The idea for this newsletter first came about in 2019, just after I was laid off from a job, as a way to keep writing and fill my suddenly ample free time. And since it launched on October 28, 2020,1 freelance work has come and gone and my writing here has fit into the spaces between. But 2025 was different. Freelance work was just gone. No calls. No emails. No one asking if I was free and then ghosting me when I responded, which is what usually happens to freelancers.

It was very hard to convince myself that this silence wasn’t personal. That there wasn’t some specific reason the entire advertising industry had started ignoring me. Was it something I said to someone? Did I inadvertently step on someone’s foot at an awards show? Why did they all suddenly hate me? It’s enough to do a person’s head in, really. So it was oddly comforting that almost every other freelance creative I knew was just as hungry for work as I was.

And so from February 1 to July 11 of this year, I published 9 issues of The Plate Cleaner. What a time to be a subscriber! What changed after July 11? The phone rang! First to work on a pitch for a few weeks and then a longer-term gig that has carried over until the new year. After seven months’ furlough, it has been challenge getting my brain back up to full speed. That meant I just didn’t have the mental bandwidth to come up with Plate Cleaner ideas as well. Hopefully, as all of my capabilities fully come back online, I’ll be able to strike a better balance.

In the meantime, here’s a very brief issue.

To mark the newsletter’s fourth anniversary, I uploaded the first Plate Cleaner video to YouTube, showing how to use a milk frother to emulsify small batches of vinaigrette.

Since then, I’ve realized that any time it’s difficult to dissolve something completely into liquid, a milk frother is the answer. Instant dashi, the granulated version of the fundamental Japanese bonito and kelp stock, always has sediment at the bottom when you add hot water, no matter who much you stir. The same with Better Than Bouillon. And Metamucil2 usually takes so much stirring to make it drinkable. With a milk frother, it’s as smooth as the label says it’s supposed to be (but never is).3

My frother has yet to see or taset and milk, but I take extra care rinsing it, lest my Metamucil taste chicken-y.4

I am a big fan of grey-market uses for kitchen tools, whether it’s using a potato ricer to squeeze out kimchi juice to make a sauce for fried rice or a cooling rack to separate two kinds of dumplings in one pot.

Let me know what your favourite gray-market uses are in the comments below.

That’s it for 2025. Again, sorry for the sparse back end. Fingers crossed there will be more consistent content (and work!) in 2026.

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At first glance, yellow (aka hot dog or ballpark) mustard might seem like an odd choice. After all, 42.8% of global mustard seed exports in 2023 were from Canada. And there is no shortage of great mustard makers in the country either—my research turned up at least 20 different small and independent mustardiers.1 But most of them produce what I would loosely call “fancy” or “European-inspired” mustards, often made with spicier, more pungent brown mustard seeds. When it comes to (North) American yellow mustard made from milder and tangier yellow mustard seeds, the most popular labels, like French’s and certain store-branded products, are all made in the US—often from Canadian seeds, which they use to maplewash23 their branding. Koops takes this a step further, branding the front of their labels with “The True North’s True Classic” and “Canada’s Main Squeeze,” while the back of the label tells a different story.

My research showed that in spite of this American domination of the yellow mustard market in Canada, there were in fact many Canadian yellow mustards available. Which could I use to replace the French’s and Vienna Beef yellows in my fridge? I decided that that would be my next quest.

Once I identified who made a mustard they described as “yellow,” “ballpark,” or “hot dog,” I emailed them and asked if they could send me a sample. To my surprise, almost all of them did, with a few notable exceptions.4 Perhaps watching @dailyrejection’s videos on Instagram, in which he approaches a different stranger each day with an unusual request, has helped me overcome my very strong aversion to asking for this kind of cold calling.

But it worked! And soon enough, 15 different mustards were on their way for tasting. (Not all 15 were yellow/hot dog/ballpark varieties. A bunch of makers were generous enough to send a few other varieties they thought I would also like to sample.)

Once I had the mustards, I knew I needed some help. Not only would tasting 15 mustards by myself would be tedious and much too small a sample size, it also meant I would be left with 15 opened jars of mustard. At the best of times, our fridge is (by my doing) 50% condiments; adding 15 more jars would possibly be grounds for divorce. If I could get some help tasting and evaluating the mustards, I could also send everyone home with a few of their favourites. That’s a win for everyone except the lawyers. I put the call out to a group of 145 friends who are as excitable about food as I am. (One couple even showed up in matching mustard-coloured clothing.) Quickly, we agreed on a date for our testing.

The question then became: how to test them? Eating them from spoons seemed clinical and not very fun. Since one of yellow mustard’s names is “hot dog mustard,” the answer was right there. And, through the incredible super power of asking someone for something, I soon had a source of hot dogs lined up as well.

Sean Kwinter, who was reviving his grandfather Sam’s legendary Kwinter’s Hot Dogs just in time for the Canada Day holiday, agreed to provide his fantastic kosher, all-beef, made-in-Toronto dogs for our tasting. It had all fallen into place.

In typical Plate Cleaner timing, the tasting was scheduled for just after Canada Day; god forbid I’m organized enough to publish issues in a timely manner. Dogs were steamed (chicken for the non-beef-eaters) and sliced into bite-size bits, pretzels were put out, drinks were iced, and mustard lids were removed. Everyone had a comment sheet as well as an outline of what ChatGPT thought the Platonic ideal of a yellow mustard should be.6 It was time to taste.7

But before we get into the panel’s reactions, a few notes:

• Unlike with canned tomatoes, there will be no scores in this tasting. The point was not to pit small, independent businesses against each other in some ballpark version of thunderdome. We wanted to discover what all of the great yellow mustards across the country had to offer with no winners or losers.

• Speaking of winners and losers, no mustard was unanimously chosen as either good or bad.8 In reviewing the comment sheets, it was clear that different people have different preferences and very different thresholds for things like sweetness, tartness, heat, and pungency (which were very often referred to as “horseradish,” even though none of them contained it).9 What was overwhelmingly tart for some were perfectly balanced for others. Keep this and your own preferences in mind if you’re considering ordering any of them (which you absolutely should).

• Several mustards received comments about having odd, unsmooth, or “oddly creamy” textures. Looking at the ingredients of the mustards that received most of those comments a common thread emerged: none of them used preservatives or stabilizers. We may have become so used to the industrially-produced default yellow mustards that we expect a silky smooth texture when, in fact, it’s more unnatural. I’ve left out most comments about texture for this reason, so if you order a mustard and it isn’t the consistency of French’s, don’t be surprised.

On to the tasting

As I see (and taste) it, the 15 mustards could be divided into 3 groups:

Yellow or Almost Yellow (listed in alphabetical order)

These are mustards that are the closest one-to-one substitutes for standard yellow mustards, although they are almost all an improvement. Tartness and pungency vary, but there is certainly a variety to please almost anyone.

Caplansky’s Ballpark - (Full disclosure: I’ve known Zane for many years, having worked on ads for his deli when it was launching on College St. In fact, Beth and I had our wedding there.) From being a pop-up sandwich maker to the owner of multiple delicatessen locations to mustard impresario, Zane Caplansky has been pleasing palates for nearly 20 years.

Tasters described Caplansky’s as “classic” and “a split between a smooth Dijon and a ballpark.” In fact, its smooth consistency, which one taster said was “creamy” was noted by several tasters, as was its balanced acidity. Perhaps swayed by Caplansky’s history, one taster noted it would taste best on a smoked meat sandwich. I found it slightly tarter than the others in this group, which for my palate is a good thing.

Cedar’s Yellow Mustard

Cedar is the house brand of the Marché Adonis supermarket chain and the only house brand I could find that was made in Canada. They’re best known for other products like olive oil, dried and canned beans, and dairy products, not their mustard. This is because, to put it plainly, it’s not very good. Only one taster wrote that they liked it. The most common comment was “meh.” The must unexpected: “tastes a little bit of foot.”10

Cressy Mustard Co.’s Ballpark Mustard

Based in Waupoos, Prince Edward County, Ontario, Cressy Mustard was first made by Sarah Harrison to sell to raise money for the Cressy Church. It was such a hit that it became a business, with eight varieties of mustard now available.

Cressy’s twist is the inclusion of smoked paprika and cumin in addition to the standard turmeric. Tasters called it “a great all-round mustard” with “good classic flavour” that “still has bite”. Slightly tart and slightly spicy (perhaps from the paprika), it divided people who either really enjoyed those qualities or weren’t as into them. Again, govern yourself accordingly.

Kellson’s Classic Yellow Mustard

When Travis Kell replied to my inquiry, he gave me a quick mustard history lesson, explaining that the origins of American mustard traditions first came from Germans who migrated to the Carolinas, which is why Carolinian-style barbecue sauces are often very mustard heavy. He also noted that his uses mustard milled by G.S Dunn Dry Mustard Millers, who have been milling mustard in Hamilton, Ontario since 1875 and are the largest miller of its kind in the world.

Made with all natural ingredients and no stabilizers, many tasters flagged Kellson’s as a classic example of the ballpark style, with a mild bite and good acidity. Others enjoyed the thick, smooth consistency. Another taster thought its brightness and clean finish “would be perfect in a mustard-forward potato salad.” I found it had a nicely mild flavour that balanced well with the medium spice of the Kwinter’s dog11 without overwhelming it.

Maison Orphée’s Yellow mustard with Turmeric

Founded in Quebec in 1983 and now a certified B-Corp run by sisters Élisabeth and Élaine Bélanger, Maison Orphée has products including oils, vinegars, mustards, mayonnaises, and vinaigrettes in over 2,000 retailers across Canada, so you’re likely to have run into one of them at some point.

Many tasters noted the strong (organic) apple cider vinegar flavours to this mustard, again to varying degrees of enjoyment. Some thought it would be “great for hot dogs,” “good for salad,” or “I’m thinking about a homemade mac and cheese.” There was also a hint of fermented funk which, again, is something you might be into. It wasn’t for everyone, but some people definitely stood by it.

Yellow Deer Mustard’s Ol’ Yeller

Mustard from the east coast of Vancouver Island, specifically Qualicum Beach, B.C. Yellow Deer prides itself on handmaking its mustards using Canadian-grown mustard seeds and, mostly, free of additives and preservatives.

Yellow Deer calls Ol’ Yeller “a mellow gourmet yellow” with a unique blend of spices including celery seed. It was another popular choice among our tasters, who noted its brightness, tang, and acidity. It was called “smooth and deep” and “classic yellow.” My notes say, “Dimensions. Good complexity.” Perhaps I was picking up on the celery seed? As Yellow Deer promised, it was definitely a yellow mustard but it also brought a little more, which people liked.

Ballpark-Adjacent

These mustards had some characteristics that brought them close to being a classic ballpark, but, at the same time, had other characteristics were not part of the ballpark orthodoxy. These often got comments about how they weren’t a true ballpark mustard.

Atlantic Mustard Mill’s East Coast Hot Dog Mustard

Sabine and Michael Schoenknecht founded Atlantic Mustard Mill in Murray Harbour North, Prince Edward Island in 2018, having first moving from Germany to PEI in 2013. Along with pickles, sauces, and dressings, they produce over 45 different varieties of mustard.

The Schoenknecht’s don’t produce a classic yellow mustard, but this one had the words “hot dog” in the name (and properly spelled as two words) so it was close enough for me. It combines both yellow and brown seeds with homemade pickles, savory, and dill for a flavour that was a favourite for many tasters.12 Though some grumbled that it wasn’t a classic ballpark mustard, its medium pungency and strong pickle flavour were big hits. As well as noting that it worked well with the Kwinter’s dogs, tasters also thought it was “screaming for a roast beef sandwich,” and would be great in potato salad.

La Morin’s La Deli Jaune De Luxe

Based in Montreal, Julien Morin was inspired by his grandfather’s quest for the perfect mustard “that tickles your nostrils and leaves you with a strong, everlasting impression.” Mission accomplished, Julien! This bright yellow example certainly packed the most punch of any mustard at the tasting, which was either perfect or overwhelming, depending on the taster. But those who liked it were very enthusiastic.

Calling it “La Deli” as instead of “La Stade” or “Le Parc” is the right decision, as its flavour definitely evokes a deli more than a stadium. One taster described it as “for real mustard fans” and several wanted to try it on sandwiches, particularly roast beef. Not for the faint of heart, but definitely for heat enthusiasts.

The Mustard Lady’s Gladly Yellow

The Mustard Lady is a small, family-run company in Courtenay BC, in the Comox Valley, also on the east coast of Vancouver Island.13 Strongly community-minded, they offer their products alongside other products made by other local farmers and makers. At their shop they also offer cheese and charcuterie boards and preserves.

What most distinguishes Gladly Yellow from the other ballpark14 mustards is right in its description on the label: Ball Park Beer Mustard. The beer flavour, from an IPA from the Gladstone Brewing Co, is front and centre and adds a dimension that the other ballparks didn’t have. I think because of the unexpectedness of the beer flavour, some found it a little confusing, but one taster called it “oddly satisfying.” I found that after my initial confusion, I liked how the beer complemented the beefy flavour of the Kwinter’s hot dog I had for lunch today, when an actual beer wasn’t available to do the job.

Other Flavours

Atlantic Mustard Mill’s Roasted Garlic — This was one mustard that produced two different reactions. The strong roasted garlic flavour of this gold medal winner at the 2025 World Mustard Competition was intense and tasty for some but overwhelming for others. If you’re into deep garlic flavour, this might be a good choice for you.

Atlantic Mustard Mill’s The Maritimer — Fermented and built for maximum heat, this was one of the mustards often described as “horseradish,” which, again, I understand to mean “heat and pungency.” That strength was appreciated by many, who wanted to try it on sandwiches or, for one taster, a croque monsieur. If there were a “Big Punchers” category, The Maritimer and La Morin’s La Deli would be in it.

Atlantic Mustard Mill’s Sauer with a chance of Kraut — Made with sauerkraut using an old recipe from Sabine’s family, people appreciated the bright tartness of the mustard. Once again, it really depended on how the taster felt about sauerkraut in general. A great choice for kraut lovers.15 (Overheard but not written down, “This is the kind of name more mustards should have! It’s so fun.)

Maison Orphee’s Organic Dijon

Being a Dijon, of course, our tasters were much more familiar with what to expect than with the other non-ballparks. And, by and large, they thought it was a good representation of the form, noting its nice “horseradish” bite, its moderate acidity, and its smoothness. One taster noted, “I want to use it as a face mask. Wow!” Overall, an excellent option if you are looking to replace your French Dijon16 with a homegrown product instead.

The Mustard Lady’s Mighty Mike’s

Named after the late father of the Mustard Lady’s best friend, a portion of every jar of Mighty Mike’s is donated to cancer research and those affected by cancer. The label bills it as “sweet & pickled beer mustard” and our tasters definitely agreed, with almost every comment noting its sweetness. One comment said the sweetness made it “great mustard for non-mustard lovers.” To another, the sweetness would “make a nice salad dressing or marinade for honey mustard salmon,” which seems appropriate for the coast of Vancouver Island. Others picked up on the pickle-y tanginess, which some described as “bread and butter pickle” or “relish.” And others, perhaps noting the Gladstone Brewing IPA in it, said it, “needs a good brat,” or, “would be good on an Oktoberfest sausage.”

Yellow Deer Mustard’s Dill Pickle

Containing chunks of dill pickle, dill weed, and dill seed, this one was definitely dill forward, as noted by several tasters, who found the turmeric prominent as well. Some tasters observed that the consistency was slightly looser than others.17 Again, that’s what some are looking for and some are not. My favourite comment was, “Mustard AND relish! Love it.”

This issue is long enough, so we will return to “What I’m consuming…” and “What’s on the menu…” next time.

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For now, so many thanks to the mustard makers and to Kwinter’s for providing all of our samples and dogs, to the great panel of participants18 who gave up part of their Sunday to argue about mustard, and to all who are reading this. If there’s another product you’d like me to find a great made-in-Canada version of, drop me a line or let me know in the comments.

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This happens with some frequency, such as when food writers don’t disclose conflicts of interest3 or their personal agendas. Or just making things seem rosier than they could ever possibly be. Then there’s lying about how long it takes to caramelize onions. This happens in all kinds of writing, I guess, but there is something about the personal and immediate interaction we have with food that makes it even easier to fudge or occlude the truth. We all see the same film and hear the same piece of music, and can point to particular passages from either in a review, but a bite of food is gone forever. It’s something I’ve always kept in mind.

One of the only rules4 I have about writing The Plate Cleaner is that I have to be as honest as possible.5 No one who cooks (or writes) is perfect all of the time, which I have done my best to show time and again. (For instance, here. Here. Here. Here. And here.)

All of which is to say: I done messed up.

When I wrote my last Plate (as my newsletter consiglieri Chris Frey and I refer to this enterprise), in addition to the skewers I cooked myself, I also mentioned souvlaki, shish kebab, suya, anticuchos, kofta, and Xinjian lamb skewers. Somehow, I left out one of the greatest skewers of all.

But first, let’s back up a bit.

Our niece was visiting on the weekend and we figured the night market at Harbourfront would be a fun outing. Upon arriving, we took the obligatory lap around the booths to get a sense of what we wanted to try. After some pretty good tteokbokki6 and a tasty pile of mini pancakes cooked in a pan similar to one you’d use to cook takoyaki or aebleskiver, topped with strawberries and bananas, we were on the hunt for our next score.

When we got to the stand for Wilson’s Haus of Lechon, a highly pork-centric restaurant in Toronto’s Little Manila, we put the order in our niece’s hands. She was born in the Philippines and her mother is a killer cook, so I figured that not only would she be a great judge of what was available, but that she might also get a slightly larger serving as a nod to her shared Pinoy heritage.7

She chose a BBQ pork skewer so there was no quantity bump to be had. No matter; we still had grilled, skewered pork in a sweet, tangy sauce to enjoy. It was fantastic and just as I remembered it when we took her to the Taste of Manila festival a few years ago. I immediately started kicking myself for overlooking it when putting together the last Plate. It is a top-tier8 skewer.

I had screwed up and I knew I had to make amends. The piece of pork shoulder I had in the fridge, which was supposed to become the Red Chile Brochettes I made previously, would instead become Filipino BBQ Pork Skewers.9 Fortunately, YouTube and the rest of the Internet are rife with recipes for them and, happily, almost all of them seem to be posted by Filipinos and not other folks “simplifying” or “elevating” them.

Just like many skewers, these required some time to marinate before being threaded onto sticks and grilled. There were some variations from recipe to recipe, but they all had the same basic marinade ingredients: soy sauce,10 sugar, garlic (in one form or another), citrus juice (calamansi if available, lemon if not), Sprite or 7Up, and banana ketchup (often labeled as “banana sauce”).

I had seen banana ketchup before, but I’d never bought it or tried it on its own.11 Our neice’s description, “It tastes like ketchup but it also doesn’t,” was very accurate. It has the sweet, tart, savoury, and fruity flavours of tomato ketchup, but there’s something different going on as well. There’s no overt banana flavour—if you were given a sample blindly, you’d never guess it was made with them—but it’s lurking subtly in the background.

Let’s back up a bit further.

The flavour of banana ketchup, it turns out, is not the most interesting thing about it. Unlike most foods, definitive credit for the invention of banana ketchup can be given to one person: Maria Ylagan Orosa. She moved from Manila to the US in 1916 and earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in pharmaceutical chemistry and her bachelor’s degree in food chemistry from the University of Washington in Seattle.

Despite being offered a job with the State of Washington, Orosa chose to return home. A committed nationalist—her father fought for the resistance movement against Spain and the United States—Orosa wanted to help the Philippines become more food self-sufficient and less reliant on foreign products.

Reducing reliance on foreign imports and resisting American hegemony? This was someone I could relate to!12 This was an unexpected twist from when I started writing a post I had conceived as being about how “I’m a dumbass and I forgot about one of the best skewered foods of all time.”

Upon her return to the Philippines, Orosa went to work for the Bureau of Sciences, tackling problems like malnutrition and food insecurity. From her school summer vacations spent working in salmon canneries in Alaska, she introduced the processes of canning and preserving, which weren’t yet widely adopted in the Philippines, and used them to preserve local products to extend their utility. And when there was a shortage of imported tomatoes, she invented banana ketchup, which has since become a staple in Filipino kitchens.

Her story doesn’t end there. When Japan invaded the Philippines in 1941, Orosa, like her father before her, joined the resistance. She invented Soylac, a nutrient-rich drink made from soy beans and rice flour that could be baked into cookies13 to sustain resistance fighters and, through the system she established for smuggling them into internment camps, 4,000 civilian detainees, most of whom were American. Sadly, she was wounded during the battle for Manila and then died when the hospital she had been taken to was struck by American shelling.

You can read more about Maria Ylagan Orosa in Lady Science’s excellent account of her life and the New York Times’ barely-better-late-than-never obituary, both of which I have stolen from extensively. It’s a remarkable story that I might never have learned about if our niece hadn’t ordered what she did. Is there anything food can’t do?

Back to the present

Once the marinade was mixed together, I poured it over the thinly sliced pork shoulder and left it in the fridge overnight. The next day I soaked some skewers in water while the charcoal was starting and then threaded the pork slices onto them. Then I made another batch of the marinade as a basting sauce, this time leaving out the Sprite.

Unfortunately, it was pouring with rain when I wanted to start grilling. I’m crafty enough to get charcoal started when it’s raining, but whenever I removed the grill’s lid to turn or baste the skewers, they got pelted with raindrops. I’m going to blame this for my skewers not developing the thick, glossy glaze or charred edges that Wilson’s Haus of Lechon did. As soon as I would brush some sauce on, the rain would sploosh it off.

Served with some jasmine rice, as well as zucchini and asparagus I cooked inside after deciding I could no longer stand the rain, the skewers were a decent approximation of what we’d had at the night market. I’m now motivated to try other recipes and see if I can get mine as close as I can to Wilson’s benchmark sticks.

What I’m consuming… I gave you two articles about Maria Ylagan Orosa! What more do you vultures want? How about an article about another use for bananas: banana vinegar. It’s relatively easy to make and a use for old bananas that doesn’t leave you with another unwanted loaf of banana bread. I can no longer find the page about making banana vinegar that listed the basic steps as: 1) hang a bunch of bananas on a string 2) put a bucket under the bananas to catch what drips as they rot 3) that’s vinegar! This recipe seems much more thorough and less likely to attract pests of all sizes.

What’s on the menu… Cole Slaw. As I write this, we are about to leave for a Canada Day barbecue at some friends’ house. When I asked what we could bring, the answer (jokingly) was, “Your best side dish.” I don’t know if cole slaw is absolutely my best side dish, but it is one that I can make very well without consulting a recipe. Shredded cabbage and carrot tossed with salt and sugar to draw out some moisture, then rinsed, dried, and dressed with mayo, sour cream, buttermilk, onion and garlic powder, cider vinegar, Dijon mustard, Old Bay, Worcestershire sauce, MSG, Lizano Salsa,14 salt and pepper. Easy! Maybe I should do a video on my slaw non-recipe?

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And now onto the issue.

Kids eat more as they grow up. I know the parents (and probably non-parents) among my readers are rolling their eyes and thinking, “Amazing discovery, Magellan.” But children’s appetites come up in my life at most twice a year and not even that often since the pandemic started. When we held our New Year’s Day open houses, I started to notice this as our friends’ kids left toddlerhood and then single digits behind. First I saw that our small house was suddenly much more crowded. Then what used to be more than enough food was barely just enough.

Since March of 2020 I’ve only had a handful of occasions when I needed to account for kids young adult meals and, as a result, was a bit surprised to discover that they all now have the “eat three baked potatoes at one sitting” appetite I had at their age.

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At an annual cottage weekend with friends, we take turns planning and preparing a meal for everyone. Before the pandemic, kids ate earlier with more kid-friendly meals than what we would prepare for the adults. Last summer, with some of them entering their last year of high school, two separate meals didn’t seem necessary or practical.

But what to serve a table that had now expanded to 14 seats? In past years I often favoured large chunks of meat like pork butt or a leg of lamb, grilled in some way. But 14 people + wild inflation + (have I mentioned this before?) a brutal freelance market made buying an even larger chunk of meat unfeasible. As well, my enthusiasm for large chunks of meat has waned in recent years.1

Earlier that summer I had been going through a bit of yakitori mania. I bought the proper skewers and charcoal but rather than splash out for one of the beautiful-but-unaffordable konro grills from Knifewear, I just wrapped some bricks in foil to support my chicken over the coals.

And one thing I learned from this grilled chicken jag—as well as how to load a balanced skewer so it doesn’t roll with the same side always facing down—was that when it’s skewered, I ate far less chicken than I normally would. Often the meat from one thigh—and not a particularly large one—would be enough for me. As explained by the Harvard Medical School, this could be because it forced me to eat more slowly, which gives digestive hormones secreted by the GI tract more time to signal the brain that it’s full.

Knowing this, I had my plan for how to feed 14 without breaking the bank: lots and lots of skewers bearing less meat than would be needed when served as one large hunk. As a bonus, I figured it would take less time to grill small bits of meat instead of the hours it can take to do a roast.2 Satay, with chicken, pork, and beef, was a great choice, with plenty of rice, both cucumber and mango salads, and a huge array of peanut sauces I had bought for a project that never came together. Everyone was happy and full, even though they had consumed a fraction of what I used to serve.

And with grilling season once upon us, I have broken out the skewers again. When I told Beth I had decided to write about them, I warned her that it was about to be Skewer Week for dinner. I planned to make three different kinds to show their versatility: pork marinated in red chile served as tacos, pork satay,3 and my own, less labour-intensive variation on momo (pieces of chicken thigh cooked yakitori-style).

For the red chile skewers, I marinated thin slices of pork shoulder in a blendered sauce of ancho chile powder, lime juice, garlic, olive oil, freshly toasted and coarsely ground cumin, and a tomato I charred under the broiler, setting some aside to serve as a sauce later. Then, with my GrillGrates turned over to the plancha side, I cooked the double-skewered, two-chunk brochettes over a hot fire4 until they were nicely charred on both sides and cooked through, about six minutes in total.

While the pork rested I grilled some zucchini and warmed up the tortillas. A morsel of pork, some guacamole, a small wedge of zucchini, and a dollop of reserved sauce made a fantastic two- or three-bite taco. Using shoulder instead of a leaner cut was a great choice, as the meat didn’t dry out over the coals. I may have had one more than I needed, but since I was only cooking for two, it wasn’t a huge cost overrun.

Two nights later, it was satay time. This time I used a pork chop cut into thin slices that were slightly longer than the red chile pork and marinated in [deep breath] shallot, ginger, garlic, lemongrass, ground cumin and coriander, turmeric, cayenne, fish sauce, lime juice, soy sauce, brown sugar, and coconut milk for about 45 minutes. Satay always seems to be cooked on single skewers with the meat threaded to lie as flat as possible, so that’s what I did. From there, the procedure is much like the red chile skewers, although I decided to flip the GrillGrates over to create some grill lines.

Although the flavour was great, using a leaner pork chop instead of shoulder did lead to dryer meat, especially since it was cut quite thinly. But nothing a dollop of peanut sauce (the one jar I saved from last year’s library of peanut sauces) couldn’t help. And a big helping of Jasmine rice.5 6 And some grilled zucchini because it came in wrapped bundles of five at the supermarket, making Zucchini Week as well.

The final night of what I guess was actually Skewer Half-Week, was an idea I had come up with myself a few weeks before. Yakitori is wonderful, but cutting chicken into small chunks and skewering all of it can, frankly, be a bit of a pain.7 Instead of cutting boneless, skinless thighs, I decided to skewer the whole thighs, rolling them so the skin covered all of the outside, with as little exposed meat as I could manage.8 Because the rolled thighs were much thicker than either of the pork pieces (over one inch vs fractions of an inch), they would take a lot longer to cook, so I built a two-level fire in my grill and cooked them on the cooler side until they were nearly ready.9 During that time, I basted them regularly with yakitori tare, made by simmering shoyu, mirin, rock sugar, sake, and tamari,10 to build up a thin glaze. When the centres of the thighs were almost at 165°F I moved them to the hot side of the grill to crisp the skin, hopefully before too much of the sugar in the tare burnt.

Now for a moment of honesty: the thighs were very unwieldy. The first time I made this a few weeks earlier, I had smaller thighs that were each a little larger than a playing card. They rolled nice and tightly. When I cooked this time to take photographs, my thighs were slightly larger than the palm of my sizeable hands, i.e., much larger than before. Rolling them left spots of meat exposed and overall they were flabby and hard to manage. For aesthetics and for the shorter cooking time, definitely do this with smaller thighs.

The skin crisped and darkened without any unwanted burning. I cut each thigh into chopstick-appropriate chunks closer in size to traditional yakitori chunks.

I went overboard with the sides, grilling zucchini (or course); making cucumbers marinated in rice vinegar, shoyu, and dashi; and putting together gai lan goma-ae (i.e., with a ground sesame dressing) that I totally ripped off from Imanishi Japanese Kitchen earlier in the week.

And rice. Lots of rice to catch all the various sauce and dressing drippings.

There are so many other great skewered foods from around the world. I could have easily done Skewer Month with souvlaki, shish kebab, suya, anticuchos, kofta, Xinjian lamb skewers, and more. What’s your favourite skewered food? Let me know in the comments!

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What I’m consuming…

Books! — After striking out a lot at thrifting lately, I finally got on a good run, bagging James McNair’s Beans and Grains and James McNair’s Stews and Casseroles at consecutive stores. They are numbers 18 and 19 in my ongoing quest to collect all 27 of McNair’s pioneering single-subject cookbooks. I also landed a copy of 1987’s Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book, which appears to give away the recipes to some of their big hits like Cherry Garcia and Heath Bar Crunch. I don’t have an ice cream maker, but if I ever get one,11 I’ll be ready. I also picked up a copy of the August 1988 edition of The Meat Buyers Guide by the National Association of Meat Purveyors. It’s full of diagrams and photos of various primal, subprimal, and retail cuts and was only $3, although one recently sold on eBay for $85 US!

One of NYC’s Last Traditional Noodle Masters — I thought baking pizza and bread at home made a floury mess. I had no idea.

What’s on the menu…

Lots of pizza — If it’s grilling season, it’s also backyard pizza season and I’ve been splitting my time between both. After all, I have an absolute ton of tomatoes to use up. I tried out a new version tonight with sweet Italian sausage, sautéed onions, and gai lan cooked in the style of rapini with garlic and olive oil, which I’ve written about before as a wonderful way not to pay rapini prices to American farmers.

It turned out great and I will definitely make it again. What won’t be making another appearance on my pizza is Hunt’s Heirloom Whole Tomatoes, the one canned tomato I couldn’t track down while I was testing. They eventually turned up at Treasure Hunt, a thoroughly depressing and yet fascinating liquidation store I can’t help dipping into when I’m in the area. Appropriate that I found them at a liquidator since they were so watery I had to strain the sauce I made from blending them to make sure my pizza didn’t turn into a puddle. I didn’t need a rubric to figure out how they rated. On a scale of one to ten? A big thumbs down.

Postscript

I realized after I’d finished writing this post that I should have done a recipe with beef as well, perhaps in place of one of the pork recipes. Since this issue wasn’t scheduled to go live for another day, I thought I would use the extra time to make something with beef, specifically kabab koobideh, or Persian ground beef (and sometimes lamb) kebabs. I found what looked like a good recipe online (I won’t name names in this case) and got to work. Initially, as I formed the meat, mixed with grated onion, baking soda,12 and sumac, around the long, flat kabab skewers I had bought years ago and barely used, things were looking promising.13

But as soon as they hit the grill, it was a disaster. The recipe calls for rotating the skewers every 30 seconds at first. This is possible when they are suspended over the fire, like yakitori. But, of course, when they are touching the grill, they will still be very stuck to it after thirty seconds. The meat on the skewers tore and fell off the skewers more each time I tried to turn them.

Eventually I pulled them off the skewers and tried to grill the now quite loose meat on the ridges of my GrillGrates, which is something like trying to cook a pancake on a badminton racquet. I was able to salvage almost all of it and, eaten with naan14 and topped with tahini-lime sauce15 I’d made for some grilled cabbage16 early in the week, it was still very tasty.

Aside from not suspending the skewers over the flame instead of placing them directly on the grill, my big mistake, I learned later, was how gingerly I had handled the beef and onion mixture. When I think of handling ground beef, my mind first turns to burgers, where you want to handle it as little as possible, lest it get tacky and bind together too much, like a sausage would.17 But that’s exactly the point here. In this video, specifically about how to keep koobideh from falling off the skewer, the host says you should mix the beef, onion, and seasonings with your hands for up to seven minutes. (Also, look at how beautiful his shaping of the skewers is in the thumbnail below! Now scroll up and look at mine again. Ugh.))

By the end of those seven minutes, the mixture is tacky and well blended and far more cohesive than my long burgers on a stick ever could be. Deep down, I knew this, but in the rush to get another skewer into this issue, I forgot to consider it. Just another reminder that you often need to rely on your own experience instead of what the recipe tells you to do.

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6

Did you know that the Thai government certifies the quality of their Jasmine rice? Only 59 producers meet its standards and bear the Thai Hom Mali Rice Certificate logo.

I also noticed that Farm Boy has a private label kosher salt in a container with the same shape as Aurora (albeit in different colours) that, like Aurora, is mined in Sicily. I didn’t need another package of salt, so I didn’t pick it up, but I’m assuming it’s a good if not identical option if you can’t find Aurora.

When I asked my Instagram followers what product I should investigate next, one suggestion stood out: canned tomatoes. I am a big user of them for pizza sauce, cabbage rolls, pasta, soup and other things. My hands-down favourite brand is Bianco DiNapoli from California. I have never had a meatier, more flavourful canned tomato in my life. Alas, not only are they American, they can cost up to $10 per can. Gustarosso tomatoes from Italy (and Eataly) are a close second and solve the “sending dollars to the US” conundrum, but they’re also $10 a can.1 That’s an added incentive to find a domestic alternative—not only am I hoping to keep as much of my money as possible in Canada, I’m also hoping to keep as much of my money as possible in my possession. Times are uncertain and, as I may have mentioned, paying work has been very slow lately, so I’d love to find a high quality product that checks the value box as well.

I set a few parameters for which tomatoes I would evaluate:

• They must be labeled “Product of Canada”.

• Whole tomatoes only, not diced or crushed.

• No “no salt added” tomatoes. Tomatoes need salt, usually more than the salted cans have added.

• No added herbs or flavourings. I want to taste only the tomato.2

• Only brands that are widely available across Canada. It wouldn’t be as helpful if a brand like Stoney Creek, which meets all of the other criteria but I was not able to find in any store, came out on top.

• Similarly, only products that came in consumer-friendly formats. Testing a brand like Stanislaus Alta Cucina, which are supposed to be terrific but only come in 2.48-litre cans helps no one. (Also, they’re from California.)

So, like Danny Ocean planning a heist, I began to assemble my crew, hitting every grocery store and supermarket that I could think of. By the time I was finished, I have twelve candidates.3

Before we get to how well each candidate fared, let’s talk about my methodology. Because I’m a one-person operation, there was no way to do double-blind testing. I would have to figure the next best thing. Here’s what I came up with.

1. I removed the label from each can and taped the same number to each of them. Then I sequestered the stack of labels far away from the kitchen. My expectation was that with so many different cans and labels, by the time I got around to testing, my sometimes creaky memory would have already cleared its cache.

   

2. I poured each can into a correspondingly numbered deli container for testing.

3. I pureed them with an immersion blender until no large chunks remained. This is what I do for my pizza sauce,4 so it was particularly relevant for me.

And this proved to be effective. By the time everything had been decanted, I didn’t have the faintest idea of which number was which.5

To evaluate each tomato, I followed Dan Richer’s Tomato Evaluation Rubric from his book The Joy of Pizza.6 The rubric is divided into seven qualities: Colour, Viscosity, Texture and Mouthfeel, Seeds and Skins, Positive Flavour Attributes (not sweetness or acidity), Acidity, and Sweetness. For each quality there are a number of statements. Regarding colour, for instance:

1. Has a bright, vibrant, and ripe colour

2. Is not dull and rusty or white/green/yellow

You score each statement from 1 (“Statement is not true at all”) to 5 (“Statement is completely true and accurate”). Once you’ve evaluated everything, you add everything up and calculate an average across the categories to see who comes out ahead.7

And just what were those scores? Let’s have worst-to-first look.

#12—No Name Whole Plum Tomatoes ($1.99)—2.77/5
My notes say “under-ripe and mushy.”

#11—Primo Whole Plum Tomatoes ($1.99)—2.81/5
I was surprised that these didn’t come last. They were awful. Very watery and flavourless. Their high score for lack of seeds and skins saved them.

#10—Giant Value Whole Tomatoes ($1.50)—3.00/5
Another surprise was that these round tomatoes from Giant Tiger8 beat out plum tomatoes. For cooking and canning, meatier, less watery tomatoes are the default over round slicing tomatoes.

#9—No Name Whole Tomatoes ($2.00)—3.12/5
Another round tomato, if the label is to be believed, beating its plum counterpart! (Still, beating it to fourth-last place isn’t much of an achievement.)

#8—Selection Whole Tomatoes (I lost my receipt but the Metro website says $1.79)—3.23/5
Another round tomato that saved itself from an even lower score by having few seeds and skins. I expected this to be closer to the bottom.

#7—Aurora Whole Tomatoes ($2.99)—3.25/5
My notes say “soft and underripe,” which seems contradictory, but processing can affect that.

#6—Compliments Whole Tomatoes ($2.19)—3.27/5
There was nothing wrong with these but also nothing particularly noteworthy. Fittingly in the middle of the pack. These are the only tomatoes in the field that don’t say “Product of Canada” on the label but instead say “Made with 100% Canadian Tomatoes.” Hmmm.

#5—Farm Boy Whole Tomatoes (Receipt lost. Instacart says $2.79)—3.36
See #6. Is Empire, owner of Sobeys, FreshCo, and Farm Boy, just making different labels? Possibly not. These ones go one step further than “Product of Canada” to also announce that they are “Ontario Grown.”

#4—Unico Tomatoes ($2.69)—3.41/5
We’re moving into “decent choice” territory. If these were all I could find, I’d buy them. But I wouldn’t be thrilled about it.

#3—Aylmer Whole Tomatoes ($2.99)—3.64/5
I was at my uncle’s 90th birthday party on Saturday and when I told my cousin’s husband about planning to do these tests, he said he’d found Aylmers to be the best. Check out the great palate on Hugh! They had a better texture than many and a nice savouriness that wasn’t present in most of the others.

#2—Primo San Marzano Type Tomatoes (Receipt lost. $2.99 on metro.ca)—3.93/5
Another big score jump from third to second. I didn’t know which brands were which, but these tomatoes and the winner were clearly different from the others. One reason for that is they’re packed in tomato purée, like most Italian tomatoes are, as opposed to tomato juice, like all of the Canadian tomatoes so far. The result is a far more full-bodied puree.

#1—Unico San Marzano Type Tomatoes ($2.69)—4.02/5
Our first 4+ score and the clear winner. Top scores in Viscosity, Texture, Flavour, Acidity, and Sweetness. Again, chalk a lot of that up to being packed in puree. A note I made just after I opened the can says, “tatters.” It looked like all of the tomatoes had been shredded. A quick stir revealed the whole tomatoes beneath. What I had first seen was the puree, which was so thick (and somewhat under-pureed, IMO) that it fooled me. The colour wasn’t quite as good as the Primo San Marzanos, but in every other aspect it was as good or better. I’ve had the Primos before many times, but I will definitely making these my top choice from now on. I don’t think they would necessarily match up too well against a Bianco DiNapoli or a Gustarosso, but they’re Canadian and almost a quarter of the price. That’s a trade (war) I’m happy to make.

What I’m consuming…

• They Invented the Game. Will They Be Allowed to Play It in the Olympics? (Gift link, so there’s no paywall.) This article has nothing to do with food, but its account of the push to have the Haudenosaunee Confederacy complete in Lacrosse at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics (and the IOC’s bullheaded refusal to allow it) is one of the most interesting things I’ve read recently.

What’s on the menu…

• Pommes Savonnettes (Gift link)—After my recent forays into the world of Lyonnaise potatoes, I thought I would branch out into another French potato preparation. Pommes Savonnettes are another dish frequently associated with Jacques Pepin. Their name means “soap potatoes” in French because of their shape, which resembles a cake of soap. They’re made by cutting inch-thick, round slices of a peeled russet potato, placing them in a pan with some oil, butter and water, bringing it to a boil, and placing it in a hot oven for about half an hour. During that time, the potato absorbs some of the water and the rest evaporates. The exposed tops of the potato puff up and brown in the oven’s heat while the bottoms fry in the oil and butter. It goes beautifully with steak, chops, y’know, hamburger, cheeseburger, any of your meat dishes. They’re very similar to fondant potatoes, which are cooked using stock instead of water which… actually sounds even better.

• Outdoor pizza! The backyard pizza oven spends its winters in the basement on top of the all-season tires, so when the tires get changed, the oven comes out for the summer. And I can think of no better way to use up the 40-ish cups of pureed tomato I currently have in the freezer than pizza early and often.

Fortunately I was not penniless and walking down the side of a road outside Channing, Texas,2 so I could do something about it. I found a recipe online that called for frying the potatoes and onion in clarified butter. Clarified butter is butter that has been heated until all of the water it contains cooks off and the milk solids separate and get skimmed off as they rise to the surface, leaving only pure butterfat. This gives it a higher smoke point than normal butter, which in turn means that the potatoes can be cooked hotter and become crispier. And it contributes a subtle, buttery flavour you don’t get when cooking with oil.

Clarifying butter requires two simple things: time and attention.345 It can take up to a half hour to remove all of the water and milk solids. And if you’re not paying close attention, the milk solids can brown before you skim them off, turning everything brown instead of the bright, golden colour you’re aiming for. And these two simple things conspired to work against me: it took enough time that I got distracted and stopped paying attention to the pot. By the time I remembered to look again, I had very brown butter.6

It was beyond a brown butter and more like a beurre noir. Its dark, nutty, and slightly bitter flavour stole much of the spotlight from the potatoes and onions. Not that it still wasn’t delicious, but wasn’t a proper Lyonnaise potatoes.

When I fail at something in the kitchen, which happens on occasion, I usually research what I can do differently next time.7 Since it was the length of the process that did me in last time, a post on thekitchn.com8 claiming you could clarify butter in just 5 minutes got my attention. It uses cornstarch rather than long heating to draw the milk solids out of solution with the fat.9 I had to give it a go.

Fortunately, butter was on sale during my next weekly shopping trip, so I grabbed an extra pound and went home to see if the article’s promise was true.

I chopped my butter into small cubes and measured out three teaspoons of cornstarch. The butter went into a pot and the pot went over medium-low heat.

It melted and eventually began to gently simmer, with the surface slightly bubbling. This was the sign it was time for the cornstarch, which I added and then whisked to combine.

As promised in the recipe, the butter foamed up quite a bit. But this is where my experience diverged from what thekitchn promised. After adding the cornstarch, their recipe says, “Continue to simmer until the mixture stops foaming, about 1 minute.” My mixture, however, did not stop foaming during my ten minutes of whisking. At least, since I was whisking, I couldn’t wander away and leave it to brown again.10 After ten minutes, I decided that the cornstarch should have worked its magic by then and moved on to the next step: removing the pan from the heat.

I lined a fine-mesh sieve with two layers of cheesecloth and poured in my mixture. What was left was a thick, semi-gooey slurry of cornstarch and milk solids. Lifting up the sieve… success! Beautiful, golden, and perfectly clear butterfat, ready to melt onions and crisp potatoes the next time my mind wanders and I happen to think about Midnight Run again.11

What I’m consuming…

Bread books—If you follow me on Instagram (why aren’t you following me on Instagram?), or, more likely, if you’ve read the past few issues of this very newsletter, you’ve seen that I have been on a bread making journey.

There have been some successes and some failures and, just as I wrote up top, that has spurred me to do more research. Stacked beside me on the table are Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish and Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day, and the James Beard- and AICP-award winning The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, both by Peter Reinhart.

Hopefully my loaves will start becoming more consistent and regular-shaped as I make my way through them. So far, I’ve enjoyed digging into the technical ABCs in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, as Reinhart outlines his 12-stage grand unified theory of breadmaking.12

What’s on the menu…

Accidental calzone—From December until the end of March, the cold room under our front porch is a walk-in fridge, give or take a few degrees. I wouldn’t store meat or dairy down there, but it comes in handy for storing overly large vegetables or batches of New York-style pizza dough that have to cold ferment for three days to develop flavour and gluten. It’s one reason I don’t make NY-style pizza at other times of the year: our normal fridge doesn’t have room for the dough and the containers they proof in. With cold weather continuing into mid-April, I figured I had one more NY-style session remaining; I was very, very wrong. The cold room was nowhere nearly cold enough, causing the dough after three days to be extremely over-proofed. Removing the first dough from its container, it was a floppy, sticky, weak mess. When I tried to stretch it to size, it tore immediately. It was clear that this mass of dough was not going to be a pizza. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t going to be something. I gave up on stretching and sealed the tears.

Then I placed all of the planned toppings on half the dough, gently folded the other half over and sealed the open sides: accidental calzone! Because of its thickness, it took a little while longer to bake, but it was very tasty. Almost good enough to make it on purpose one day!

One Last Thing: When I started my video series Just Add Celebs, I always had the faint hope that I could get one of the celebrities in my various cookbooks to make their recipe with me. I saw in The Globe and Mail recently that Liona Boyd, the classical guitarist and Pierre Trudeau paramour, had moved back to Canada and had an album to promote and it seemed like the perfect storm.

But I need your help. If you’re on Instagram, please please post and tag @lionaboydmusic that you would like her to appear on Just Add Celebs!

Take, for instance, Windsor Salt. It was founded in Windsor (duh) in 1893 but bought by Morton Salt, based in Chicago, in 1954. In 2009, Morton was acquired by a German fertilizer and salt company, K+S. And, in 2020, K+S sold Morton and Windsor to the Kissner Group,1 which is owned by Stone Canyon Industries Holdings from Los Angeles. (Windsor’s head office is now in Pointe-Claire, Quebec, because of course.) The salt is Canadian, but is the salt company? Is it Canadian enough?

I mention Windsor Salt because one of the products I’m trying to find a replacement for is kosher salt,2 although not Windsor’s version. (More on that later.) I’m trying to find a replacement for Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt, which is owned by Cargill,3 based in Minnetonka, Minnesota. “Trying to find” is the operative phrase, because Diamond Crystal is, in the world of salt, sui generis.

To understand why, let’s talk about salt in general. In comparing different kinds of salt—like table salt, sea salt, flaky salt, kosher salt, or fleur de sel—people often say that some are saltier than others. This is not true, but also true. All salt, of course, is sodium chloride, along with, in some cases, other minerals or additives. (More on that later too.) So 5 grams of any salt will be just as salty as 5 grams of any other salt, just as any one molecule of NaCl will be as salty as any other molecule. Let’s call this True Saltiness.

What makes different salts saltier or less salty than others isn’t their chemistry; it’s their geometry. Diamond Crystal salt is made using the patented Alberger process, which creates hollow, ziggurat-like diamond- or pyramid-shaped crystals with lots of facets. The process for making Windsor Kosher Salt (and Morton as well, since they’re essentially the same salt in different packages) yields solid flakes of salt. This means that a tablespoon of solid flakes of Windsor/Morton Kosher Salt will contain a lot more salt than a tablespoon of hollow Diamond Crystal, which will contain a lot more air. When measured by volume, a tablespoon of Windsor/Morton is about twice as salty as a tablespoon of Diamond Crystal because there are literally twice as many NaCl atoms in the spoon. Let’s call this Perceived Saltiness.

This hollow structure has given Diamond Crystal some properties that have caused chefs like Samin Nosrat to swear by it.

1. It dissolves more quickly than other, solid salts. This means you that when you add salt to whatever you’re cooking, you get an accurate sense of whether you’ve seasoned correctly sooner. With a salt that dissolves more slowly, it’s possible to add the perfect amount of salt to your dish, taste it before all the salt has dissolved, think that it needs more seasoning, and add more (i.e., too much) salt again.

2. The many facets on the crystals make it very adherent. When you sprinkle Diamond Crystal on your food, it doesn’t bounce off.

3. Because, by volume, it’s less salty, it gives cooks a wider margin of error when adjusting seasoning. It’s a lot harder to add too much salt when each pinch or tablespoon is less salty.

Another difference between Diamond Crystal and Windsor/Morton is what’s in them. Diamond Crystal is pure salt with no additives. Windsor/Morton contains salt with yellow prussiate of soda, an anti-caking agent, added.4 If you look not very hard online, you will discover some pearl-clutching about yellow prussiate of soda’s chemical name, sodium ferrocyanide, which seems terrifying but really isn’t. I’m not afraid of anti-caking agents; I’d just prefer my salt be all salt.5

With all of that in mind, my criteria for finding a salt to replace Diamond Crystal are these:

1. Canadian

2. Failing that, Canadian-friendly

3. Additive free6

4. As close to Diamond Crystal’s Perceived Saltiness as possible

5. Similar hand-feel to Diamond Crystal. After 15+ years of using Diamond Crystal, I know how much I’m picking up when I reach into my salt container and drop it into what I’m cooking.

Criteria established, I headed out to several supermarkets, warehouse stores, and restaurant supply cash-and-carries to see what I could find.

Here are the contenders:

Borrometi Gourmet Coarse Kosher Salt

• Product origin: Italy

• Company HQ: Italy

• Ingredients: Natural Sicilian rock salt, Magnesium carbonate (an anti-caking agent)

• Size: 1.36kg

• Cost: $5.79 ($0.43/100g)

Aurora Pure Italian Kosher Salt

• Product origin: Italy

• Company HQ: Canada

• Ingredients: Rock salt

• Size: 1.36kg

• Cost: $5.99 ($0.44/100g)

Windsor Coarse Kosher Salt

• Product origin: Canada

• Company HQ: Canada

• Ingredients: Salt, Yellow prussiate of soda (an anti-caking agent)

• Size: 1.36kg

• Cost: $6.99 ($0.51/100g)

Borrometi Coarse Sea Salt (Not a kosher salt, but it was so much cheaper that I dearly hoped it would be of similar coarseness)7

• Product origin: Italy

• Company HQ: Italy

• Ingredients: Natural Sicilian Mediterranean sea salt

• Size: 1kg

• Cost: $1.99 ($0.19/100 g)

And for comparison, Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt

• Product origin: USA

• Company HQ: USA

• Ingredients: Salt

• Size: 1.36kg

• Cost: $12.99 ($0.96/100g) (Although I have seen it in stores priced as high as $21.99, or $1.62/100g!)

Before even opening the boxes, it was already clear that no salt was going to be perfect. They all failed to meet at least one of my criteria. But, happily, they were all around half the price of Diamond Crystal. And packed in boxes that took up much less space that the big red box.8

I poured a small pile of each salt onto a sheet tray and compared how they felt on my fingertips.

First, I felt the Diamond Crystal to establish a benchmark. It felt almost soft and powdery, but still easy to pinch. Aurora was very slightly more coarse. Borrometi Kosher was even coarser. Borrometi Coarse Sea was unacceptably chunky and more suited for pickling or brining.910 Windsor was less coarse than that, but easily the coarsest and hardest of the kosher salts.

Next I measured the Perceived Saltiness of each candidate by filling a 1/4 cup measure, levelling it off with a straight edge, and weighing the result. I did this twice for each salt and averaged the results to account for slight variations.

Diamond Crystal was the same each time: 35g. Here’s how the others weighed in:

Windsor: 57g.
Aurora: 57.5g
Borrometi Kosher: 58.5
Borrometi Coarse: 59.5.

In all cases, the candidates had significantly higher Perceived Saltiness than Diamond Crystal—definitely something to keep in mind when switching over.

But perhaps even more important than how much fits into a measuring spoon is who much fits between my fingers, as they are the primary way I add salt when cooking. To test this, I took my usual thumb-and two fingers pinch of salt and weighed it, then repeated it three more times to see how consistent my pinches were.

Once again, Diamond Crystal was very consistent, with only a spread of 0.11g between my largest and smallest pinch, averaging 0.77g per pinch. Here are how the candidates fared:

Windsor: 1.21g average / 0.57g spread
Aurora: 0.88g average / 0.25g spread
Borrometi Kosher: 0.94g average / 0.29g spread
Borrometi Coarse: 1.68g average / 0.62g spread

Once again, Aurora was looking like it was in the lead, aside from having a Perceived Saltiness that is 60% higher than Diamond Crystal. It was the closest in all other measures. The Borrometi Coarse’s grains varied greatly in size, making it very difficult to pick up a consistent amount each time. For this reason and its previous results, I eliminated it at this point.

The final test I performed was to check how quickly each salt dissolved. I measured 200g of water straight from the cold tap (warmer water speeds up dilution) and measured 5g of each salt, which would create a 2.5% brine, which is about the upper limit for how salty you want a sauerkraut brine to be.

At first I timed how long it would take for me to stir each mixture until all the crystals were dissolved, but I quickly realized that I could game the results subconsciously by stirring faster or slower. I also saw that it was difficult to know exactly when the crystals had all dissolved. To account for both of these concerns, I switched from stirring to using my handy, one-speed milk frother and stopped to inspect for remaining crystals every five seconds. Here are the results:

Diamond Crystal: 15 seconds
Windsor: 20 seconds
Aurora: 20 seconds
Borrometi Kosher: 20 seconds
Borrometi Coarse (I know I said I eliminated it, but I was morbidly curious): 60 seconds!

No huge differences here. It was impossible to know if any salt’s crystals had dissolved at the 16th second or just before the 20th. Trying shorter blending intervals seemed impractical and stopping more frequently to check, which took varying amounts of time, seemed likely to introduce more noise than signal to the data. I called it a draw.

A draw in the last test, but a clear winner overall: Aurora Pure Italian Kosher Salt. In terms of provenance, it’s not perfect because the salt is Italian not Canadian, but at least it’s imported by a Canadian company. To the touch, it feels the most like Diamond Crystal and pinches the closest as well. Its Perceived Saltiness is something I will need to remind myself of constantly, as well as its slower dilution time. But it is additive-free, which I’m very glad of.

Even before starting this experiment, I had suspected that among my contenders Aurora would come the closest to what I was after. And, as far as I know, Aurora has never been accused of aiding and abetting slave labour in Cote d’Ivoire, like Diamond Crystal’s parent company. But I won’t switch over to Aurora for a while. I still have about an eighth of a box of Diamond Crystal left and, as a result of these tests, about four kilograms of Aurora, Windsor, and Borrometi to work through before I need any kosher salt again. It’s entirely possible that the trade war and the administration that brought it about will be gone by then.11 But, as with so many other choices Canadians have made recently, I almost certainly won’t be back. Elbows up!

What’s Consuming Me…

Another episode of The Plate Cleaner on Video, for one. I described this on Instagram (Why aren’t you following me on Instagram?) as “A recipe, a cash grab, and a video that won’t do much to attract followers under the age of 45.

I’d be so happy if you would like and subscribe to my channel. Leave a comment even!

What I’m Consuming/What’s on the Menu…

Further to last issue’s Classic French Loaf, I’m on to baguette now. My mother-in-law recently gave me some baguette pans and it was the spur I needed to start tackling a bread I’ve thought about trying but was always afraid of. I could link to another King Arthur Baking video by Martin Philip about shaping baguette, but instead I will share a video by Markus Färbinger.

I watched this video minutes before shaping my own and… well let’s just say it’s going to take some practice.

But first, there’s a new (well, maybe not so new by now) Plate Cleaner video on YouTube! And a new series. Please check it out and, if you can, like, subscribe, comment, etc, etc.

It’s been two weeks since we returned from a week in Costa Rica. My very light tan has faded enough that I could risk shaving off my beard without having a pale mask across my face. It was our1 seventh time in the country and our first time back since our last visit in 2020.

We arrived on March 12 that year, just one day after the WHO had declared a global pandemic, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced they had COVID, and the NBA shut down its season.2 AKA, the perfect time for a relaxing vacation! Facing so much uncertainty, it was impossible to enjoy ourselves and we made the decision to return to Toronto within a few days.

This visit was much more relaxing,3 in part because of what we’ve learned from previous trips, sometimes the hard way. Because these are often things that don’t come up in online guides and message boards, I thought now would be a good time to share them.4

1. Let’s start before you’ve even left your home. We have a ziploc bag that we keep all of our leftover foreign currency in. There’s a mix of US dollars and a ha’penny or two, and, as I was very happy to discover before we left, a few hundred dollars of Costa Rican Colones. Perhaps you’ve been there before as well and also have some left over. Take note: if, like us, you last were there before 2021, your money is no longer any good. At least not in stores. In 2021 Costa Rica went from paper to polymer money and the paper can only be exchanged in banks. Scratch that. At one bank: Banco de Costa Rica (BCR), the state-owned commercial bank. I learned this by a) trying to buy something with my old money; b) trusting Google Maps to take me to a town nearby with a bank that definitely did not have a bank; c) trying to exchange it at a different bank, only to learn that without an account, I could only exchange it at BCR; and d) they close at 3:30 on Friday and don’t open again until Monday at 9 and you’re leaving on Tuesday morning.

2. If you enjoy a tasty cocktail on your vacation, take note. When you arrive in either San Jose (SJO), the capital, or Liberia (LIB), a smaller international airport in the region northwest of SJO, there is a duty-free shop in each airport after you clear immigration but before baggage claim. Because each traveller over 18 is allowed to bring up to 3 litres of liquor with them duty free, these shops have multipack offers that can get you to that limit for very little. For our stay (there were four adults), we picked up a multipack of Bacardi rum for $55. Single bottles5 are still priced very well, but the multipack savings is significant.6

3. Let’s move ahead to picking up your car rental, which is a shuttle bus ride away. (This really should fall into the “before you leave” category since you’d be somewhat unhinged not to reserve a car in advance.) You’ll read in various guides and property descriptions that you need to have a 4x4/4WD/AWD/SUV in order to get around. You most likely do, but don’t get too fussed about which one of those you’ve reserved.7 They each have slight technical differences8 but as long as it’s not rear- or front-wheel drive, you should be fine. What’s most important is ground clearance because, given the conditions of some roads,9 you will likely need more of it that you have in a regular car. We had a Subaru Crosstrek, basically an Impreza with almost 4” of additional clearance, and had no problems whatsoever.

4. Also, book an automatic. If you find shifting out of neutral on a hill in your hometown harrowing, imagine what it’s like trying to do it when a drop into the jungle is the only thing behind you.

5. Car rental insurance can be confusing. If you have insurance coverage with your credit card, bring the certificate of insurance booklet that came with your card. Rental places don’t always ask for it, but I’d hate to be caught without it when they do. If you’ve got credit card coverage, you really only need the SLI liability insurance, which gets you a million dollars of coverage for any damage you do to others or their property. When I was in line to pick up our rental, the guy behind me told me that he declined all insurance and just paid a $3,000 deposit against any damage. I knew I wasn’t going to take his advice even before I saw the back of his ballcap said, “Team Convoy.”

6. On the road, you’ve got two things to concern yourself with: the first of those is the sun. Because Costa Rica is so close to the equator, the sun sets promptly after 6.10 And because Costa Rica is a fairly unspoiled natural wonderland, there aren’t a lot of lights around. Trying to find your new-to-you vacation rental in the dark is, the steepness and pavedness of the road you’re on will be somewhere between bewildering and terrifying. Depending on what time your flight arrives11 and how far your rental is from the airport, you might consider staying over in either San Jose (there’s a Holiday Inn Express right next to a Denny’s across from SJO) or Liberia and leaving in the morning.

7. The second thing to concern yourself with is the roads themselves. Researching driving in Costa Rica in the past, I had read many stories of terrible roads that were frequently washed out and impassable. But in all our trips until this year, which we’d spent in Dominical and Uvita, a five-plus hour drive from SJO, my only complaint would be about getting stuck behind a tractor on the many two-lane stretches of highway. Or having to wait for an iguana to stop sunning itself in your lane.12 This year we flew into LIR and our place was only two hours away. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, I figured. And it was, at first. And then:

   After an hour and twenty minutes, we turned from the paved road on to a dusty, hardscrabble one, two questions occurred to me. The first was, “Are we sure we’re on the right road?” The second was, “Why does the GPS say it will take us 40 minutes to drive 25 km?” I was used to drives of similar distances taking longer in Costa Rica than they do on Canada’s multilane highways, but this seemed disproportionately long. A good rule of thumb for Costa Rica is: If your GPS says it will take a long time to drive a short distance, you’re in for some wild driving. The rest of the trip was almost all on dirt roads that twisted, turned, climbed, and winded as they meandered towards San Juanillo, our destination. Whenever they dipped into valleys, it was clear they were washed out every rainy season, making it very difficult to maintain a permanently driveable surface. This is where the extra ground clearance comes in helpful. Unless you know the exact location of every upcoming rut, bump, and pothole, you would almost certainly bottom out a regular car.13

8. Once you’ve arrived at your rental, if there’s anything that appears damaged or out of sorts, take a photo immediately and send it to the property manager. At our most recent place, the property manager went to great pains to tell us that the massive and wonderful screens that allowed most of the kitchen, dining, and living rooms to be open completely, were custom made and very expensive. So we, being considerate and nice guests, did so. But there were a few places where the screens had popped loose or were torn. Not wanting to bother the property manager unnecessarily and assuming he already knew about them, we did nothing. When we arrived home, one of our friends, who had done the booking, got a snippy note from the PM showing damage he alleged we had done to the screens. Fortunately a little pushback from us was all that was needed to get him to back down, but it could have been costly.

9. Be pest-aware. On our first night in 2020, I was understandably preoccupied with how quickly the pandemic was accelerating and forgot the rule that is drummed into you when you visit Costa Rica: Scorpions exist. So check your shoes and bags and anything you leave on the floor and don’t walk barefoot in the grass. I mindlessly wandered to the edge of the patio, where the lawn begins and almost immediately got stung by one. Fortunately, after administering some Advil and Centenario Añejo rum, it was no worse than a mild bee sting. This time, there were no scorpion stings (although there was one in the bathroom on the first day).

   

   I did manage to catch an extremely mild case of Zika virus, however. It was nothing more than a very, very mild rash on my forearms that really only I noticed. On every previous trip, mosquitos and bug bites have never been a problem at all. Or even a consideration, but our rental was a little lower down the mountain this time and the climate in 2025 is not the climate in 2015-2020, so we’ll be packing bug spray the next time we return.

   

10. OK. It’s a food newsletter and aside from tips on how to get your drank on cheaply, and where the Denny’s is, I haven’t talked about food yet. And I still won’t, but at least I’ll be food adjacent. I’ve written recently about how to equip a vacation rental kitchen, but sadly most property owners haven’t read it. So I choose to travel with my own equipment. Knives, a peeler, a corkscrew, an instant-read thermometer, quality tongs, a fish spatula, and a pepper mill.14 For me, cooking is part of my relaxation, so it’s worth checking a bag to have the things I need to make sure it’s relaxing. Cutting with dull knives and those stupid bent metal tongs definitely aren’t.

11. At most larger supermarkets in tourist areas, there will be a selection of imported items dairy products. They will probably be brands you have at least a passing familiarity with. There will also be a separate section with the equivalent domestic dairy products from brands like Dos Pinos, whose plant you will drive past as you leave SJO. They are just as good and, more importantly, they are about three times less than Land o’ Lakes. Also, many hot dogs are individually wrapped in plastic. Be sure to check before putting them on the grill.

12. Finally, another food tip that explains the cryptic (and deliciously/despicably punny) title. There’s really only one word to describe the meat in Costa Rica: wet. It’s all super super wet. The chicken, the steaks, the ground beef. I don’t know how or why. There’s so much that’s different between living and shopping in a major Canadian city and in coastal Costa Rica that I don’t hazard a guess, but I’m sure there are many factors that play a part. But, all the same, the meat is wet and that makes it hard to get things browned and crispy and tasty. And also to stop things from sticking to the grill, which is a problem with wet meat.
    
    For whole muscle cuts like chicken parts or chops, it’s a two-part solution. First, salt your meat as far in advance as you can and set it, uncovered, on a rack in the fridge. This is advisable even if your meat isn’t wet. As I have written previously, the salt initially draws moisture from inside the meat, which is then reabsorbed, drawing seasoning deeper inside. At the same time, the very dry air in the fridge will dry out the surface, making it much easier to brown. For chicken, which unlike a steak needs to be cooked evenly throughout, start cooking at a low temperature. This will allow the centre of the meat to reach doneness without the outside burning. And, just like the fridge, the low temperatures will dry the outsides even more, making for even easier browning. When you’re within about 20 degrees of your target temperature (This is why I bring a thermometer with me.), you can crank the heat to crisp up the outside.
    
    For ground meat, the answer is different. Salting ground meat in advance causes its proteins to denature and cross-link, resulting in a spongy, sausage- or baloney-like texture.15 The solution we hit upon this year was to remove some of the moisture mechanically. We lined a tray with a triple layer of paper towel, spread the ground beef evenly across it, topped it with another triple layer of paper towel and then another tray. Fortunately, we had a bunch of large bottles of Bacardi rum,16 which we could put on top of the second tray to force out some moisture, like you would with tofu. The result: nicely browned burgers that won’t leave half of themselves adhered to the grill.

What I’m Consuming…/What’s on the Menu…

Classic French Bread Loaf

Martin Philip is one of my favourite people to watch on YouTube. I find his videos for King Arthur Baking informative, entertaining, and somehow soothing. The way he uses his hands to handle dough is… at times quite sensuous. I’ve made his classic French bread loaf twice in the last few weeks. Each time it has turned out well, although a dull lame has made for weird oven spring.17 The flavour, helped by an overnight fermentation, is great and, doing the math today, I figured that each loaf costs, factoring in ingredients and energy but not labour,18 about $1.18. A bargain at twice the price!

And if you didn’t get the subtle sales pitch before….

You can order “Elbows Up” t-shirts, sweatshirts, and more at elbows-up-canada.ca!

6

Tip 2.1: Pepsi makes a zero-calorie flavoured seltzer called H2Oh! that, especially with a small pinch of salt, makes an excellent mixer. Limonata (lemonade) and Taronja Pink (pink grapefruit) were our favourites.

Before we get to the newsletter proper, I wanted to let you know that The Plate Cleaner on Video is back with another episode, this time about the Japanese Canadian Chow Mein I wrote about back in January 2021.

Before I started making videos, I didn’t realize a) how time-consuming it can be and b) how much people commenting, liking, and subscribing to my channel increases its visibility to other people who don’t know about The Plate Cleaner. So if you can find a way to do any of those things, I’d really appreciate it.

OK, now on to the newsletter.

I have met only one green I didn’t like: kale.1 Other than that, I like them all. Collards, mustard, rapini, turnip, chard, spinach, as well as Asian varieties like the various bok choys, mizuna, pea shoots, and my go-to, gai lan.

We almost always have gai lan in the fridge. Frozen dumplings or wonton (either store-bought or homemade), rice, and steamed or stir-fried gai lan with oyster sauce is a frequent, low-effort/easy-clean up weekday meal at our house. Chopped up gai lan tossed into the pot at the same time as the noodles adds a good chunk of the recommended dietary allowance for folates and Vitamins A, C, and K, offsetting, perhaps, the hit to your sodium RDA that the noodles and soup deliver. The gai lan goma-ae (cold gai lan dressed in sesame, miso, and sake) at Imanishi Japanese Kitchen is also fantastic.

Until recently, I had only ever used Asian greens as sides for other Asian dishes. I have no good reason why. It just never occurred to me.2 But recently I realized that I had forgotten to pick up the rapini I had planned to make for dinner alongside some pork chops and potatoes. I didn’t have time to pop out to a store that would carry it, but I did have a bunch of gai lan in the fridge. Cooked like rapini, I reasoned, it would be similar enough. I would use only garlic instead of garlic and ginger during the stir-frying and finish it with a squeeze of lemon and crushed red pepper flakes instead of oyster sauce.

To probably no one’s surprise but mine, it was terrific. Even better, it’s far cheaper than rapini. At Ample Food Market, our local Asian supermarket, gai lan sells for around $2.50 per pound (though I got it on sale last week for $1.59/lb). A package of Andy Boy rapini, the kind you’re most likely to find at the store, weighs about 300g and usually costs between four and five bucks, or between $6 and $7.50 per pound. In this economy?3 I’m bringing home a lot less rapini these days. Andy Boy is also imported from the US, which means I won’t be buying it for at least the next four years. Gai lan, by contrast, has been grown in and around Toronto since 1947.

While writing this week’s dinner plan, I took stock of what food we already had on hand and wanted to use up. There was some chicken breast, potatoes from the 10-pound sack I bought when it was the grocery store’s only Canadian potato option, breadcrumbs I made from the multigrain (ew) baguette I mistakenly bought at Christmas, and the rest of the gai lan I had bought on sale. I also had eggs, flour, and cream so… chicken schnitzel, mashed potatoes, and gai lan à la rapini. One dinner decided.

A lot of recipes for rapini have you blanch it briefly in a pot of boiling water before sautéing it to tame its strong bitterness. If I’m not boiling anything else, I’d rather not heat a whole pot of water for a 45-second dip. But without doing something to reduce the bitterness, it can definitely be too intense to be enjoyable. I prefer to cut rapini into bite-sized pieces, wash them thoroughly in a colander, and then leave them to drain but trying to keep as much water clinging to the leaves as possible. I’ll heat some olive oil in a sauté pan and, when it’s shimmering, I will add the rapini (and its water) to the pan, followed immediately by salt, a bunch of minced garlic and a lid. In 2 or 3 minutes, the steam created has the same effect as blanching, while using far less time and energy and only dirtying a single pan. After that, the lid comes off, and I start sauteing the greens. Once they’re crisp-tender, I dress them with lemon or vinegar, pepper flakes, and maybe an additional shot of oil. Quick, easy, really tasty.

Gai lan stems are usually thicker than rapini stems, so for the schnitzel dinner, I separated the leaves from the stems, chopped the stems into smaller pieces, and let them steam in the pan for a few minutes before adding the leaves, garlic, salt, and lid.

When making greens this way, I usually give the lidded pan a few popcorn-style shakes during the steaming, just to make sure everything gets cooked equally. This time, I had other things on the go and let the steaming stems alone until it was time to add everything else. What resulted wasn’t done on purpose, but I will definitely be doing it next time.

The sides of the stem chunks that had been face down in the pan had turned a deep, delicious brown that added another layer of flavour to an already flavourful dish. Whatever style of dish I’m making next time, I am definitely adding the stems first and the leaving them undisturbed to brown for a few minutes.

Isn’t it great to learn a new way to turn less (work, effort, attention) into more (flavour)?

What’s on the menu…

• A succulent Chinese meal. We had friends over for dinner on the weekend and I decided to serve a few of the dishes I’ve become handy with over the last few years, including Hong Kong-style Noodles from MadewithLau.com, and Sue Li’s incredible Chili Oil Wontons from the New York Times’ recent Dumpling Week special. And a decidedly non-Chinese but equally delicious (and very simple to prepare) Lemon Posset for dessert.

• There are both soup and sandwiches on the dinner plan this week, so I decided to make a batch of Joe Rosenthal’s hoagie rolls instead of buying bread. According to the photos on my phone, I haven’t made them since 2022. They were very oddly shaped. I’m hoping that the intervening years and lots of pizza dough making practice will help get better results this time. I will report back.

  

What I’m consuming…

• After finishing Griffin Dunne’s The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir, I was still in a memoir mood, so I’ve just started The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious—and Perplexing—City, David Lebovitz’s memoir about packing up his life in northern California and moving Paris to start anew. I’m only a few chapters in, but the combination of food, Paris, and memoir is very relevant to my interests. In addition to being a terrific writer (check out his newsletter) Lebovitz was also, prior to the move, the pastry chef at Chez Panisse, so he knows of what he writes.

• I’m writing this on the day it was announced that Gene Hackman, his wife, and their dog were found dead in their New Mexico home. It’s incredibly sad news with so many unanswered questions. Of the many great clips from the many great movies in his filmography being shared shared today, this one was a much-needed laugh.

  How fun was that? Know what’s even more fun? Sharing the Plate Cleaner with your people.

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My whole life I’ve lived in a Kikkoman house. It’s what we used when I was a kid. It’s what I bought when I went to university. It’s what I bought when I lived in Japan and, I’m guessing, there were a lot more choices available. When it ran out, it never entered my mind to buy a different brand.

Recently, as I poured the last of my large container of Kikkoman into the smaller, iconic red-capped dispenser, I remembered an Epicurious article I had read about which soy sauces different chefs use. In it, Niki Nakayama, chef-owner of L.A.’s Michelin-starred n/naka, says that her restaurant uses Yamasa.

I thought to myself that maybe it was time to give something else a try. Then another thought quickly entered my head: “What was I thinking? We’re Kikkoman people. We can’t walk away from that.” The utter disbelief that I would even consider switching shoyu brands was not unlike the reaction I would get if I momentarily considered gargling with Clorox. It was absolutely unthinkable.

Or was it?

There’s something to be said about sticking with things. Not chasing after something that might possibly be better. Of what is called satisficing. But as I once described myself when writing about a crack in our cutting board, I am an optimizer, not a satisficer. Not knowing if Yamasa was better than Kikkoman would kill me. I had to know. So I went out and bought a large bottle of Yamasa to have on hand right when the last of the Kikkoman left the dispenser. I finally used up the last of it while I was making chow mein last week. So I poured the last few dregs from the dispenser into a shallow dish and then did the same with the newly opened Yamasa. The difference was immediately apparent.

The Yamasa was much lighter and clearer, while the Kikkoman was dark and almost inky. The difference in taste was also immediately apparent. The Yamasa was smooth and more subtle. It was salty, of course, but nowhere near as intensely salty as the Kikkoman. Tasted after the Yamasa, the Kikkoman seemed one-dimensional and spiky, if that can be used to describe a flavour.

I did not regret having used an inferior shoyu since the Nixon administration, but I was glad to have finally learned there was something better out there. This is a Yamasa house from now on (until some chef with more Michelin stars tells me otherwise).

This brief taste test raised two new questions for me:

1. How many different types of soy sauce do I have?

2. Why haven’t I tasted them straight and side-by-side before?

The answer to the first question is 13. The answer to the second question is that I now have. The executive summary is this: they are all salty and brown. But there are some differences between them. Let’s look at them in groups.

The Japanese

Koikuchi — This is what could be called the default shoyu. If you’re buying shoyu and it doesn’t say anything else, it’s koikuchi. It’s fairly dark and in the case of the Yamasa, smooth and somewhat complex.

Usukuchi — Thinner and saltier than koikuchi, it’s often used when the goal is to add saltiness without affecting the dish’s appearance as much.

Double fermented — This is a premium koikuchi that, much like a double chicken stock in which the usual stock ingredients are simmered in chicken stock instead of water, uses shoyu for the second fermentation instead of salt water. This is supposed to double the umami and savouriness. Its flavour profile is pretty similar to regular Kikkoman koikuchi, but it definitely has a bit more character and less spikiness.

Yamaroku Tsuru-bishio — Another premium koikuchi that is aged for 1-2 years, then fortified with additional soy beans and wheat, and then aged for another 2-3 years. This is great stuff. And at $15 for a tiny bottle reserved for special occasions.1

Tosa Joyu — This is shoyu that has been simmered with sake and katsuobushi (flakes of simmered, smoked, and fermented bonito) to give it a slightly smoky flavour. It’s mainly used for dipping sashimi, but when used in place of koikuchi, it adds an added dimension to dishes. It’s also one of the most pleasant to taste straight out of the bottle. (Editor’s note: Mike introduced me to this and I use it for pretty much everything.)

Ponzu — Koikuchi that has been simmered with citrus, kombu, mirin, and katsuobushi to give it a bright, tart flavour. It’s often used for dipping tataki (lightly grilled slices of bonito or steak) or the ingredients from nabe (hotpots) like shabu-shabu.

Yuasa Smoked Shoyu — This tastes a lot like tosa joyu. A little goes a long way, much like the Yamaroku. It’s also around $15 and the bottle is even tinier.2

Tamari — Shoyu is traditionally made using soy beans and wheat. Tamari uses just soy beans, so it’s gluten free. I don’t normally have it, but a recipe I was making called for it. It’s very similar to koikuchi.

The Chinese

Soy Paste — Unique to Taiwan, soy paste is thicker than regular soy sauces. Many people liken its flavour to oyster sauce without the oyster and, thinned with a little water, it makes a good oyster sauce substitute as a condiment for Chinese greens like gai lan or bok choy. To me, the flavour is similar to koikuchi shoyu.

Light Soy Sauce — The most commonly used soy sauce in Chinese cooking. “Light” is just to distinguish it from dark soy sauce. It is much more fragrant than shoyu. The bottle I have almost tastes a little fishy, although there is no fish in it. Recipes often say you can use koikuchi shoyu and light soy sauce interchangeably, but it really does pack a bigger punch.

Dark Soy Sauce — Speaking of packing a punch, dark soy sauce is a wallop of flavour. Intensely dark in colour and taste, it’s sweet with a hint of licorice but not particularly salty. It’s usually used sparingly to avoid making dishes overly dark.

The Southeast Asians

Sweet Soy Sauce — Also called Kecap Manis, it’s viscous and sweet. This Indonesian sauce has a strong caramel-molasses flavour. I cannot figure out what recipe I bought this for.

Thin Soy Sauce — This translucent, medium-brown sauce from Thailand is very similar in flavour to shoyu. According to Hot Thai Kitchen, it’s the default soy sauce for Thai cooking. I had to unseal this bottle to taste it. I once drove around searching for thin soy sauce and couldn’t find it, so when I did find it once, I snapped it up but haven’t used it yet.

According to this guide to soy sauces, my collection is still missing a few types. I have no mushroom-flavoured soy sauce, for example. Perhaps one day I’ll have a need for it but until then I think 13 will tide me over.

How many kinds of soy sauce do you have in your cupboard?3 Let me know in the comments!

What I’m Consuming…

A Field Guide to Fermentation by Arielle Johnson and Lars Williams — I happened upon this book, self-published by the Danish restaurant Noma, while thrifting last week. Published in 2016, it’s a shorter, sparer precursor to The Noma Guide to Fermentation by David Zilber and Rene Redzepi published a couple of years later. Each chapter has a handy troubleshooting section that can help you figure out why your ferment went awry, which happens. What’s really wild about this book is that I can find almost no information online about it beyond free downloads of the PDF. There isn’t a single used copy available on Abebooks or Thriftbooks. About the only mention of it I can find is in a Toronto Life profile of the chef at Chantecler, which calls it a rare find. Not bad for $1.99! I had plans to make miso a few years ago but never acted on them. Maybe this is a sign to get back to it.

What’s on the Menu…

Like seemingly every other Canadian I follow on social media, upon hearing that Cherry Blossoms had been discontinued by Hershey, I rushed out to get one last taste. Or rather, one first taste, since I’d never actually had one before. Canonically, I don’t like cherries so I avoid any that aren’t in a Manhattan. But I do like cherry candies, so I figured I’d try one while I still had the chance.

And… I liked it! It was still pretty cold from the trip home from the store so the liquid in the centre wasn’t as flowing and messy as I’ve heard it can be. (It was still kind of messy.) The cold also muted the cherry flavour. What I enjoyed most was the Nut Milk Chocolate—milk chocolate with coconut and other nuts mixed in—that makes up the outer shell.

I learned about it from this post by Brian Sheppard (@themapletooth), a former executive creative director who has headed back to Newfoundland where he pursues his hobby (obsession?) with Canadian candy history, design, and culture. His instagram feed is an amazing trip through packaging you never expected to see again.

In the meantime, I posted a short video to the new Plate Cleaner YouTube channel about emulsifying small amounts of vinaigrette. I’m very excited to announce that as of this writing, it has garnered a whopping seven views. (And 569 times on The Plate Cleaner’s TikTok channel!)

But the sauerkraut video remained unfinished.

This fall I started teaching a course about writing for digital advertising at Centennial College, and one of the first things I showed my students was a video someone had made from a recording of Ira Glass, of This American Life fame, talking about what he calls “The Gap.” It’s the difference between what your taste knows to be good and what you’re actually capable of producing when you start out. The Gap can be immense and seem insurmountable. Many never get past it and quit. But the only way to get past The Gap is to start making things, no matter how much your taste knows they are not good.

I have spent a fair part of my advertising career on commercial film shoots, which often means solving problems on the fly. Huddling with my art director partner and the director to make things work better. Tweaking a line so it lands even better than we scripted it. I’ve argued for things, resisted others, and capitulated on still other details while shooting. On set, I have developed a fair amount of taste.

What I hadn’t ever done before was shoot something for myself. And that gap? It makes the Darién Gap seem like a game of hopscotch. For all my time making ads, I’ve never had to frame up a shot from scratch, hang lights, or worry about camera placement. I had my job on set; I did it and let everyone else do theirs. Part of me thinks I should have been taking notes all along, but another part of me knows I need to learn by doing.

And learning by doing necessarily involves a lot of failure. Or rather, failure in one sense but not in another. If you’re trying, I often tell my students, you’re not failing. You’re only getting better.1 So I regard my first video for The Plate Cleaner as both a success and a failure. It’s a success because I managed to get it done, exported, and uploaded to YouTube in spite of every possible fear I have. And it’s a failure because, Good God, just watch it. The lighting is abysmal. The colours are all over the place. I couldn’t remember what the font in my logo was when I was doing the titles. The sound is spotty at times because I didn’t know how to use the microphones I bought. The edit is pretty random. The cadence of my delivery seems like a poor (and completely unintentional) ripoff of the Glen and Friends YouTube channel. And it’s over a half hour long! In an ideal world, it would have been more like 10-15 minutes, but that’s where my editing and storytelling (and shoot planning) skills are right now.2 But I’m trying.

One useful thing I’ve learned recently is to believe in yourself and treat yourself with the sort of kindness and encouragement you’d give someone else you cared about. So I need to remind myself, just like I do my students, that trying is succeeding, even if it’s a failure this time.

Where I absolutely didn’t fail in the video is the fermentation. If you manage to make it through the whole thing, you’ll see: I have closed The Gap when it comes to preserving cabbage.

I’ve heard from many people in the time I’ve been fermenting things that they love the flavour and are curious about trying it, but ultimately are afraid of it. Sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it? It’s absolutely possible to fail at making sauerkraut. I’ve had pink molds and black molds form on batches. I’ve had batches go slimy and others that go completely, inexplicably dry. But the great thing about sauerkraut and most fermented vegetables is that they will tell you very clearly when you should not eat them. If in doubt, just chuck it. Cabbage is cheap.

If you are interested in giving sauerkraut a go, I want to emphasize a few points I made in the video but want to reiterate to make sure they sink in.

• Make any fermentation with the freshest ingredients you can. I’ve heard fermentation called “controlled rot” and if your ingredients are already on the road to rot, you’ve ceded control.

• Work clean. The process of fermentation is usually very inhospitable to nasty organisms; just like working with the freshest ingredients, a tidy, hygienic work area gives you more control over the rot.

• Make sure you’re using salt that will encourage fermentation—meaning salts with no additives. Anti-caking agents or iodine can inhibit fermentation and leave you with a jar of mush.

• Measure by weight rather than by volume. Tablespoons and teaspoons are useless when it comes to measuring salt because different salt crystals take up different amounts of space. The only way to accurately measure how much salt you’re using is by weight. And the only way to know how much salt you need is by weighing our other ingredients.

• Think of salt, time, and temperature as three ingredients that are interdependent. Increasing one will mean lowering or increasing the others. When the temperature goes up, you either need more salt or less time to make sure your batch doesn’t go too wild. When it’s colder, less salt or more time will make sure the good bacteria can thrive enough to work their magic. If you want your kraut faster (I wouldn’t, however, because slower ferments develop better, more complex flavours) use less salt and keep your batch in a warmer place. Etc., etc.

Once you’ve got the hang of sauerkraut, there is no end of places your fermentation journey can take you. But by trying, and even by failing once or twice, you’ve already succeeded.

And now the video:

Just like everything else about The Plate Cleaner, video is a work in progress, so if there’s anything you’d be interested in seeing, let me know in the comments or by replying to this email if you’re a subscriber.

Also, if you’re one of my friends in the production community, please let me know what I can do in my next video to make it better. Learning by mistakes is fine, but so is learning by being taught.

What I’m consuming…

Honestly, it’s been a lot of YouTube videos about “How not to make your food videos look like crap.” Other than that, there hasn’t been a lot I can think of.

What’s on the menu…

• Knorr Tomato and Chicken Bouillon — This summer I saw an Instagram post by Sohla El-Waylly about how she uses Knorr Tomato to make tomatoes taste as tomatoey as possible.

  sohlae

  

  A post shared by @sohlae

  I eventually tracked some down at La Tienda Movil, beside Sandown Market. Looking online, I was shocked to see it was around $17, but when I saw it in store and realized it was for a massive two-pound jar instead of the tiny one in Sohla’s post, all was good. I gave some to my sister who has since proclaimed that “It makes everything good.” And it really does. Pretty much anything that could use a boost of umami will benefit from it. Used judiciously, it adds no more tomato flavour than fish sauce adds fishy flavour to whatever it’s added to.

Two summers ago, my friend Jane somewhat impulsively bought what could only be described as a run-down, off-grid cottage near Combermere, Ontario. She quickly set about to turning it into somewhere that people (as opposed to large rodents) would come from as far as Toronto, a 3.5-hour drive away, to visit.

I say “quickly,” but as I have seen by following the cottage on Instagram, and as with all renovations, especially those in places where winter prevents any progress from being made, it has taken longer than expected. But it has been fun seeing Jane go from ripping out wall-to-wall carpet (in a cottage!) to undertaking major roof repairs, to somehow winning a two-storey bunkie. Jane also has one of the most killer thrifting eyes I have ever seen,1 so you had better believe she’s been loading up on terrific pieces for when the cottage is ready for visitors.

I was content being a spectator to all of this until the end of August, when I got a message from Jane putting the Panhunter on the case.

“If one were to put together a minimalist chef’s kitchen what would you need? I want to pare down all the stuff at the cottage to the bare necessities. I threw out so much crap. Our kitchen area will be very small. Like tiny-house small. Mostly I think we will bbq or heat things on the wood stove in shoulder season. We’re getting a bar-size propane fridge to replace the big 80s one. We have a small propane stove. My concept is quality not quantity for folks who like to cook who may rent.”

I am, of course, someone who loves to cook and has almost always been disappointed by the quality of kitchenware at vacation rentals. It has gotten to the point that I bought myself a knife roll to bring with me on vacation, full of the things I know most places never have.

I had only ever, for my own convenience, put together what I could carry. What would it be like to put a package together that could stay in one place? And couldn’t run on any power? It was a challenge the Panhunter had to accept.

Here’s what made my list:

Knives: Stainless steel for all of them. Don’t even think of carbon steel, which careless people will ruin the first time they cut an onion or garlic. Don’t consider serrated blades for anything but the bread knife.

• 8” Chef’s knife like this

• Paring knife like this

• Serrated/Bread knife—I have this one.

• Zwilling J.A. Henckels 4-Stage Pull Through Knife Sharpener. There’s no point in having a decent set of knives if they’re dull. Hand sharpening on whetstones gets the best results, but it’s not a skill most people have. Since an electric sharpener is out of the question, a pull-through sharpener like this one is probably the best option.2

Pots and Pans: Because you’re off-grid and won’t have a dishwasher, cast iron becomes a good option for some pieces; someone would have to be very determined to ruin its seasoning. You may have to do a little maintenance once or twice a year to make sure they’re at their best, but it’s a lot easier to take care of than most people think.

• 10-12” cast iron skillet. Just pick up a Lodge somewhere. If you know how to season it, you can pick one up for $30 or less at a thrift store. If you would rather not, you shouldn’t have to spend more than $50 for a pre-seasoned one.

• Cast iron Dutch oven. There are some (I have one of these) wherein the skillet acts as the lid, or an enameled one, which is more versatile since you can cook acidic things like red wine or tomatoes in it. Cooked on raw cast iron, they can take on a metallic taste and also ruin the pan’s seasoning.

For non-cast iron, the rule of thumb, adapted from Anthony Bourdain, is that any pot or pan you buy should be solid enough that, if bashed over someone’s head, the head sustains more damage than the pan.

• 8-10” nonstick skillet. The cheapest one you can find at HomeSense3 that’s solidly built. Nonstick coatings never, ever last, even when you baby them, so there’s no point in spending money here.

• 2-3 qt sauce pan. Solid, not nonstick. Something like this would work. You just want something that you could make a can of soup or a pack of KD in.

Sheet pans, because they are standard sizes, nest very well and are incredibly handy for carrying things out to the grill.

Do not buy the flimsy, expensive cookie or baking sheets at a kitchen store that will warp the first time you use them. Go to a restaurant supply store or a cash-and-carry and buy the sturdy ones—they’re sometimes called “bun pans”—that are used in professional kitchens. In the short and long run, they will be cheaper.

• 2 x 1/2 sheet pans, 2 x 1/4 sheet pans, 2 x 1/8 sheet pans.

Other Cookware

• Buy nesting metal mixing bowls, but not a set with one of every single size. Get multiples of three sizes. Small ones that can hold an egg or two, medium ones that can hold a small salad or a few helpings of potatoes, and large ones that you can comfortably toss a salad in. Glass bowls will break, they’re heavy, and they take up more space. Though if you want a great look and don’t mind spending…

• Maybe a baking dish or two? Not essential. Again, here’s a good-looking spendy version. A good search could probably turn up much cheaper vintage versions.

• Colander, plus maybe a fine mesh strainer. This is not an either/or. It is no fun trying to drain spaghetti in a handheld strainer.

• Either a good box grater (this is hands down the best) or, at the very least, a microplane.

• Tongs with metal tips. The ones with silicone tips are useless for trying to pick anything up. I guess they exist so people don’t ruin their nonstick pans but, as mentioned above, it is the destiny of nonstick pans to get ruined.

• Flipper-style spatulas. One silicone for the nonstick.4 One large for the grill (get it at Value Village). Or possibly a large fish spatula, which is what I use on the grill. 

• Scraper-style silicone spatulas. One or two. Maybe one small, one big.

• Silicone whisk.5

• Good corkscrew. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to figure out some way to open a wine bottle from an internet video. None of them work.

• Can opener.

• Y-Peeler (buy a set of 3 and replace as needed).

• Measuring spoons.

• Oxo plastic measuring cup (or two) (here, but easier and cheaper to pick up at Homesense).

• Cutting boards. Maybe a couple of sizes. Wood is best and could definitely suit the vibe of the cottage better. But many people are dumb and believe that wood boards are more dangerous than plastic ones. (They aren’t.) To keep any dummies from kvetching, I’d just opt for a few nice, decent ones.

• Oven mitts or, even better, welding gloves, especially if you have a charcoal grill.

Not essential, but nice

• Peppermill. The Pepper Cannon, which I love and often recommend, is overkill here. Also, people would steal it. Maybe this one instead, although it’s not very rustic looking.

• Fine mesh strainer. Again, not instead of a colander.

• Kettle. Jane says she has “a cool old enamel kettle.” I’m imagining something like this.

• Pour-over coffee filter/French press/Aeropress.

• Mortar and pestle. You don’t want people grinding their cumin in your antique coffee mill, do you?

• Mechanical timer. Sure, you’ve got one on your phone, but how off-grid is that?

• Whirley-pop popcorn popper. The single best way to make popcorn. It takes two minutes and almost every kernel pops. And what’s better at the cottage? AND you can get a used one at almost any thrift store of a small fraction of what they cost new.6

• Salad spinner. Begrudgingly included. I’m on Smitten Kitchen’s side that salad spinners are too ineffective for the space they take up. But some people like them. Go figure. Though this list is in no particular order, it’s last for a reason.

Can you think of anything I overlooked here? Curious to know what you pack to take on vacation just in case the kitchen is terrible. Or do you have a kitchen equipment conundrum you think the Panhunter might be able to solve? Let me know in the comments below.

What I’m Consuming…

• The Story of the Montreal Melon It was about three years ago when I first heard about the Montreal melon, a huge, supposedly sublime-tasting melon grown around the turn of the 20th century in Montreal’s NDG neighbourhood. I was momentarily curious, but with so little information, I didn’t think much more about it. This article about the campaign to revive what was once the most sought-after melon in the world has me interested again.

What’s on the Menu…

• BBQ Plum Sauce Last month I posted an Instagram story (Why aren’t you following me on Instagram?) about Eric Kim’s Grilled Pork Chops with BBQ Plum Sauce.

I mentioned that the plum sauce was so good that it could easily replace cranberry sauce for me at Thanksgiving. I am happy to report that the batch I brought to Thanksgiving was a hit. In fact, everything I’ve tried it on has been great—pork chops, brisket tacos, and turkey. It seems like an easy recipe to tweak to suit even more foods.

And Finally…

• Almost four years ago, in Plate Cleaner issue #27, I laid out the case for why lentils rather than beans were my dried legume of choice, particularly for panic buying. And now look who’s singing much the same song? The same rag that in March pinched my idea about cabbage being the new cool vegetable. #influencer

In March of 2023, when I delivered my lecture about hot dog semantics1 at Trampoline Hall, friend of the newsletter Patrick Pittman delivered a lecture about using Google Maps’ Street View as a time machine. By using Street View’s “See More Dates” option, you can travel back and see things as they no longer are, but also see people who are no longer there. Patrick can use it to see his late mother working in her garden. A man in Singapore uses it to visit his Grandmother every Chinese New Year.

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And, long after I am gone,2 you can go on Street View, search for “8 Bristol Avenue,” and choose “May 2019” to see me walking along Geary Ave on my way to work.3

In a similar way, I’ve always enjoyed using Street View as a teleporter. When I can’t be somewhere, I can still look around. I’ve taken several walks around my old neighbourhood in Osaka, seeing what’s changed and if I can still find my way to the 7-11 and video store.4

And so, after watching a video about a Bailey Bridge5 that Old Finch Ave. uses to cross the Rouge River near the rear, non-public entrance to the Toronto Zoo, I decided to use Street View to go for a walk.

A follow-up video also mentioned the Sewells Road Bridge a little farther along. It’s the only suspension bridge in Toronto and surely one of the smallest vehicluar suspension bridges anywhere, so I Street View wandered over there as well.

“Yes, yes,” I hear you grumbling, “But what does any of this have to do with food? What is this, The Bridge Cleaner?”

At the very end of the follow-up video, the host, notsmoothsteve, mentions there is also a small roadside butter tart stand nearby. THAT was when I knew I should probably get out there and see everything for myself. Because Street View makes for a great time machine and teleporter but also a terrible mouth. With just a little more poking about on Google Maps, I came across something I didn’t know existed in Toronto: a proper Honesty Box.

Sure, I’ve bought vegetables at the end of dirt driveways on country roads, with only a coffee can at an unstaffed table to collect payments. But it wasn’t until watching the sixth season of Shetland that I learned just how much more an Honesty Box could be.6

And here, on the very edge of the city—quite literally, the other side of the street is Pickering—there was an honesty box. The situation went from “I should probably check that out,” to, “I must be there as soon as possible,” in seconds flat.

The first steps to get there are simple: just follow whatever directions you’re given to reach the Toronto Zoo.7 But rather than turn into the zoo’s parking lot, keep driving north on Meadowvale Rd. Then, after crossing Hillside Bridge, yet another (but comparitively unremarkable) single-track span, you’re surrounded by the woods of Rouge National Urban Park. It’s the city, but not the city. A few more turns take you past Julie’s Homemade Butter Tarts, and a few more after that brings you to the Scarborough-Pickering Townline and the Rouge Park Pie Stand.

By the time we arrived (3 pm on a late September Sunday) there were only three pies (two blueberry-peach and one blueberry) and a few jars of honey remaining.

We opted for a blueberry-peach and put our $13 (cash only, of course) into the jar beside the honey.

Turning back home, we stopped at Julie’s Homemade Butter Tarts. I chatted briefly with a man who I assume was not Julie, but could’ve been Beth’s father’s doppelganger (when seen from across the road anyway). He mentioned that the pie stand had been doing strong business all summer8 and that a lot of people were coming away empty handed.9 He also mentioned that his daughter, Stephanie,10 had some spicy pickles for sale. So that was the end of my cash. $13 for half dozen butter tarts (three plain, three pecan, plus an extra plain because one looked a bit wonky) for $11 plus another $10 (maybe?) for the pickles.11

The pie, even with the less-common combination (at least to me) of peach and blueberry was very nice. There aren’t many homemade pies you’ll regret making a drive for; this is one that is more than worth it. The crust, in that wonderfully homemade way, was ever so slightly burnt in a few places and hit just right. Nice crumble top as well. The butter tarts were not overly sweet, which I appreciated as it’s the downfall for many of them. They had a nice balance of sweetness and richness with an sturdy but crumbly crust. The pickles had a small but enjoyable kick of heat and an undertone of garlic, but of the things available at Julie’s stand, I think I’d stick with the baking.

Longtime readers will have noticed that the interval between this issue and the previous one is significantly shorter than usual.12 That’s because the season for both stands is rapidly drawing to a close. I expect that they’ll be open this weekend, but I have no idea what happens beyond that. Judging from past posts on Facebook, Julie’s tends to close after the second weekend in October. Links to both locations include contact information, so it might not be a bad idea to call or email before; if you live near me, it’s a 45-minute drive across the city to get there. But even if they’re sold out or closed, it’s a hell of a gorgeous drive at this time of year.13 And if they’re not open, consider that the motivation you need to be first in line next spring.

Are there any semi-secret spots where you live that you kind of want to keep to yourself but also want the world to know about? Let me know in the comments below?14

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The gap between my first post-pandemic hotel stay and my second would not be nearly as long. It was just ten days, in fact. In June, Beth had brought up the idea of a road trip, suggesting we circle Lake Erie, stopping in Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit before seeing her mother in Windsor and completing the circuit by heading home. The only wrench in the plan was, to our complete surprise, the prices of hotels in Buffalo and Cleveland. For reasons that are still unknown to us, any hotel in a walkable, interesting part of town was over $500 USD. We could have stayed by the airports and paid less than that, but that didn’t seem like much of a holiday.

Instead, we found a fairly reasonably priced hotel in downtown Detroit, the Siren, for one night and then a Hampton Inn in Ann Arbor1 for another. The Hampton wasn’t as centrally located, but with ride-sharing (and our own car) it wasn’t much of a hassle to get around.2 From Ann Arbor, the plan was to head back to Windsor for one night and then head home.

Having not planned a vacation in a few years, I eagerly dove into figuring out where we could eat. In the past, I’ve often had every dinner of a five-day trip booked weeks or even a month in advance. By nature (or possibly by years and years of unconscious training) I’m an optimizer. But lately I’ve been pushing myself, in travel and generally in life, to reduce the amount of self-induced anxiety in my life. I wasn’t going to worry that we would miss out on the Greatest Possible Michigan Food Experiences Ever. Instead, I just wanted to know the lay of the land.

And, just to be up front about it, we definitely missed a bunch of Great Michigan Food Experiences. Anyone who has read this newsletter (and followed me on Instagram or even IRL) has seen me go on about hot dogs and pizza and thus will be shocked to read that we tried neither of Detroit’s signature styles. One afternoon and one night are just not enough time to tackle my list, particularly because trying to fit pizza, a comparison of Lafayette vs American Coney dogs, a sandwich from Mike’s Famous Ham Place, and some Polish food would have made travelling the next day (or, indeed, standing and moving) quite impossible. The same goes for Ann Arbor, where I was desperate to try Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burgers, but couldn’t find an opening, either temporally or anatomically, that would accommodate a visit. More reason to revisit!

Downton Detroit has changed significantly since I last passed through in the spring of 2009 (with Newsletter Consiglieri Chris Frey at the wheel).3 Compared to Toronto, foot traffic, at least on a late July Tuesday afternoon, was sparse, but mostly made up of tourists. Fifteen years ago, on an early March weekday, we had been the only foot traffic, so things were looking up. And though the sidewalks were somewhat abandoned, the same could no longer be said about the buildings. Where once it seemed like well over half of all the storefronts were vacant, construction cranes loomed everywhere and boutiques and cafe and restaurants and hip hotels had moved in, giving the streets a vibrancy completely absent before.

Our hip hotel, The Siren, was across the street from the Detroit Opera House and shared a block with an outlet of Buddy’s Pizza, the originators of the Detroit style. Inside the hotel’s corridors were fashionably dark enough that I would set the over/under for how much money you could drop and decide there was no point in searching for it at $25.4 The room was small but stylish and comfortable.5 We switched on HGTV (of course) while we figured out where to have dinner. Between the always helpful Eater Essential 38 list and some recommendations from friends who had just finished a similar trip, we had no end of options.

We ultimately settled on somewhere that seemed like a meal we were less likely to find in Toronto.6 Alpino says it is “inspired by regional dishes from the Alps.” Although some of the food like schnitzel crosses borders and cultures and can be found in central- and eastern-European restaurants in Toronto, there really isn’t a place dedicated to food that is specifically Alpine (or Alpine-inspired).7

Located in Corktown, just west of downtown, Alpino is a bright, spacious room with lots of wood and warm tones. We started with a cheese fondue made from a blend of Gruyere and Rahmtahler, a creamier, more tender version of Emmenthal, with chunks of potato, bread, and pleasantly surprisingly, apple.

We split an excellent wienerschnitzel with the desired poof of air between the pork and the crust,8 topped with mushroom sauce and pickled mustard seeds, as well as side servings of braised red cabbage and cucumber salad. 9

It was tempting to order a rösti topped with smoked salmon, creme fraiche, and mustard greens as well, but there was more than enough with what we ordered, especially since we finished with a rhubarb tarte: shortbread topped with zabaione mousse, braised rhubarb, sweet pistachio pesto. Service was friendly and very efficient. We waddled to our Uber with a bag containing the remainder of the bottle of Blaufränkisch we were unable to finish before dinner was over.

The next day, after a stop at the Detroit Institute of Arts, we headed to Dearborn, home to the largest Arab-American population in the US, for some middle Eastern food. Determined again not to stress out about researching every possible choice, I steered us towards Cedarland which, as well as having good reviews, it what has been described as a “ski chalet-inspired decor.”10

The menu was very straightforward. We opted for shawarma sandwiches with hummous, baba ghanouj, and tabbouleh on the side, as well as the always complimentary lentil soup. It was all excellent. If you went to your neighbourhood shawarma place—which would probably be more expensive ($3.99 for a sandwich!)—and you got this food, you would be very, very happy. Like the menu, it’s very straightforward but it’s straightforwardly excellent.

Still in Dearborn, we stopped at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. It’s hard to comprehend the scale of the place without seeing it for yoruself. It holds multiple trains; a full mockup of a Buckminster Fuller-designed Dymaxion round house, and countless cars and trucks, including the limousine in which JFK was assassinated.11

Arriving in Ann Arbor mid-afternoon, we had some time before dinner to visit a few supermarkets to try to stock up on things not available at home. Despite hitting several places that said they carried it, there was no Cascatelli to be found, although we still managed to fill the trunk pretty well. (More on that later.)

Dinner in Ann Arbor was the one reservation I made in advance because I knew exactly where I wanted to eat and knew that tables can get booked up fast. I first heard about Miss Kim on a Deep Dish episode of The Sporkful podcast. In it, chef-hosts Sohla and Ham El-Waylly talk to Miss Kim’s chef, Ji Hye Kim, about the history of tteokbokki, the chewy, spicy rice cakes that are a staple street food in Korea. She also shares her approach to non-traditional recipes like cacio e pepe tteokbokki, which I knew we had to try.12

Made with miso butter and Parmigiano Reggiano, it was chewy, nutty, and slightly funky from the miso. The El-Wayllys have posted their version of a recipe on Instagram and I plan to try it soon.

The other standout of the night was crispy broccolini in caramel fish sauce, although everything from the arancini-like crispy kimchi rice balls to the miso butter corn with pork belly, pickled onions, and chiles was outstanding. For drinks, we shared a sampler flight of 5 different makgeolli, some of them infused with flavours in-house.13

The next morning we visited a few more supermarkets and some thrift stores14 while waiting for Zingerman’s to open at 11. Zingerman’s, of course, is one of America’s great delis. My first visit was during that same 2009 trip to Detroit15 and I had longed to go back ever since.

After several laps of the store and grabbing a few more things to take home, it was time to order lunch. Having already tried their Reuben, I decided this time to get #14 Jenny’s Fix: pastrami, Swiss Emmental cheese, coleslaw and Russian dressing on grilled Jewish Rye. Just like the Reuben I’d dreamed about in the intervening 15 years, it was fantastic.

And Beth even let me steal a few bites from her Cone of Cheese.16

From there, our plans became very fluid very quickly. A plan to stop in Detroit for Coneys before crossing back into Canada was scuttled as unnecessary, since it was just after lunch. From there, it just made sense to stay on the highway and head back to Toronto, our trunk and our bellies full of goodies.

Substack says this post is over-length for email. I say screw it. We’re getting this whole trip in one issue!

What I brought back…

Glory Foods Southern Style Greens - I fell in love with these greens after first reading about them in Saveur Magazine. I’ve tried to bring some back any time I’m in a state they’re sold in. I have written Glory Foods begging them to come to Canada, but they still haven’t.

Bachan’s Japanese Barbecue Sauce - Dennis Lee, the writer of the inimitable17 Food is Stupid newsletter, recommended these in last year’s gift guide.18 I finally got a chance to try them, although only the Original so far because the others wouldn’t fit in the fridge if I opened them. The original is similar to a yakitori sauce, although a little thinner. Still, very tasty and I look forward to trying the miso sauce in the grilled zucchini recipe I wrote about two issues ago.

The Authentic Stadium Mustard, Old Bay Hot Sauce, Zab’s Original and St. Augustine Datil Pepper Sauces - A friend brought me a bottle of Stadium Mustard—It’s the mustard served originally at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium—19last year and I absolutely love it. We don’t get many brown mustards in Canada that aren’t honey mustard. And we definitely don’t get this, although the company tells me they’re working on it.20 I bought three bottles in case it takes a while.

I wrote about Old Bay Hot Sauce early last year. It’s a great combination of Frank’s and Old Bay (both owned by McCormick’s)21 but since De La Mer closed a few year ago, I haven’t been able to find it in Toronto. It’s fantastic on wings.

I had read a little but didn’t know much about Zab’s or datil peppers or St. Augustine, but when I saw these sauces at Zingerman’s, I decided to pick them up. I still don’t know that much of the backstory, but so far I’m liking them. Not insanely spicy (about the same as habanero) but sweeter.

Brooklyn Delhi simmer sauces and achaars - These come up a lot as a small food brand success story. (As well as a story about how larger brands take advantage of them.) We’ve already gone through the simmer sauces, which were great, but still waiting to open the achaars.

Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt Flakes, King Arthur AP Flour, Zingerman’s Virginia Peanuts - This lot is definitely a mixed bag. I picked up the salt flakes thinking they would be something like Maldon salt, which was very exciting, especially since it was much cheaper than Maldon. They are, in fact, just plain old Diamond Crystal salt in a new package and a new, somewhat misleading name.

The 10-lb bag of King Arthur Flour is higher in protein that other all-purpose flours and should last me through a winter of making New York-style pizza as taught by Joe Rosenthal and his impeccable method.

I bought the peanuts thinking they single-origin peanuts produced for Zingerman’s by Hubs, a peanut producer in Virginia that fries their peanuts rather than roasting them.22 But those are only available at Zingerman’s Roadhouse, one of their several enterprises in Ann Arbor23. The ones I picked up are fried but not single-origin and are produced by Virginia Diner instead. Ah well. Still tasty.

When you travel, are there “must haves” you bring back whenever you can?

That means that there is still time for summer food. More cobs of corn to be boiled, rolled in butter, and sprinkled with flaky salt.1 More perfectly red tomato slices nuzzled up against bacon, lettuce, and a generous swash of mayonnaise in toasty-crisp sandwiches.2 And, for me at least, more chances to have my favourite Japanese hot-weather foods.

Every summer I hit a point where I don’t want to cook. Or rather, I don’t feel like cooking much, because I want to minimize my exposure to heat as much as possible. I want things that, to paraphrase Satchel Paige’s How to Stay Young, won’t angry up the blood and will pacify the stomach with cool thoughts.

When I reached this point last year, exacerbated by my stubborn refusal to turn on the air conditioning during the daytime, a question popped into my head: “Why aren’t you drinking mugicha?” In the 22 years since I moved home from Osaka, this question had never occurred to me. Mugicha is barley tea,3 only it’s not actually tea. It’s toasted barley grains steeped in water until you have a mid-brown, slightly bitter, nutty drink that is incredibly refreshing when served ice cold. In the oppressively humid Osaka summer,4 it can be a godsend. And it’s naturally caffeine-free, so it won’t rile you up and cause you to get all sweaty again. How had I forgotten about it? Was it because of the comparatively mild Canadian summers? Was it only now because of global warming that I wanted it once again? And how could I get some?

Making mugicha is easy enough. Take a mugicha bag, toss it in a quart container, cover it with cold water, let it steep for a couple of hours, then discard the bag and refrigerate until it’s cool and refreshing. It’s a forgiving process. I have often forgotten and left the bag in overnight, only to discover that the resulting flavour was only slightly more bitter than it would have been if I were more attentive. But all of that presupposes that I had some on hand, which I did not.

In our last issue, you may remember5 that I showed you the three Japanese supermarkets in the Greater Toronto Area. The reason I wound up at all three in quick succession was because I was looking for mugicha. I didn’t see it at Sanko6 so I decided to take a trip down to Sandown, who had it on sale, no less. And then it struck me that if I also went to Heisei Mart,7 I might get a story out of it as well.

A nice thing about mugicha is that it’s a cold brew, so you don’t even need to run the kettle to make it. Let’s keep away from the stove again for our next heat-beater: hiyayakko.

Hiyayakko translates simply to “cold tofu,” but the story behind it is a little less straightforward. The “hiya” means “cold” and the second half refers to the servants (“yakko”) of a samurai. Apparently they wore a square crest representing a nail-puller on their vests that (somehow) resembled a block of tofu cut into cubes. (I know, it seems obvious once you explain it.)

The dish itself, similarly, is both straightforward or, if you choose, not as straightforward. First, drain your well-chilled silken tofu on a plate for a few minutes without pressing it, which will crush the delicate curd. 8

If desired, cut it into single portion-sized blocks and plate individually. The classic preparation for hiyayakko is to top it with sliced green onions; katsuobushi, or dried and smoked bonito flakes; and shoyu and garnish with a side of grated ginger.

There are also many variations for how it can be topped. The first, which is my go-to, is to swap ponzu for the shoyu. I love how the citrus of the ponzu complements the slight smokiness of the katsuobushi and bite of the green onion and ginger, as well as the cool, creaminess of the tofu.

Other serving suggestions I’ve seen include minced shiso leaf or lemon zest, grated daikon, baby anchovies, crab meat (or crab stick), corn kernels, cucumber slices, wasabi, plum paste,9 or sliced okra. However you choose to top it, it is a dish you need in a stultifying summer heat. Making it requires only as much effort and creativity as you see fit to muster and eating it will satisfy your hunger without overheating you or weighing you down excessively.

If you’re someone who has been turned off tofu before, I urge you to give hiyayakko a try. Silken tofu has such a mild flavour that the dish is much more about its coolness and texture. There’s none of the rubbery, overcooked omelet feel you sometimes find in cooked dishes. Cold silken tofu, flavour-wise, is merely a vessel for all of the tasty things you put on top.

You could probably cobble together an almost passable hiyayakko with any soft tofu, green onions, ginger, and shoyu (and maybe even ponzu) from your local Western or Asian supermarket. But for katsuobushi, which is essential, plum paste and shiso leaf and baby anchovies and everything else, you’ll need to hit a Japanese market. And, happily, all three spots in the last issue carry everything you’ll need.

The final of my favourites is zarusoba, cold noodles served with a chilled, soy-based dipping sauce on the side. Sadly, it needs the stove, but only for about seven minutes of cooking, plus however long it takes your stove to bring some water to a boil. (Just stand back from the heat as often as you can.)

Zarusoba starts just like all soba does: by boiling the noodles until just tender in lots of unsalted water. But then, instead of being placed into a bowl of hot broth and topped with things like deep-fried tofu wafers or tempura bits, they’re run under cold water to stop the cooking, drained, and neatly piled on bamboo10 mats called zaru,11 and topped with a pile of kizami nori (shredded seaweed).

It’s possible to make your own mentsuyu,12 the dipping sauce, but this requires more time at the hot stove as well as the ability to plan far enough ahead that it will be nicely chilled when you need it. I can’t be bothered with either.13 All of the stores I’ve mentioned sell pre-made sauce that you just take out of the fridge and pour into a bowl. The most common options for doctoring your sauce to your taste are wasabi and sliced green onions, although sometimes you also get a raw quail egg to mix in as well.14

You also might find restaurants that serve tenzaru soba, where your zarusoba comes with a side of tempura shrimp and possibly vegetables. Once again, my goal for zarusoba, as it is with most summer food, is to be near to heat for as little time as possible. Deep frying anything is antithetical to that goal, so it is only an option for me when eating out.15

Mix up your mentsuyu (be sure to get the wasabi well blended or you are in for a one-bite landmine at some point), lift a small knot of noodles from the zaru, give them a dip, and slurp away. Taste the cool saltiness of the sauce. The bite of the wasabi and onion, and the slippery chew of the noodles.16 Together, it’s all chilled and chilling, yet another cool thought to pacify your stomach without, most importantly, angrying up the blood.17

What I’m consuming…

• A Feast of Floyd by Keith Floyd — I first learned about Keith Floyd reading Stanley Tucci’s Taste: My Life Through Food but sadly never got to see the man in action before he died. I have devoured almost every clip I could find of his madcap, BBC-management-taunting, on-location cooking shows that were years ahead of his time. (I wrote more about him here.)

  

  Until recently, though, I had never seen one of his books. That changed on a recent thrifting trip and now A Feast of Floyd is my current bedside reading. I’ve just finished the introduction, in which Floyd recounts in his singular, florid, and (almost certainly) wine-soaked voice just how he came to fall in love with food. I can’t wait to get into the recipes and, hopefully, make some of them.

What’s on the menu…

• Nem Nuong (Vietnamese grilled sausages) — Although I’ve eaten these on numerous occasions in restaurants,18 it never occurred to me to make them until I happened upon a recipe from Samin Nosrat on the New York Times Cooking site. Further searching brought me to a recipe by Vicky Pham that intrigued me by calling for Tusino curing powder, essentially the Southeast Asian version of pink salt or Prague powder, which gives it its distinct flavour and red colour. I found some at my local Asian grocery store,19 but by the time I got home, dinner was running behind, so I wound up making Nosrat’s simpler version.

  Stirring the meat mixture vigorously by hand for a minute and adding baking powder gave it a smooth, springy texture, but next time I will try adding the curing powder and following Pham’s recipe to see if it’s an improvement. I served them on some banh mi baguettes I picked up when I bought the curing powder, topped with mayo, herbs, and pickled carrot and daikon, but they would also be great over a bowl of rice or rice vermicelli.

• Rice

• Shoyu

• Miso

• Sake

• Mirin

• Sesame seeds and sesame oil

• Dashi, which could come in its component parts of kombu and katsuobushi, but more likely is in the form of dashi granules

This is a gross-oversimplification, of course, and the list could be expanded to include rice vinegar, ponzu, other dried seaweeds like hijiki and wakame, and shichimi (and beyond), but even without those additions, the vast majority of Japanese recipes you encounter will rely on some or all of the above.

For instance, if you wanted to make the first six recipes on the list of most popular Japanese classic dishes on JustOneCookbook.com, you would need just four additional ingredients1 not typically available in a typical North American supermarket. Over half of the recipes could be made buying only familiar things like chicken thighs, green onions, or shiitake mushrooms.

Should your local supermarket not have these things, your chances are increasingly good that an Asian supermarket has opened near you that will stock at least these items in their Japanese section, as well as blocks of curry roux, snacks, and instant noodles. If you live in a larger city, of course, you are probably even luckier: on a recent scouting trip, I stopped at six different large Asian supermarkets, all within what I would consider a reasonable driving distance from home.2

Because the Japanese are by far the smallest among East and Southeast Asian groups in Canada, the Japanese sections in these stores are often correspondingly small.3 This is why, outside of the initial list above, you may not be able to find other Japanese ingredients as easily. If you live outside a major city, your best option is probably to order online, although that can quickly get expensive. If you live in a major city, chances are there’s a specialty Japanese grocery store that will have what you’re looking for. And if you’re in Toronto, you have three different stores to choose from,4 each telling a slightly different story about Japanese food.

The Throwback

Sandown Market West is tucked away in an unassuming strip mall, just south of where the 427 runs into the Gardiner Expressway. Open since 1975, it retains the old-school charm of the OG (and long-gone) Japanese stores near Dundas and Huron, now sometimes referred to as “Toronto’s Original J-Town.” The displays are simple and functional. Much of the merchandise seems geared towards cooks who have fallen into what has been described as “the immigrant time warp.”

The Immigrant Time Warp is the phenomenon where immigrants stop keeping up with the cultural changes in their home country after they move away. It helps explain why some5 immigrants from a country often hold less progressive beliefs than the same generation that stayed behind. Their perspective on what their home country is becomes frozen in amber as they struggle to keep hold of their former home while, in reality, it continues to evolve. It’s a phenomenon that’s plainly evident on the shelves at Sandown.

That’s not to say everything is dusty and old-fashioned. There’s plenty of interesting things I’ve never seen or tried, but a lot of the merchandise is things I recognize from my grandparents’ and father’s kitchens,6 and less so the kinds of things I encountered when I lived in Japan in the 1990s. Overall, it’s as though the packaging and the prices are all that has changed in the last 49 years. For me, it feels like home, and although it’s a 20-km drive away, I still leap at the chance to visit. It wouldn’t be the first place I’d look for the latest limited-release seasonal Kit Kat. But if you’re in the west end of Toronto and you need something Japanese that your local Asian grocery store doesn’t carry, I’d definitely make the trip.7

The New Kid

As well as observing the Gregorian calendar for numbering years, Japan also uses the Japanese era calendar scheme, counting how many years into the reign of the current emperor it is. By this system, 2024 currently Reiwa 6, since Emperor Naruhito ascended to the throne in 2018. When he did, the Heisei era, which started in 1989 when Akihito ascended, came to an end. Located in the J-Town shopping complex in northeast Toronto, Heisei Mart is very aptly named.

In contrast to Sandown Market, whose shoppers’ families probably arrived in Canada during the Showa era (1926-1989) or even, in the case of my grandfather, the Taisho era (1912-1926), the shelves at Heisei are more geared to people who arrived from Japan after 1989 (or so). You can still find the things that are familiar to much earlier generations,8 but there are many more things that are a reflection of where Japan has gone since then.

Located where it is, it seems built to cater to an expat community working at the many large multinationals with offices nearby. Similarly, their social media presence is dedicated to keeping its followers up to date with the latest food happenings in Japan. The largest of the three Japanese groceries in Toronto, it has the best selection of fresh specialty produce, including some of the hallmarks of modern Japan, like $210 melons.9

It also has a spectacular selection of miso.

If I had to guess, Heisei Mart is where the YouTuber Imamu Room does her shopping to make her Husbentos.

The Crowd Pleaser

If you live in Toronto and you know one Japanese grocery store, it’s probably Sanko. Open since 1968 at the corner of Claremont and Queen St. W., it has a strong selection of old school and new school products, mostly priced at a premium. Its grocery section is probably the smallest of the three stores,10 but it also carries an impressive(ly priced) selection of dishware, small appliances, and knives. I’m also told (but have never confirmed for myself) that the store is just part of a much larger company that imports products from Japan. Apparently you can ask for a lot more unusual fish products from the back that aren’t regularly on display.

What truly differentiates Sanko from the other two stores, though, is its location—West Queen West very much catering to the young and trendy professional class. (My editor mocked me for initially using the word “hipster.”) The elbows you rub in their narrow aisles are much less likely to be sansei getting her mum a reup of umeboshi or an expat housewife stocking up for the week, and more likely to be a condo dweller looking for some novel snacks, or one of their (admittedly fantastic) onigiri (stuffed rice balls) that sell out almost as soon as they’re loaded into the fridge.

There are handwritten signs explaining how some products are used, giving it a bit of a Trader Joe’s feel, but far more charming. If you’re looking for the limited edition Kit Kat, this is definitely the first stop, if only to save you the long drive up to Heisei first.

But lest you think I am taking a shot at Sanko because they’re some sort of pandering sell-out, think again. I love the place. It’s convenient, the staff are super-nice, and they’ve almost always got what I’m looking for.11 And here’s a reward for reading this far: they also have free parking along the side of their building, which no one seems to know about and every time I stop in is always available.

If you live in Toronto, you can count yourself lucky. You have one Japanese grocery store where your chances are very good that if you asked one of the customers, “Did you or anyone in your family receive reparations from the government for the WWII internment?” you’ll get a yes. Another where your chances are very good that if you asked one of the customers, “How long until you are transferred back to Nagoya?” you’ll get a target date. And one store where your chances are very good if you want to hear someone ask their partner, “What is that?” I highly recommend all three.

What I’m consuming…

• Ali Stoner, who goes by @RovingHaggis on Instagram. Stoner, a Scottish artist born near Glasgow, was a contestant on MasterChef Australia Season 14. She didn’t win, but almost every single recipe she posts is something I want to make immediately.

  Longtime readers will know about my longstanding animus towards the family who owns Martin’s Potato Rolls. How great is it that now I have a recipe to make them for myself? This is a delicious must-follow for your feed.

What’s on the menu…

• Grilled Zucchini with Miso Glaze by Hetty Lui McKinnon It’s zucchini season and while I’m not growing any this year, I still find myself with a fair number of them. I made this recipe a few nights ago and was very pleased to have a new sauce to add to my repertoire.

But applied to halved and scored zucchini and then placed face-down on the grill, it was such a welcome change to my usual salt, pepper, lemon, and olive oil. I can imagine a lot of other vegetables it would work well with and can’t wait to see where it pops up next.

Finally, a reminder…

The offer from last issue still stands: if you recommend The Plate Cleaner to a friend, I’ll give you a free (thrifted but very good condition) cookbook. See here for what’s remaining. Just let me know that you’ve recommended it and let me know which book you’d like.

For those of you who have already recommended the newsletter: thank you so much. Your choices have been set aside and will be on their way shortly.

Reality, of course, also fails me. The reason you haven’t received a Plate Cleaner in over a month is because I’ve been asking myself, “Where do we go from here?” Or, more precisely, “How do we get there from here?”

Because I know where I want to go: I want more people to read The Plate Cleaner. I want more people to know about my hatred of ounces as a unit of measure and about Sauergurkenzeit and about why “stuff-in-a-thing” is almost always better than “thing-in-a-thing”. I want to find the people out there who don’t know what they’re missing (yet). And after kicking around some ideas for the better part of June, I settled on what I think is the best way to grow my audience:

Bribery

It’s generally accepted that the best way to grow the audience for any creative project is through one-to-one recommendations. But I can be as guilty as anyone else of not always speaking up about the things I’m into these days. I’ve found myself thinking, “At the end of the day, what’s in it for me?” And that’s where bribery comes in.

In the plainest possible terms, here’s what’s in it for you: I will pay you to recommend The Plate Cleaner to anyone you think might like it. But not in money.1 In something some would say is more valuable than money: a free cookbook,2 hand-selected3 by me because it’s a volume I think everyone should have on their shelf.

How it will work

There are two ways you can get a book:

1. If you recommend The Plate Cleaner just generally on your socials, (“Hey everyone, if you’re interested in food and cooking, you might enjoy reading this.”) you can pick any one book from what I’m calling the trove (while supplies last).

2. If you recommend The Plate Cleaner (via email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Friendster, ICQ, etc.) to a specific person you think would enjoy it, you can choose two books from the trove, one for you and one for the person you’ve mentioned4 (also while supplies last). There are quite a few titles with multiple copies, so you might want to choose two of the same so you and your pal can cook along and compare notes.

In either case, tag me in some way. I can be tagged at:

• Insta: @the_plate_cleaner

• Threads: @the_plate_cleaner

• FB: @takasaki

• LinkedIn: Mike Takasaki

• Sorry, no Twitter/X

Or email me a screenshot at mike [at] takasaki.ca or even just reply to this message to let you know you’ve posted something or who you’ve recommended it to.

I’m going to keep the whole thing a little loosey-goosey because, and I can’t stress this enough, this is not a contest. I make no money from The Plate Cleaner and every book I’m giving away is one I have thrifted5 with my own money. It will be first-come, first-served on the titles while supplies last and I will do my best to make sure that however you contact me, I will respond in the order messages are received.

Now that the (non) terms and conditions (Not a contest!) have been established, let’s take a look at what’s on offer.

The Netflix Star

Salt Fat Acid Heat — Samin Nosrat (1 copy)

It’s a book! It’s a website! It’s a TV series! It’s a cultural phenomenon! One of the most influential cookbooks of the last ten years. SFAH breaks down cooking to its most basic elements to show you how to manipulate each one to create great flavour. Also, Samin’s laugh is the best.

For the Tomato Sauce Alone

Essentials of Italian Cooking — Marcella Hazan (2 copies)

Yes, it contains the recipe for her famous tomato, butter, and onion sauce, but it also contains recipes for pretty much all of the foundational recipes in Italian cuisine. One of those books that serves as the jumping-off point for everyone who came after her.

The Juggernaut

Hot Sour Salty Sweet (2 copies), The Seductions of Rice (3 copies6), Home Baking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition Around the World (1 copy), Flatbreads & Flavors: A Baker’s Atlas (1 copy) — Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid

The globetrotting duo of Alford and Duguid have put out so many gorgeous, delicious cookbooks that changed how every other book looked and read, and won just about every cookbook award there is in the process.7 Often as much travelogues as cooking guides, they’re sumptuous in every way. Many of them are also very heavy, so I beg of you, if I’m going to have to ship a book to you, maybe choose something else.

A Trio by a Duo

The Silver Palate Cookbook (5 copies!), The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook (2 copies), The New Basics Cookbook (3 copies) — Julee Rosso & Sheila Lukins

I’ve written about how much The New Basics means to me. Colu Henry has posted about how The Silver Palate Cookbook, source of the ever-popular Chicken Marbella, is among her top five ever. I’ll be honest: I only just got a copy of Good Times for myself recently, but I have to believe it’s just as great.

The Standard Reference

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (1 copy) — Harold McGee

If you’ve ever read someone’s scientific explanation for why something happens during cooking, the odds are it was first written about in this book. It goes deeper than any other book I’m aware of to separate myth from fact in the kitchen. Absolutely indispensable if you want to know why as well as how you’re doing things. If you’re into J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s work, you might enjoy this, although it goes much harder on the science and much lighter on the Beatles metaphors.

For the Backyard (or Balcony)

Smoke & Spice (1 copy) — Cheryl and Bill Jamison

All of the fundamentals of low-and-slow cooking, from the standards to new ideas, plus sides and drinks. It’s a summer afternoon in a book! It’s the first book on barbecuing I bought and one I still refer back to when I have questions.

And for the meatless…

The Moosewood Cookbook (2 copies) — Mollie Katzen, Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special (1 copy) — The Moosewood Collective, Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home (1 copy) — The Moosewood Collective

From Ithaca’s famed vegetarian restaurant, these are books that launched a thousand second-year university potlucks. The first cookbook is a classic that I know many vegetarians still love using today. The Daily Special book features their rotating roster of soups, stews, and salads. Cooks at Home, Beth tells me, has her all-time favourite recipe for pepper soup.

Level Up Your Skills

Jacques Pepin’s Complete Techniques (1 copy) — Jacques Pepin, Essentials of Cooking (2 copies) — James Peterson, The Cook’s Handbook (1 copy) — Prue Leith

I’ve also written about how much I enjoy cookbooks that don’t centre themselves around recipes but instead focus on technique.8 If, like Moira and David Rose, you’ve ever wondered what folding in the cheese actually means, all three of these teach you just that. Jacques Pepin’s book covers pretty much everything you need to know for all the French classics. James Peterson’s is more modern and less Francocentric and includes very clear colour photos to demonstrate. And Prue Leith’s also contains many esoteric but oh-so-British skills like skinning eels.

Bocuse the Night

Paul Bocuse in your Kitchen (1 copy) — Paul Bocuse

If you’ve ever wanted to impress your dinner guests with dishes created by the man for whom Bocuse d’Or, the world chef championships, are named after, now is your chance. But as the back cover says, with “no truffles, no caviar, no foie gras, no lobster.” Approachable French cuisine from the man they call “the pope of gastronomy.” I just picked up a copy for myself as well, so maybe we can both cook something and compare notes.

More than just the Butter Chicken Lady

Indian Instant Pot Cookbook (2 copies) — Urvashi Pitre

Online she’s known as “The Butter Chicken Lady” because of her widely-used recipe. But with her cookbook, she proves that she’s so much more. In the last five years, I doubt I’ve used another cookbook as much as this one. If your Instant Pot is tucked away in a cupboard because you felt it never lived up to the hype, get it down and get a copy of this book.

Food for Thought

The Art of Eating (1 copy) — M.F.K. Fisher, The Man Who Ate Everything (1 copy) — Jeffrey Steingarten

Not cookbooks, but books about food, cooking, and eating from very different eras. I first read M.F.K. Fisher, who published from 1937 until 1991, after I had read Jeffery Steingarten’s book. At the time, Steingarten and Calvin Trillin were the only writers I have ever read who wrote as much about the enjoyment of eating as about cooking. (In Trillin’s case, exclusively about eating.) It was so novel to me that I imagined they were the first to do it. So it was a revelation to me to learn that Fisher had been doing it long, long before either of them. Fisher’s writing strikes a perfect balance of keen observations about food and keen observations about life that I definitely aspire to. Steingarten, on the other hand, demonstrates a level of obsession that is both admirable and slightly terrifying. I could read both repeatedly forever.

A Star-Studded Finale

Cravings (1 copy), Cravings: Hungry for More (1 copy) — Chrissy Teigen

As longtime readers may have already noticed, I have tried doing giveaways to boost readership before. The two books I gave away, while definitely great and worthy, were a little dated. When I happened upon the second of Chrissy Teigen’s Cravings books, I picked it up for the sole purpose of running a giveaway with it. But then I started cooking from it and it is a solid book from back to front. Her mom’s red chicken curry was a big hit and, having stained that page, I had to find another copy because I was definitely keeping the first one I bought. Which I did. And then I found the first one, which has just as many bangers.9

There’s something for everyone, in the trove, by my lights. If you want to see what’s still available, you can check here.

Share The Plate Cleaner

Ordinarily I would end this issue with the “What I’m consuming” and “What’s on the menu” sections, but I feel like this whole issue has been “What I’m consuming,” so I will leave it out this time. Rest assured it, and the rest of The Plate Cleaner, will be back soon.10

None of this apprehension, of course, should take away from the gratitude I feel to all of you. Whether you are a OG reader or someone who signed up yesterday, I appreciate your being here. Again, it’s kind of unbelievable that even one person would want to read anything I write, so whatever boost to my ego I might feel is offset by a countervailing increase in my sense of imposter syndrome. Nature seeks balance, I guess.

But back to my search for what to write about in this 50th issue. Eventually, I realized that I should embrace my Gen X heritage, and with it the form that so many sitcom writers from the formative years of our TV watching—the ’70s and ’80s—relied upon when they had nothing left in the tank. Whether it was because the writers needed a few more episodes to get to syndication, or there was no budget left to shoot additional scenes, there was always one tried and true solution: put together a clip show.

There is a long tradition of repackaging previously released material that goes back further than Happy Days, of course. Though I might have been inspired originally by 1970s clip shows, I’m putting this issue together more in the spirit of movie serials from the 1930s, which included a recap so that to audiences who might have missed the previous episode of Mandrake the Magician or Flash Gordon could be brought up to speed. Many of you are new enough that you may have missed some of my favourite issues. Or, if you’ve been here since the beginning, this is a chance to say, “Wow, his writing has gotten so much better/worse.” (I leave it up to you to decide.)

With 49 issues to choose from, trimming the list was harder than I anticipated. Mostly because 49 is a large number and required a lot of re-reading,1 not because it was a 49-way Sophie’s Choice. There were a few on the bubble, but they ultimately fell outside my top five issues.2

And now for my top five issues of Plate Cleaner:

#5 — On the Pulse Side

My second issue ever! It’s a combination of early pandemic thrift and the cookalong posts I used to do on Instagram3 before I started The Plate Cleaner. The recipe for ragout of Beluga lentils is still one I make regularly during the cooler months.

Judging from the feedback I received, it seems like I sold a few bags of lentils, as well as a bunch of 1/8 sheet pans, which I lauded for being incredibly versatile. It’s also the first instance of my railing against recipes calling for “one medium carrot” without defining in absolute terms like grams or cups what a medium carrot actually is, something I would develop into a full issue of its own a couple of years later.

#4 —Rehearsal Dinner

Another recipe that is still in my repertoire today. In cooler months I roast chicken indoors in the oven. As soon as it gets too hot for that, I roast chicken outside on the grill or, this year, on my new rotisserie attachment.

However you decide to roast yours, this recipe lays out the principles that will elevate your roast chicken to another level of greatness, even approaching perfection. Yes, there are a lot of little steps and the process spans several days, but none of the steps—and I feel like this is maybe becoming my trademark—are difficult in and of themselves. Individually, they are quite easy; there are just a lot of them.4

#3 (Tie) — Lost in the Fog and Heat-Adjacent Cooking

Ah yes, the mental errors. Whether it’s filling my salt dish with sugar or trying to cook a chicken with the oven off, I make my share of mistakes in the kitchen.

Everyone does. I’ve always felt it was important to share my mistakes as well as my successes. You’ll get no pressure from me to be perfect. It’s a theme I also explore in Govern Yourself Accordingly, an issue about not living in fear that Gordon Ramsay is going to scream at you for messing up. The best way to cook is the way you cook.5

#2 — Tales from the Cookbook Section

It took a while to figure out what I wanted to say about thrifting cookbooks, but I’m really happy with the way this issue turned out.

Having spent another eight months rummaging through thrift store shelves since then, I might tweak the list of the books you’re most likely to find on shelves, but I stand by my central thesis: thrift store cookbooks tell us about what kind of cooks we aspire to be and what kind of cooks we actually are. In Everybody Lies, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz shows how much more revealing Google search data can be than surveys because (wink to the camera) everybody lies on surveys, but everyone asks Google what they really want to know. In much the same way, the Value Village bookshelves don’t lie.

#1 — The Mein Event

This will probably never not be my favourite. Partly because it’s about my family but mostly because it’s about Japanese-Canadian chow mein.

Beyond the writing of it, it’s the fond memory attached to that moment in time—New Year’s Day, 2021. Beth and I packed up the car with containers of chow mein and made the rounds in Toronto, Burlington, and Waterloo, making sure that, from a safe distance, everyone who was missing out on our traditional New Year’s Day open house at least got a few of their favourite bites. Last week, digging through the pantry, I found a few stray packages of Marufumi mein noodles, so I may have to whip up a batch soon.

If you have a favourite issue of The Plate Cleaner, I’d love to hear about it. Let me know in the comments below or by replying to this email (if you’re a subscriber.)

What I’m consuming…

• River Cottage Handbooks I’ve been a longtime fan of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage. It started out as a TV series and a small cottage in Dorset, where HFW (please don’t make me type that out every time) tried to become self-sufficient by growing his own produce and raising his own animals. It has since become an enterprise/juggernaut, with multiple shows, an event space, a restaurant and inn, a cooking school, and a growing library of terrific books.6 I’ve recently gotten my hands on three volumes of the 18-edition Handbook series: Preserves, Bread, and Edible Seashore.

  

  Of the three, Edible Seashore is definitely the least useful, as I live nowhere near the British seashore. Having been on a multi-year pizza adventure,7 I started in on Bread first. I’ve read a lot of bread books lately, but I am enjoying the easy-going nature of both Daniel Stevens’ writing and his approach to baking. If I can’t be in the kitchen kneading (or, foreshadowing, stretching and folding) dough, this is the next best thing.

• Martin Philip’s bread videos for King Arthur Baking Speaking of bread, I think one of the reasons I’ve been having success with pizza is because I’ve watched a lot of Martin Philip’s videos lately. The one below, for high-hydration8 Pan De Cristal, in particular is a great lesson in how to handle a dough that is so wet it starts out more like batter than dough. It also teaches you how to use the stretch-and-fold method to develop gluten and structure instead of conventional kneading, which is great for people with less strength in their hands or for whom kneading is painful. It was a key to helping me figure out how to get my Roman-style pizza dough to a good place. Definitely give it a try. (There’s also a second video about shaping the same dough into baguette shapes to make great sandwiches.)

• The New York Times says cabbage is cool. As I mentioned above, a full fourteen months before the Times wrote an article called, “The Coolest Menu Item at the Moment Is … Cabbage?” I wrote about its many uses. #influencer

What’s on the menu…

• Kaitlyn’s Special Noodles from The Woks of Life I made this on Monday and it’s on the schedule again for next week.

  

  A mix of ground pork (you could easily substitute ground chicken without noticing much difference), lo mein noodles,9 stir-fried greens, and a one-two punch of Sichuan peppercorns and Lao Gan Ma Black Bean Chili Sauce, it’s a fast and somewhat feisty meal in a single dish.

• I have a duck in the freezer that will eventually find its way to the backyard and the rotisserie spit for some version of Rotisserie Duck with Drip Pan Potatoes. This week is calling for a lot of rain so I may have to wait a bit. In the meantime, I will continue to watch this video and drool.

Butter is not one of them.

Even before the seemingly limitless inflation3 of the last few years, the economics of home butter-making were not on your side; a block of butter costs the same or less than the cream you would require to make it.4 Making butter is quite simple, but it can also be time-consuming. It’s not like tossing bones and scraps in the Instant Pot and straining the results 45 minutes later. There are steps, most of which require your active attention. But, I would argue, butter still worth making at home, at least some of the time, for the simple reason that the butter you make will be far superior to the butter you would buy,5 particularly if you take the extra time to make cultured butter.

If you have ever eaten French butter, you probably noticed how much better it is than most butter in North America. That’s because it’s cultured; cream is inoculated with active cultures, which cause it to ferment and convert some of the cream’s sugars into lactic acid. This creates a more buttery, tangy flavour when it’s churned.

There are a few cultured butters available commercially. In Canada, Lactancia and Cow’s both make it. (Cow’s is better.) But by making it at home, you can control just how much tang you want, as well as adding other ingredients, like the flaky sea salt that makes Grand Fermage’s Noirmoutier sea salt butter so irresistible that, on its own, it’s practically a snack food.6

Making butter is time consuming, but it’s not hard. And making cultured butter requires just two more things of you: the ability to stir and the ability to wait. To culture cream, you require two things: cream and culture. For cream, it should be whipping cream that has not been ultra-pasteurized. For the culture, plain yogurt, creme fraiche, sour cream, or buttermilk will all work, provided they don’t have any stabilizers or gums. A single-serving pot of Astro plain is enough to inoculate a litre of whipping cream while leaving a few spoonfuls leftover as a snack.

Whichever form of cultured dairy you decide to add, make sure it’s the only culture you’re adding. Sterilize everything that is going to be touching your cream, including the spoons, bowls, and whatever utensils you may use to shuttle the cream and yogurt between them. I use a spray called Star-San to sanitize everything, but a trip through the dishwasher or even a very hot handwashing should be enough.

Add 1/3 cup of yogurt to your cream, stir to dissolve, and the cover it loosely. (This is just to keep debris out. You don’t want an airtight seal. I mix mine in a large mason jar and cover it with a coffee filter held tight by the jar’s screw band.) Then set it out at room temperature and let the culturing begin.

Let it go for at least 12 hours, although it’s even better if you can let it go 24 or 36 to let it grow thicker and tangier. I know, it seems absolutely against your innate good sense to leave dairy at room temperature, but trust me. (Don’t even trust me; trust France!) The bacteria needs room temperature to elevate your butter beyond almost any other butter you can buy. That said, the golden rule of any kind of fermentation is that if you think your ferment seems off in some way, err on the side of caution and toss it.7

Once you have achieved the thickness and tanginess that you desire, put the cream in the fridge until it gets down to around 16°C/60°F. You now have your choice of how to make your butter. If you have a butter churn, go for it. You could also use a whisk, a hand mixer, a stand mixer, or a food processor.

In the spirit of wanting to demonstrate that you don’t need to use a stand mixer to get good results, I opted instead to use the whisk attachment of an immersion blender. This was a mistake. The single beater took around 20 minutes to do the job, far more than a stand mixer or even a hand mixer with two beaters would have taken.

I whipped it on a fairly high speed until the cream held stiff peaks and then switched to a medium-low speed. As I continued beating the cream, it (eventually) started to look grainy (You don’t think you know what that looks like, but you absolutely will.) and shortly after that, the butterfat began separating out of the liquid.

Most recipes I’ve read say to pour off the liquid, but I found it easier to pour the entire contents of the bowl into a fine-meshed sieve and press on the butter to express as much of the liquid as possible. Be sure to put your sieve over a container, though, because the milky liquid that has just separated from your butter is… buttermilk. The real stuff and not the supermarket liquid that’s made by adding cultures to pasteurized milk. And it’s free! My litre of cream gave me around 400 ml of buttermilk to use in coleslaw the next day with enough left over for buttermilk biscuits.8

Any buttermilk that’s left in the butter will cause it to spoil more quickly, so it needs to be rinsed away. I returned the butter to the mixing bowl and added a half cup of ice cold water. Using a fork, I mashed the butter against the wall of the bowl to force water through it. It very quickly became cloudy with residual buttermilk. I poured it off, this time into a container headed for the drain, and added freshly icy water and repeated. Eventually the water stopped turning cloudy and, after pouring it off and then mashing for another minute to get out every possible drop of water, I was finished.

The only thing left to do was add salt. I opted for a generous amount of Maldon.

A smarter person would have planned to have some bread baking while all of this was happening. I am not that person. I didn’t even think to have something that required butter planned for dinner. (We were having pizza.) So I had to content myself with eating small nibbles to test its tangly, salty goodness. It may not be worth the money, but it’s definitely worth the effort.

What I’m consuming…

• I am sorry Neapolitan Pizza, I am leaving you for this... You may recall that at the end of last year I went on a quest to make great Pizza Romana (or pizza al taglio as it’s also known). I’m still on it and continue to be happy with the pies I’m making. I’m also working on a version that replaces traditional kneading with kneading with a mixer and dough stretching, which will make it easier for people with less hand strength to get great results.

  You may also recall I’ve mentioned Alex, a French YouTuber, before. His schtick (which, to be clear, I absolutely enjoy) is relentlessly pursuing the techniques needed to produce the “best” version of a variety of dishes like fried rice, omelettes, and Neapolitan pizza. In his latest video, he gives many of the same reasons why he’s so interested in pizza al taglio as I have. (It’s less fussy. It can be made in a standard home oven. It’s easier to make for a crowd.)

Hopefully this is the start of a new series in which he finds out things that will help my own pizza practice.

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What’s on the menu…

• Vij’s and Vij’s at Home. I came home from a recent thrifting trip with copies of these books, written by the then-married couple that ran Vancouver’s legendary Indian restaurant Vij’s and, at the time of writing, its sister restaurant Rangoli.9 Everything in both books looks fantastic and I don’t know where I’ll start. Possibly with the chickpea and cucumber curry. Or maybe the paneer, green beans, and eggplant in tamarind curry. I can’t wait.

  Both books were inscribed by the authors to “John.” The hunt for “Hi Ho” continues, so I do not have the time or energy to figure out who “John” is. I also picked up another copy of Vij’s for my sister so we can choose dishes, do parallel cooking sessions, and compare notes on how we did. (More on this in future issues.)

Just a reminder that the mystery of Hi-Ho remains unsolved. If you want to help discover Hi-Ho’s identity, please share the last issue with someone you think is more likely to know who Hi-Ho is, no matter how faint a chance it might seem. In his small-world experiment, Stanley Milgram discovered that any two random Americans are separated from an average of just three friendship links. That’s how close we might be to figuring it out!

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And now on to our next story…

Read enough about food and you will run into a lot of the same origin stories again and again. Their veracity can range from out and out fabrications—the Margherita pizza was created to commemorate Queen Margherita’s visit to Naples in 1889—to omitting part of the story—Walter Chell did mix the first Bloody Caesar at the Calgary Inn in 1969, but there are many similar drinks that were documented as early as 1951—to the fairly accurate—Caesar Cardini actually did invent the Caesar salad at his restaurant in Tijuana in 1937.1

Another story that falls into the middle category, the true but incomplete stories, is one that was, as far as I knew until recently, definitive: Teressa Bellissimo made the first Buffalo chicken wings coated in a blend of Frank’s Red Hot Sauce and butter at the Anchor Bar in March 1964. That’s the story I had heard since I was a kid, when Buffalo wings first started turning up in Toronto in the early ’80s. My father, ever the culinary adventurer, had gotten wise to them, I believe, at Phil’s, a bar near Eglinton and Mt. Pleasant that was an ad guy hangout at the time and one of the first places2 in the city to serve them. Shortly after that, dedicated wing places like the Chicken Thief on Cumberland started popping up and the race was on. From that time forward, it was always the Bellissimo’s story that was told.

There’s nothing to suggest any of their story is a fabrication. But to say that it was the moment chicken wings became a thing in Buffalo is to leave out a huge part of the story. And, like so many stories, the part that gets left out involves a Black person.

In the early ’60s, John Young started selling chicken wings at Wings and Things, his restaurant less than a mile east of the Anchor Bar. His wings borrowed their “Mumbo” sauce from wing joints in Chicago and DC, a tangy, tomato-based sauce with a bit of heat and a smack of sweetness. Wings and Things was an instant hit, with lines down the block on the day it opened.

There’s also no evidence that Teressa Bellissimo ripped off John Young’s recipe. Hers is hot and sour and buttery while Young’s is hot and sweet and tangy. But it’s hard not to imagine that Young’s instant success might have caused a lot of people in Buffalo to look at chicken wings, which at that point were mostly used for making chicken stock, a little differently.

Even in 1983, Calvin Trillin,3 in his “An Attempt to Compile a Short History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing” acknowledged that Young had at least a partial claim to having invented them, even though his were sold whole (i.e., not split into drumettes and flats) and breaded. But since that time, the Bellissimo story has endured, possibly in part because the Anchor Bar has, while Young has largely been written out of the picture.4

Happily, in the last few years John Young’s style of wings has started enjoying a revival. Spurred on by a local bicycle tour guide with an interest in the history of Buffalo wings, Young’s daughter started staging a series of pop-up events to sell her father’s wings, which she had cooked at his restaurants as a teen. Following that success, she and the tour guide joined forces to launch a retail version of her father’s Mumbo sauce.

This short documentary is a great retelling of their story:

By the time I had found out about this, the first batch of sauce had sold out. Rather than wait for the second batch to become available (and unsure if they would even ship to Canada) I decided to make some on my own. Because Mumbo sauce is an established thing in DC and Chicago, I was able to find a recipe that may not have been an exact copy of Young’s, but was at least in the same ballpark.

The Mumbo sauce is made of ketchup, white vinegar, dark brown sugar, pineapple juice, hot sauce, soy sauce, salt, paprika, white pepper, and garlic powder, whisked until combined and then simmered until thick enough to coat a spoon.

Since I would be cooking my wings in the oven instead of frying them, I approximated a light breading with a toss in some rice flour mixed with a bit of cornstarch and just a pinch of baking powder and baked them on a rack over a rimmed sheet pan at 400°(convection) for 17 minutes per side.

John Young’s method was to dunk the finished wings in a simmering pot of Mumbo sauce, but that seemed more feasible for a restaurant what would dunk multiple batches than for me, who was cooking just one. So instead I heated some of the Mumbo sauce in a wok and tossed the wings until they were completely coated.

Once they were nice and saucy, I served them with a creamy cole slaw to offset the tartness and sweetness of the Mumbo sauce. The wings were very different from what has become known as a Buffalo wing. The Mumbo sauce was more like an un-smokey barbecue sauce, similar to the sauce on the barbecue chicken served at the Jamaican places a few blocks away from our house.

Old habits die hard, of course. I have been eating “traditional” Buffalo wings for more than 40 years, but I can definitely see myself making space in the future for Mumbo wings5 and the chance to acknowledge John Young, the man who first got Buffalo eating sauced wings.

What I’m consuming…

• Somebody Feed Phil Season 7 OK, not until March 1, but I will definitey be consuming it then.

  Of the new destinations announced, I am most looking forward to Kyoto and Scotland, both of which are places dear to my heart. That said, Phil always finds great places and people wherever he goes, so I have no doubt all the rest will be interesting as well.

What’s on the menu…

• We’ve been making a very conscious effort lately to eat food that has been languishing in the freezer for a while. I always find it helpful to do a complete inventory of what we actually have so I can incorporate it into the weekly meal plan. One of the things I was surprised to find was a pack of Cumberland bangers from the British Grocer in Burlington. I must have picked them up a while ago on my way home from visiting my father and stepmother. To be honest, I find their sausages a bit too faithfully British; compared to Canadian sausages, they have a lot more cereal filling than I am used to. But they’re in the freezer so they’re getting used!

  

  I hadn’t made Toad in the Hole (sausages roasted in Yorkshire pudding batter, a classic stuff-in-thing) in a few years, so it got a spot in this week’s dinner plan. (I’m including a photo of one I made a few years ago because the one I made this week was a very feisty riser to the point that parts of it got very dark and, although tasty, made it quite unphotogenic.)

  

  OK, fine. I’ll show it to you.

  

Other than the slightly carbonized top edges, the Yorkshire was light and puffy. I wholeheartedly endorse the recipe I used, as well as the companion recipe for onion gravy.