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Foodbuzz
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Books
Two Summer Salads
July 18th, 2008 | Category: Salad, Turkish Cuisine, Vegetarian
Come summer, I find a box full of organic produce on my desk every Monday morning. Big, bright red tomatoes that do smell and taste like tomatoes, tiny crunchy seedless cucumbers, crisp & sweet green peppers and a bunch of tender purslane. And how can I forget the dark purple eggplants that will perfume my kitchen all week long while they bake in the oven with a drizzle of olive oil and a generous sprinkle of cinnamon?
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Vietnamese Coffee Ice Cream
July 10th, 2008 | Category: Ice Cream & Sorbet
Recently, I have been reading Dianne Jacob’s “Will Write for Food”. No, wait. Not reading it - I am studying the book. As in taking notes, underlining important sentences with a marker and making a list of buzz words to avoid, etc. One of the chapters in the book talks about getting the passion across, which is to me one of the core elements of good food writing. Jacob quotes Colman Andrews, co-founder of Saveur, now with Gourmet: “When you turn a camera on people to get to their passion, they freeze up, use big words, and become stilted, especially when they’re very emotional about a subject. You can’t just open a vein and let it flow out. If you’re very passionate about some wonderful dish, you have to tame your passion to write about it, or it will probably come across sounding stupid.”
So, at the risk of sounding stupid, I want to say: The Vietnamese Coffee Ice Cream from David’s book is one of the greatest ice cream flavors in the world.
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Semolina Halva with Turkish Ice Cream
July 06th, 2008 | Category: Dessert, Ice Cream & Sorbet, Turkish Cuisine
The scoop of ice cream above, clotted cream Maras (MA-rush) ice cream to be specific, was nestled on top of a bowl of warm semolina halva with a spoon stabbed in the center for the whole duration of the photo shoot. And the spoon stayed still for at least 20 minutes. All this was possible due to the core ingredient of Turkish ice cream: Salep.
Aside from a traditional winter drink, salep also refers to a powder of dried orchid tubers, used in thickening the delicious Turkish ice cream, which is indigenous to Kahramanmaras - a city in southeastern Turkey. The local orchids contain a nutritious starch-like polysaccharide (complex carbohydrate) called bassorin, which accounts for the thick consistency. The resulting ice cream is extremely elastic and chewy and stays solid for quite a long time. The spoon stabbed in the center of the scoop was intended to summarize this magical quality. Unfortunately, since the top part of the photo was cropped, you weren’t able to see that in the published article very clearly. Aren’t I lucky to have a blog with endless space to fill?
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