Pandan Leaf Pound Cake

I've been meaning to bake with pandan leaves (see photo) for a while. Pandan is a popular flavoring in Asian desserts (used much like vanilla) and has a difficult-to-describe flavor that's both unique and delicious. The mere scent of it reminds me of travel or of kaya spread (a very tasty Singaporean concoction of egg yolks, sugar, coconut and pandan) on toast. The astute among you will note that pandan leaves come from the same plant as the kewra water I blogged about a few months ago. Kewra water comes from the flowers, however, not the leaves.

There were a couple obstacles in the way of my baking objective, however. First, I had to figure out what pandan leaves looked like and who carried them. I knew their taste and scent, but had never bought one before. Finding them in Toronto wasn't really a problem with a little olfaction at my favorite Indian/Sri Lankan grocery store on Parliament (Ambal Trading Co.). I saw them there a month or so ago and made a mental note of where they were for when I needed them.

This past weekend, I went back to the store and walked over to where the leaves had been. Lo and behold, they weren't there this time. That brings me to obstacle #2: pandan is the Chinese term for the leaves (I think), but I had no idea what they were called in India or Sri Lanka. The man behind the counter at Ambal is usually very friendly (which is good, because just about nothing in this store is labeled -- I often ask questions), so I asked him if he had pandan leaves. He stared back blankly. I tried to describe them and pointed to where I had seen them. He said "Oh, you mean [unintelligible] leaves?" I said, "maybe." We walked over to the refrigerator and realized we were indeed talking about the same leaf. I bought some.

As a quick side note, Ambal is a great store not just for their selection of spices, lentils, rice and fresh produce (with the notable and odd consistent exception of cucumbers), but also because just about every sort of leaf you could want for Indian cooking costs $1 per bag.

Ok, back to my project. I learned via some reading that pandan is usually steeped in liquid (like water and/or coconut milk), sometimes blending the leaf directly in, to create a bright green pandan "juice." I had also heard recently that another good way to get a flavor into something is to blend the flavor with the sugar for the recipe. Given the nature of the recipe I was using as my basis (Pichet Ong's sweetened condensed milk and vanilla pound cake), I adopted the latter approach.

To make pandan sugar, I tore up 2 pandan leaves and put them in the food processor with some sugar. I let it spin for quite a while (several minutes) until the leaf was completely broken up and the sugar was a delightful shade of green. The leaves had a bit of liquid in them, so the sugar got a little wet…but this didn't seem to have a huge effect. I then processed the sugar with some butter. In the photo you can see the contrast of the green sugar/butter and the sweetened condensed milk added next. Then I added some flour/baking powder and 3 eggs, and baked it for about an hour.


The resulting cake is shown in the next photo. The top cracked a bit, but this lets you see that the interior stayed green and looked kind of cool. It was pretty tasty -- very sweet and rich, as you'd expect. I could very clearly taste pandan (with a very slight hint of a bitter aftertaste that may have come from including the whole leaves). A couple friends who tried it, however, said they couldn't pick out the pandan taste. They liked the cake, though. I guess maybe it's just a subtle flavor or one people just aren't good at picking out (especially if not used to it).

I put the unused pandan leaves in the freezer, so stay tuned. I'm thinking about possibly using them to infuse vodka. Or maybe something else entirely.

Making Grapefruit Almond Frangipane

I was unoriginal again. While this means that I don't get to tell you about one of my own creations, it does give me the opportunity to tell you about yet another one of my favorite cookbook authors - Pichet Ong. Ong's book, The Sweet Spot, is a unique treat that contains the recipes for even more unique treats.

Ong specializes in desserts (he ran a dessert-only restaurant in New York called P*Ong), but brings an a creative Asian sensibility to them. His book is all about taking traditional Asian flavors (mango, various teas, yuzu, almonds, coconut, etc.) and working them into western desserts like cookies, cakes, pies and ice cream. If you know me at all (or have even read this blog a couple times), you likely understand that I think this is a fabulous approach.

I've worked my way through much of his book, and recently noticed his blog. And especially this recipe for a Grapefruit Almond Frangipane tart. I love grapefruit, but had never thought to use it in baking. And it seemed like it could go well with almonds. It was a fascinating idea, if nothing else; so I tried it.

This was not an easy recipe. Blog recipes aren't explained quite the way cookbook recipes are, so I had to Google to learn about browning butter (no, I'd never done this before). It also had a number of steps -- making and rolling out the grapefruit-flavored (via zest) tart pastry, which is not my strongsuit (mine cracked quite a bit). Making the frangipane cream without burning the butter. Locating almond flour at the grocery store (in the organic area of Wegman's, it turns out). And getting it all assembled.

In the end, I'm pleased with how it came out. Definitely one of the prettier things I've ever made. I think I used a tart ring that was too big, as I'd want more grapefruit coverage if I did it again. People seemed to like it a lot, though I noticed that the crust came out a bit underbaked despite being in the oven for quite a while.

Chrysanthemum Ice Cream

Ice cream is like an artist's blank canvas, in an alternate world where canvas is richly delicious. Like real canvas, though, ice cream can be a base for a tremendous variety of creations -- basically any flavor you can steep in milk and/or puree and mix with a custard, and then freeze. Once you have a few basic recipes, you can try just about anything.

Somewhat surprisingly given the ease of steeping-based ice creams (like mint, ginger, etc.), we don't often see ice creams based on tea. Yes, green tea ice cream is pretty easy to get -- but I'm excluding it because it is usually made with matcha powder, and not steeped with leaves or flowers. And yet, people have been mixing tea with milk and sugar for years -- Asian milk teas, Indian Chai with milk, yummy Thai tea with sweetened condensed milk, European teas with milk, the American 'tea latte,' etc. etc.

To be fair, Googling and thumbing through books does yield a few recipes. My favorite ice cream cookbook is David Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop. He's got a huge range of recipes from vanilla and chocolate standards to creative (and delicious) forays like black pepper or goat cheese. And most of them can be pretty easily tweaked to incorporate other ingredients. He includes a recipe for a steeped Black Currant Tea ice cream.

This was the basis for my experiment with chrysanthemum ice cream. I picked up a few packages of chrysanthemum tea (really just a packet of dried flowers) on a recent trip to Hangzhou, China for the CSCW conference. This is one of the areas where the tea is produced. It's typically brewed by putting a few flowers in hot water for a few minutes.

Instead, I put a handful of flowers, some milk, and a bit of sugar in a saucepan on the stove. I warmed these to about 170 degrees (to avoid filmy boiled milk), and then turned off the heat and let the leaves do their thing for about an hour. This was then stirred into some egg yolks, and cooked to form a thick yellow custard that I then mixed with some heavy cream.

Then I froze it in my nifty new(ish) ice cream maker (yes, those keeping score at home will note that i now have two ice cream makers; don't ask), and tasted it. The ice cream was richly (but not cloyingly) sweet, with just a hint of clearly identifiable chrysanthemum taste. Some more flowers or longer steeping might help get a stronger flavor, but I actually liked the subtlety of it on the end of each bite. I might try this with some other teas, too…perhaps hibiscus or jasmine.

Stay tuned for more experiments, and please let me know if you've had other experience with steeped tea-based ice creams.

Why I love Toronto's Chinatown

When I'm in Toronto and I need more than a couple dollars worth of groceries, I get on my bike (or sometimes my car) and head to Chinatown on Spadina. Many of my friends think I'm crazy for doing this, and they have some good arguments:

It's inconvenient: why bike a mile or so when there are at least 15-20 grocery stores within 5 blocks of my apartment (did you hear that, Ithaca? 15-20 grocery stores!)? It's dirty: you never quite know what you're stepping on, there are dead animals hanging in windows, and it's important to check berries for signs of mold. It's crowded and off-putting: stores are tightly packed and few people speak English.

And still others say that it's a relic of a bygone era that wasn't very nice to begin with: many immigrants with the means to do so shop at T&T (a Canadian chain that's sort of an Asian version of Whole Foods) or Pacific Mall in the suburbs, and there aren't even many markets like this left in China.

And yet, I still love it. Here's why:

It's efficient. The goal is here not to be polite, provide great service, conform to corporate policy, or work as slowly as possible until the end of one's shift. The goal, which somehow appears to be shared by everybody, is to sell a lot of stuff as quickly as possible. Classic example: if you're just buying one or two things and have exact change, just hold it up and make eye contact with a cashier who is processing somebody else's order. They'll take your money and you can go. No problem. The cash register software even supports this (they can shift between multiple simultaneous orders) at the larger stores. Ditto if the person in front of you is taking a while to pay; the cashier will start on your order and then return to the other person's. Amazing.

It's resourceful, with a refreshing sensibility that pervades everything. Nothing is wasted, and I don't feel like I'm paying for a show (note to Wegman's: the Irish music for selling St. Patrick's day beer was cute, but I'm still talking to you here).
Signs are often handwritten on cardboard. The produce isn't shiny. Stuff isn't unnecessarily refrigerated, periodically sprayed with water, or thrown away. Stuff that's ripe or very ripe is cheaper than stuff that isn't ripe yet. And they make good use of the weather: foods displayed on the sidewalk vary every day as the temperature changes (and are sometimes rotated inside to keep from freezing), and very cold days mean that all of the produce is inside, and frozen seafood is on the sidewalk. I respect that, and I'm pretty sure it saves me money too. It almost hearkens back to an era when refrigeration wasn't cheaper than labor, and energy cost real money.

Speaking of saving money, stuff in Chinatown is dirt cheap. Without getting into stereotypes, I may be genetically predisposed to enjoy a bargain (and I certainly like it a lot, even if it's not hereditary). Chinatown is very much a caveat emptor sort of world, but cheaper produce cannot be found in very many developed places on the planet. I find that I typically pay between 10 and 50% (I don't mean 10% less, I mean 10% of the price) of what similar items cost in supermarkets. Recent examples: Bean sprouts @ $.29/lb ($3.98 per lb @ Wegman's), quarts of strawberries @ 2 for $2, tomatoes @ $.59/lb, carrots @ $.39/lb, limes @ 5 for $1, atulfo mangoes @ 6 for $5, etc. It goes on and on.

It's educational. When stuff isn't clearly labeled and staff don't speak English, you very quickly learn to tell the difference between things like galangal, ginger and turmeric root (just ask anybody who tried the turmeric sorbet I accidentally made a few years ago-- oops!); thai basil, mint, rau ram and pandan leaves; etc. Yes, it's frustrating sometimes. But a bit of trial and error means sampling new foods and being better equipped for travel. I find it endlessly fascinating and there are still lots of things I haven't tried.

You can find just about anything. Durian? Sure. Rambutans? Yup. Mangosteens? Absolutely. With a little digging (and possibly some online research beforehand to find photos), it's possible to find just about anything in Chinatown.

And finally, it's fun. When I lived in Toronto, part of my routine for weekend visitors was to take them grocery shopping with me in Chinatown (and Kensington). They almost invariably loved this. Try taking your visiting friends to the supermarket with you and see what they say.

Dabbling in Mexican Candy

I don't believe that I have yet given a Pearwise shout-out to Lynne Rosetto-Kasper and The Splendid Table, her fabulous NPR show. It's one of the staples in the set of podcasts that keeps me company on my frequent treks between Toronto and Ithaca. One of the things I love about the show is her knack for identifying great new cookbooks, which I wind up purchasing more often than perhaps I should.

It's one of these interviews that is the reason I'm writing about Mexican candy today. It's not something I had ever really thought much about, at least since the occasional treat in middle school Spanish class or the spicy Pixy Stix-like candy that kids from Mexico used to get in care packages at camp.

Yet…Lynne's interview with Fany Gerson about her book -- My Sweet Mexico -- really intrigued me. She talked about coconut and limes; about candies that had origins in convents; about candied tropical fruits like tamarind and others. And this was suddenly an arena I wanted to play in.

The book is beautiful and fascinating. I've now made a few recipes from it, and they've been very unlike anything I've ever done before. This makes for some fun time in the kitchen, but also makes the book occasionally difficult to cook from. I can deal with some vagueness in a cookie recipe because I've made hundreds (thousands?) of cookies and know roughly what's going to happen. I know less about what "thick" means as a time to stop heating a mixture of coconut and sugar (um…how thick should it be?). The book assumes a bit of expertise I don't always have, and the suggested timings seem to be a bit off. But the results have been tasty.

A couple candies so far. First, I tried a lime 'jamoncillo' or milk fudge. This basically is the product of slowly cooking down sweetened condensed milk, condensed milk, and butter, flavored with lots of lime zest. It was a lot of stirring (though much less than if one had started with sugar and non-condensed milk; this is a shortcut), but the result was rich and flavorful. Many other flavors are possible.

I also made cocada -- a coconut caramel candy. These were not all that pretty, so no photo. Here you basically make a caramel syrup using coconut water, then stir in grated coconut (I used frozen) and cook it until quite thick (defined here as being able to see the bottom of the pot when stirring), and then add some lime zest. The resulting product is then formed into little balls. These were extremely sweet, but tasty. Mine came out a bit soupier than the ones in the cookbook pictures. I think this may have been because I used frozen coconut.

With that in mind, I bought a fresh coconut when I made limones rellenos de coco -- coconut-stuffed limes. These had fascinated me from the start; whole limes cooked, hollowed out, sweetened with sugar syrup and then filled with sweet fresh coconut. They were a lot of work, especially given the amount of new techniques I had to figure out. I had never cracked a coconut shell and grated the meat, nor had I ever hollowed out a lime. I'm still not sure I did either of these things correctly. The result, however, is pretty cool looking, I have to say. These are for my colleagues on Wednesday, so I'll withhold judgment until they've tasted them.

Some interesting things here. I'm wanting to learn more about candy, and to keep playing with this book. I'll keep you posted and would love to hear about your experiences.

Carrot Cupcakes With Rau Ram Icing

This cupcake began with that papaya salad in Cambodia. It was unique among the papaya salads I've had because it had a hefty dose of rau ram. Rau ram, a southeast Asian herb (aka Vietnamese coriander), has a vaguely citrus-y taste that is strong, but doesn't overpower. (I find it very unlike coriander/cilantro, so I'm not sure where the alternate name came from.) It gave the papaya salad a lovely fresh sweetness that contrasted with the salty fish sauce, sour lime and green tomato, and hot chilies. (Image of rau ram borrowed from Kitchentoworld.com).

I had not tasted or thought much about rau ram in a while, but that papaya salad was a jarring reminder that it might be a fun flavor to play with in a cupcake. Its sweetness and citrusiness might play nicely with sugar, and could be used like basil or sage. So I spent some time thinking about this.

First idea was to see if I could come up with a cupcake based directly on the papaya salad. No fish sauce or dried shrimp, but a similar combination of hot, sour, salty and sweet (the four key flavors in Thai cooking). Green papayas and mangoes are not unlike apples or carrots in consistency, so I probably could have used them directly. The problem is that they don't have a lot of flavor; they're really more of a delivery device in the salad. I might try this later, but wasn't sure how they'd stand up in baking. So I decided to use carrots. They're sweet and have a similar texture; and carrot cake recipes are abundant.

The problem was that carrot cake recipes are loaded with cinnamon and nutmeg, flavors you'd never find within miles of a good papaya salad. That wasn't going to work. So I started to think about substitutes. I started with a carrot cupcake recipe from Epicurious.

Papaya salads start by mixing garlic cloves, fresh chilies, and salt with a mortar and pestle. Garlic seemed inappropriate for a cupcake, but there's no harm in chilies and salt. Ginger, however, is a taste that makes its way into both sweet and savory dishes. It can plausibly be substituted for either garlic or cinnamon in the right context. So by the transitive property, so I used a teaspoon of ground ginger in place of cinnamon, along with some cayenne powder instead of the nutmeg.

I still needed tartness, so I threw in the finely grated zest of a lime just before baking.

And I haven't forgotten about the rau ram, which is pretty easy to find in Toronto's Spadina Chinatown (but you have to recognize it -- nothing is labeled). It was, well, the icing on the cake. Borrowing another technique from Vanilla Garlic, I chopped up the leaves and cooked them with sugar and water to form a thick syrup. I then mixed this with cream cheese (from Mendel's Creamery), butter, and powdered sugar to get a rich icing with little flecks of rau ram.

We'll see what people think of these...

Update after eating: The cake was moist, delicious and gingery. If I do it again, I'd like to add a bit more chili so it burns more. The rau ram, unfortunately, got a bit lost. I'm going to think about ways to possibly make it stronger, and also incorporate it into other ingredients. Considering some herbal candies if I can come up with a way to do it...

Cooking Internationally in Ithaca

I really like cooking south and southeast Asian food. These areas feature some of my favorite combinations of flavors, and have food that's just generally tasty. When I have folks over for dinner, these are generally my foods of choice.

I also like to be as authentic as I can in capturing the key elements of those flavors. This often requires a bit of scrambling to find ingredients. In Ithaca, this can be a non-trivial challenge. Wegman's is pretty good, but they don't have everything. In this entry I will walk you through a recent Thai-style dinner I hosted, and explain where I was able to find the ingredients in Ithaca.

I was working mostly from a cookbook I got when taking a cooking class at the (fabulous) Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School in Thailand. The recipes have probably been adapted slightly for a western palate (half the chilies, anyone?), but they're pretty close to real. I also wanted to make my own curry paste. I've not done this before, and it seemed a worthy endeavor.

I decided to make: mieng kum (leaf wraps), green papaya salad (but only if I could find a green papaya), pad thai with tofu, coconut curry with chicken, and some sort of lemongrass ice cream (ice cream not really Thai at all, but this seemed like it would fit and it was a good excuse to play with my new ice cream maker).

Ok…so I won't bore you with a full list of ingredients, but here are the more unusual things (read: stuff not usually in US supermarkets) that would be required for this: green papaya, lemongrass (for ice cream and curry paste), shrimp paste (for curry paste), lime leaves (for curry), Thai basil (for curry), galangal (for a few things), dried shrimp, and Asian eggplant.

First stop was Wegman's. They have an impressive Asian dry goods department and a decent selection of Asian produce. Lesson #1: Their Thai dry goods are not well suited to making stuff from scratch. They had lots of prepared Thai curry pastes, but no shrimp paste or dried shrimp, which are key constituent ingredients. They did, impressively, have fresh galangal however. They also had lemongrass, but it was very expensive and didn't look very good. Pass.

Next stop: Ithaca Tofu, which is a little Asian market buried behind the Triphammer Mall. I knew I was on the right track when I ran into several Asian graduate students from my department there, and this place was impressive. Thai basil? Check. Asian eggplants? check. Dried shrimp? check. Lime leaves? Needed to ask the guy behind the counter to dig them out of the freezer, but…yes, they were there. Check. Green papaya? Not so much, but I guess they sometimes have them.

Final stop: Win Li, which is an Asian market on the other end of Ithaca, almost at Home Depot. Green papaya? Yes! They had many of the other things here too (though no lime leaves or thai basil), but it was interesting to note that their prices were a lot higher than Ithaca Tofu. They also had some really nice (if slightly overpriced) Atulfo mangoes, which were pretty outstanding for this time of year.

So here are a couple shots of dinner. Making my own curry paste was somewhat stinky (if you've ever opened a jar of shrimp paste, you know what I mean), but rewarding. Some effort, yes, but really tasty. The only hitch in this was that none of the stores had red Thai chilies (only green), so my 'red' curry paste was a bit on the brown side.

The curry itself was interesting because it relied on separating (i.e., thick and thin) coconut milk, with the thick milk added first and used as a cooking fat. This also browns and thickens the coconut milk, which adds depth to the curry. It's unfortunately not possible to get the tiny (pea-sized) Thai eggplants in Ithaca (or most places in the US, as far as I can tell), but purple Asian eggplants fill in ok (though with a much less bitter taste). And it was totally worth chasing down those lime leaves; they add such a nice finish to coconut curry that just can't be had otherwise.

The mieng kum (above) were enjoyed by everybody, though not as beautiful as the ones I had in Singapore last month (I didn't even attempt to look for betel leaves, which are way cooler than Boston lettuce). Pad thai was pretty standard, perhaps slightly enhanced by the palm sugar I bought from a farmer in Cambodia (see photo). Papaya salad was tasty. And the ice cream came out nicely as well.


One other ingredient note. This isn't Thai at all, but it's also possible to find fresh curry leaves in Ithaca. The "Universal Deli" (actually a convenience store) on Eddy St. in Collegetown gets them on the first Wednesday of the month. It's $2 for a small packet (which is really pricey, for curry leaves) and you have to ask the cashier to fetch them for you.

Next post: Mexican candy.