Cooking tips and wonderful flavour combinations

[Mr. Tea]

This isn't really the right thread for this, but I can't be arsed to start a 'terrible flavour combinations' thread, so...

I finally had a trip to Amsterdam last week. Lovely place, to be sure. But my friend and I stopped for something to eat in a cafe selling these savoury pancake things. I had something fairly conservative like cheese, salami and mushrooms. Under the heading 'fantasy pancakes' were topping combinations such as:

cheese - chicken - tomato - sweet pepper - onions - mushrooms - curry sauce - skunk

OK, so it didn't really include skunk, but the title of 'fantasy pancakes' would have been a bit more warranted if it had.

The rest of the topping list is real, however. Which led me to a conclusion: The Dutch are worse at food than we are. This was borne out later that day, when I realized with a jolt that this country has such an impoverished national cuisine that they have such a thing as an English restaurant.

 

[Slothrop]

I've got a friend who spent a couple of years there, and he still breaks out in a cold sweat if you mention Albert Heijn to him...

So what WOULD be a fantasy pancake topping?

 

[baboon2004]

I heard terrible things about Dutch food this week, although I've never been myself. It's a bit odd, with Belgium just next door producing largely fantastic food.

 

[Mr. Tea]

So what WOULD be a fantasy pancake topping?

Unicorn carpaccio and Elvish waybread?

 

[Ransbeeck]

I heard terrible things about Dutch food this week, although I've never been myself. It's a bit odd, with Belgium just next door producing largely fantastic food.

Belgian food and the local attitude towards it is very much like the French. From personal experience, I feel food and dining doesn't hold the same significance in the Netherlands (especially the northern parts) as is does in Belgium and France.

They say it's the difference between sober work-oriented Dutch Calvinists and hedonist, 'Burgundian' Belgians. God might be dead and we all work flexible 9-to-5s, but you can still see it in the culture around food.

The big cities in the Netherlands have a lot of ethnic restaurants from their former colonies that serve great food that's hard to find elsewhere. That might be a tip.

 

[Mr. Tea]

The big cities in the Netherlands have a lot of ethnic restaurants from their former colonies that serve great food that's hard to find elsewhere. That might be a tip.

Yeah, that's basically the way to go. Some good Indonesian places, found a decent Chinese here too. There seems to be a whole heap of Argentinian restaurants in Amsterdam too, for some reason.

 

[mistersloane]

This is why I'm happy to shell out to keep dissensus running, little morsels like this. Achiote! Andale!

Andale indeed! Can't recommend it enough.

The Doc and me grew our own epazote this year - it's the herb Mexicans use in beans and it stops you farting (true) - and it was really nice, fresh. And worked better than the dried stuff.
Then overnight the plant changed, like really changed, and started to look suspiciously like marijuana, and I got a bit freaked out, and then it died. We just stood and stared at it and went "Well THAT was weird".

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

This was borne out later that day, when I realized with a jolt that this country has such an impoverished national cuisine that they have such a thing as an English restaurant.

One of the best meals I had last year was in this place in Amersfoort.
http://www.depastinaeck.nl/

Nice town as well, less 'on top' than Amsterdam.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Favourite place so far in Eindhoven is a restaurant that has a 25-euro lobster menu. You get four California rolls with lobster in them for a starter, then a plate of really lush lobster bisque (my girlfriend found it *too* lobstery, I thought it was fit) then half a good-sized lobster for the main, boiled or grilled to your choice. If you have it grilled the exposed flesh is coated in this amazing cheese/pesto concoction, all nicely golden from the grill. You also get noodles and a salad that's actually worth saving room for, all full of sundried tomatoes and blueberries and crazy shit like that. They do a decent prosecco at a decent price, too. Not bad for 25 euro.

 

[baboon2004]

What kind of typical dishes do they serve at Indonesian restaurants? Don't think I've ever been to one, as far as I can recall.

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

What kind of typical dishes do they serve at Indonesian restaurants? Don't think I've ever been to one, as far as I can recall.

Beef Rendang - delicious beefy stew with around 17 different herbs and spices thrown in, plus coconut milk
Nasi Goreng - fried rice with everything in it
Mi Goreng - fried noodles with everything in it
Sambal - sweetish chilli sauce used liberally with vegetables, fish, meat
Satays

Babi guling - slow roasted suckling pig
Ayam - lighter curried chicken, lamb, beef
All good, a hybrid of East Asian and South Asian cuisine, unsurprisingly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indonesian_dishes

 

[Mr. Tea]

What kind of typical dishes do they serve at Indonesian restaurants? Don't think I've ever been to one, as far as I can recall.

Sounds like HMG knows more than me, but a lot of it's quite sweet, there's lots of peanuts (ooh, you don't eat the peanut, do you?), there are spices but it's not generally super-hot.

We had a meal in quite nice little restaurant-caff kind of place, it was a selection of curries and grilled meats and stuff all on one plate, all topped off with...a fried egg! I can just imagine early Dutch settlers arriving in Java or wherever, being bowled over by all this amazing local cuisine with its Indian, Chinese, Arabic etc. influences, and thinking "There's only one way this could possibly be improved - FRIED EGG, motherfucker!".

 

[Slothrop]

Sweet - sounds like bibimbap on a big scale.

Wasn't beef rendang to 2010 as thai green curry was to the late nineties, ie something that you cook when you fancy a curry but want to emphasize that you're a bit ahead of the Asian food game. Particularly if you tell people that you're getting "really into Indonesian food" while you're telling them about it.

 

[baboon2004]

Ah, rendang and satay I do know, and had some sambal oelek (?) in the cupboard for ages, but the others are new to me. Yeah, fear of peanuts is probably the reason I haven't investigated Indonesian food much.

Still on the lookout for some kecap manis (is that Indonesian?), cos the stuff I bought at the Chinese supermarket has turned out to be something else entirely.

 

[Mr. Tea]

In the same restaurant I asked the waitress for some ketjap - my girlfriend called me a heathen because she thought I meant the red stuff from Heinz. And yes, I laughed in her face, wouldn't you?

 

[luka]

indonesian not hugely sweet? you might be thinking of malayasian? simliar, but sweeter!

 

[blacktulip]

We went to Hong Kong's three-Michelin-star Italian, Otto e Mezzo, last week or so. Amazing.

Went to a bib gourmand Indian tonight (Bombay Dreams) and the head chef of said Italian was sat at the table opposite, bottle of wine chilling by his side and the table covered in kebabs etc. Good sign.

Two great meals. All the rest, Tim Ho Wan, Lung King Heen, Peking duck in Macau, would take a week to write up - it took a fortnight to get into the swing of HK, not to mention work up a decent appetite in the heat and humidity.

 

[mistersloane]

^^^ write them up please ))

Am rockin with this guy at the moment :

http://www.youtube.com/user/sanjeevkapoorkhazana/videos?view=0

Keema mater from there last night kicked it.

 

[baboon2004]

vindaloo:

whizz up shallots, 10 or so cloves of garlic, several dried Kashmiri chillies that have been soaked to resuscitate them, ginger, cumin seeds and a few liberal splashes of vinegar (I used white wine, but apparently malt works well).

Fry the onion mix in oil for 5-10 mins, and then add pork shoulder that has already been quickly fried. Stew for a while and then add vinegar to taste...lovely.

 

[Slothrop]

Foods You Would Have Never Foreseen Yourself Becoming A Crazed Evangelist For #1 - smoked tofu.

Smoked tofu update:
cut into slices
dip each slice in a big pile of cornflour (the point here is that the cornflour sticks to the tofu and forms a batter as the water in it seeps out)
shallow fry slices in a flat frying pan to get crunchy battered tofu slices
cool (ie until actually cold) and dry slices on kitchen roll then put them in the middle of a plate
slice an avocado and arrange slices around the edge of the plate
squirt liberally with sriracha
serve as one dish in a chinese style spread.

The thinking here was that i) avocado and bacon is a classic flavor combination, ii) battered smoked tofu is crunchy, fatty and smoky like crispy bacon iii) avocado and tofu is a thing according to Fuschia Dunlop and iv) sriracha makes everything more awesome. And it worked!

Baboon - what brand was your ersatz ketjap manis? I've got conimex. No idea how authentic that is but it went well with steamed broccoli and toasted sesame seeds.

Also, has anyone managed to track down the "korean chilli flakes" that FD alleges are a) a real thing and b) essential to making good sichuan chilli oil? I tried about six oriental stores today including one that was specifically korean and they all basically just had East End and Rajah brands...