Text 412, 95 rader
Skriven 2006-04-15 18:40:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
Ärende: Meat flavoured food 1
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For the carnivores among us....

Fish and Vegetables, Cozying Up to Meat

By MARK BITTMAN, NY Times

IT'S not that David Chang doesn't like vegetables. In fact, Mr. Chang,
the chef and owner of the Momofuku Noodle Bar in the East Village, loves
them. He just thinks a little meat makes them better.

Even an innocent-looking bowl of sugar snap peas with horseradish begins
with a reduction of stock, usually made with pork.

"We've got all this great pork coming in here every day," Mr. Chang
said, "and it'd be crazy not to use it."

Momofuku's pro-meat attitude goes even deeper than that. The menu warns
off vegetarians, and Mr. Chang, 28, said: "It's hard to order anything
here that doesn't have meat in some form or other; we just try not to
make anything vegetarian. We're just doing the food we like, and we like
meat. We don't make a vegetarian broth, because we don't want to, and we
don't make vegetarian versions of things because they just don't taste
as good as the versions we do make."

Some of the results of this meat-o-philia make Momofuku's one of the
most interesting menus in town if you're an omnivore: the spicy,
crisp-fried pig tail is the best version I've had of that
underappreciated cut; the deep red tripe stew is also exemplary.

Others are more subtle: the sugar snap peas, the brussels sprouts, even
the roasted corn feature meat in some form or another. And fish dishes
are not exempt; when Mr. Chang began to see razor clams in nearby
Chinatown, he immediately ordered kielbasa from the neighborhood
butcher, Kurowycky Meat Products, and figured out a way to combine them.

"I want to respect tradition, and even to some extent maintain it," he
said. "But I'm playful, too, and creative. It's not that I'm big into
fusion, but if something crosses over, and it makes sense to me to do it
in a new way, that's a direction I'm going to take."

The three dishes showcased here are good examples of his thinking. I ate
Mr. Chang's baby brussels sprouts nearly weekly this winter; it seemed
impossible to become tired of them. And though the basic preparation is
French, beginning with bacon and ending with butter, the twist that
makes them so fascinating ƒ€" serving them on a bed of purAced kimchi
ƒ€" comes from Mr. Chang's Korean-American background.

"At the beginning of the winter, I started seeing these beautiful baby
brussels sprouts in the markets," Mr. Chang said. "But you really don't
see brussels sprouts at all in Asian cuisine, so I couldn't quite figure
out how to make them feel legitimate to me. Then I thought, well,
they're a form of cabbage, and cabbage and pork kimchi is pretty
classic, so why not combine bacon and the sprouts, then bring in the
kimchi?"

The result may not be spectacular in appearance ƒ€" in fact it looks
quite rustic ƒ€" but the flavor is irresistible. Though Mr. Chang uses
his own kimchi (fiery pickled cabbage), I've since made this dish with
good, fresh, fairly mild kimchi purchased in a Korean market, and it
remains super.

The sugar snap peas' story is similar. "I was eating wasabi peas," he
said, "and thinking how good they were, even though they're probably not
traditional, and might even have been invented in America."

"You always see horseradish in Japanese food," he added. "They might
call it wasabi, but unless you're in a super-high-end restaurant it's
just horseradish dyed green. So I thought, why not just be honest about
it and grate fresh horseradish over some cooked peas?"

With sugar snap peas (and snow peas, which are just as good here) and
horseradish in season, this is a perfect spring dish. But, again, there
are no vegetarian pretensions; though the peas would be good lightly
cooked in oil, they're sensational prepared in Mr. Chang's style: cooked
in reduced stock and finished with butter before being graced with the
horseradish.

Even fish gets the meat treatment. When you look at Mr. Chang's razor
clams with kielbasa, you see a dish that, with a couple of exceptions,
like the addition of soy and ginger, could have originated in Portugal.
Of course that country's cuisine has as much respect for the tradition
of including meat in nearly everything as Mr. Chang's own.


Cheers

Jim, in Yellowknife




... Eat meat, eat meat, eat it all day long
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