmopolitan world, but for centuries different cultures had original dishes not seen elsewhere. We still call such dishes that originated during these times "national". What's wrong with that? It has nothing to do with political ideologies. In English "national" might sound a bit strange and I see "traditional" used more often, but in many other languages it's literary called "national dish".
Other uses of Onion Juice apart from cooking;
1. Onion Juice + Honey = Instant cough relief
2. Applying Onion juice on bald head helps regrowing hair. It is every effective.
Another great use is for ear infections. During summer months after a lake session or two, if one of our kids gets a sore ear we make a compress of onion bits (usually quite juiced up) and place it over the affected ear. Quite often - within minutes many times - this just solves the ear-ache and the kids go back to the lake.
I'm surprised that pickled onions didn't get a mention.
A standard pickled recipe looks a lot like the onion juice ingredients: onions, vinegar, salt - but commonly includes some sugar (I suspect this is historically a recent addition, given the age of this preserving method and the scarcity of sugar more than a century ago).
Pickled onions (and eggs, herrings, etc) are commonly seen in British pubs - scooped out and sold by the unit as a salty comestible in the age old tradition of making your customers thirstier.
I sometimes use onion juice in stews, soups, hot sauces, barbecue sauces, and other stirred items. It's a good addition to the pan for certain sautés as well. I get mine by putting an onion through my electric fruit and vegetable juicer.
A little does go a long way. Be careful about leftovers, as it can taste stronger the second day when chilled in the refrigerator overnight in a mixed broth.
When it's fresh the flavor is pretty close but of course the texture is different. I'd imagine pre-boiled with salt and vinegar it'd be stable longer. It tastes fresher and more potent to me than onion powder or dried minced onion which is more what I'd replace with it.
A sautéed onion is going to be more mellow than a raw one. The juice will be more intense per weight and volume than the minced or diced raw root. It's really a matter of a few drops for a pot of soup. In my chili I often use both yellow and white fresh onions with the meat, plus onion powder as part of my homemade chili powder, plus a few drops of onion juice in the sauce to simmer down before combining the meat and sauce.
If you're really curious, there's no description I can give that would match trying it. Just don't go crazy and add the juice of a couple whole onions to a vegetable broth. Drops really will do the trick.
If this is literally the juice from squeezed onions, then I use it. It acts as a great meat tenderiser and also adds a nice flavour - works great with lamb! I believe this is fairly common in Iran.
I had a similar “wtf” sensation when I encountered onion juice in a Michael Solomonov (Zahav, Philadelphia) recipe I recently made (http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/middle-eastern-lamb-skewe...). It called for a whole pureed onion in the marinade, and the very idea stunned and inspired me. The lamb was great; the funk cooked out but the harmony stayed. It got me thinking the same thing this post does: where else is there onion juice, figuratively speaking? Worthy, but driven out by a manipulation of culture?
I'm not a food scientist, but one could say something like:
Intact alliums have no pungency, since the volatile products are only released following the interaction of the enzyme, alliinase, with the S-alk(en)ylcysteine sulfoxide (alliin, I) which occurs when tissue is damaged or disrupted (Figure 1). The initial products of this enzymic hydrolysis are ammonia, pyruvate, and an alk(en)ylthiosulphinate (allicin, II). The latter, which possesses odor characteristics typical of the freshly cut tissue, can undergo further nonenzymic reactions to yield a variety of compounds, including thiosulfinate [III] and di- and trisulfides [IV]. These compounds have slightly differing flavors and odors, and may impart a cooked note to steam-distilled onion or leek oils.
Bingo, was about to post that but read the comments instead.
I got many herbs and spices in my kitchen, including little bottles of powdered, dried garlic & onion. I prefer fresh, but when I'm lazy I use that instead. There's also Tabasco for pungent/acidic taste (which also contains vinegar, like this onion juice product) whereas chili sauce here [according to my anecdata] is often 90+% sugar.
Now, the powdered, dried garlic is strong in flavour, but dried onion less so. You still miss out on the fried, caramelised taste of (stir) fried onions though or the sharper taste of fresh onion (especially the red ones). I do love either of these, but in e.g. a soup, if you don't require the bite, you're good to go with powder. Unless when you're making a French onion soup. Speaking of soup one could also check their bouillon powder ingredients. Some are just mostly salt (or, less salt + MSG), but some contain a complex mix of a variety of herbs and vegetables.
Onion itself (as well as garlic) is found and used in so many dishes in my country it is too much to mention. From herring to frikandel/frites special, gehaktbal, and even the vegetarian clone of the gehaktbal, "gehacktbal", contains it.
Onion (and its relatives) and horseradish (and its relatives) store the components of a sulfur-based binary chemical weapon to deter being eaten by animals. When the tissue is ruptured, the chemical deterrent is formed and released. However, the compound breaks down with time, oxygen, heat, etc.
Does tang yield the same flavor as fresh squeezed orange juice? On the one hand yeah they both taste like their source, on the other there is a quality difference that is noticeable.
Wondering why this has come up - is it due to the recent fad among MRAs to drink onion juice to supposedly boost their testosterone and make them more manly?
This reminds me of the old Paul Lukas magazine Beer Frame - The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption. Some of his writing made it to the web and on Core77.com.
Did you mean clam juice? Micheladas validate Clamato, though I'm not sure clam juice is actually necessary in Clamato since Clamato tastes more like a different take on V8 than something with clam in it.
I remember my mum giving me onion juice to drink as a remedy for sore throat when I was a kid...I think the sheer thought of having to have the treatment repeated cured my throat :)
One nice thing about his books is he has these sort of dreamlike fantasies about what a food is supposed to taste like, and pursues recipes based on this imagination. That means that, unlike a lot of cookbooks, just about every John Thorne recipe is amazing (his pecan pie is the best I've ever tried, because he directly tackled the problem of cloying sweetness and gummy texture).
Highly recommended if you care about food.