by Cathy Erway
“Uh-huh,” he said, listening attentively
“And then, I don’t know.... I guess it’s been weird.”
We laughed.
“This place is a lot less busy than I thought it would be. I’m surprised we got seats right away,” Michael observed. I looked around us. It felt chaotic and busy, and I felt squished into a corner of the table, on a backless wooden stool. The long tables were all completely packed, and people were constantly getting up and sitting back down. Behind a separator along one side of the room, the cooks scurried around one another as they worked.
“So what should we get?” I asked.
“Start with a couple of appetizers, and definitely get the Momofuku ramen,” Michael said. The menu was heavy on meat, especially pork. The only criticism I’d heard about the place was that there was only one vegetarian entree on the menu, a rather boring ginger and scallion noodle soup.
“I’d say definitely get the pork buns if you haven’t tried them; they’re what everyone comes here for,” said Michael.
“Okay ... and what else?” I thought aloud, my eyes scrolling through the menu. “Have you tried the pig’s tails?”
“No, I’ve never had that one.”
We decided to get it. Our waitress came by for the second time—she had already nudged in a couple of minutes ago, before we had even glanced at our menus. We ordered the two appetizers and decided to share the ramen noodles. As we waited for our food, Michael and I kept up a rapid conversation about upcoming A Razor, A Shiny Knife dinners. He told me about a plan he was devising to re-create, dish for dish, a menu created by one of his favorite chefs, Thomas Keller of the French Laundry. It sounded like an elaborate challenge, but I knew well by then that when Michael had a vision and a mission to complete, not even a meteor crash could stop him.
“So what else do you do or think about? I feel like we always talk about food,” he said suddenly at one point. For once, I was stuck for a response. I stammered, searching for an accurate answer.
“I don’t know. I guess I’m just trying to learn as much about food and cooking as possible,” I told him.
“Fair enough.”
Our appetizers came quickly. The pork buns surprised me at first sight. I had expected to see a traditional Cantonese-style steamed bun that completely encapsulated a reddish, barbecued shredded pork center, but these buns opened up like thick, puffy tacos. Tucked in their creases was a filling of thick slabs of pork belly coated in dark sauce and garnished with cilantro.
I gulped down the last bite of one of them and sat in wonder.
“That was amazing. It’s like an open-faced pork bun. Who’d have thought of that?” I said.
“They’re good, right?” Michael said, working on his.
“They kind of have a little more sauce than I would have expected ...,” I began to say.
“But it keeps it moist, right? I hate it when they’re too dry.”
I had to admit, he did have a point. David Chang’s pork bun might have been an improvement on the age-old classic in this regard. Or perhaps, I thought again, the unorthodox ensemble more closely resembled a heavily dressed sandwich and so was more appetizing to the Western palate. The pig’s tails, however, were quite the opposite. Instead of curlicue tails, they were walnut-sized chunks of bone surrounded by strings of tender meat, like a turkey’s neck, or oxtail, only they had been glazed heavily in a deep brown, hoisin-based sauce. Michael didn’t seem to be much of a fan. I enjoyed working the pieces of meat off the bone with my teeth and found the flavor pleasant. Although, novelty factor aside, I wasn’t sure how great the meat of pig’s tails really was. Perhaps these could have been cooked a little more.
The steaming bowl of ramen came to our table two minutes later. Floating on top of the noodle soup was a delicately arranged selection of different cuts of pork, a fish cake or two, some spinach, and a poached egg. We asked our waiter for a small bowl, and I made a separate portion for myself.
“This is the best part,” Michael said, lifting up a chopstick pinch of some braised shredded pork. He also marveled at the perfect poaching of the egg.
“I bet you that’s seventy-one degrees Celsius,” he said.
“What?”
“The egg. It’s poached to seventy-one degrees. That’s the perfect temperature. It gets the white fully cooked, but the yolk stays liquid. Watch,” he said, and delicately punctured the middle of the egg with a chopstick. The creamy orange liquid spilled into the soup.
When we had finished our noodles and the waitress came by to take our plates, Michael stopped her as she was leaving.
“Could you tell me what temperature the egg was poached at?”
The waitress looked confused. “I don’t know. But I could ask one of the cooks,” she offered.
“That would be terrific, if you could. Thanks so much,” Michael said.
She came back a few minutes later, reporting that it had been poached to seventy-one degrees Celsius. Michael snapped his fingers and thanked her. The waitress handed us our check as she took our plates.
“I’ve got this one,” Michael said, hastily snatching away the check.
“What? No! Let me get half,” I insisted.
“No, really. I owe you for all the times you’ve cooked for dinners,” he said.
I sighed. I never imagined that during opposite week, I might end up spending less than I spent during normal week. If I got treated to any more meals, this could throw off the whole experiment.
“Thank you,” I said to Michael.
Michael had driven his car into Manhattan, so he offered to give me a ride home. On the way to the bridge, we passed a small side street and Michael suddenly hit the steering wheel.
“I forgot to ask Wylie Dufresne about the vacuum chamber,” he said.
“The what?”
“Hold on; do you mind if we make a little detour?” he asked. I shrugged and said it was fine. A few minutes later we stepped gingerly into the quiet, well-groomed lobby of the restaurant wd-50. It was late in the dinner service, and only a couple of tables that could be seen from the front of the room were filled. A host looked up at us expectantly.
“Good evening, sir,” Michael said to the host, and began to explain that he was a friend of Alex Talbot’s from “Ideas in Food,” who was a good friend of Wylie Dufresne’s, the owner of wd-50 and a renowned experimental chef. Alex had referred him to Wylie to ask about a particular brand of vacuum-compress chambers. The host apologized that Wylie was not present at the moment but took down Michael’s information to pass on the message.
On the car ride back, Michael told me about how Alex had purchased a less-than-great vacuum chamber, a large and extremely expensive device used by high-tech-minded chefs to essentially suck the air out of foods. Always lamenting his poor investment, he had urged Michael to speak with Wylie first about whatever kind of vacuum he owned.
“How much are these things again?” I asked Michael.
“It’s ridiculous. Like four thousand dollars. Totally nuts. But I need to have one,” he said. I knew he did, too. That was the way Michael progressed with his cooking—by constantly expanding. It was also where we fell on different sides of the track: I wanted to make cooking at home more approachable and thus simpler, and he wanted to make it as extravagant as could be. I still appreciated and was fascinated by his approach.
The next morning, I woke early to meet Saha at Doughnut Plant. It was still raining since the night before, and I put on my rain boots and took the train into Chinatown. I was running about five minutes late when I got out of the subway, so I gave him a call.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m here now, sitting with the guy at the counter, who gave me a chai,” he said. When I got to the bakery five minutes later, Saha was indeed sitting by the register, talking to the only other person in the store, with a cup of chai between his palms. They greeted me and went back to chatting as if they were old pals.
“So this is your friend?” The counter
person asked, a few exchanges and chuckles with Saha later. His name was Luis. We nodded. “Would you guys like a doughnut now?” We nodded again. I put my umbrella down and took in the cozy atmosphere. One wall was lined with colorful doughnut-shaped tiles, and a few framed magazine features about Doughnut Plant were hung on it. Behind a large glass window, the interior of the kitchen and a couple of pastry chefs could be seen. Beside the register was a tall metal rack of fresh doughnuts on trays. The specials were written on the wall above Luis. I chose one of the special doughnuts of the day, a blackberry jam-filled, vanilla bean, glazed square doughnut. Saha ordered a coconut cream-filled glazed doughnut, also square. Luis handed them over with a sheet of waxed paper. I settled onto the bench next to Saha.
“Wow,” he said, tearing into the coconut one.
“Let me try,” I said. The cream spurted out as I took a bite. These doughnuts each had a hole in the middle, but the filling was stuffed all around the square of pastry. As we were eating, Mark Isreal came out from the kitchen and sat on a stool across the room. He opened up a newspaper.
“Hey, Mark, I want you to meet my new friends,” Luis said.
“Hey, guys,” Mark said as we waved hello back.
“Saha is a Web designer,” Luis said, shooting a look back to Saha. “Right?”
“Yes,” he said, mouth full of doughnut glaze crumbles.
“Really? I need to hire someone to help out with my website,” Mark said. “I have a few things I need to do with it, can you?”
Saha waved his hand in apology. “I can’t. But I know a lot of great designers who probably could if you asked them.”
Mark Isreal’s face dropped.
“I’m too busy right now,” Saha quickly replied. “But seriously, if you want any of their contact info, I’m sure they’d love to do it.”
Mark looked at Luis in shock and turned back to Saha. He gave him a cold glare as if to say, How dare you not stop everything to help out with my doughnut website? Although the look was exaggerated, I felt like he was being half serious. I was beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable.
“No, really; they’d be great,” Saha went on. “I’d work on it, too, but—”
Mark gave up on the topic with a wave of his hand. He turned his attention back to Luis and began asking him a question about the daily operations.
“Yikes,” I said to Saha. “How come you don’t want to work for the doughnut website?” I teased. He shook his head and kept quiet. I snapped some photos of the doughnuts on the racks and of us eating doughnuts as we chatted and finished our breakfast. For a while, Saha and I had been throwing around the idea of starting up a new food newsletter, with recipes and anecdotes about the dinner-party series that we also intended to start up. We were both so busy with other projects, though, that it looked like the collaboration might have to wait.
Luis gave Saha the cup of chai on the house. We each paid for our doughnuts; mine had cost $3.25. Not a bad deal for such a tasty, carefully made work of doughnut art. But it was still a sticky, greasy, sugary, and most of all, empty calorie-filled breakfast. I was still a little bit hungry after I left. On my way back to the subway, I popped into a bakery a few doors down. It was Kossar’s, a real New York legend of a place, the oldest bialy bakery in the country, opened in 1936. In fact, it was the place that had put bialys on the map in the United States. But because there was no seating and the place was strictly for takeout bialys—often by the dozen—I couldn’t quite qualify it as a real eating-out experience. I ended up buying a bialy to go and brought it home with me in a bag. This I planned to eat once Sunday rolled around and my opposite week was officially over.
On Saturday, I’d need to bring a huge pot of chili over to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for the Chili Takedown. Whether or not I ate the chili I cooked during opposite week was one thing. But I knew I’d be surrounded by the chilis of my fellow contestants at the Botanic Garden’s Chile Pepper Fiesta, and probably a lot more homemade food, too. I’d also be attending Jordan’s birthday party that Saturday night, and on Friday, I planned to go to my friend Nora’s birthday party. Both would likely be filled with homemade treats.
So I gave up on trying to make Saturday a strictly restaurant-food-only day. It was just as well, though. I couldn’t go a full normal week without encountering restaurant-made food (at the Edible Manhattan launch party), and I couldn’t go a full opposite week without some homemade food. The two worlds had melded into my life inextricably. Once the week was done I was glad I’d made the choice to lose the not-eating-out gimmick.
I spent most of Friday making my chili. I took the pork shoulder from Tom Mylan’s butchering class out of the bag of brine it had been sitting in for the last couple of days. Before leaving the class, I’d grilled Tom for some insight on how to cook it into chili, and he’d suggested brining it first. I also asked Michael for some advice and ended up borrowing from his mole-braised duck legs cooked at the Hope Lounge barbecue. After the brined pork was patted dry, I browned it in my biggest pot. I then filled the pot to the brim with a mixture of liquids—pork stock made a week before from bones from the same Berkshire pig, left over from the butchering class, the water I used to soak some dried ancho peppers, beer, and a cup of strong coffee. I tossed in onions, garlic, bacon, the soaked anchos, and a number of spices, and let the shoulder cook in the oven for about five hours. Following Michael’s advice, I took the pork out of the braising liquid and let it roast on a rack above the pot for the last fifteen minutes. This created crispy, slightly caramelized shreds of meat around its surface to pull.
After pulling the meat into bite-sized shreds and reducing the braising liquid, I spent the next couple of hours rounding it out with other ingredients—tomatoes, onions, peppers of all stripes, fresh corn, more bacon, ground-up chorizo sausage, canned pumpkin, pinto beans, more beer, lots of spices. It was a long process, one that I was familiar with from entering plenty of other Chili Takedowns.
While the meat was braising, I’d grabbed some lunch. I didn’t feel like spending much, after buying so many ingredients for the chili, so I opened the drawer filled with takeout menus and picked out the one for the nearest Chinese takeout restaurant. I wasn’t in the mood for meat for some reason, either, so I ordered tofu with broccoli. It was tempting to ask for my order to be delivered. In my building’s lobby, I frequently saw deliverymen heading upstairs with steaming bags or leaving on their battered bicycles. A lot of times, these deliverymen looked like they were past middle age. It made me sad to see them riding through the busy streets in the rain, wearing ponchos, and carefully balancing their food packages on the handlebars. I couldn’t fathom someone my father’s age having to do that, and for just one person’s measly lunch. So I walked the three blocks to the restaurant in the rain to pick up my polystyrene foam-packed order.
It was more food than I was hungry for, but I finished it anyway. It wasn’t particularly good, either. Afterward, I felt a little sick. I thought about skipping dinner and just seeing whatever food would be at Nora’s party, but around six o’clock I was feeling like a snack again and headed outside to grab a slice of pizza from a local pie shop.
It was ten o‘clock when I got to Nora’s, and the combination of the mediocre pizza, the Chinese food, the doughnut, and the constant tastes of the chili I was cooking throughout the day had my stomach feeling more than off. Still, I tried bites of the snacks at Nora’s party as I sipped wine. The theme of Nora’s birthday party was 2050, the year that some scientists predicted the world would end thanks to global warming. To go with the heat theme, all the food at the party was spicy. Nora also had decked her home in streamers made from twisted plastic shopping bags, and various signs of apocalyptic doom.
I woke the next morning with half an hour to spare before I was due at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It was still raining. The party had gone on until well past three in the morning, when I decided to leave. I was glad I’d finished all my chili making the day before. Since the Botanic Garden wa
s so close to my home, I was able to carry my pot of chili and containers with extra garnish there on my own.
The Chili Takedown was just one event that was taking place at the all-day Chile Pepper Fiesta. There were at least two dozen other tastings, demonstrations, lectures, and workshops related to the chili pepper, and the highlight of this year’s festival was hands down Pete Seeger’s performance on the open-field stage. The legendary folk musician, now in his eighties, rarely performed anymore, and when he did it was often for nonprofit or educational events like this one. When I found out I’d be participating in the festival, I’d sent my parents an excited e-mail. My dad is a longtime fan of Pete Seeger and other folk musicians from his hippie days in the 1960s. Even so, I wasn’t expecting the response I got from him, a few days later. “I may not be able to convince Mom to come along, but I’ll be there,” he wrote. “I’ve seen Pete Seeger twice—once in Berkeley in the 1960s and another time when he played in New Jersey in the 1980s. So I’ll come out to your chili contest and get to see him again.”
As I sat with the other chili contestants and Matt, I felt a little nervous about my dad showing up. We had never been particularly close, and I had a hard time recalling any activity we’d done together without other family members present. It was neat to discover that we both shared a huge respect for Pete Seeger—although mine was due more to his environmental achievements than his music. Of course, my dad and I had another thing in common: a passion for cooking. When he showed up, as I was in the midst of serving an enormous crowd of festival-goers, I was all too eager to step aside for a moment and walk around the room with him. We looked at other chili-themed vendors selling hot sauce and chutneys. We talked about the chili that I’d made. My dad’s cooking signature may be pies, but a close runner-up just might be his chili, for which he had earned a reputation. As Matt Timms and many others have put it, chili is great communal food—it feeds the masses. It keeps well, travels well, and is open to interpretation with a number of flavors and ingredients. That’s why it’s such common fare, I think, for cook-offs. My memories of chili from my youth have always stemmed from my dad cooking up an enormous pot to keep eating for leftovers the entire week.