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The Market Porter

16 May

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My recent “Viking Five” was quite a difficult one to narrow down, and to be honest there are a few other styles that are probably just as good with food as the ones I chose. Hefeweizens come to mind, as do witbiers, tripels, oatmeal stouts, altbiers, and pilsners. But if I had to choose just one candidate for honorable mention, it would probably have to be porter.

The humble porter is often overshadowed by its mutant commie cousin, Baltic porter, and by its stocky younger brother, stout, a style derivative of porter in form as well as name: stouts started off as “stout porters” back in the day. Don’t get me wrong, I love stouts, and they’re good with food, too – especially desserts and red meat – but porters, which are just a shade lighter in color and flavor, cover more ground than stouts. Here’s a Venn diagram to illustrate, because hey, I can’t remember the last time I made a Venn diagram, so why the hell not?

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I don’t drink a lot of porters, partly because I’m a sucker for the up-front bitter chocolate and coffee flavors of many stouts, but also because there is something of a dearth of porters on the market. In America, they are increasingly common, but even though London is the birthplace of the style, they are notably hard to find here.

So it didn’t really dawn on me that porters are awesome with food until I chanced upon a porter at – where else? – the Market Porter in Borough Market. The Market Porter is a haven for ale aficionados, with at least a baker’s dozen of casked beers to choose from at any given time. Most of these beers come from British microbreweries and encompass a range of obscure styles, like dark milds, real lagers, oyster stouts, and fruit beers. The clientele, mostly suits taking long lunches, culinary tourists, and CAMRA members, are jovial and unpretentious, as are the beer-savvy barkeeps. The inside is austere and plastered with ale paraphrenalia, while the façade, though cluttered with smokers, is impressively decked out with pretty flowers and ivies hanging from the second floor.

It’s a great pub in and of itself, but its location in Borough Market is what really makes it a personal favorite. You can grab a pint in a plastic nonic, then hungrily wander off into the stalls to try your beer with all manner of fantastic fare on offer in the market proper: Thai green seafood curry, Middle Eastern confections, British venison burgers, Toulousean cassoulet, Swiss cheeses, Spanish charcuterie, and the list goes on.

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This is exactly what I did with my pint of Wickwar’s toffee-sweet, moderately hopped, satiny smooth Station Porter. It was brilliant by itself, and seemed to meld effortlessly with just about everything I ate with it. Its buttery character and roasted sweetness found a happy home in the cozy cheese and potatoes of Raclette. Its caramel notes and lightly spicy hops linked up nearly perfectly with the peppery pork fat of a chorizo and arugula sandwich. It brought forth hidden mocha and dark fruit notes for an encounter with a chocolate-covered raisin and shortbread bar. The only thing it didn’t work with was a Cornish oyster on the half shell, but overall I was extremely pleased to have such a versatile brew in my hand as I perused the market. The porter, and the Market Porter, are indeed very lovely companions to food.

The Market Porter
9 Stoney Street
Borough Market
London
SE1 9AA
020 7407 2495

Monday to Friday: 06:00-08:30 and 11:00-23:00
Saturday: 12:00-23:00
Sunday: 12:00-22:30

JT’s J-Treats and I am a viking. Collabo!

25 Apr

My oldest friend in the whole wide world (we’ve been friends since we were seven or eight) does a series of awesome video reviews of new and/or limited-edition Japanese junk food called “JT’s J-Treats.” You can watch them on YouTube here. Commonly featured on JT’s J-Treats are temptingly strange flavors of Doritos (yuzu, wasabi mayo, etc.), Pepsi (yogurt, cucumber, etc.), and Pringles (Napolitan pasta, honey-roast chicken, “Night Club” cheddar cheese, extreme mushroom, etc.). Another star player on JT’s snack stage is KitKats, Japan’s favorite edible tabula rasa, taking on a wowingly wide range of flavors. Just a sample of some that I sampled when I lived there: strawberry and thyme, Japanese chestnut, cantaloupe, kiwi, two kinds of azuki bean, kinako-kuromitsu, blueberry fromage, mango, matcha milk, salted white chocolate, white peach, and cherry blossom. I have also seen (but not tried) red wine, creamy apple, “Exotic Kyushu,” “Exotic Tokyo,” and maple.

JT’s J-Treats chronicles the ongoing flood of weird KitKats in the Japanese market with scholarly dedication and professionalism. The videos are always fun to watch, and so I was very geeked when an opportunity arose for me to contribute to JT’s increasingly encyclopedic database of Japanese KitKats.

When Laura’s parents went to Japan last month, I asked them to bring me two things: instant Ippudō and unusual KitKats. I was overcome with joy when they returned with four bowls of Ippudō and two obscure KitKat flavors from Hokkaido, the Wisconsin of Japan: grilled corn 焼きもろこし and potato じゃがいも. I asked JT if I could review them for an installment of J-Treats, and he graciously agreed. So here it is: the first ever (and hopefully not last?) collaboration between I am a viking. and JT’s J’-Treats. Enjoy!

Soul Food for Thought

8 Apr Miss Maude's

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On my recent, brief trip to New York to visit family and friends, I had a checklist of specific foods I wanted to eat there; I wanted nothing but good food experiences – nothing mediocre, nothing mundane. To these ends, the trip was beyond satisfactory. Fork-tender Greek-style grilled octopus, colorful piles of Ethiopian curries on spongy injera, a lowbrow burger, a highbrow burger, and butter beans with bacon and crème fraîche all made their way into my gullet, washed down with a variety of uniquely American indulgences: high-gravity craft beer, bottomless cups of coffee, and the notorious Twinkie milkshake, which was probably conceived either by some mad genius chef, or somebody’s six-year-old child.

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Yes, it was a five-day feeding frenzy on fantastic food – a very successful trip in my book. And though it’s hard to choose highlights from such a delicious holiday, my two favorite meals were probably a sampler plate from Miss Maude’s Spoonbread Too and good ol’ Akamaru tonkotsu ramen from Ippudō.

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Miss Maude’s sampler plate included fried chicken, fried shrimp, barbecue short ribs and baby back ribs, candied yams, black eyed peas, and collard greens, a burly plate of food that was so good and perfect it could be in a museum – an exemplary soul food meal, Harlem, circa 2009. The ribs fell off the bone as if they couldn’t wait to be eaten, and the shrimp had a brilliant, fresh flavor that burst through the solid crunch and spice of its breading. I was especially impressed with the humble greens, wilted yet firm and unexpectedly tinged with a hint of smoke, like they had been cooked over a fire.

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And then the Akamaru – well, we all know how I feel about Ippudō. Or do we? Ippudō is legendary. It was among the first bowls of really exceptional ramen I had in Tokyo, and it remained a favorite – somewhere in my top three, I’d reckon – over the course of the two years I lived in Japan, even after countless bowls of worthy competitors. The creativity displayed in Ippudō’s kiwami shin’aji and the ramen en flambé at its sister restaurant, Gogyō, cemented Ippudō’s status in my mind as one of the greatest ramen shops in existence. It seems silly, in retrospect, that I even considered not going there while I was in New York – the only city outside Japan lucky enough to boast an Ippudō.

Both of these meals (and yes, a bowl of ramen is definitely a meal – welcome to the site!) are sold as soul food. Miss Maude’s is soul food in the typical American sense of the word (and pardon my glib definition here): simple yet hard-to-get-right cuisine with loads of fat, protein, and carbohydrates originating in Southern Black households. The literature on Miss Maude’s and other restaurants serving this kind of traditional soul food often play up its homemade history; menus and reviews alike deploy comfort-food clichés such as “like Mom used to make,” “home-cooked taste,” and “just how you remember it” so repeatedly that crackers like me almost think that we actually did eat really awesome soul food growing up. Don’t we wish.

With this homey image in mind, the claim on Ippudō’s website that “Ramen is Japan’s Soul Food” struck me as a misappropriation of the term. Ramen, while hearty, frequently full of lard, and often relatively simple, it takes too much time and effort to cook at home (except, obviously, for the instant version); this, I thought, disqualified it as soul food. A Japanese visitor to Ippudō New York who could truthfully claim that his bowl of Akamaru was “just like Mom used to make” would have been raised by a very outstanding mother indeed.

Then I thought: what if the idea of “homemade” is allowed to extend outside the actual, physical home? While ramen isn’t really something that is cooked in the home in Japan, it is cooked at home in the sense that every town in Japan has a ramen shop, and, importantly, every region produces a different version of the dish that becomes a part of local culture and identity. Also, ramen is accessible – it’s cheap, fast, filling, and warming, and it provides a wonderful mélange of textures and flavors that just seems to make people a bit happier; in other words, it’s comfort food. So while ramen probably won’t elicit memories of the smell of pork broth wafting out of their kitchen when they come home from school, it’s likely to evoke a more generalized but no less affectionate nostalgia for their furusato, their old home – which may be their town, their prefecture, or (if they’re in New York), their country. And, for what it’s worth, Ippudō NY was just how I remembered it.

Cynical New York Postcard Series

30 Mar

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Myanmar Stream of Consciousness: Week 3 ミャンマーの旅の意識の流れ・第三周

26 Jan

Oh and now you’ve had your fun
Under an air-conditioned sun
It’s burned into your eyes,
Left you plain and left behind
I see them rise and fall
Into the jaws of a pestilent love

Beck, “Tropicalia”

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This trip had a way of oscillating between utterly, desperately, I-want-to-go-home awful and breathtakingly, deliriously, I-never-want-to-leave wonderful; for every boring-ass Buddha there is a mercilessly flavorful curry; for every mountain of monkey poo there is a ride in a beautiful balloon. On rare occasions, these lows and highs happened simultaneously.

We touched down in Heho around four in the afternoon. It was a joy to get out of Kyaing Tong, especially since I was in the early stages of what would prove to be an ugly bout of Montezuma’s revenge (Thibaw‘s revenge?). I was feeling alright at the moment – the view  of the surrounding area was lovely, and when we got to the car, a pack of strange men hustled towards us, and began massaging us. It was unsolicited, and weird, but damn did it feel good. At least, it did at the time – but soon I would come to feel nothing but remorse and anger for paying them 7000 kyats.

The drive to Pindaya was beautiful, in an unexpected way – the landscape would not have looked at all out of place in southwestern England, or central Wisconsin. Rolling hills, a quilt of crops – yellow and ochre, green and red. Cotton candy clouds. I wish I had asked the driver to pull over, like the van full of Japanese tourists ahead of us had done, so that I could take photos.

But I just wanted to get to the hotel as fast as possible. My tract was buckling and convulsing as we drove on; a war was being waged as savage microbes fought to colonize my insides. The typically bumpy Burmese road (not something one gets used to quickly, as it turns out) didn’t help the situation, and neither did that massage. That massage – I don’t know what those people did to me, those horrible little con men, but my muscles have never felt worse. It started as an ache, a patch of discomfort somewhere between my shoulders, and then it expanded into an encompassing, disquieting, pulsing pain throughout my upper back that caused me to sweat, glare at our guide, and curse this rotten trip, curse this vulnerable body, curse this insufferable country.

It was dark when we got to the hotel. I took six Pepto Bismols and three paracetamols, ate a plate of plain white rice, drank a glass of rice whiskey and went to bed. Tomorrow, I decided, would be much better.

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At least until the night I spent vomiting and defecating into a toilet that wouldn’t flush in a millipede-infested treehouse in the middle of a jungle in southern Thailand, that drive to Pindaya was the nadir of my trip. I was in pain from that regrettable massage for a while longer, but otherwise the rest of the week was just lovely:

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A cave of eight thousand Buddhas, a stunning demonstration of traditional paper and parasol making, and a trek through the mountains near Kalaw on a clear day.

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Next stop, Inle Lake: calm, glassy water filling a wide-open valley, surrounded on all sides by mountains, many capped with the distinctive brown patchwork and green terraces of hill tribe agriculture. But down here, the people live on the water – literally. Houses, shops, restaurants, markets, and resorts built on stilts hover just above the water. Transportation is by boat. Schoolkids row their way home at the end of the day, as fishermen pull in their final catches; there are no lights on the water, so it’s important to be home by sundown.

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It’s amazing, the resources the people here have found in this lake – obviously there is seaweed, and seafood (lakeweed, and lakefood?); but also lotuses, prized not only for their blossoms but for their stems, which contain a bundle of strong, thin fibers that are woven into beautiful and durable (and expensive) fabrics.

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And then there are the tomatoes – possibly the best tomatoes I’ve ever tasted, and grown in an ingenious way. Hedges of buoyant seaweed are lined up neatly atop the water, then soil and compost is layered on top of the seaweed, then tomatoes are sown in the soil. Little floating farms, bringing forth the sweetest, savoriest, sauciest tomatoes. There must be something in the water.

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And then it was onto Ngapali: this was the much-awaited “vacation” portion of the trip. In the four and half weeks since I started my trip in Taiwan, I hadn’t had a single day off – in fact, I had barely had an afternoon off. The trip had been non-stop sightseeing, non-stop hotel inspections, and non-stop yammering from our guides until our two days in Ngapali. No guides. No temples. No Buddhas. No bumpy drives. And we only had to see five hotels and we could do that whenever we wanted to – so it was time to relax.

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(I’m afraid I may have used too many superlatives in these posts about Burma, so this is the last one, I promise:) Ngapali is the most amazing beach I’ve ever seen. Now, I haven’t even been to that many beaches, so I suppose that isn’t that great of an endorsement, but I should mention that I don’t even like beaches very much – too much sand, and you never know what’s gonna brush up against you in the water (jellyfish, kelp, fast food containers, children… ugh). But I liked Ngapali. I reeeally liked it. The sand – fine, flaky, and ivory in color. The water – crystal in your hand, and so delightfully warm. Perfect weather. Gorgeous sunsets. And the best part? No people.

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I actually feel a bit conflicted just telling people about Ngapali. One one hand, I feel like people need to know about this beach; on the other hand, I don’t want anybody to go there. But if you do go, you have to get out onto the main road and head to one of the local restaurants for a dinner of fresh, tender grilled squid with an electric sauce of lime, chili, and ginger. (You can thank me later.)

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Finally, we flew back to the dusty haze of Yangon, relaxed, tan, and more than a little annoyed that our short break was over. Of course, we didn’t know that we would be stuck in Yangon for the next week with nothing to do while we waited for Thai protesters to leave the airport. In the end, I left Myanmar satisfied, but knowing that I will return.

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