Po' boy (Dressed Oyster and Undressed Calamari)

Cue In Search of Perfection music

[ts]
tigidingding, ding-dum, dum-dum
tigidingding, ding-dum, dum-dum

[js]
with feigned British accent:
Hi, my name is JS. I don't have a restaurant and my non-existent restaurant has been voted one of the top two in the world for two consecutive years.

Some time ago, I had a fried oyster po' boy from a supposedly Cajun place.

I wasn't too satisfied with it, so TS and I set about making the perfect po' boy.

[ts]
Stop that accent!



[js]
You'd think we'd go to New Orleans, the birthplace of the po' boys, but we didn't really have the budget to travel around the world to research food.

You'd think we'd go to oyster hotspots to get the perfect frying oysters, but we didn't really have the budget to do that as well.

I suppose we could have gotten the book A Geography of Oysters to help us with our quest, but then we would have to wait until they've shipped the book to us.

We didn't have time to wait, as we wanted our perfect fried oysters po' boy now.

So, in search of our perfect fried oyster po' boy, we had, like home cooks, to make do with what we have.

We went to the local supermarket to get the oysters. They came in one-pound jars and were only labelled "Fresh Pacific Oysters."

Peeking inside the jar, they looked and smelled to me good enough to be fried.



[js]
The po'boy is a sandwich, and in sandwiches, the bread is as important as the filling inside.

You'd think we'd go to Paris to find the best French baguette. That's not really in the cards.

I suppose we could have driven around town visiting artisan bakeries, but there wasn't enough time to do that.

We wanted a lighter, softer crumb bread, with a not-too-thick crust. We've seen the artisan French bread for sale around town and most of them seem to have very thick crusts.

So we landed -- yes, I'm afraid to admit -- at Safeway, to get one of their "artisan" French breads.

You know the end of the world is near when Safeway starts appropriating words like artisan.

[ts]
I think the "puh-fect" baguette for po' boy may be the same type of baguette as for Vietnamese banh mi. A very light crackly crust on the outside is what it is. I don't know where we can get such an entity!

Lest you think less of us, in our defence, I must say that we only got home at around 10pm after a 14-hour day. I think at that point, the bar for "perfection" was set relatively low.

[js]
Getting all of the ingredients together, we set about making our perfect fried oyster po' boy.

And a fried calamari po' boy as well.

[ts]
The oysters were pretty easy to do.

We started by heating up some cutesy peanut oil in a pan.

(Yes, cutesy. Look at it.)

We added cayenne, salt and pepper to some cornmeal, dredged the oysters, and in the pan they went.



So pretty, the grains of cornmeal and salt and pepper!



[ts]
While they were frying, we made a mayo-based sauce with shallots, grainy dijon and capers.



[ts]
Here's our perfect oyster po' boy.

Apparently, one can eat a po' boy plain or "dressed." We dressed this one with tomato and the mayo sauce.


Those oysters were huge. We could only fit three on there.

[js]
Our fried oyster po'boy was better than the one I had at Dadeo, but I wanted more oyster flavour. I kept thinking of the fried oysters they served at a small restaurant called Olympia, on Thurlow and Robson. (The restaurant is no longer in business since several years ago.) Those were very plump, very oysterrific oysters.

We also ran into the problem of the stale bread. (It was bought in the morning.) Toasting the bread revived it and solved that for us.

[ts]
For the calamari po' boy, it was the exact same method. (Well, except that JS accidently lost control of the cayenne pepper and dumped in about 2 tablespoons worth into the cornmeal.)

The calamari was undressed. Just itself and the bun.




[js]
From where I am, I think the calamari po' boy was better. It was absolutely delicious. It had a lot of body, a lot of squid-flavour, and it had some heat to it.

[ts]
However, I'm thinking that the calamari needed to be battered. Or, it needed a cornmeal and flour blend. The cornmeal was too heavy to coat the delicate pieces of squid. There was a mutiny and about 95% of the cornmeal "coating" ended up in the pan, cooking in the oil themselves!

The calamari really were undressed!

And, oopsy, they were a tad too seasoned, so ultimately, I added tomatoes in the sandwich. The calamari and tomatoes together were spectacular!

[js]
We should make these sandwiches again.

[ts]
This guy below looks like a guest on Charlie Rose.

DaDeO

(April 19, 2008)
http://www.dadeo.ca/

Two reviewers: ts and js

[ts]
To get ahead of ourselves, this was blah.

[js]
Dadeo is located on Cambie Street, right along the Canada Line construction. It used to be the Tomato Fresh Café, which has moved to a new location because of the diminished business from said construction.

Dadeo is fairly new (I think about a year old) and we have been meaning to try it since it opened. It is also just a stone's throw away from Pied-à-Terre.

Saturday lunch is our opportunity to try restaurants. I suggested Ajisai first, but in typical decision-making fashion, we drifted and drifted until we drove along Cambie Street and spotted Dadeo.

Upon entering, we were greeted and asked whether we wanted to have lunch or brunch. We asked if they could just get both menus to peruse and then decide after surveying our options.

I decided against the brunch options and opted for the lunch menu. Our server said that the only items available from the lunch menu are the po' boys. Which was fine with me, as I had a sort of a craving for fried oysters anyways. When I saw that they had a fried oyster po'boy on the menu, I was set.

[ts]
It took me longer to decide. I usually want something besides a sandwich. My choices were between the crab cake po' boy, the blackened catfish, and the andouille sausage. I finally decided on the crab cake. I had sweet potato fries as a side.

[js]
I had my fried oyster po' boy with a side of jambalaya rice (as opposed to hash browns or the sweet potato fries option).


foreground: crab cake po'boy w/ sweet potato fries
background: fried oyster po'boy w/ jambalaya rice

[js]
The fried oysters po' boy was merely okay. It was nicely fried and was not greasy at all, but I was missing some oysters. There seemed to be a lot of batter and filler for the oysters. (Take a look at it, to the left.)

The baguette was chewy and a tad stale, which was disappointing to me.

Of all, the jambalaya rice was -- well, I really did not like it at all.

It was not even warm, the rice grains were hard, and the "jambalaya stuff" on it was kind of eck.

[ts]
I tasted the "jambalaya rice" and I must say, it is not like jambalaya AT ALL. That's the thing, see.... I'll get back to this later. On to my food first.



[ts]
The sweet potato fries were not bad. They seemed to be battered, not just fried. The inside was really soft, like mashed sweet potato.

The crab cake po' boy was not bad as well. They looked pretty good. However, like the oysters, the batter seemed a little thick. That is, it overwhelmed the crab. The sauces (mayo and "scratch cocktail" sauce) also hid the taste of crab. I agree with JS about the bread.



[js]
Maybe we caught them on an off-day and I wouldn't be averse to trying this restaurant again. It would have to wait though as there are other restaurants in the queue.

I can't get past the stale bread though. I can forgive the lack of oysters and even that jambalaya-ish rice, but the stale bread is almost unforgivable. Think of the equivalent: if you got stale rice and/or hardened rice in a Chinese restaurant, would you be able to forgive it? Hardened rice becomes fried rice and the stale bread here should have been transformed into breadcrumbs already.

Perhaps the breadcrumbs that are the very filler of the oysters?

[ts]
This was a so-so meal for me.

The thing is, as I started to say above, as I was looking at the menu, nothing screamed "New Orleans" to me. The items just seemed like regular ol' dishes with perhaps some allegedly Cajun or Creole flavors. I doubt the authenticity is all.

[js]
All throughout our lunch, I kept thinking how I would make "my perfect fried oysters po' boy" à la Heston Blumenthal. Perhaps that's another post and another project sometimes in the near future. I am still craving some fried oysters.

(Chinese) Roast Pork Belly / Lechon

Another day, another belly...



[js]
I bought pork belly last week in the hopes of doing it as adobo. We discussed the pros and cons of an adobo pork belly.

Pro: it's superdelicious, loved by all, easy to make.
Con: can't really do another blog entry on pork adobo. (And we've also blogged about chicken adobo too!)

We wanted to do something superdelicious, loved by all, easy to make, and bloggable.

So our thoughts turn to another Filipino application of pork belly, that is, lechon kawali.

Lechon kawali is pork belly cut into bite-sized cubes, which are then usually deep-fried. Lechon kawali is similar to the "roast pig" served in Cantonese noodle houses. I don't know if the preparation is the same (deep-frying). The skin of "roast pig" (not to be confused with BBQ pork) is usually more blistery than lechon kawali.

The important thing to both these dishes is the crispy, crispy skin which contrasts with the ultrasoft fat and the tender meat. It is a marvel to eat because one gets three different textures all once with a bite.

I searched for how to prepare "roast pig" at home and it seemed to be fairly straightforward. I knew we didn't want to be deep-frying, and unlike lechon ni Betchon, we did not have a turbo convection oven to use for the bellies. They would have to go into the oven.

sim cooks recipe: home-made roast pork

Her dish looked like traditional roast pig, so I set about following her technique.

The seasoning is five-spice powder and salt. I didn't want to experiment with the seasoning the first time we're doing the dish. In fact, my ratio for five-spice to salt was only 1 to 15. I knew from experience that five spice can be a little overwhelming and I wanted to err on the side of caution.



I rubbed the salt and five spice mixture all over the pork bellies and let them dry-brine in the fridge for about 30 minutes.

Now that we have these metal skewers (bought for shish kebab), they're turning out to be extremely useful.

We used the metal skewers to suspend the bellies above the roasting pan. We figure that them hanging would be better, in that the dry oven heat can get under them and dry-cook them. We didn't want the bellies to be sitting in a pool of its own fat.

I started using two skewers per pork belly piece, but got lazy. I tried to save a skewer!



After the initial 30 minutes in the oven, the skin has turned a light butterscotch-y brown, with some blisters forning at the edges.


Look how they've shrunk!

To get more blisters, the skin would have to be poked a million times. We used a fork at first, then graduated to toothpicks to pierce the skin.

Notice how the skin had a matte finish pre-poking and how it glistened with its own fat post-poking.


poke, poke-poke-poke, poke, poke-poke, poke, poke, poke-poke-poke

Pre-poke:


Post-poke:


Into the oven for another 30 minutes. The skin was getting there, but some parts were still not crispy.

We poked some more and put it back into the oven for more time. At about 15 minutes more, we were afraid that the pork would start to burn. So, although a proportion (about 15%) of the skin surface was still not as crisp as we would like, we pulled out the pork bellies.


It has shrunk even more!

We made a chili-garlic-vinegar condiment to use as a dipping sauce for the pork belly. Served with a side of sauteed bok choy and over some steaming white rice, this was quite heavenly.




This is pretty much a set-it-and-forget-it meal, easy to do on a weeknight, but oh-so-satisfying.

Perhaps pork belly this way is also infinitely variable and I am looking forward to experimenting with different seasonings for the pork.


So here it is! Superdelicious, loved by all, easy to make, and most importantly, bloggable.

[captions provided by TS]

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