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Back in February, with the help of a Thai friend, we spent several days nosing around Chiang Mai in an attempt to sniff out a definitive khao soi history. I won't claim that we succeeded, but we did turn up a few interesting tidbits.
It's complicated. Much too complicated for 800 words. So for now, here's our khao soi primer, published in today's edition of Wall Street Journal Asia's 'Weekend Asia'.
Next, the back story.
The joy of eating street food is rooted not only in the flavors, but also in the experience. Sometimes it's more about the latter than the former.
This curious establishment was on the 'hit list' that a friend passed to us before we drove to Hat Yai and Songkhla last June. It resides under a stage erected in the courtyard of a temple smack in the middle of the city's Chinatown. The place is an institution; if you were to ask anyone on the street about 'noodles under the stage' they'd point you here.
The vendor has worked out of her cramped quarters for many years, and her specialty is yen taa fo, a rice noodle soup colored red by a sauce that incorporates preserved bean curd.
Hers features a light pork broth and bone-in meat and/or meat balls, a blood cake if you wish it, bean sprouts, and a loose knob of boiled pakbong (kangkong or water spinach).
'Oh, I wish you'd come earlier. She's run out of meat balls,' a local said as we carefully lowered ourselves onto a dollhouse-tiny wooden bench. 'Her pork balls are famous.' The heads of other diners nodded in agreement.
I wish the same. I wasn't too excited about this bowl of noodles, with its anemic broth and incredibly chewy pork. The tongue-singeing, brightly tart homemade chili sauce was its only high note.
That said I wouldn't have missed it for anything. Watching other diners (many of whom were much shorter than we -- and most of whom were amused by our bemusement) hunch over to scuttle under the stage and then carefully rise from their chairs, bent double again, to retrieve their noodles made for great lunchtime theater.
(The vendor stays mostly seated, assembling orders and washing and rinsing bowls, chopsticks, and spoons in a couple of pails at her feet. She's got diners busing and wiping their own tables.)
Why here? She lives on the temple grounds, she said, and the temple rents the space to her for next to nothing. She'll never be rich, but business is steady and she makes enough to get by.
It's a living, under the opera stage.
Yen taa fo vendor under the stage, Thanon Nam Ngan, Songkhla town. From 9-ish. She seems to run out of pork balls around 1:30p or so.
Chef Musa Dagdeviren takes a break at Worlds of Flavor 2009
I first heard about Turkish chef Musa Dagdeviren in 1999, from my Turkish teacher.
I was one of only two students taking second-year Turkish at UC Berkeley. My classmate and I had different interests (he, politics and me, Turkey and Turkish food -- mild obsessions which I allowed to distract me from the dissertation on Chinese politics I was supposed to be writing), so our teacher Ayla split us up for one-on-one tutorials. What a blissful school year it was; for ninety minutes three times a week I learned by reading and talking with Ayla -- who is also be a cookbook author -- about almost nothing but Turkish yemek kulturu (food culture).
Ayla told me about a chef in Istanbul who was doing something daring -- serving halk yemegi ('food of the people' -- 'peasant food', in other words) in his restaurant. Musa Dagdeviren was unusual not only for his food, but for the way he gathered recipes and discovered new ingredients (especially otlar - wild herbs and greens): by spending time with home cooks and artisan food producers in small, out-of-the-way villages all over the country.
His approach to his own country's cuisine resonated. In China my most memorable meals had been eaten not in Shanghai, where we lived, but in the Anhui, Jiangsu, and Liaoning villages in which I'd conducted research. A three-week road trip around Anatolia the previous year had shown Dave and I that there was much more to Turkish cuisine than Ottoman court specialties. And Chef Musa's methodology appealed to the academic in me -- I never did finish that dissertation, but my love of focused research at the grassroots level has never faded.
Years ago, before I abandoned that dissertation to write about food, I copied a quote of Musa's onto an index card. It still occupies a corner of my bulletin board:
I get very excited when I discover poor people's dishes, because I believe only poor people can create great food. If a man has money, he can buy anything, but a person who has nothing must create beauty from within.
Thanks to Chef Musa the dining scene in Istanbul has changed radically over the last decade; his restaurant is no longer the only one serving dishes that originated in Turkey's hinterlands made with unusual, often foraged ingredients. When not cooking there he's often conducting his research around Turkey (and now, in northern Syria as well). More recently Musa and his wife Zeynep Caliskan started publishing the quarterly food journal Yemek ve Kultur (Food and Culture), a sort of Turkish Gastronomica devoted mostly to Turkish culinary culture and history.
Shaping seasoned minced lamb onto skewers for Adana kebap
At last week's Worlds of Flavor conference Dave and I finally met Musa, as well as Zeynep and Burak Epir, chef-owner of Turkish restaurant Pilita in San Francisco, as he was leading CIA students and chef-instructors in the preparation of Adana kebap (minced lamb seasoned with plenty of Maras biber, shaped onto flat, sword-like skewers and grilled).
Adana kebap prior to grilling
Despite the pressure (the kebabs were to feed hundreds of hungry conference-goers) he was obviously having a great time. Fame aside, this is a chef who's clearly most in his element when he's mincing meat with a two foot-long scythe-like knife or wrist-deep in sliced onions, herbs, and sumac, tossing a salad.
Given his democratic approach to food I suspected that Chef Musa would be a great partner in culinary conversation. And I was right. On the last day of the conference, after his kitchen duties were finished, we sat down and talked Turkey. I asked questions and he responded in volume; within every answer was a nugget or two that we could have chewed over for hours.
What came through most is this man's passion for discovering -- and preserving -- Turkey's little-known, under-appreciated regional ingredients and recipes. His love for what he does is so infectious, and I greatly look forward to continuing this conversation when Dave and I return to Turkey in a few months.
Born in Gaziantep (also called Antep, a city in southeastern Turkey known for its fantastic food), Musa got an early start on his career when he began working in a bakery at age five. After opening a restaurant with two friends in Gaziantep he moved to Istanbul in 1977, where he opened Ciya, a kebap and lahmacun eatery, a decade later. In 1998 he opened the more upscale Ciya Sofrasi, and followed in 2001 with Ciya Kebap II.
Tossing slivered onion with mint, parsley, and sumac to accompany the kebap
How would you describe the food at your restaurants?
It's seasonal, reflective of geography, and representative of regional culture. Different geography means different lifestyles, different ingredients, different flora and fauna, and that creates different food cultures. Geography connects a people. Religion, race, and ethnicity pull them apart.
Where or from whom do you get your inspiration?
From my own geography, whcih stretches from the Caucuses to Mesopotamia, from the Balkans to the Mediterranean. Turkey has seven different regions and I literally study all of them. They're all different, and I study these differences on the spot. I also study books, Ottoman engravings and inscriptions, old postcards -- all of these things that I find in old shops, at auctions, and on EBay. I try to identify the regions that foods come from. Somebody may say "I created doner kebab, I created Adana kebab, balkava is from Antep [Gaziantep, a city in Turkey's southeast]..." This is false. I study the etymology of dish names and try to find a food's region. After much study I can begin to understand who was cooking what, when, and why.
I'm so disappointed that at traditional culinary schools in Turkey French cooking is taught. Students learn this and they don't even know how to cook five mutton dishes! I'm trying to show that we don't have to go outside of Turkey to find great food -- it's in our own villages.
In Turkey people are publishing books like 'Breads of the World'. Why not 'Breads of Turkey?' Why not 'Simits of Turkey'? There are so may different kinds of simit. And this is why we started the magazine.
You know, when I opened my first restaurant people never thought that our own local cuisine would be anything interesting. But now there are more upscale restaurants doing Asia Minor cuisine. It's become a trendy thing. And that's good.
Preparing to de-skewer a grilled kebap onto a piece of warm lavash
How long have you been doing this kind of culinary research?
Since the seventies. I have a huge library at home, and its ongoing. For example: I've found that there are 114 different types of tarhana. It's crazy, you know, often people do not even know what they're own neighbor is cooking, it could be completely different to the version that they make. Turkey is so rich in culture, and geography .... so for instance there are countless processes of yeasting bread, making cheese. As I study more I find more, and as I find more I find I need to study more.
How do you do your research? What do you do on a typical research trip?
I go to a village. I don't cook right away
... that's not the way. I sit and drink tea and talk with the village
elders. I seek out the village's older generation of cooks and I talk
to them, try to pull out their memories. If there is a special
occasion, a wedding or a special feast day, I will by the sheep for the
big meal, I'll buy all the ingredients, because I don't just want to
take from the village, I want to contribute. Basically I am like an
apprentice. I watch, I help, I cook, I clean up...
And I try to see what the village is
offering -- does it produce an interesting ingredient? A special pepper
or cheese or other kind of food? And I'll try to find connections
outside the village where they can sell that, so that the whole village
will prosper. I talk to the people about maybe setting up a village
institution to protect an especially interesting ingredient, to make a
seed bank maybe .... those sorts of things.
Adana kebap wrapped in lavash, served
Can you tell me about a dish or an ingredient that you've discovered recently?
Oh, yes. In Karaburun, a town on the Aegean across from [the Greek island of] Kios, I learned about an old woman who makes a cheese called peynir kelle. She gathers wild herbs in high pasture, then braids them and forms them into a hollow ball. The smell is nice, very aromatic. She milks her goats, makes the cheese, and then puts the cheese into the ball, which she then dips in salt, covers with more fresh herbs, and lets it sit for a year. The cheese is dry and crumbly, it tastes garlicky and of oregano. Outside it's greenish from the herbs. It's not a heavy cheese, but very light, very good.
Nobody in the village is interested in reproducing the cheese and selling it, but I want to find a way to distribute it. Someone has to take this woman under their wing and protect her cheese, and promote it.
Many thanks to Chef Musa, Zeynep, Burak, Mehmet -- and also to Jale, for help with translation.
Just another day off the northern California coast
We rose every morning and, on our way past the French doors that led from our dining room to a front porch with a drop-dead view, never failed to sigh at the sight of the San Francisco Bay. In the evening we watched as tentacles of fog slithered from San Francisco over to our side of the water.
We biked and ran outside year-round, on wooded paths linking hundreds of miles of pristine regional parks reachable in just a 15-minute drive from our house. When it rained we donned slickers and walked, happy to be out in the fresh air despite the weather ... or swam in an uncrowded, beautifully maintained community pool close to our home.
I miss all of it, but I don't miss it enough to leave Asia. And the strange thing is that when I'm in Asia, I miss all of it almost not at all.
The Brazilian/Bahian contingent rests their feet at CIA Greystone
'We're in the middle of a street food rennaissance, and we're all much happier for it,' said food critic Jonathan Gold at yesterday's Worlds of Flavor, referring to the proliferation of food trucks in Los Angeles and across the USA.
A major driver of that rennaissance has been what Gold referred to as the 'new wave' of trucks that take their inspiration from trucks selling tacos, tamales, and sandwiches traditionally run by Mexican and Latin American immigrants. And probably the best known 'new wave' truck of all is Roy Choi's brainchild Kogi, a Korean BBQ taco truck (actually four trucks, now) that ply the streets of LA, alerting customers of their location via Twitter.
Roy is a CIA-trained chef who, as he tells it, only realized his potential when he stopped trying so hard to be a successful classically-trained chef and started his taco truck. He's a great speaker and fascinating to watch in action. Yesterday we sat in on his demo in the CIA kitchen, and tasted one of Kogi's famous tacos (yes, it is that good). I had originally intended to nail him down for an interview, but Roy is so forthcoming with bon mots that cushioning them in a lot of narrative would be like icing an already frosted cake.
Here, instead, is Roy uncensored, on tacos, community, street food, and other topics. I leave the interpretation to you.
"To cook great street food a chef has to get past his ego."
On what Kogi is about: "We really try to pay homage to the Mexican street taco."
On Korean cuisine: "Take your classical training, just take that sh*t and throw it in the trash."
(His example here was the vinaigrette: "As a chef I learned that that you whisk till emulsified. Look at my vinaigrettes here -- they're all broken.")
On how to cook street food: "Everything is by feel, by hand, by touch. My goal here (Roy was mixing the salad garnish for his Kogi taco at the time) is that every single bite has ll the flavors, all of the complexities of the dish. All of the joy and sorrows of your life in one bite."
On the importance of using the right tortillas: "I HATE [insert brand name tortilla supplied by CIA kitchen here], by the way. They have no puff, no flexibility. They taste like cardboard."
On what he's looking for when he makes Kogi's Blackjack Quesadilla (filled with black pork and jack cheese): "I want to achieve a state of existence just like a beautiful Neopolitan pizza. You know, it's just a quesadilla, but we put a lot of love into it."
On why, despite its popularity, Kogi still sells its tacos for $2 each: "Street food needs to be cheap. Why? Because it needs to be fluid with the rest of your life."
On what's great about street food: "Street food makes you slow your life down."
On whether or not street food can be successfully cooked and served in a restaurant setting: "Street food can be served in a stationary place, but your heart and your spirit has to be moving."
On the fact that most Americans -- particularly those in positions of authority in various municipalities -- don't yet understand what street food is all about: "We [Kogi] get treated like we're selling crack! It's just a taco."
On possible expansion plans for Kogi: "I don't want to go to other cities to conquer them. But I would like to go to other cities to spread the love."
A typical meal at Worlds of Flavor 2009: row upon row of thali plates
As a frequenter of street food stalls, where dishes are prepared by just one or two vendors one at a time, I wondered if the quality of the food at this year's Worlds of Flavors would rise to the level of the conference's themes (Street Food, Comfort Food). Much of what's been served here is street food, after all, and in my experience street food rarely translates seamlessly to a restaurant/institutional setting.
The kitchen here at CIA Greystone is turning out hundreds and hundreds of meals (and snacks) twice a day. I've never tasted food cooked on such a massive scale that is anywhere near delicious ... until now.
Mining the campus herb garden at CIA Greystone
The global street and comfort foods served at last night's World Marketplace was consistently stupendous. Today's lunch was fantastic. Every snack, sweet, and nibble has been fabulous. (And no, I wasn't paid to write that.)
How does the kitchen do it? In a few words: advance planning and lots of organization.
This morning I sat down with Scott Samuel, a Chef Instructor at CIA and the institution's Strategic Initiatives Conference Chef. Scott migrated south from Seattle to join CIA Greystone one and a half years ago, as planning for this year's conference was kicking into high gear.
This year's Worlds of Flavor is CIA Greystone's 12th.. The first year CIA hosted 20 Chef Presenters; this year there are 93.
Each day they, along with the institute's Chef Instructors, students (around 200 in all), and volunteers for the event converge on the kitchen, a cavernous but warm space with 7 two-sided main cooking suites (each meant to accomodate 20 cooks, with French, induction, and gas burners, ovens, and lowboy fridges), 6 baking benches with marble and wood counters, and banks of refrigerators and ovens along the back and side walls.
Imagine the organization involved. Scott manages with earphone, mouthpiece, and walkie-talkie. "I'm a chef, and this is my knife," he says, indicating the latter.
The nitty-gritty kitchen planning began two months ago, when Scott received a schedule for the conference from CIA Executive Director of Strategic Initiatives and planner of this year's conference Greg Drescher, detailing the responsibilities of various Chef Presenters (kitchen workshops, demos, speaking, manning 'stalls' at the World Marketplace). He then grouped the chefs by geography, and 'assigned' each group to a CIA Chef Instructor.
Each Chef Instructor was then responsible for contacting the Chef Presenters to get recipes for the dishes they planned to prepare and/or demonstrate. Foreign-language recipes were translated into English and rewritten into CIA format. Shopping lists were drawn up, ingredients ordered from around the world. And finally, the Master Recipe Document was generated. All 600 pages of it.
Sounds straightforward enough, but problems do arise.
"The biggest issue is making sure the right product is here at the right time," says Scott. "We need at least a week's advance notice" to obtain anything from overseas, "but we can't order an ingredient until the Chef Presenters tell us what they're doing" at the conference.
Many chefs take it down to the wire when it comes to submitting recipes. Others specifiy ingredients that can't be sources (an example from this year's conference: barnacles, for one of the Chef Presenters from Spain). Some just don't answer emails
But somehow it all comes together in the end, and the result is impressive.
"Minor emergencies do pop up," says Scott, pointing at his mouthpiece. "That's why I wear this."
As we were talking Scott jumped up several times to put out fires. "Chef Andy, I'm sorry, what do you need?" he said into his mouthpiece as we were talking logistics.
Worlds of Flavor has grown every single year since it's inception -- at last night's World Marketplace 2,000-3,000 small plates were served.
I asked Scott if the event will be even bigger next year, when the entire conference will be dedicated to Japanese cuisine.
He smiled. (Did I mention that the guy's demeanor is beyond calm?) "We're maxing this place out," he says, shaking his head almost imperceptibly.
"Last night we ran out of sheet pans."
CIA chefs and students rushing to set up for World Marketplace
CIA Greystone's Worlds of Flavor 2009: Street Food, Comfort Food kicked off yesterday afternoon, with several fascinating presentations followed by World Marketplace, a jaw-dropping spread of delicious specialties from around the world.
Andrea Nguyen introduces Singapore's KF Seetoh, founder of Makansutra
After extolling the 'thrilling immediacy' and deceptive simplicity of street food, Rick Bayless took us on a trip to a favorite tacos de cazuela stall in Mexico City. Bobby Chin shared his modus operandi for learning how to cook street food in Vietnam: show up at a stall again and again -- at 11am, 12pm, 1pm, 2pm, and so on. Vendors, he said, don't want to teach their specialty, so learning by observation is the only option.
Roy Choi of Kogi Korean BBQ taco truck fame talked about how running his Los Angeles truck has enabled him to connect with his community, and shared the secret to his chili paste-marinated pork ribs and belly: massage the meat long, slow, and with feeling, and let your soul flow out through your fingers into the meat. (He also wondered -- rightly, we think -- why Korea isn't represented at this year's conference: 'I mean, Korean street food is off the hook!')
KF Seetoh of Makansutra fame introduced us to Singaporean makers of murtabak and roti prata, and Paul Bartolotta talked about Southern Italy's grandmothers as inspiration and took us, with the help of native chefs, into the kitchens of Apulia. Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food expert Anissa Helou introduced her friend, Turkish chef Musa Dagdeviren, who stoked appetites when he (via live feed) slid roasted chunks of lamb from a skewer onto crusty loaves of pita just pulled from a wood-fired oven, and the fabulous Paula Wolfert demonstrated how to make paper-thin warka, a Moroccan crepe, with a paintbrush.
In the CIA Greystone kitchen
While all this knowledge was being shared, across the hall, in the mammoth CIA Greystone kitchen, street and comfort foods from all over the world were being prepared by hundreds of resident chefs and students and the events guest chefs.
Frying Bolinhos de Acaraje, a Bahian street food
Cred given to the ladies who keep the kitchen in clean pots and pans
After the presentations attendees converged at the World Marketplace, where they grazed on treats from Singapore and Thailand, Italy and Spain, Peru and Brazil -- and everywhere in between.
Serving up Caruru, a Bahian steamed dumpling
For us the highlights of the evening were fresh mozzarella from Apulia, a delicious chickpea soup from Tunisa, shrimp ceviche with popcorn from Peru, salt cod salad and white gazpacho (made with almonds, olive oil, garlic, and bread) from Catalonia, and chef Dagdeviren's amazing lahmacun.
We lingered longest at the Bahian table, where we packed ourselves with spicy banana leaf-steamed dumplings stuffed with dried shrimp and fried black-eyed pea fritters tinted red from palm oil, eaten split open, smeared with okra paste and a coconut milk-based spread, and small, spicy shell-on shrimp.
Icy pisco sours with a kick, courtesy of Maricel Presilla
Right next door, at chef and South American food expert's table, they were serving strong pisco sours.
Turkish chef Musa Dagdeviren slices lahmacun
The queue in front of Musa Dagdeviren's table was crazy long, and it took several attempts to finally get ahold of a piece of his lahmacun, a crusty bread thinly spread with lamb and tomatoes. The wait was well worth it.
Chef Dagdeviren and friends
What a way to wrap up five weeks of travel -- this afternoon we're heading up to Napa, to attend Culinary Institute of America at Greystone's 12th Annual Worlds of Flavor conference. The topics of this year's conference are ones that are near and dear to our hearts: World Street Food and World Comfort Food.
We're looking forward to catching up with old friends and making new ones. And I'm hoping to blog from the conference, if I can tear time away from the packed schedule of talks, demos, and workshops -- so stay tuned.
One thing we love about Taipei is that it's so obviously comfortable in its own skin.
Confident enough of its 21st century-ness that it's not driven to clear the streets of food sellers to prove its standing as a 'modern' city, Taipei is a metropolis in which skyscrapers and upscale eateries happily coexist with itinerant vendors, often on the same block.
In Wanhua District we bumped into a vendor peddling, from a hand-pushed two-wheeled cart, a mysterious sweet that we'd encountered nowhere else on the island -- chewy bite-sized squares chilled underneath blocks of ice,
and tossed in ground sesame seeds before bagging.
It was a warm day and the chilled marshmallow-ish pillows, lightly toasty and not too sweet, hit the spot.
The gent was decidedly nonplussed by Dave's camera and resisted my attempts to conduct an informal interview. He did, however, tell us how long he's been plying his trade on the streets of Wanhua: 50 years, give or take a few.
Update 12/11/09: Mystery solved -- this is a traditional Taiwanese treat made of sweet potato (sometimes green bean) and rolled in plain flour, toasted. Apparently the vendor, known to folks in the 'hood as Ah Bee, is a bit of a local celebrity. If you can read Chinese, further info awaits here.
Thanks much to K, a font of info on all things Taiwanese (especially food)!
Chewy sweets vendor, somewhere in the vicinity of the intersection of Guiyang and Xitang Roads -- maybe -- in Wanhua district, Taipei. He says he's there everyday, public holidays excepted.