The Maltese Bacon

Eating in Brooklyn: Lan Zhou Hand Pull Noodles

It's amazing that you can still eat handmade noodles for $6. But that's the Chinatown Paradox isn't it? As the zig zag of inflation and deflation confuse food costs all across the board, Chinatown prices manage to stay compelling. I am referring to the noodles at the Sunset Park branch of Lan Zhou Hand Pull Noodles, a couple blocks off the N stop at 8th Avenue and 62nd St.

The Mixed Beef Noodles comes with tripe, gelatinous cuts, and sliced beef. The broth was not as tasty as I would have liked, but there are plenty of condiments to spruce it up. The Duck Noodle Soup broth was more flavorful. They do not skimp on the fresh noodles, and for once I had trouble finishing them. Afterward, we went to the new giant supermarket one block southwest of the train stop. The condiments section alone is to die for, not to mention the wide variety of fresh vegetables.

 Lan Zhou Hand Pull Noodles
 5924 8th Ave
 Brooklyn, NY 11220
 (718) 492-7568‎
 For photos of the noodles at Lan Zhou click here.

 Lan Zhou Handmade Noodles (This is a Manhattan location of hand pulled noodles, but I'm not sure if it is the same owner as the one I went to above.)
144 E. Broadway (b/w East Broadway & Pike St.)
New York, NY 10002
(212)566-6933

Pan Fried Salt and Pepper Shrimp

The only time I remember eating salt and pepper shrimp growing up was during Vietnamese wedding receptions, invariably held at Chinese banquet halls. I never paid them too much attention as they had to compete with the more exciting prospects of crunchy jellyfish salad, Peking duck and steamed carp.They would appear heads and shells on, looming larger than life.  (They reminded me of crayfish, who were my sworn enemies - residual scars left over from falling into a river full of them when I was young. They didn't bite me or nothin', but I couldn't shake the thought that they had been crawling all over me.)

In New York, salt and pepper shrimp is widely available at Vietnamese restaurants, which are mostly owned by ethnic Chinese-Vietnamese. You can call it Vietnamese shrimp, but I believe it's a dish that has been co-opted, thanks to those wedding banquets. ( Why are Vietnamese wedding receptions often held at Chinese restaurants? Not sure of the exact origins of this tradition, but the Chinese did rule over Vietnam for over 1000 years and their banquet food is seen as more formal. Also, the Vietnamese don't really have a lot of big restaurants appropriate for a wedding reception, which they need because there is often hundreds of people invited.)

I made these salt and pepper shrimp, without their heads on, as you can see. It would be good with the shells on, but I wasn't in the mood. I have simply fried it in a pan with a minimum of fuss, and they were terrific. If you want to make it more 'banquet style', fry the shrimp with some scallions, chili and shallot as instructed here.

Salt and Pepper Shrimp (Tom Rang Muoi)
 1/2 pound of shrimp (peeled and deveined is optional. If you want to keep the shell on you can snip the back with scissors to devein it if you want to get fussy)
 2-3 tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 cup of corn oil (or a combo of oil and butter)
salt
pepper

Salt the shrimp and let sit for a few minutes. (How much salt? A little more than 'lightly' salted)  Then rinse under cold water. This plumps up the shrimp and freshens them up. Now lightly salt the shrimp. Add freshly grated black pepper - as much as you can handle. Dip the shrimp in cornstarch. In a smallish saute pan (or wok), heat the oil to very hot, but not smoking. Spread the shrimp in the pan evenly. Hopefully they will all fit. After a minute or so, turn them on the other side. After another minute or two when they have turned pink, take them out of the pan. Squeeze some lime on and eat. 

Chinese Sausage with Sticky Rice and Ginger Scallion Oil

 
If I could eat Chinese sausage every morning with a bowl of sticky rice, I would. Whenever I go home to see my parents my mom is always sweet enough to make some for breakfast. I started making it recently, and am finding it difficult to want to make anything else. It had taken me so long to make it because I was always so blocked with the idea of steaming the darn sticky rice. (But I don't have a steamer, and and why does rice need to be steamed and i just can't freakin' deal. Where are my tortillas? )

Luckily, I meditated for a long time and some tension cleared up and my ego suppressed to levels low enough so that I was finally able to proceed with the sticky rice. I went looking for a steamer a couple times but didn't find one. Then I remembered Adela using a regular old plate to steam that lovely carp one night. This is why Adela is a doctor who can perform deliveries involving human beings and I still can't tie my shoes properly. So here we are. One makeshift steamer:

Watching raw rice being steamed into perfect grains is like magic. While the rice is steaming, cut your Chinese sausage. Cut it very thin, on the diagonal, and saute in a little oil. Saute some minced rehydrated shitake as well. This is the type of Chinese sausage I like:

It says "lap xuong tuoi" and is from Westminster, CA which is also known as Little Saigon.  According to my mom, Vietnamese style Chinese sausage has more wine and less fat. There are a million sausage brands out there and some of them are terrible. If the sausage feels as hard as a rock, that is probably how it will digest. E-mail me for directions on how to find this particular brand.

Top the rice with the sausage and the shitake mushrooms. Eat with ginger scallion oil and a little Maggi seasoning.

Ginger Scallion Oil adapted from Francis Lam

Make a batch and have for the rest of the week to add lots of flavor to stir fries or plain rice. This stuff is amazing.

1/4 cup corn or peanut oil
maybe 3/4 Tablespoon of ginger
3 scallions loosely chopped
salt

In a food processor, grind the ginger and scallion. Put in a tall bowl or cup. Add healthy pinches of salt. (It should be enough to salt the 1/4 cup of oil.) Heat oil until just smoking. Pour oil over ginger scallion. Be careful, because it will smoke and sputter when you pour it.

Sticky Rice

With sticky rice, soak 1-2 cups of rice overnight (for at least for 2 hours) in cold water. Drain and rinse it. Create a makeshift steamer by balancing a plate on a bowl in a large deep pan/stock pot.Fill the pan with water up to about 2/3 the way of the bowl or as high as you can. Put the rice on the plate. Bring the water to a boil and put the lid on. Steam on a low simmer for 20 minutes. During that time stir a few times to make sure the rice cooks evenly.

Eating in Brooklyn: Yun Nan Flavor Snack

Levity and warmth for a cold winter night from a hole in the wall in Sunset Park. That is what I wanted. I had read about every imaginable description of Yun Nan Flavor Snack and spent all of Saturday craving its spicy soups, which I had not tried yet. I bullied Brian into not cooking and taking the D train with me.

The food comes from Yunnan province, one of the most ethnically diverse regions in China and therefore hard to generalize. We had the pork dumplings swimming in a hot and sour broth - GAD. They were the perfect anti-freeze for the bones ($4.25). The rice noodle soup with a spicy meat sauce had Sichuan peppercorns and cilantro garnish and was also very good. Is there a better feeling than walking out of a restaurant with a burned tongue, tingling lips and MSG thirst? No, sir.

For more Yunnan info, Francis Lam from Gourmet has a travel diary here.

 

Yun Nan Flavor Snack
774 49th St. @ 8th Ave  ( D or M to Fort Hamilton Pkwy.)
Brooklyn, NY 11220
718-633-3090

House Specials

I was in the Southern California area recently to celebrate my cousin Chris’ wedding. The first evening I was there, we were trying on our Vietnamese wedding clothes at the tailor’s when the talk of what to eat for dinner comes up. My mother insists that we go to eat the famous Vietnamese “7 Courses of Beef” (Bò 7 món) because she has a craving. It just isn’t the same in northern Virginia, where my parents now reside. There is some bickering among the aunts about which restaurant to go to. When it’s been decided that we will go to Hong An in Garden Grove, my aunt runs out to buy a special green herb, hung que, to bring to the restaurant to eat with the dinner.

Usually, we don’t eat the full courses when we go. We pick and choose what we want to eat. We ate the grilled beef (bo nuong vi), which you do table side at a small grill that they bring. The beef is sliced very thin and coated in oil and lemon grass. You wrap the beef around some rice paper, which the restaurant served raw. So, we had to dip it in water and let it hang dry. Emily and William, my cousin Anh Quan's kids, really got a kick out of this. After you lay down your rice paper, you load up it up with lettuce, cooked beef, thinly sliced raw plantain, mint, various other herbs you may want (including an herb called fish lettuce that tastes frighteningly like its name). Roll this up and dip it in fermented shrimp paste sauce. (My mom mailed me a sweater recently which she said was the color of shrimp paste, an interesting portent of the meal to come.)

It was so good. I was in Maltese Bacon heaven. If I had Diddy’s money, there would be no diamonds or trips to Ibiza. I would charter a helicopter and fly all my friends to Garden Grove for 7 courses of beef. We also ate beef wrapped in Hawaiian La Lot leaves (Bo Nuong La Lop), meatballs (bo nuong mo chai), and a steamed beef dish that is mixed up with noodles, nuts and mushrooms (Bo Cha Dum).

The morning after the wedding, we had a “brunch”, which the bride and groom interpreted to mean a 10 course Chinese banquet at King Harbor in Garden Grove. It was a meat storm of food.

This was the menu for each table:

Crabmeat with fish maw soup
A giant plate of braised butter lobster yee mein (my favorite of the meal...lo mein taken to the next level.)
beef chunk ‘French style’
salt and pepper fried shrimp
steamed whole fish
stir fried pea shoots (love this vegetable)
fried squid (Emily's favorite)
clams with pepper black bean sauce (William's favorite)
fried crispy chicken
sweet bean soup for dessert

This happened at 11:30 am.

Hong An
9862 Westminster Ave. Suite B
Garden Grove, CA 92843
714-534-5384

King Harbor Restaurant
13018 Harbor Blvd.
Garden Grove, CA 92843
714-636-9103

Noodle Blitzkrieg: Part 1 of Probably Several

Here's an initial offering of three places I love to get noodles at:

Chao Chao Noodle Soup

New Chao Chow
Open from 8:10am to 10pm, this noodle shop does a brisk business with the locals, from the knuckle-tattooed Chinatown tough guy to the older lady wearing giant sunglasses ("My usual. ONLY SHRIMP! I don't eat the otha stuff. You guys don't have Chinese parsley today?" ) The place is cheery, the service is quick, and the small soup is a perfect size for lunch. The combination rice stick noodle soup (Hu Tieu), is a composed dish ($4.25), with the broth appearing on the side. The noodles come heaped with fresh fish cake, sliced pork, ground pork, bean sprouts, fried onions, one shrimp and sliced pork innard, which I gently push to the side. The shrimp is an indication of the Chiu Chow people's coastal roots in Guandong on the eastern side of China. The basic flavorings of the dish hark back to the Vietnamese Hu Tieu noodle soup, which may have come from the Chiu Chow population that emigrated to Vietnam.

New Chao Chow
111 Mott St.
North of Canal St.
(212) 226-2590

Naeng Myun

Li Hua
This is what I crave when the dial hits 90 degrees, and I don't feel like walking in the summery stink of Chinatown. It's naeng myun, an icy cold beef soup with chewy sweet potato noodles (or buckwheat noodles in other recipes) and topped with brisket, Asian pear, hardboiled egg, and sliced cucumber. It's like eating a sublime beef slurpee. I was initially intrigued by naeng-myun when I read that a Mr. Jung-Hyun Kim had opened up a restaurant in Seoul so that he could eat this dish three times a day everyday. He eventually opened up 4 more restaurants in New York, Paraguay and Korea. There is movie material here somewhere. (A man opens up one naeng myun restaurant after another to mourn a long lost sweetheart, separated by the 38th parallel, who he used to share this dish with. One day, she walks into his Paraguay branch, which he so happens to be doing an efficiency inspection of. "Of all the naeng-myun joints in town, you had to walk into mine," he says. "Well, this is technically the only one on the continent," she replies. ) The naeng myun is not listed on the permanent menu, so just ask for it. If you don't feel like eating romantic naeng myun, don't miss the duk mandoo-guk, a soup of dumplings and sliced rice cake in a murky white beef and egg broth.

Li Hua
171 Grand St.
At Baxter St
212-343-0090

Pho Bo Vien

Pho Bang
Pho Bang is my diner. I have done everything short of my taxes here, using their space as my psychic and organizational center. Many an hour there has been spent reading, scribbling, staring at the nice Vietnamese lady in the poster, and even writing a half-baked short story set in Pho Bang itself. The waiters are sweet and let me be. They were a little baffled when I had my birthday dinner there last week. They were like, this chick has friends?

Their house specialty, the pho beef noodle soup is a great restaurant version. I don't mean to use "restaurant version" as a huge qualifier, but you have to understand. I can't gush like crazy about any restaurant phos. In all my years, our family has only found 2 acceptable pho restaurants to eat at (one in San Jose and one in Virginia) because the criteria is a definitive home-style broth and the standard of measurement is my mother's, which is famous. But really, the one at Pho Bang is nice, I've eaten the pho tai with rare beef about 80 times. Sometimes I get the beef meatball one (pho bo vien), which has fun, chewy bite. I also recommend the one special they advertise on the wall, a rice noodle crepe stuffed with pork and mushroom and served with ham (banh cuon) and all their vermicelli (bun) dishes.

Pho Bang
157 Mott St, New York 10013
North of Grand St.
212-966-3797