How to Make: Butter Chicken

So the Indian food in Gainesville is...alright. The problem is that there are two levels of Indian food. There is the alright version which is basically the version you make that's built for speed of service and is fairly homogeneous and lacks the flavor profile you want in a better made dish, and then there is the more classically prepared kind which includes a, frankly, tremendous number of spices. Much like all kinds of stew-like dishes, curries tend to vary from cook to cook a lot like chili.That being said, I discovered that I couldn't really get exactly the butter chicken I wanted from restaurants here, so I had to make it myself.

There are two components to butter chicken. The chicken and the gravy. The chicken for butter chicken should be made from the scraps of tandoori chicken. The gravy is a tomato and cream based gravy that's been appropriately spiced. Both are challenging to do correctly in a normal kitchen since very few people have a Tandoor oven in their house (the tandoor party of Tandoori Chicken.) Let's break it down.

The Tandoori Chicken scrap thing isn't really workable for me since I tend not to make whole tandoori chicken that frequently (though I should.) As a result, I don't tend to have scraps, so when I make this dish I'm usually making a lot of tandoori chicken that is usually fine on its own as a meal. I won't lie, this is a timely process, so you really have to prepare a day in advance. I use a two stage marination process, which means you can't just marinate and forget it either. Thighs, legs, and breasts are normally the cuts used for Tandoori Chicken. You can use a whole chicken (though if you do that I suggest deboning it,) but boneless chicken thighs were on sale at Publix, so that's what I used. I find thighs give a great flavor because there's a bit more fat and the chicken will stay juicy. The Marinade does a pretty good job of preventing it from drying out unless you just cook it to oblivion, so you really don't lose too much by using breasts.

One of the more important things to make this dish is, in my mind, ginger garlic paste. The ingredients are simple. Just use equal portions of ginger and garlic. I tend to make a good amount because peeling garlic and ginger is both time consuming and kind of annoying. it's easy enough to make. Take equal portions on ginger and garlic, and put these in a blender with some salt. If it's really having a hard time blending, you should add some water. You'll really want to blend it into a fine paste.

I just pureed this in my mini food processor for a couple minutes. The more pureed it is, the better texture it will be. If it's too chunky, it'll stand out in the finished product.

So the proportion of ingredients is going to vary depending on how much you're making. I was making a few pounds of thighs, so I used a few heaping tablespoons of my ginger garlic paste. I made sure to add a bit more salt and some red chile powder as well. The Indian chile powder makes a big difference, so if you can get that from an Indian Market, you probably should. You'll also need a couple of lemons to really get the texture and flavor correct as it will partially cook the chicken in this first process because of the acid.

Thighs!

So this mixture is one you're only going to want to do for about 2-3 hours. After that, you're going to begin phase 2 of the marinade. This means you should use some thick Greek Yogurt (normal fat kind or it won't cook properly,) pepper, paprika, cumin, turmeric, garam masala and coriander powder. The paprika and turmeric are essentially your coloring for the chicken. I used a couple of tablespoons of paprika compared to maybe 1 each for the other spices. That'll get the red color tandoori chicken is best associated with. You're going to want to make the spice blend first and then add yogurt until it's thick enough as to stick on the chicken but loose enough as to still be workable.

I poured some oil on top as well to kind of seal the marinade and pressed some cling wrap on top of it. You can see it's pretty orange there. It'll redden up with more paprika/turmeric, but it'll also redden up during the cooking process.

The chicken can sit in the marinade for up to a day, but at the minimum it should sit at least 6 hours.

When you're ready to cook it, preheat the oven to 400. You're going to cook this for about 35 minutes or so with the chicken arrayed across a baking sheet. Tandoori chicken is cooked in a tandoor at like 800 degrees, so basically we're cooking the inside of the chicken and then we're finishing with the broiler to give it color as 500 degrees (the normal oven max) will not be enough to get this kind of color:

Basically what you're looking for

Some people cook these on top of onions to serve as a mirepoix like you see when people roast chicken in French dishes. It's pretty solid thing to do. Tandoori onions are excellent to use for any kind of thing.

The gravy is more challenging and also requires a ton of spices. The opening part requires the use of onions in fat. Now, butter chicken restaurant recipes will basically cook the onion in a stick of butter; hence, butter chicken. I do most of my cooking in olive oil and then finish the dish with butter. The flavor is pretty similar, and it's a lot less butter, so that makes this dish healthier. You're basically just going to want to turn the onions translucent on mid-high. You'll then put in a couple of teaspoons of ginger garlic paste. You don't want to burn these so just a minute or so with constant stirring. Now begins the dry roasting of the spices. Butter chicken sauce spice mixes will vary from person to person, but here's mine in ratio.

1.5 Salt
.5 Pepper
.5 Cumin
.5 Red Chile Powder
1 Fenugreek
.5 Coriander Powder
1 Garam masala
.25 Turmeric
.5 Paprika
Couple bay leaves

You're going to dump this in with the onions and ginger garlic paste and keep stirring it. You're only going to do this for a minute or so or it'll burn. After the minute has passed, you add enough tomato paste to appropriately cover your onion mixture.

Spices roasting

Tomato Paste

You're going to dry roast this for a few minutes on mid high heat with continuous stirring. It'll really bring all the flavors together. After this, you can add some tomato sauce. I usually do 1 of those small cans of tomato paste and two of those large cans of tomato sauce. That ratio tends to work best in my mind. You'll turn it to low after the sauce comes back to heat.

You're going to stew this for a while. How long? At least 30 minutes. You can really keep it going forever though.

When you're ready to serve, pour this stuff in a blender (maybe take out the bay leaves if you can find them) and blend into a smooth gravy. You'll find this to give a very good texture. Now, you can do this with diced tomatoes or tomato puree, but the seeds tend to make the gravy more bitter and the gravy just not as smooth. Right before you serve, you add cream and butter. I'd say the cream is to taste. The butter, you can probably just go with a tablespoon or two.

Dinner.

Served with some raita, some rice, palak, naan, and some chai tea, it'll beat any Indian restaurant in Gainesville going away.

Pho Hanoi

It's been a while. Why? Well, I just haven't been going out to eat that much recently. I guess to some degree when I find restaurants I like in Gainesville, I tend to just go to them over and over. Where I live (southwest Gainesville) doesn't exactly have a vibrant restaurant scene either. All the same, we have a couple of good places in this part of town, and I will talk about one today. Another problem is the restaurant I've now wanted to review for the past couple of weeks I have not really been able to because I kept forgetting to take pictures of their menu, and the menu online is not their complete menu.

Pho Hanoi does, as its name implies, Vietnamese food. Pho (and no, I'm not going to type out the little accent mark for this entire review) is probably the best known Vietnamese dish. It's a noodle soup dish that has a lighter broth. Unlike the soups you might be used to in Americanized Chinese food, Pho is most definitely a lighter soup. Everyone does their own version of the broth that has slightly different balances of usually the same seasoning. In the end though, I'll be the first to admit that I usually find Pho to be a pretty boring dish. When done to my tastes, it can be both subtle and complex. Like most noodle soups though, the reality is that it's peasant food, so it's a straight up mixed bag. More discerning Vietnamese eaters will recognize that Pho Hanoi's Pho is not immaculate. In fact, I'd put it at just OK, and even then it can be inconsistent. If that's all you care about when it comes to Vietnamese food, I don't know what to tell you. Not many other options in Gainesville, so you can either learn to make it yourself or suck it up.

Hanoi refers to, of course, to the Finnish Glam Metal band Hanoi Rocks.

Yeah, didn't expect that.

All the same, Pho Hanoi is in the same strip mall as Indian Cuisine and Lollicup, which I consider the triumvirate of ethnic food in southeast Gainesville. They recently did some rennovations, so the restaurant looks a bit better than it used to. All the same, I care about that roughly none at all, so my girlfriend and I went two separate times for this review to give a decent idea of what they have there that I like. Along with the renovations, they also added some stuff to the menu, and I was very pleased to see a Vietnamese Iced Coffee on the menu. If you are unaware, oh boy do I have some news for you.

Vietnamese Iced Coffee is extremely strong and drips into the cup beneath with condensed milk. It's kind of the perfect drink to go with Vietnamese food. It is to Vietnamese food as the mango lassi is to Indian, the orchata is to Mexican, and high proof liquor is to Russian food. The condensed milk sweetens it up, and the coffee itself packs a punch. I can see the strength of the coffee being a bit much for some people, but I find it to be excellent. It cost about $2.75, but I found that entirely worth it when I'm looking for some good iced coffee.

One of the new menu items that caught my eye immediately was the new sandwiches that Pho Hanoi has added to the menu, called Banh Mi. You can see a nice mix of them on their own sheet. My girlfriend and I decided to try the shredded pork (Banh Mi Bi.)

At $4.25, this sandwich was surprisingly good. It was in the Vietnamese style, which is basically a combination of French and Vietnamese where you have the French bread with more traditional filling. I thought the combination of the carrot, cucumber, cilantro, and roast pork was pretty solid. The roast pork was surprisingly well done as well with a pretty good flavor profile of salty with a touch of sweet. It probably could have been a bit tender, but, overall, a very solid sandwich. The bread was about the quality you can buy at Publix, so I'm pretty sure it's not made in house. All the same, it's a quality price thing.

The first time we went, my girlfriend got the Pho Bo Vien for $7.50. The Pho Bo Vien is a rice noodle soup with beef meatballs.

This is probably one of the simpler dishes they made, and personally, I found it somewhat bland. It's not like it wasn't seasoned or anything. It just didn't feel like it had a lot going on. To some degree, this is sort of Vietnamese comfort food, so I'm not altogether surprised that this is kind of how it is. All the same, noodles in a simple broth with chunks of meat that, if they were seasoned previously, had lost that to the soup making a very uniform taste. There's an interesting textural mix, but you can see that the dish itself is very straightforward, and, realistically, that's not what I go out to eat for. Still, pretty cheap for a lot of soup.

What I got the first time was probably my favorite dish the place does. It's called the Bun Bo Hue. There are supposed to be a ton of accent marks in that name, but eh, you get the picture. In any case, it's marked "spicy," so of course I had to give it a shot. At $8.00, it's pretty affordable as well.

I added the basil and jalapenos that came with the soup to the top, but even without those, this is an awesome bowl of soup. It's got slices of beef and pork in there (though you can only see the pork in this picture.) Was it that spicy? Despite its color, not really. I kicked it up with some sriracha. All the same, the flavor of the broth was way more complex and full. To some degree it's the added spice, but I think the meats actually added flavor to this one instead of the previous dish where the meat is kind of taken over. The noodles really soak up all that flavor as well and were cooked correctly, which usually ends with me eating the whole bowl. You might find a touch of hoisin sauce will add a little sweetness to this soup as well to hit the flavor chart a bit more spot on. It has a touch of sourness, spiciness, saltiness, and that umami flavor that makes everything kind of taste more prominent. Just an excellent dish.


After a couple of weeks, we returned to try some other stuff. My girlfriend got the Hu tieu mi bo vien this time for $7.50. It is pretty similar to the above soup, but the taste was a bit different.

You may think this is pretty much the exact same dish she got last time, but it actually isn't. Well, you can see red onion this time as well, but that's not the only difference. The flavor actually had way more depth this time. I don't know what they upped the ante on (probably a combination of fish sauce and a more concentrated seasoning,) but this time, I kind of understood this dish. With the better seasoning, the meat wasn't quite so tasteless either. It really came together in a lot better way.


Instead of going with the soup bowl, this time I decided to try on of their rice dishes. I decided to go with the roast pork because I'm just a big fan of roast pork. This was the dish I ended up getting. It's called Com Thit Heo Nuong for $7.50.

Compared to some of the soups, this might seem like kind of a paltry amount of food, but it was actually pretty filling considering. The sauce it came with was a lighter sauce compared to what you might expect that went with the rice and the pork pretty well. I ended up just kind of mixing it all together with the sauce and making myself a kind of fried riced like mixture. I put some sriracha on there as well to take it up a bit, and the flavor was actually pretty solid. The pork was salty (as it should have been) mixed with some of the sourness and umami associated with some form of fish sauce in the seasoning. The sauce was sweeter and a bit vinegary which helped to complete the flavor profile of the whole thing a bit. With the added spice from the rooster sauce, it came together in a pretty good way.

You'll notice I didn't say much regarding value. Well, the same thing can be said about all of these dishes. They were all a pretty good value. Even the soup I thought was kind of bland was still pretty reasonable. I grant that a big bowl of hot soup is probably not something people are jonesing for that often here in Gainesville, where hot weather tends to be the norm rather than the exception. All the same, it does fit one branch of Asian food pretty adequately. Considering we still have no decent Thai or Chinese in Gainesville, it's nice to have this place at least taking a solid pass at Vietnamese. Is it as good as what you can get in, say, Orlando? No, but it's not much worse than that either, and with a meal being under $10, it's really tough to complain about decent Vietnamese stews.

Making Pizza

I was planning to review Pho Hanoi on 34th south of Archer by the hhgreg (or is it hhgregg? hhggreeg? Swedes are probably to blame for this.) In any case, I go in and discover a lack of air conditioning because of a broken air conditioner. As much as I am one to enjoy Vietnamese food, I am not one to enjoy the Vietnamese climate. I'll come back when they get that under control.

Instead, I decided to make pizza this last week which is kind of an event for me. I try not to eat pizza too often because Gainesville doesn't really have much in the way of good pizza, and for health concerns I try to save more unhealthy food for when it's actually well prepared and cooked, which basically translates to when I make it myself. You may have heard the saying that "sex is like pizza. Even when it's bad, it's still pretty good." I'd amend the last part of the saying to "Even when it's bad, it's still satisfying."

When I reviewed Satchel's I talked a bit about what I think makes a good pizza. The components are crust, sauce, cheese, toppings. When each one comes together just right, you start thinking of pizza outside of the above paradigm. That being said, ostensibly, we're all on budgets and cannot afford to import some Buffalo Mozzarella, so the challenge is to make an affordable pizza that can still blow away pretty much whatever you get at a normal pizza place here in Gainesville.

We start with the crust, which is, without a doubt, the hardest part of the pizza to get right. I tend to loathe baking because of all the specific measuring that is involved. I find that to be counter to the nature of cooking in a general way where cooking is commonly and expression of the person making the food. You get everything down to some exact measurement by weight or whatever, and it loses its character.

I should mention that I lack a Stand Mixer. This should explain why I do this stuff the way I do. Stand mixers make the whole kneading process substantially easier. I've done the kneading thing before, and it's just not worth the trouble when people have already formulated ways around this. What way am I talking about? Well, it's called the "No Knead" technique, and I use the technique as formulated by the venerable Jim Lahey.

I do it a bit differently, but the purpose is the same.

Ingredients:
4 cups of flour
1 tbl of salt
2 tsp of sugar
1/4 tsp of instant yeast
1 tsp of dried Italian Herbs
1/4 tsp of black pepper

So I season my pizza dough. Why? You see this with a lot of artisan baking. Personally, I just enjoy the flavor. Now, a person might see the salt and freak out. Honestly, I give them a little space, but instant yeast doesn't require proofing as much as the dry active type. The flour I'm using here is King Arthur's Whole White Wheat. I used to use a mix of white and wheat to give the flour a bit more rustic flavor, but the whole white wheat does that without having to mix the two. If you just want the lightest and most glutenous dough though, use the bread flour.

So...dry ingredients are there. Wet ingredients are just a couple tbls of olive oil and 2 cups of warm water.

Probably the most unappetizing picture I've put on this site. I use my spatula here because with this much water to dough, you're going to get a very sticky mixture. If you really can't mix in that last bit of flour, use a tablespoon of warm water, but realistically, you probably just aren't mixing it in that well if you can't incorporate the flour. All the same, mine ended up looking like this:

I get some water on my hands and wet the top lightly before I put on some plastic wrap with slits cut in, so the top of the dough doesn't dry out.

On goes the wrap with the holes cut in. Now...we wait. How long? About 20 hours or so. Good gluten takes time. Patience is a virtue. Etc. etc. After the 20 hours or so, you can take out the dough and form it into as many dough ball as you want pizzas. This much will make 4 individual pizzas or you can make 2 large pizzas. I went with 2 large because it's easier. Flour your hands because this thing is quite sticky. Use your hands to form it into dough balls in way where the dough looks something like this:

You want a smooth exterior. Now you wait again. About 2 hours should do it. It makes the whole thing easier to handle.

When you're ready to bake, you'll roll or stretch one of these out to your desired thickness. I find rolling give you a more even crust, and the gluten should be good enough to still give your outer crust some rise. If you want some dough that has irregular crust density throughout, by all means, toss away.

This is how mine turns out before I put stuff on it. A pizza stone helps in this situation if you want a crunch to your crust. About 425-450 degrees will crunch up this crust a decent amount on a pizza stone. This large one took about 23 minutes or so at 425 to be right. Smaller pizzas take less time of course.


Now for the sauce. Ingredients:

1-2 tbls of Olive Oil
1 28 oz can of San Marzano tomatoes
1 small can of tomato paste (the 4.5 oz ones)
1 onion (I like the sweet ones)
1 bulb of garlic (I use a lot of garlic)
1 bunch of basil
1 bunch of oregano
Few tbls of red wine
1 tbl of crushed red pepper
Good amount of salt and pepper
About a tsp of sugar. This'll depend on taste, but I don't like going much more than this on the sugar. Some people like sweet sauces for their pizzas though, so whatever.

I tried making this in my cast iron this time, and enjoyed it, but it doesn't really matter what you make it in. You start at mid-high heat with your diced onion. Once that starts to get translucent, you dump in your garlic and dry herbs (if you're using any.) I sometimes use some dried Italian herbs along with the fresh ones to get some more depth of flavor. I use this little dry roasting trick that I picked up from making Indian food. It works well here.

As you can see, full cloves of garlic. I immersion blender this sauce at the end. If you don't have an immersion blender...have fun chopping that stuff. You can just pulse a couple of times with a normal blender, but that's kind of a pain in the ass. Your choice in where you want to spend your time.

After having cooked the stuff to the point where it's tarting to carmelize, I add the tomato paste. I begin dry roasting this, which takes an edge off the tomato paste. It'll look like kind of a mess at this point. Just keep stirring, so the whole thing doesn't burn.

At this point, I drop in my fresh seasoning to cook out some of the water from the herbs and get it all kind of homogeneous before I add my plum tomatoes.

It'll cook down into kind of a mush. Takes about 5 minutes. At this point, you can start stirring in some wine. It'll get you this super rich looking tomato sauce. Stir in that stuff for about 5 minutes as well.

This is how you make sure your sauce has body along with a complex and rich flavor with a pretty small amount of ingredients. It's largely all in the technique. After the five minutes, you can add your tomatoes.

It incorporates very easily at this point. A couple hours, and an immersion blend later:

That's the perfect kind of pizza sauce to me. Wonderful color certainly.

Personally, I like my cheese to be a mozzarella and parmesan combo. Stuff was on sale at Publix, so that was just a bonus.

For toppings I like to go kitchen sink style. Tomatoes, mushrooms, garlic, onion, and basil. To add an element of freshness I added some spinach as well. To give it some meat, I added some sausage, which I removed from the casings of some hot Italian sausage from Publix. My girlfriend wanted some pepperoni as well, so I threw a couple of pieces on to appease her. 25, minutes later.

You'll notice the crust puffed up and colored. This is what you want. You can't really tell by this shot, but the crust was sort of golden. Here's a different one from a different time I used the same recipe:

With whole wheat, that's a pretty nice accomplishment.

In the end, the toppings are up to you, but the crust and the sauce I consider to be winners for what's feasible in Florida, and certainly top shelf for what you can get in Gainesville. I suppose one of the things I love about doing pizza this way is that it always comes out slightly different, while always being good. At that point, pizza goes from beyond the easy satisfaction of bad pizza to the profundity of good food made from scratch.

--Charles

Yamato Restaurtant Gainesville

Yamato Restaurant by the Oaks Mall is a Teppanyaki place. Teppanyaki, as opposed to hibachi, uses the stainless steel flat tops. You may have heard of Benihana, which is a nationwide chain serving this kind of food. Our version has been altered from its original Japanese to suit American tastes. In the end, it's kind of like this:

When done well, it can be pretty entertaining, but as I've said before, this blog is about the food.

The real problem with reviewing a restaurant that does this style of cooking is that you really are beholden to the quality of each individual chef. As this is working with a very hot flat top, you really need someone on the ball to really do it correctly. Quality of ingredients can be lost pretty easily depending on how the flattop is handled. Add in all the little tricks and such, you get a pretty difficult task to accomplish correctly. As a result, my review can't, in all honesty, be a full review of the restaurant. Some chefs are probably just better than others. If my chef isn't good, that might mean he had an off night, or I just got a newer guy. There's no pass or line for an executive or sous chef to do a quality spot check. It's just really variable.

My group of 7 went on a Sunday night where we were seated at one of the large tables surrounding one of the teppanyaki flat tops. I decided to go with the NY Strip Steak for $16, while my girlfriend went for the Salmon for $16 as well. You may recall my review of Mahzu Sushi and Grill. The Salmon being almost the exact same price allowed for a pretty good shot to get a side by side comparison. The steak was something I'd have to gauge on my own.

 Each teppanyaki meal began with a soup and salad.

 The soup was not a miso soup, but a brothy kind of mushroom soup with tempura flakes. It was alright. The flavor was mild and the texture of the tempura flakes and mushrooms mixed in gave it a little something extra. The salad was made with a lighter ginger vinaigrette rather than the more thick ginger dressings you normally see. It was also alright. They were more just there than to actually serve the meal to come in any really positive way.

When the chef brought his cart out, he went around asking the doneness we'd prefer for our meat. I said rare because I figured that's the only way to really ensure any kind of rareness considering how thinly sliced the 2 3 oz NY Strips were that I had ordered. He did not ask my girlfriend to what doneness she would have liked her salmon. This came back a bit later.

The first thing the chef started with was the rice. He made a fried rice by crisping up some rice on the flat top. He then laid out some eggs which he proceeded to cook into oblivion. He really cooked these. I'd say overcooked them as they were basically harden crumbs of eggs by the end. Considering this, I'm probably a terrible teppanyaki customer, as I'll see stuff overcooking while it's happening and become apprehensive when the chef doesn't get on top of that. He then proceeded to mix the egg pellets and the rice together seasoning it with some sauce and some dried seasoning blend. As he put the rice on my plate, my first thought: Bland. The rice just wasn't very seasoned. For a fried rice, that's not so good. Two sauces came with the rice though.

The first was the normal spicy mayo with vinegar and sugar mixture you see commonly at Japanese steak houses, sometimes referred to as "shrimp sauce." The other sauce was a kind of a sweetish soy vinegar sauce. In order to get flavor on this rice, we had to drop a goodly amount of each sauce onto the rice. Of course, the rice is probably at its best when it just came out from being cooked, but we have run into the first problem of this kind of teppanyaki. Yamato doesn't cook everything at the same time. It does rice first, then protein, then vegetables, and finally noodles. There's a several minute gap between all of these regardless of chef proficiencies. If someone ordered chicken, it's going to take 4 minutes or so. There's a pretty good reason rice dishes usually are not appetizers outside of the rare risotto. Rice is largely meant to be a filler. When done well, it's meant to accent other flavors with whatever seasoning its been hit with. This is how nigiri succeeds. Fried rice, on the other hand, is supposed to be made using leftovers similar to how Americans will make a sandwich using leftover meat from a roasted Turkey. Having this to start out the meal feels weird, but it's made worse because if you don't eat it while it's hot, you get tepid rice, which now tastes only of the sauce you dumped on it to give it some flavor in the first place.

Forced Perspective or not, that's a ton of rice.

The proteins can be broken down pretty easily. The steak was cooked rare, which as I established in my previous reviews, is really important for any place to do if they ask how well cooked you want something. It was lightly seasoned, but that's OK as a cut of beef like a NY Strip can work pretty well without that much seasoning. It was pretty juicy as a result of it being cooked rare. I have no idea why my friends got theirs cooked beyond medium rare as that flat top is killing flavor every second it cooks beyond the medium rare point. In terms of quantity I'd say I got somewhere between 6-8 oz of steak.  I'd err on the side of 6 oz. The beef looked pretty decent. I'd say of pretty solid quality.

Even with the salmon getting the benefit of forced perspective, it's still a ton of rice.

My girlfriend's Salmon was just over cooked. She got 3 cuts, all cut in different portions, so, naturally, they all cooked unevenly. Each piece didn't have skin, but they were all cooked as though they did by cooking largely on one side. One of our friends was asked how rare he wanted his tuna cooked, but the chef didn't ask my girlfriend the same question. He ended up cooking each piece well done. What flavor the fish might have had was largely killed leaving it merely the taste that salmon was used, but of what quality? No one can say. The seasoning was light again, and that may have been OK with a lighter cooked fish, but as it stood there just wasn't much flavor there. That's what happens when you cook salmon too far though.

The mixed vegetables were of an OK quality. I think they probably could have used our old friend the maillard reaction to give them some color instead of largely just getting the color from the sauce the chef hit the veg with as it cooked. Seemed like fresh veggies though.

The noodles were of a pretty good quality. I don't know which brand they used, but they did taste how good noodles should taste. Regretfully, the noodles weren't seasoned particularly much, so this was kind of an opportunity left to die. Side sauces come back into play here.

You know, that may be my biggest issue with this meal. When you flavor pretty much your entire meal with the same seasoning, no wonder it's kind of a dull experience. Instead of really trying to make each component of the dish beyond the protein just act as filler with the same seasoning, they could have embraced making the rice, noodles, and veg all part of a larger experience. This runs into my main problem though where you are basically eating stuff in order as its served if you want the food to be hot. So you have rice, your protein, veggies, and finally noodles. I attempted to see how it all worked together, so I tried each part hot as it came out, and waited for the chef to complete the full thing before digging in. The end result left me, at the end of the meal, wanting for a flavor, literally any different flavor, to just come through.

At 16 dollars an entree, I think the value is sort of there, considering you do get a lot of food of an alright quality depending on the chef and what you ordered. Personally, I'd suggest they switch up the portions though. For the so called main part of the dish (the beef, chicken, seafood, etc.) the portion feels woefully inadequate compared to all the filler. I'd rather they cut back on the filler and upped the protein in whatever way maintains the same price or cut out some of the filler and drop the price a bit. With so much carb filler  on the plate, it's like they haven't even heard of the new food plate thingy.
 
So if you're desirous of teppanyaki, I have a hard time giving a firm warning to stay away. This last experience was just mediocre. It was basically the Fridays or Chilis of Japanese food as so many Teppanyaki places seem to be in the US. If you go on your birthday, it's basically a buy one, get one, which I think may be single handedly pushing their business along by the birthday person bringing all their friends along. All the same, you go with a friend and get 2 17 dollar entrees it'll only be 17 dollars and if you split the check with whomever you brought along, 10 dollars a person (including tip) is pretty solid even on a mediocre night.


--Charles

 

What I've Been Up To

Welp, if you noticed last week, I did not enter a single review. Why? I've been in Miami with my girlfriend eating at the Japanese restaurant her parents own. It's alright to be jealous. As a result of my time there, I have undergone the dreaded shift of taste any person goes through when they spend too much time with good food, and, thereafter, must acclimate to the food they have left behind. This has a couple of results.

1. I ate way too much food in Miami. Granted, most of it was pretty healthy since it fell under the Japanese umbrella as opposed to, say, the Southern Comfort Food Umbrella. As a result, I'm likely not going to eat quite as much when I go out until I'm back on the track I was on. This will likely result in me not being able to give full reviews of restaurants as I probably won't be trying as much stuff. You can expect multiple reviews of the same restaurants as a result.

2. I'm likely going to have to kill my standards. For the restaurants I will be reviewing over these immediate couple of weeks, prepare for some pretty hardass reviews. I'm probably not even going to have sushi again until I can forget about watching a chef literally cut a piece of sashimi off a fish to give to me. For the reader, well, it's probably best to be aware that my reviews might be erring on the side of Jon Lovitz's Critic character with regards to the dishes I try (It stinks!)

3. Expect more recipe blogs. I'm trying to incorporate leafy green veggies into normal dishes with mixed success. I tend to like cooking mostly healthy food as it tends to be more satisfying to eat than the French Toast sandwich I made a few weeks ago. If you're into seeing my thought process behind creating dishes, you'll probably find that interesting. If you're just interested in the reviews, I'll still have those, so don't be too worried.

4. Fall semester has begun. Sigh. I actually really like summer Gainesville. There's usually no wait to do anything. I can get in and out of Publix with very little trouble. I don't have to worry about gameday traffic preventing me from going anywhere. I can go to the store without being decked by an undergrad attempting to gear up for their dorm room with things that sparkle or whatever. This will probably make it more difficult to go to popular restaurants unfortunately. I already know that the Indian Grocery/Restaurant I go to will start seeing a steady increase in patronage. As someone who takes a zen approach to gathering ingredients, I'm always wary of these first couple of weeks.

You should be too.

5. All the same, to the new people in Gainesville, Welcome! I hope that I will provide you with an unbiased and in depth review of local restaurants to help you know which ones to avoid and which one deserve your patronage.

Speaking of restaurants that deserve patronage, Liquid Ginger's groupon has resulted in a definite visit from me in the not too distant future, which I am quite excited about (though I'll try and reign that in to remain unbiased.)

Also, look forward to my review of where to gather food products, especially if you're interesting in getting local/organic products. I will brave downtown and the hippies to scope out the farmer's market when it gets a little cooler.

If you have any requests for reviews, just shoot me an email, and I'll be sure to consider it.

--Charles

La Nopalera

If you're wondering where the Hooters on 34th and Archer went because you need that trip to Hooters to get through the week, we probably don't know each other. That being said, if the absence of the ostentatious decor of Hooters has left you looking a bit close at the location, you'll recognize Mexican restaurant La Nopalera. Having reviewed their cross street competition in Chuy's, I figure that it can't be any worse than there. The reality is that it's not. It's substantially better. Is it good? Eh. General standards would say mediocre. Gainesville standards would say OK. The reality is that it's cheap, comes out fast, there's a lot of it, and it has OK flavor. As a result, it is the best restaurant in the SW Gainesville Archer/34th Street Area. Considering the only competition is Taco Bell, Chipotle, and the previously reviewed Chuy's, it's not a very deep field. Is it better than the best Gainesville has to offer for Mexican? No. Is it tied or slightly better than a lot of the similar places Gainesville has? Yes.

First things first. Salsa Check:

Passable.

Indeed, the salsa itself was passable. Clearly it was a blended mixture, but it certainly tasted more robust than the watery mess at Chuy's. Did it use all fresh ingredients? In this condition, it'd probably be impossible to tell for sure, but I'd err on the side of no. This is the kind of stuff that comes out of jars where the assumption is that it was fresh at one point and does have the potential (at the very least) to go bad. I don't particularly mind a thicker blended salsa if it tastes good. That's not the kind of thing that bothers me. This one tasted of tomatoes with slight hints of some other salsa elements, but it was barely there. All the same, I can live with passable, and that's what this was.

Looking through the menu, I come across one of my pet peeves of Mexican food in Florida. Whether or not Horchata is on the menu is highly variable. This both frustrates and confuses me. If you are not familiar with Horchata I suggest boning up. It is incredible.

This is pretty similar to the way I make it. Now, I know what you're thinking. That seems like a metric ass ton of work to get a drink. This is true. That's why purveyors of Mexican foodstuffs to restaurants have concentrated versions of this. Will it be as good as the kind shown above? No. Will it still fit the gap? Probably. It's basically the drink that works perfectly with Mexican food (as opposed to Margaritas that usually overpower nearly anything you can think to eat.)

So I look through the rest of the menu, and discover some kind of bait and switch items. Namely, the California Burrito they have is not a California Burrito but a San Francisco burrito. I know that likely very few patrons of this restaurant know the difference, but the reality is that it does exist. Further, their fish tacos are not the Baja Fish Tacos that I prefer. What does that mean? Well, it's served with lettuce instead of cabbage and there's no white sauce that the fish taco is traditionally served with. Honestly, I was trying hard not to let this result in me prejudging the food, but when your expectations are subverted, it's hard to deny being affected.

It seems like the main thing Nopalera is going for is their combination dishes. These are mixes and matches of the standard variety of Mexican. Enchiladas, tacos, burritos, chile rellenos, chalupas, and tamales all get mixed and matched to whatever your particular preference is. It makes it pretty convenient to review, but as my goal is to give restaurants their best shot at proving their quality, I went right to their specials. This is where you start seeing their more authentic dishes. All the same, one of my friends got the bean burrito, so I got a shot at one of their most basic dishes as well as their supposed best ones.

As an appetizer, we got the Fajita Nachos off the special. For $12 dollars, I was expecting some ridiculously good nachos.

This was the worst part of the meal. I should have trusted my better judgment when I saw that the fajita nachos came with chicken, shrimp, and beef. There's a pretty good reason that most people usually don't mix proteins in their meals. All the same, this gave me a look at the meat of their fajitas, and if their fajitas all used the meat that came with the nachos, then I'd stay away from those fajitas. The flavor of their marinade on the meat was alright, though fairly underwhelming considering the flavor profile of Mexican food. The main problem was that each piece of meat was overcooked. It's like they tried to cook the beef, chicken, and shrimp in a big pile. Considering all those meats cook in different times, that's really not something you should do. as a result, it all came out overcooked. There really wasn't much queso for these nachos as well, but the queso that did come with the nachos did, in fact, taste like it was made from real cheese at some point. It did have a slightly store bought taste as the cheese cooled, but it was a bit too complex for me to think it was just off the shelf. it certainly didn't look/taste like the kind of nacho cheese I made in my recipe rebuttal of Chuy's. The pepper and such were really just completing the notion of this being all the normal fajita stuff on nachos; however, the end result is that you should totally pass.

My buddy got the Bean Burrito for $3.

This was the highlight in terms of value. The burrito itself was large, decently seasoned, and had pretty good tasting beans on the inside. The sauce was of the more basic tomato based style, but like the salsa tasted as if tomatoes of an alright quality were used at one point. I grant that there were no super complex flavors at work here, but sometimes the simplicity of a dish can make it stronger. This is the case here. You should probably be aware that the tortillas are definitely not made there (which is a shame. Even shitty pizza places in Gainesville tend to make their own dough.) All the same, at a whopping 25% of the price of the fajita nachos, I was somewhat shocked. Honestly, there isn't a ton to say about this one, but upon checking out the other prices, this particular item is a winner.

My girlfriend got the Enchilada Suizas (a specialty item) for $9.

This one was a pretty good value too considering she got 4 enchiladas and the tomatilla sauce actually tasted of tomatillas. The chicken, like at Chuy's, was more textural than flavorful, but at the very least this chicken was not as overcooked at the fajita nachos found above. It was pretty simply prepared and presented. The cheese was OK, though for being one of the more traditional Mexican enchiladas they served, I think some Mexican crumbling cheese would have gone a long way here over the melting western cheeses they went with.

I got the carnitas for $12. It's one of the most expensive entrees, so I assume this is where they step it up.

Now, I'm trying very hard not to compare these carnitas to Carnitas Uruapan, which is where my parents took me when we visited Tijuana to get, what are widely regarded as, some of the best Carnitas in the world. And no, the one in San Diego does not count as it's run by the TJ one's brother, and he apparently does some things differently. First, you should probably know what carnitas are, you white person, you. To be simplistic, it's almost the pulled pork of the Mexican food world. Instead of shredding off the pork though, you get cubes of pork as carnitas is Spanish for "small meat." Usually that meat is then crisped up through a more direct heat process. In TJ they slow cook these pigs in these pots in this huge hearth outside the restaurant, and, when the time comes, a guy will skewer some meat, pull it out of the pot, and take it into the restaurant to be cubed up.

So how does this stack up. Well, they got the cooking part somewhat right. A fairly crispy exterior with a moist interior. The problem lied in the flavor. There just wasn't much of it. It was severely lacking. Further, with the fairly mundane guacomole and lack of the simple garnishes that make great carnitas, I think they kind of missed the boat on this one. Carnitas are tough to do right, and while it's a worthy goal to try and master them, going half assed is not going to really endear anyone who knows how good carnitas are supposed to taste. Honestly, their flavor profile was pretty similar to what you can get at Chipotle. That's not necessarily a terrible thing, but it is something to keep in mind if you're choosing whether to go to a restaurant and drop 12 dollars or get take out from Chipotle for 6 dollars. The value thing comes into play if you can't take it up a notch.


Lastly, my girlfriend and I got some of their rice and beans. $4 for rice and beans to go with a meal seems excessive considering the portions they gave and that they likely just have a vat of these made in mass quantities ready to go. The rice was relatively flavorless but had a decent texture. The beans were seasoned, but were completely uniform in consistency, which I'm not a huge fan of.

In the end, my recommendation of this place is largely mixed. Better than La Tienda? No. Mexico Lindo is a bit more authentic, but they're about equivalent. It's about the same as Las Margaritas, really, and Las Margaritas is super far from where I live, so this place will do in a pinch I suppose. If you're looking for a sit down dinner type place for Mexican, this is basically par for the course for Gainesville. Maybe a little better at some things, a little worse at other things, but mostly...about the same.



-Charles

Sweet Mel's Recipe Rebuttal

When deciding what kind of recipe rebuttal to do, I had to look at what I felt was the most offensively bad dish they had at Sweet Mel's in terms of what they offered vs. what was delivered. Without question, it was their burger served between pieces of french toast with hashbrowns, cheese, egg, bacon, and a normal burger in the center. I decided that nearly every component of what should have been an interesting burger failed to meet expectations. That's pretty bad when you're supposedly a burger place. Crappy french toast, overcooked egg, tasteless cheese, frozen tasting hashbrowns, an overcooked burger patty, and a really bad couple pieces of bacon. Bad bacon? Is such a thing possible? Apparently so.

The mainstay to French Toast in my mind has to be good quality bread. Luckily, the good people at Uppercrust Bakery set me up with a delicious French White bread. Normally, yes, I prefer a Sourdough, but French Toast made with a French Bread: sure. I think that'll do. So French Toast recipes as designed by the English were called "pain perdu,"which is French for wasted bread. Basically, this is bread that has gone stale, but can still be salvaged with the combination of a delightful custard. To be honest, I eyeballed the custard. I used two eggs and about a cup or so of milk with a dash of vanilla and just a bit of brown sugar. Custard is delicious probably regardless of the ratio, but I didn't skimp on the eggs considering I got some fresh eggs from the chickens my parents keep at their place in Tampa. Step 1 was to cut 4 pieces of white bread to let stale up overnight. I also let the custard set overnight as well.

The next step was to consider meat. I considered doing a beef patty along with bacon like they did at Sweet Mel's but, honestly, I felt like the Beef wouldn't particular match well with the French Toast. While I did like the idea of going with some good bacon, I figured I did want the meaty bite of a patty. So the question arose. What kind of meat patty would I go with? Luckily, Fresh Market has some handy dandy breakfast country style sausage meat.

Delightful. Going with the patty of pork meant a difficult decision. Should I also add bacon to this? I figured with all the other stuff going in, it might be gilding the lily. Considering the whole thing seems like a big case of gilding the lily, adding bacon could have just been a bridge too far. In retrospect, I'm not sure if I would have repeated that decision. I just don't know how much the bacon would have added considering the final product was so over the top.

So step 1 was to cook the pork patties. I wanted decent color, but I definitely do not like overcooked pork which tends to be something everyone seems to enjoy doing. So I cranked my big cast iron to medium and cooked fairly thinly pressed pork patties to a golden color. I seasoned with a bit of salt and pepper as well.

Halfway done.

I flipped them about 3 times to make sure the color was even.

Next step was the hashbrowns. I had some Idaho Gold on hand, so I figured that'd be good enough. Great hashbrowns have to be dried pretty substantially to get you the best possible hashbrowns. I did a decent amount of drying, but I could have gone farther. Ideally, you want to probably put the shredded potatoes into the fridge to dry using a similar method to drying out steak. I cooked these through somewhere between medium and medium high.

Forgive the Blurryish Soap Operaishness

As you can see, the color on the top one was pretty much exactly how it was supposed to be done. The one of the left had to be flipped another time to really crisp it up further. I used a bit of salt and pepper here as well.


Meanwhile, the French Toast had to soak up that batter. I gave each piece of toast about five minutes on each side to really soak up that custard.

So after soaking all four pieces of French toast, I put it in my cast iron with some butter at a bit past medium heat. I was worried that I was crowding the pan a bit, but it turned out to not be that bad.

I had to give the bottom left one another flip.

As you can see, a decent browning was had. They were pretty incredible though, as it was almost a custardy bread pudding. Pretty incredible.

Construction Begins

I laid a slab of some awesome local honey on the French Toast to add that delightful honey flavor to my French Toast that had relatively little sweetness in the custard. As you can see, I have the filling arranged up top.

Extra Sharp Cheddar

I went with extra sharp cheddar to cut through the creaminess already in the French Toast.

On top of all this, I did two eggs over easy making sure the egg yolk stayed runny. That went on top of the rest of the filling.

That egg yolk is ready to burst.

And then I assembled. And drizzled some maple syrup on top.

Because I wanted to, I added just a touch of Nutella to the top of the French Toast. Why? Because I had some.

Yeah, that egg yolk just burst all over it.


Was it good? Regretfully, it was way better than anything that terrible for you has any right to be. Honestly, it was super delicious. Did it all work together? Honestly, there's probably a good reason that breakfast places separate the components. As good as a French Toast sandwich can be? It's probably pretty close.

One things for sure. After having such a ridiculous meal, I have one thing to eat for the next three days.

It's a green smoothie made with fruit, kale, and lettuce. Maybe after spending the next 3 days only eating this, I'll feel like I can eat a normal meal again without any guilt.

--Charles