Quick hit: Schnitzel und Spätzle

Just a quick one before I pass out...

At the local marché's butcher stand yesterday, we came across some fantastic looking veal and asked for two escalopes. Once again, as though thinking in unison, Alannah and I had the same thing in mind: Schnitzel.

Now before you go on about how cruel veal is, there are two kinds of veal. The traditional "white" veal, which is milk or – worse yet – formula fed and kept in tiny pens, and then there's "pink" or rosé veal, which is naturally, normally, humanely raised veal. The calf is allowed to pasture and forage for itself, have – depending on the farm – room to roam, and its existence is no more cruel than that of other animals raised for meat.  (If that in and of itself is a concern for you, there are plenty of wonderful vegetarian and vegan blogs that-a-way --> )

Anyway, back to the food...

Schnitzel mit Spätzle und Pilzen

Schnitzel: A slice of rosé veal breaded in panko and standard bread crumbs, fried for approximately three minutes a side over medium-high heat (for a truly rosé interior).

Sage Spätzle: Standard spätzle dough with eggs, milk, salt and flour, with the addition of finely chopped sage and mustard. Alannah had pressed the dough through a collander with a spatula into a pot of boiling water, and before serving sautéed it in browned butter and more sage.

Mushroom sauce: Sliced and sautéed mushrooms, reduced in Porto Branco (white port wine). Thickened with the cheat addition of leftover brown gravy from last night's Loco Moco.

Mock Sauerkraut: Barely in the picture is my quick mock sauerkraut. Real sauerkraut takes days to make, as the cabbage needs to ferment. So I steamed finely sliced savoy cabbage with salt and cider vinegar, and then put it into a fan of sweet onions softened in a spoonful of... lard. Cinnamon and caraway seeds lent it a bit of that Central European flavor. Simmered in more Porto Branco.

As is a common theme around here, German food, despite being from a neighboring country, is very hard to come by in Paris. Our new favorite place to have a nooner or late afternoon quickie, Tante Emma Laden, isn't open at night, and the only other Teutonic resto/bakery/shop in town, the Austro-Hungarian Stübli, recently closed its doors. And we always crave what we can't get.

Continuing the theme, our dessert was something else you can't regularly get when you go out in Paris: A shot of Fernet-Branca with a ginger ale back. Ok, multiple shots. This particular combination is rather uniquely San Franciscan, but with both Fernet and ginger ale becoming much more common on store shelves in the City of Light, we're going to try to bring this eater's drink into style.

Fernet, being a digestif, is wonderful for its intended effect. It's brilliant after a heavy meal. Taken in chilled shots with gulps of ginger ale, it also has the magical ability to get you fired up and drunk at the same time. *hiccup*

Kamanawanale'a

It's a faux Hawaiian title. Read it out loud. Hur hur. Hur hur.

And this, despite our best efforts, is probably faux Hawaiian food.

Neither of us are Hawaiian. I think Alannah's been there once. I've never even been. But back in California, we have a good number of Hawaiian friends, and one unattainable thing we really crave every once in a while is Hawaiian food.

We were walking through Paris' Chinatown the previous weekend, and like every time, were disappointed when passing by a restaurant called Hawai. Looking at the menu, it's all standard Sino-Vietnamese fare. No loco moco. No kalua pig. Not even a single taro root. In fact, it's probably pronounced "Hah-way" and our fantasies of gravy-slathered beef, pulled pork, and starch overload are just a bout of wishful thinking... At that point, we both thought, "We really need to cook up a Hawaiian feast sometime."

This last weekend we found some more off-the-beaten path ethnic stores (including a handful of tiny Filipino markets in the ritzy 16th arrondissement) and, as it turns out, wound up with what it takes to make an authentic Hawaiian meal. No, not an entire pig to roast in a sandpit under banana leaves, but that other Island staple: Spam.

Spam musubi and Longanisa onigiri

The South Pacific has a longstanding love affair with the canned lunchmeat that's been ridiculed for decades by Johnny Carson and Monty Python. Our friend Arnold over at Inuyaki has an archive of articles on Spam. Frankly, I still find it utterly disgusting. But as soon as we saw the iconic blue can on the shelf of the Marché Manille, Alannah and I turned to each other and said in unison, "Spam musubi!"

Musubi is another term for the Japanese snack onigiri. (Many Hawaiian dishes, I've found, are derived from what I grew up with as Japanese comfort foods.) It's basically a bundle or brick of cold or room-temperature rice stuffed or topped with some sort of non-rice substance. In this case, that non-rice, non-food, non-organic substance is a fried slice of Spam. And it's magical. You can eat it warm. You can eat it cold. You can probably eat it 20 years from now.

NOTE: As conscientious foodies, we try to buy as much organic/locally produced/artisan product as possible. While it's still somewhat inexcusable, we were relieved to learn that this UK-sourced Spam is actually made under license in Denmark using European hog parts. For what it's worth, at least it's all EU.

Of course, with the guy at the Filipino store having hooked us up with some of his buddy's homemade Longanisa, we had to honor his coolness by making some onigiri with said sweet sausage as well. Not to mention it's perfectly fitting, as Filipino foods are as much a part of the Hawaiian melting pot as Japanese, Chinese and mainland. (Or so the menu at the L&L Hawaiian Barbecue chain informs me.)

Despite the setback in bequeathing it with official endangered status, the recent brouhaha over the scarcity of bluefin tuna (which is rarely served or sold in the mainstream marketplace), has seemd to make the price of all tuna go up. Despite the rather ridiculous prices, when I saw some beautiful, deeply-colored, sashimi-grade tuna at our local Sunday market, I had to pony up. All for one dish that'll get hoovered up in two seconds: Poké.

Don't worry, it's not endangered bluefin. We can't afford dat shit, brudda.

Poké is a Polynesian variant on sashimi or ceviche. You take your fresh fish, slice it up into strips or dice it into cubes, and let it marry with a blend of soy sauce, sesame oil, chilis, and sweet onion. Simple but fantastic. Like with many raw fish dishes like ceviche, it goes really well with a contrasting side like guacamole – or simply sliced avocados. But it's good enough to have straight up. I like to think of it as the steak tartare of the sea.

These cucumbers are here for the sake of not dying
of heart failure before the meal is over.

Going by experiences like the aforementioned L&L (or San Francisco's legendary Hawaiian sit-down, Da Hukilau), no platter of Hawaiian food is complete without a rich, mayonnaise-y macaroni salad. Like Spam, mayonnaise is one of those things where it takes an exception for me to like. Those exceptions are Japanese Kewpie-brand mayonnaise and the homemade stuff.

For this salad, while Kewpie would've been perfect, we simply went with making our own, which is easy: Hand-beat the ever-loving crap out of one egg yolk with a touch of vinegar, slowly adding standard salad oil (olive, peanut, etc.) until it gets to the volume and consistency you like. The approximate ratio is around 200ml (just under one cup) per egg yolk. You can use a machine, but everyone knows a good whipping by hand is where it's at.

We used less mayo than we're accustomed to from Hawaiian joints back on the Left Coast, and even lightened it up with some thinly sliced Japanese-style cucumber to give it some freshness.

Heart attack on a plate.

Of course, a cholesterol-heavy side dish needs an even more fat-laden main course to accompany it. And there's no Hawaiian meal easier or more satisfying to make than loco moco. Take a pile of steamed Japanese rice, top it with a hamburger patty, top that with a fried egg, and then smother it all with brown gravy. If you're insane like we are, add a link of longanisa on the side, just to seal your doom.

This was no ordinary loco moco, though. We used top grade Japanese rice made in filtered water, grade "01" eggs (the top French classification for free-range, cage-free, blah blah blah), and freshly ground steak from our local butcher (that I'd mixed with finely diced sweet onion). The result was the most amazing tasting loco moco we've ever had – largely due to the crazy hambagu steak (as they'd say in Japanese) patty. After the musubi and the onigiri and the poké and the macaroni salad, this was all just overkill.

But, well, that's what a Hawaiian feast is all about. Celebrating the abundance of starch, flesh, fat and sugar that can find its way on to an island chain in the Pacific. Or the Ile-de-France region around Paris.

That's kind of sort of an Island, right?

KFC vs. Local & Organic: An Epic Tale

It's been a long, hot, sultry summer. Have you noticed our absence?

In true Parisian style, we've blown off just about everything for the summer: A couple of weeks in the States, entertaining (and sometimes getting busy in the kitchen with) friends from abroad, and generally doing anything to avoid being in our steampit of an apartment. Generally, this has meant hanging out on the various terrasses of Paris and getting slurry. And frankly, if there's anything we like better than cooking, taking photos, and writing about it, it's actually being out and about in Paris. Drinking.

But with the weather cooling down in time for la rentrée, we've ventured back into the kitchen more often, greasing the pans and flouring the crevices of passion. I've been compiling a sort of "Greatest Hits" of the summer for anyone interested, but in the meantime, something else has brought us out of our summer stupor: The KFC Double-Down.

Of course, I loathe KFC for their animal husbandry practices (or lack thereof) and the fact that their food, in general, sucks. But I have this morbid curiosity about various manufactured foods, and the last one to enchant me with its siren song was KFC's disgusting Famous Bowl. From first sight, I had to know what a sandwich using two pieces of fried chicken breast in lieu of bread was all about.

Fortunately for my stomach, intestines, and any other orifices affected by potential food poisoning, KFC in France has an extremely limited menu. No Famous/Toilet Bowl. And most certainly no Double Down. So after numerous comments back and forth on Facebook and Twitter – and some egging on from Alannah – I vowed I would make a "premium" version of the Double Down so we can try for ourselves.


Behold, the TKFC Double Down.

Two fried chicken breasts done in the style of Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc fried chicken (from scratch, cribbing the recipe from the spooge-worthy Inuyaki.com), and in between it some slices of cheese and bacon.

Of course, these aren't just any ingredients. In order to really one-up KFC, we went as from-scratch as possible.

The chicken is farm-raised, just slaughtered, and lovingly prepared by our local butcher. Yesterday morning, it still had a head, feet, and feathers.

The bacon is one of the same butcher's specialties: Poitrine fumée (smoked pork belly), sliced to order. The butcher's from the Auvergne region – famous for its hogs – so he does not mess around when it comes to his cured meats, most of which are the product of his mad in-house charcuterie skills.

The cheese is Gruyère from the fromagerie up the street: One of the many master cheesemongers who ages and then selects cheeses for you on-site based on when you'll consume it (an appreciated art in France); One of the few who is a woman.

We even went a little crazy sourcing the ingredients for the fried chicken coating.

Buttermilk is hard to come by in France, so Alannah has devised a trick where she mixes fromage blanc ("white cheese," but it's actually just a denser yogurt) with milk. Naturally, we go with the organic stuff that's micro-filtered as opposed to heat pasteurized, but sometimes we go raw if we know we're going to use a litre within a few days.

For the dry part of the coating, we went as "from scratch" as we could, as well. While we don't mill our own flour, I did mill our own garlic powder (half a dried clove in a pestel and mortar), and the seasonings were as locally sourced as possible. (Impossible for the cayenne pepper, but hell...) Even the herbs and lemon for the brine were purchased at the local green market.

Having gone so far as to skip KFC and the supermarket, we decided to go a bit upmarket with classic KFC sides, as well.


Mashed potatoes became Alannah's spectacularly creamy, thick mashed red potatoes, topped with bacon gravy. Corn on the cob became corn charred on the cob, then shucked and tossed with butter and parsley. And - making a pitstop at Shakey's - Mojo potatoes became our Belgian-style double fried Mojo potatoes with grated parmesean and olive oil.

And the end result of all this?

It tasted like upscale fast food. Really good, really upscale fast food. As in I'd do body shots of the gravy off of Alannah. And she's already told me the only thing she'd forsake me for is Ad Hoc – and by golly, that's Ad Hoc fried chicken in front of her.

But I didn't cream my jeans over the concept.

In fact, I'm not sure what the big deal with KFC's Double Down is. The marketing ploy is that it's a bacon-cheese sandwich using fried chicken breasts for a bun. In reality, the combo you're looking at is a rebranded chicken Cordon Bleu. Think about it: A Cordon Bleu is a fried chicken breast stuffed with ham and cheese, often served at banquets and school cafeterias. The Double Down just doubles the amount of chicken.

So really, we made chicken Cordon Bleu with excellent ingredients tonight. Ho freakin' hum.

--

But wait, there's more!

When we were assembling the ingredient list yesterday (we started a day before, because of the overnight brining process for the chicken), Alannah was a bit bummed by the bill of materials. She was under the impression that the Double Down was a burger. As in chicken-burger patty-chicken with some bacon and cheese in there.

So when we were at the butcher shop, we had our man in the bloody apron grind up some of his finest beef for us.

And like every good mad science project, we created a backup in case the first one failed... "Screw the Double Down," she said. "I wanna go All-In."

Mixed gambling metaphors aside, it was a perfect name.


Two TKFC chicken breasts, a 250 gram (over half pound) burger patty cooked medium, bacon, gruyère cheese, caramelized onions, deep fried hash browns, and bacon/burger-dripping gravy.

The heart-topped picks not only keep this monstrosity together, but remind you exactly what you risk damaging while you eat it.

I suggested topping it with a fried egg, but Alannah told me to stay realistic. There's only so much one can fit in his/her mouth in one go, after all.

And while I can't say I will ever make or eat such a thing again, it is now quite evident that I married the perfect woman. One who is still shapely, but can concoct a "sandwich" that puts the McGangBang to shame.

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Unfortunately, we were too busy deep frying, frying, and roasting to concoct a KFC-style dessert. And to be frank, I don't care to make a fancy version of the Colonel's Parfait.

Instead, we rolled down to the gelato shop in our neighborhood, named in 2007 as Maître Glacier (Master Ice Cream Maker) of Europe, for some of their fabulous on-site creations. I was very happy with my cup of lemon-basil gelato, and Alannah with her green tea gelato, all made and sold on the very same street as the butcher, green market, and cheesemonger.

How's that for supporting independent, local merchants who source their goods from as near as possible?

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Unfortunately, in bending the Colonel over and making his redneck ass our bitch like this, we spent a lot of time and money, and didn't exactly stroll to the gelateria all light as a feather.

The ingredient cost for one "Double Down," one "All-In," three sides, a bottle of wine, and dessert for two nearly came out to 30€ ($43). The time to prepare it from beginning to end: 17 hours. NOTE: There's a substantial amount of leftovers. Except the wine.

A Double Down combo meal at KFC costs around $7 (plus tax) and probably takes around six minutes.

Neither is particularly good for you.

But our version contained no hormones, came from animals raised in open-air farms (and we don't accept farms that are big dirt lots as open-air, there's a whole rating system for it), had as few industrial ingredients as we could get away with (no luck on the peppercorns, salt, and milk, I'm sure) and nothing genetically modified.

We got the pleasure of talking to our local purveyors, who are always more friendly than anyone at a supermarket or fast food restaurant.

We enjoyed beer and wine while waiting for the brine to cool.

We enjoyed each other's company while the chicken was brining overnight.

In every way, despite the much higher amount of time and money required, our "Double Down" (and "All In") were infinitely more pleasurable than the experience you get from KFC.

And what point is it going after foods on the extreme ends of the spectrum – be they the biggest, the fattiest, the greasiest, or whatever – if there is no pleasure?