Food Chain
Thursday, July 13, 2017
Food & Drink Food Chain One Bite Cool your sweaty corpus with stir-fried ice cream at Legend Tasty House
Posted By Mike Sula on 07.13.17 at 04:35 PM
It was high noon in late June in Chinatown on the first really swampy day of the summer. There were a few customers at Lao Sze Chuan. There was nobody in the new Korean barbecue joint except three fat, sweaty white guys. And who the hell could even think of eating in any of the dozen or so hot-pot joints on a day like that?
There was nothing going down in Chinatown.
But wait—what's that crowd of teenagers and others idlers doing down on Wentworth? They'd gathered under the red faux pagoda that is home to Legend Tasty House, an ice cream parlor trafficking in the alluring confection known as rolled iced cream or, as the kids say, stir-fried ice cream. This is a delightful treat popularly enjoyed in Japan, Korea, China, and, most importantly, Thailand. That's where a breakthrough in the dairy arts occurred more than half a decade ago in a Bangkok ice cream shop. More about that later.
First, what is it? The easiest comparison to make for Westerners, it seems, is Cold Stone Creamery. But instead of a marble prep surface, what you have here is a freezing-cold metal pan upon which an ice cream jockey of heroic abilities pours a liquid as if she's making crepes. She adds some kind of fruit, or cookie, or cracker, or sauce and haughtily smashes it with one of two metal spatulas she wields in each fist, then begins rapidly scraping and chopping the mixture until it begins to crystalize and hold shape. With the grace of an interpretive dancer she quickly smoothes and flattens it into a thin square, and—this is the really hypnotizing part—scrapes wide ribbons of ice cream that roll up like scrolls of papyrus. These are placed upright in a cup and garnished with garish combinations of whipped cream, gummies, sprinkles, sauces, fruit, marshmallows, jimmies, and other flair. The base flavors include coffee, mango, strawberry, s'mores, green tea, and, God bless them, durian. And more. I lost myself awhile in the dreamy depths of the avocado, which I've come to suspect is the perfect match for ice cream.
This is a treat made for Instagrammers. You can watch them standing in front of the counter agog, their phones up recording the transfixing ballet. Legend Tasty house opened last January, an inauspicious month for ice cream, but it looks like it's doing just fine now. There's a full menu of savory stuff too—skewers, soups, even oden, which is perfect fuel for January. Not so much in June.
Legend Tasty House—which has a whole-fish hot-pot sister restaurant, Legend Spicy Bar, down the street—invokes the "streets of Hong Kong" on its website. But there'd be no rolled ice cream in China or Chicago, for that matter, if it weren't for a Bangkok dairy disruptor. Friend of the Food Chain and author of Bangkok: Recipes and Stories From the Heart of Thailand, Leela Punyaratabandhu is working on a piece about Thai-style rolled ice cream for a future issue of Dill Magazine.* She explains:
"The method of manipulating ice cream on a cold surface had been around for a long time. You could find it in Korea, Japan, etc.—and Thailand too. But about 6 years ago, a small shop inside a mall in Bangkok started making their ice cream on a steel pan (that very much resembles a commercial pad thai pan, which is a wide, flat carbon steel pan with a short, flared rim) whose temperature registers at minus 30° Celsius. According to the owner of that ice cream shop, this is about 20° lower than the surface on which the same type of ice cream had been made in other countries. This means you get the job done in much less time—about one minute. They called it "Ice Cream Phat" (literally 'stir-fried ice cream'), because the way you prepare it looks like you're "stir-frying" the liquid ice cream base into solid ice cream, and the vessel also looks like a flat stir-fry pan. That shop eventually outgrew their original location and is now operating in over 60 locations throughout Thailand. Lots of copycats these days."
This ice cream is phat.
Legend Tasty House: Next to the fish counter at Mayflower Food, it's the best place in Chinatown to cool off on a hot summer day.
Legend Tasty House, 2242 S. Wentworth, 312-225-8869, legendtastyhouse.com
Legend Spicy Bar, 2358 S. Wentworth, 312-929-2758, legendspicybar.com
*Full disclosure: I'm a contributor to Dill. It's a quarterly that focuses on Asian foodways. Its first issue, which drops Saturday at the Thai Food Festival, is all about noodles.
Correction: This post has amended to correctly reflect the name of Legend Tasty House's sister restaurant. It is Legend Spicy Bar, not Legend Spicy House.
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Food & Drink Food Chain So long, Peerless Potato Chips
Posted By Mike Sula on 06.28.17 at 05:41 PM
The Times of Northwest Indiana broke the news on Monday that Gary's 89-year-old potato chip company Peerless Potato Chips is going under.
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Food & Drink Food Chain One Bite Get the sandwich of the summer at Daley Plaza Farmers Market
Posted By Mike Sula on 06.13.17 at 12:59 PM
Baked Cheese Haus is not the name of your older brother's stoner-metal side project. But it may be the only outdoor-market sandwich slinger worth its own stoner-metal soundtrack. It's definitely the most theatrical.
It is, however, a side project, an increasingly heroic one from the folks behind Brunkow Cheese of Darlington, Wisconsin, a perennial presence at Chicago farmers' markets and the brains behind another brilliant market act: free samples of its molten Finnish-style Brun-uusto "bread cheese."
Baked Cheese Haus exists primarily to push Brunkow's 12-pound, three- to five-month-old raclette wheel. But the epically metal sandwich has proven so popular that the cheesemaker is out of raclette and Brunkow is now importing it from Switzerland to accommodate the savage demand. Picture it: You're wading through the lunchtime throngs at Daley Plaza. An intoxicating fungal aroma in the warm summer air alerts your olfactory system: It's alive! The crowd ahead parts and a booth appears where a maestro—his T-shirt relays a ninth beatitude, "Blessed are the cheesemakers"—plays a half reel of raclette like he's Tony Iommi.
Wednesday, May 10, 2017
Books Food & Drink Food Chain Leela Punyaratabandhu, author of Bangkok, talks street food, real Thai food, and shares a recipe for crispy water spinach salad
Posted By Mike Sula on 05.10.17 at 06:00 PM
I don’t publish anything on Thai food before running it past Friend of the Food Chain Leela Punyaratabandhu. In English, no one is writing more authoritatively on the subject than she. For readers of her blog SheSimmers this has been evident for years, and it was only cemented with the publication of her first cookbook, Simple Thai Food, which was a come-to-Jesus for anyone familiar with the broad array of disparate dishes that seems to appear on the menus of Thai restaurants everywhere in the world—except for Thailand.
Her second cookbook, Bangkok, released yesterday, is a deep dive into the culinary landscape of a city most visitors only scratch the surface of. There’s a lot of food you won’t find on the streets, like home cooking (steamed dumplings with chicken-peanut filling), royal cuisine (fried taro dumplings with shrimp-coconut filling), restaurant cooking (fried chicken in pandan leaves) and cook-shop cooking (pork chops, cook-shop style), recipes resurrected from the dusty pages of history (pork belly-green juice curry), seasonal recipes (fire-roasted river prawns with tamarind sauce and blanched neem), Portuguese-Thai (rice vermicelli with chopped chicken curry and yellow chile-coconut sauce), Chinese-Thai (khao ka mu) and, yes, even street food (grilled meatballs with spicy sweet-and-sour sauce). It’s all seasoned with the sometimes-bittersweet memories of a lifelong Bangkokian who spends about half her time away from home, a lot of it in Chicago.
Friday, April 14, 2017
Food & Drink Key Ingredient Food Chain A GT Prime chef creates a sticky-sweet pairing for foie gras
Posted By Julia Thiel on 04.14.17 at 11:41 AM
This year Marshmallow Fluff, America’s oldest brand of marshmallow creme, celebrates its 100th anniversary. It wasn’t the first commercially available version—that honor goes to a brand called Snowflake—but it has outlasted its rival by more than 50 years. And Fluff has a particularly devoted following, especially in Massachusetts, where it was invented and is honored with an annual “What the Fluff” festival. (The state also made national headlines in 2006 after a senator filed a measure that would limit serving Fluffernutter sandwiches in school cafeterias to once a week, which provoked outrage and prompted other legislators to propose making the Fluffernutter the state sandwich.)
The other brands of marshmallow creme sold in the U.S. are Solo and Kraft, and it’s the latter that Emily Stewart of Bang Bang Pie & Biscuits chose for GT Prime chef John Kirchner's challenge. Kirchner hates marshmallows, he says, because of their texture, though the softer marshmallow creme (which uses egg whites in place of gelatin) isn’t so bad. He didn’t grow up eating the confection, though he does remember having a Fluffernutter sandwich in high school and immediately forming a “fake band” with his friends called Garbage Juice and the Fluffernutters. “We played no actual instruments—it was more for status,” he says.
Thursday, April 13, 2017
Books Food & Drink Food Chain Make Dana Cree's donut ice cream
Posted By Mike Sula on 04.13.17 at 12:22 PM
Publican-brand pastry chef Dana Cree's cookbook Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream is out now, and it should be priority one for cooks who've dreamed of making their own frozen dairy products only to be foiled by ice cream enemy number one: ice itself. Cree, whose career-long runup to this book involved attending Penn State's Ice Cream University, opens the alluring volume with a deep dive into the science behind ice cream, explaining how ice, fat, protein, sugar, and air alchemize into the miracle we all love. Along the way she provides numerous options or "texture methods" for reducing the size of ice crystals, leading to a smooth end product. And then there are the recipes, divided into custard ice creams (green cardamom, pumpkin sage), eggless Philadelphia-style ice creams (Parmesan, cheesecake), sherbets (blood orange, avocado-grapefruit), and frozen yogurt (spiced cane syrup, hibiscus), plus recipes for add-ins (butterscotch ripple, cinnamon-brown sugar streusel), all culminating in a chapter on epic composed scoops like the multipart recipe listed below. It concludes with an appendix on ratios to help you create your own recipes. Recipes are after the jump.
Cree will address all of this as well as ice cream history at Saturday's meeting of the Culinary Historians of Chicago at 10 AM at Kendall College, 900 N. North Branch, where she'll serve samples and sign books; it's $5. And next Friday, April 21, she'll appear at Foodease, 835 N. Michigan, at noon.
Cree will address all of this as well as ice cream history at Saturday's meeting of the Culinary Historians of Chicago at 10 AM at Kendall College, 900 N. North Branch, where she'll serve samples and sign books; it's $5. And next Friday, April 21, she'll appear at Foodease, 835 N. Michigan, at noon.
Wednesday, April 12, 2017
Food & Drink Food Chain Ryuu Asian BBQ fills Logan Square’s tabletop-grilling void
Posted By Julia Thiel on 04.12.17 at 11:54 AM
Cooking over an open fire in restaurant kitchens has been big this past year, so it's only logical that letting diners grill their own food would be the next step. Of course, Korean barbecue joints have been doing this for years, so the concept is hardly new. But while Chicago doesn't lack for Korean barbecue, Logan Square did until November, when Ryuu Asian BBQ opened its doors. The sleek new spot doesn't limit itself to Korean fare, or even to Asian barbecue: the menu also includes sushi, Thai noodle and rice dishes, and a few Vietnamese, Laotian, and Malaysian entrees.
Monday, April 10, 2017
Food & Drink Food Chain A wonderland of fruit pizza and Colombian pastry in Albany Park
Posted By Mike Sula on 04.10.17 at 07:22 PM
Name two great tastes that taste great together.
Chocolate and peanut butter, of course.
Burgers and fries. Duh.
Raisins and pizza?
Uhhhhh . . .
Hold on now. That makes perfect sense in Colombia, where pizza tropical—cheesy pies topped with some combination of pineapple, cherry, raisins, and/or plum—is a thing.
Fruit pizza, my friends. Deal with it.
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Booze Food & Drink Food Chain Murasaki Sake Lounge is a fountain of Japanese whiskey
Posted By Mike Sula on 03.21.17 at 09:02 AM
A few weeks ago I pointed out that the tightly focused booze list at Kitsune doesn't quite stand up to the wildly imaginative food at Iliana Regan's izakaya. If you have ambitions of washing down your okonomiyaki with any Japanese whiskeys, you only have a choice of two: Nikka's popular Coffey grain and Taketsuru expressions. Oh well—it's a midwestern izakaya, after all. You're probably better off swilling Daisy Cutter anyway.
Japanese whiskey is a booze category that hasn't quite caught on in this town the way, say, mezcal has—it's often lighter than our bold American whiskeys, and way more expensive. The Boka Group's Momotaro is the first thing that comes to mind when contemplating this, with some 26 bottles available, a few priced at more than $100 a pour. Conversely, you don't often hear folks mention Murasaki Sake Lounge, an unassuming eight-year-old Streeterville spot that for all intents and purposes is pretty much an izakaya. They have a slightly smaller selection of 21 bottles, but they make up the deficit in diversity and relative affordability—friendlier than the more diverse list at Yusho, and featuring a few brands that don't show up on Momotaro's list, like Togouchi, a whiskey distilled in Scotland and aged and blended in Japan.
But as the name implies, Murasaki's mainly about the sake, with more than four dozen varieties, listed with helpful tasting notes, available hot or cold by the glass, decanter, or bottle. Japanese beer, shochu, and shochu and sake cocktails round out an impressively varied selection.
Naturally, there's no eating without drinking, and the food menu is fairly straightforward (relative to Kitsune's), featuring snacky, absorbent bites, like cold tofu showered in bonito flakes, appropriately custardy takoyaki and okonomiyaki, pro forma tonkotsku ramen and curry rice, and more texturally challenging snacks like ochazuke—cold, raw octopus dosed with sinus-scouring wasabi.
いただきます, or rather, 乾杯!
Monday, February 27, 2017
Food & Drink Food Chain A tiny takeout joint in a Wilmette strip mall serves some of the most lovingly made Pakistani food in the Chicago area
Posted By Mike Sula on 02.27.17 at 04:26 PM
If I told you a take-out joint in a Wilmette strip mall served the most exciting Pakistani food north of Granville, would you take the Brown Line, transfer to the Purple Line, ride that to Central, then wait a half hour for the 201 to shove off to Old Orchard Mall before plodding about a third of a mile up Skokie Boulevard for some freshly curdled palak paneer and bhindi that tastes like green fireworks?
