Brian Lagerstrom's YouTube Cooking Videos

I really like Brian Lagerstrom's cooking videos. He goes fast and breezy, but he develops the bejesus out of his recipes. Always some really smart twists I'd never seen before, but it's not just flashy shtick.

He'll use expedient ingredients and methods when he can get away with them, because he's not trying to set a high tone, but also tells you when to splurge. He doesn't pretend everything's easy just because it's easy for him (i.e. he tells you when to really pay attention and slows down the action so you know what to watch for).

While you can easily follow the general shape of his recipe without sweating the specifics (incorporating his hacks and twists), he also offers more precise info re: quantities and timings than most for people who are into that.

A lot of YouTube chefs go for a vibe, while Lagerstrom's 100% about results - yours, not his. Nary a nanosecond serves him; it's all for you.

Check out his NYC Pizza video and his shrimp scampi video.

The Whole World Eats Fufu

Fufu is the only truly pan-African dish. If you ask some bitter African emigres I know, it's the only African dish, period.

Fitting for humanity's mother continent, fufu is grounded, earthy, and rooty. Literally! You pound yams or other tubers (sometimes maize) until they utterly give up, texturally, and are transformed into a jiggling blob of starchy ectoplasm. Tear off a wisp, dunk it into the "soup" (the broad term for whatever's not fufu), and eat. If you're living large, you might have been served morsels of protein to grab up, as well.

It's all performed with thumb and first two fingers, so it's messy work—though Congolese serve a dainty little bowl of water—but kind of fun. Kind of different. And while Japanese won't blink twice at your chopstick prowess, nor can you ever hope to impress an Italian with your spaghetti wrangling, white people deftly consuming fufu can draw an entire village of awed spectators.

So you need to be careful not to mess up. A fine point distinguishes natives from tourists: you must never chew fufu. Chewing fufu is as pointless as chewing water. It marks you as a clown. Just let the fufu glide down your throat, suppressing any chewing urge. Because there's nothing to chew.

Fufu has been part of my life since the 1980s. At this point, it's as familiar as reaching for my nutcracker in a Maryland crab house or scooping Lebanese mezza with pita bits. It's a familiar groove, though a whole other thing. But it's hard to explain to people, because it seems strange and foreign.

I was feeling disoriented eating the meal in the above photo because it was half finger-food (fufu + beany soup) and half fork/knife food (roast fish, plantains, tomato/onion salad). I felt an impulse to just dump the soup over the mound of (corn) fufu and work it with my fork. Sort of like mashed potatoes. Suddenly I realized, in a flash: holy crap, MASHED POTATOES ARE FUFU.

I called over the chef, a Senegalese Brazilian living in Portugal, and shared my epiphany.

"You know mashed potatoes, like the French eat?"

"Yeah, sure."

"It's fufu!"

"What do you mean, 'it's fufu'?" she frowned.

"IT'S FUFU! It's totally fufu!" I enthused. And her eyes began to spark.

"The whole world eats fufu!" I whispered.

"The whole world eats fufu," she replied thoughtfully, examining the words as she spoke them, and ambled back to the kitchen, lost in thought.

Food Status Fallacy

A non-chowhoundish friend, marveling at the quality of my unambitious hole-in-the-wall lunch joints, expressed surprise that we were eating so well in such unlikely venues.

"Building design doesn't cook your food,” I noted. "Genre doesn't cook your food. Location doesn't cook your food. A human being cooks your food. So the only thing that matters is the care and talent applied by that person.”

She replied "Sure, but garish bus station lunch counters don't normally attract great chefs."

"That's a false distinction," I said, "based on fallacy."

Most food is bad, I explained.

By bad, I mean uninteresting, unexciting, mediocre or worse. That includes a lot of food others might call "okay" or "decent", but which would leave me disappointed. Anywhere you go—top of the status range to the bottom—you'll find it hard to escape the dictum.

High-status restaurants have a bag of tricks to distract you from the listlessness of their food, beginning with their status, itself. Spend $100 on dinner, you'll probably miss the shortfall. If you do notice, you'll be inclined to shrug it off. Maybe it was a bad night (the place has such a great reputation) or it wasn't to your particular taste (again, the place has such a great reputation!). But when a joint serves bad food—and remember, most food is bad—it confirms your assumptions about low-status eateries.

If you mull it over, you'll notice this applies far beyond food.


See also the Green M&M Fallacy

Grease Below Rice...That's Nice!

One of the very few universal rules in gastronomy (a real unicorn!) is that greasy sauce spooned onto the plate under the rice is a hallmark of impoverishment. Straight grease used that way is a hallmark of destitution.

I'm not saying chefs who do this are poor or destitute, but that's where they came from, directly (i.e. in this same generation).

It's not lusty ebullience. It's a way to boost the calorie count. I know it sounds crazy from our perch here in Utopia that anyone would want to BOOST their calorie count. It seems as perverse as trying to increase one's load of possessions. Hard to imagine, no?

Sushi with Royalty

So I had dinner with a woman in London at a fancy sushi place. We ordered a service of chef-selected special nigiri, very artfully put together, very expensive. She snarfed it up like takeout from her corner sushi shop, downing eight of the nine pieces in 2 minutes flat.

Smiling, with gentle encouragement, I urged her to maybe slow down, because we presumably wanted dinner to stretch longer than five minutes. She gave me a look that signaled that she was in no way done with dinner, so while I'd expected the exorbitant nigiri to be sufficient, I realized, startled, that she needed more.

I lunged for the menu, which I held out before her. As the, I supposed, gender-compelled host of this meal, I felt nervous flop sweat eyeing her final piece of nigiri which signaled a 15 second countdown to some kind of breakpoint.

She peered at the menu blankly. "I don't want cooked food," she pouted, "I thought we were having sushi." I asked whether we should repeat the platter, and she was quite agreeable, so we requested another round of special lacquered nigiri, as the waiter tried to conceal his "geez-never-saw-that-before" face.

The bill came, I paid a spine-tingling $300, and we said goodbye. And the next day she sent me an excoriating note, saying I'd made her feel like a pig for eating too fast.

I rolled the proposition around my mind a few times, as I do. She was obviously averse to being thought of as someone who eats like a pig. Fair enough, but this leaves me surprised that she'd eat like a pig. If this is a sore point, then the issue is on her end, no?

If I'd hate to be thought of as someone with dirty hair, I'd shampoo daily. If I considered "stubbly" a disgusting epithet, I'd shave constantly. This is how we shape our existences, no? We take pains not to do the things that would make us doers of those things. We sidestep horribleness in order to--well, to sidestep horribleness.

I tried to compose that last sentence to make some sense, but there are realms of nonsense so baffling as to resist even the most artful rhetorical surmise.

Eating like a pig, if one doesn't mind being seen as a piggish eater, is a fully respectable choice. But the notion of maintaining an elegant feeling while eating disgustingly by taking prickly umbrage at any hint of an implication that one might take longer than three minutes to consume one's supper, that boggles my mind.

I often note that citizens of the first world currently are bona fide aristocrats, but this isn't aristocracy, it's royalty. The king and queen are only to be viewed in the most flattering light, despite disgusting, slovenly, or dodgy behavior. Beheading is too good for commoners who fail to maintain game faces as seamlessly composed as high-end nigiri.

I guess it's nice work if you can get it--where you eat like a pig without ever feeling like a piggish eater because everyone pretends you're a vision of stylish grace while diligently keeping your trough full. The only blemish in this scenario would be the person across the table with no harsh words, but who might be so impertinent as to urge a more deliberate pacing for a more enjoyable experience lasting double-digit minutes. The problem--the only problem--was me.

From this perspective, I see her point. As the sole blight on her vaunted, stylish, elegant landscape, I deserved to be scornfully shamed for unintentionally making her feel ashamed for her shamelessness. I get the logic.


It took me a few weeks, but I finally cracked the code on what was going on. See "The Desperate Preservation of Effortless Grace: Explaining Royal Privilege"

A Treasury of Selected Recent Baked Apples

Pastel de nata is for tourists. Head into the side streets, to the lunch counters where limping pensioners feast for pennies (I've been covering them on Facebook, per this constantly updating list), and it's all about the baked apples.

And so I proudly offer, as a downloadable PDF photo book, "A Treasury of Selected Recent Baked Apples"

Chowhounding Évora (Portugal), Part 2

Continuing from Part 1...



Vinho e Noz
Vinho e Noz (click title, above, for link), despite being hidden way out of the town center on a scary residential street, was so stuffed with American tourists that the waiter couldn't speak to me in Portuguese—he was 100% in English language mode. But the food is real, traditional, non-pandering. Is it touristic? I'm confused!

Nice shroomy throwaway.

We need to talk about the cilantro. Portugal loves cilantro, but Alentejo worships it. They use more of it, and in mysterious ways. An Alentejan chef does things with cilantro that Thai, Vietnamese and Mexican chefs could scarcely imagine. I tried to capture it in a photo. Behold cilantro as biomass:

I'm digging into a holy grail. I remember açorda from my music tours of Portugal in the early 90s when you'd get a thin soup full of garlic and strewn with some bread cubes, much like Castilian garlic soup. These days, when you ask for açorda you get wet migas—a thick gruel of bready stuffing. I've been trying to score old-style açorda, and a few elderly folks have pointed me to Alentejo. And here I am, doin' it!

This is not a great açorda. It tasted like faded glory. A dish from a past generation. I need to get out into the countryside and find a staunchly traditional village where I might find a more vibrant version, and perhaps even one with fish eggs—the apotheosis of classical açorda.

But I'm awfully glad to have emerged from the gaslighting, having confirmed that my memory of açorda wasn't manufactured by my fevered imagination!


Taberna Tipica Quarta-Feira
Taberna Tipica Quarta-Feira ("Typical Wednesday Tavern") is the world’s kindest, most diligent, and principled rip-off. They tout their high-concept service: a lengthy tasting menu with many daily-rotating dishes—just show up and eat, no decisions required. They bring course after course of basically traditional Portuguese food, with just enough quirks to sustain the “tasting menu” conceit.

It’s all really good, and a few things are awesome, and far more food than anyone can eat, like fattening hogs. Then they charge 57.50€/person, a king’s ransom in Portugal, even in a presumptuous restaurant town like Évora.

There’s no question that you receive value, both in quality and in sheer quantity. But I felt like someone sold me twelve printer cartridges. I don’t need twelve printer cartridges. Nobody does. And while it might be a fair price for twelve printer cartridges, it’s still a lot of damned money when, again, no one needs twelve printer cartridges.

But it was delicious, everyone left happy, and the staff is lovely. They speak perfect English, as they must—it’s nearly all Americans, because no Portuguese person would spend 57.50€ on lunch. In the end, they won me over with the world’s kindest, most diligent, and principled rip-off. And great food.

Folhada de queijo. About as good as it gets.

Beautiful "black pig" presunto.

Tongue sliders with a relish of chopped pig ear and rabbit. Edgy! But by no means a false note. It's both innovative yet organically Alentejan. No pandering here.

Exquisite calamari, decent bacon-wrapped dates (ala Better Homes & Gardens canapés circa 1965).

Thin sliced slow cooked pumpkin (HOW DID IT NOT DISSOLVE? THIS IS MAGIC!) with onions, oxtail rice, and actually good Belgian-style fries. Still a million miles from pandersville. They're not betraying Portugal by making Belgian-style fries. Fries are everywhere, and they're just doing them right.

Ultra slow-cooked pork neck. The best thing. With spinach migas.

Dessert for four. yeah, as if!

Those shot glasses are "frozen mojito". Again, forgivable. It's not like a Sriracha jello boilermaker. They've managed to be clever without pandering. Évora restaurants have mastered the impossible, none more than these guys. They walk the line with grace and aplomb. It's real. And it's good.

Note: the waiter told me "I don't taste coriander, really." He meant it in the same way that a Thai doesn't taste chili heat. This statement was the essence of Alentejo, and I was honored to receive it. I wear the insight like a medal.

Yikes!


Dom Joaquim

Dom Joaquim is a historical, weighty, dignified old-school place, as you can see from the dining room. Though even here they offer (in addition to a weighty leather bound tome of a la carte offerings no one looks at) revolving plates-of-the-day specials at lunch (catch up on that culture via my explanation).

I went for ovos rotos ("broken eggs") with mushrooms (self-explanatory from the photos, below):

...and deer and wild boar stew with chestnuts, with migas featuring delicate wild asparagus, a local craze that only appears for a brief few weeks per year.

Staunchly traditional cooking with no shortcuts. Nice.

For dessert, I often fall into the "which of these things is unlike the others", and I'd never had sericá before, which they describe as milk/sugar/flour/cinnamon pudding accompanied by conserved plum. But it turns out I know it under a different spelling, Srikaya, which always intrigued me due to its random and unintentional Thai correspondence. Wikipedia has it as sericaia. Not sure what's up with all these spellings. In any case, you can't get the full vibe from a single portion, so check out this photo from Wikipedia:

Oof!
Padaria Arte Antiga

Quick random bakery stop at Padaria Arte Antiga, which is nothing special but centrally located and had some interesting local stuff.

At 6 o'clock, that's doce de grão, a fried patty stuffed with sweet chickpea filling. If sugar + chickpea strikes you as strange, just remember how in East Asia all beans are prepared sweet for dessert. It works.

At 11 o'clock, a big discovery for me. Argolas de azeite are crunchy baked bread rings, with plenty of olive oil baked in, very much like a number of Genoese and Tuscan bread-stick adjacent items. This really got under my skin.

The bratwursty pastry at 4 o'clock was stuffed with sweetened sweet potato (they also make them with jam or with pumpkin/walnut marmelada). It would be too doughy/heavy anywhere else, but the local bread is so tasty that you could polish off five pounds of these lickety-split. They're called popias (aka alcôncoras, aka poa de espécie). I never saw anything like them, but found this explanation online (translated into English):

At first glance it looks like a dry cake, but then the filling is surprising and delicious, based on honey, sugar and olive oil cooked in the light until it forms a dough. This dough is then wrapped in a thin, sugar-free dough and goes into the oven to bake for about 15 minutes. It's a typical cake from the Odemira area.

I'm lucky; turns out there's a food fair in Odemira in three weeks where selected ancient grandmas converge to bake these. I'm giddy. I'll report back.


Snack Bar Portugal
The ultimate honor is a return visit, and so I lunched again at my proudest obscure find (I actually stumbled into it a year ago), where I admire everything so much. This meal couldn't match the supernal watercress soup and majestic feijoada de choclo, but the caldo verde and cação com amêijoas—dogfish shark with clams and mashed potatoes—was homey wonderment. The caldo verde did not contain the traditional slice of choriço, and the owner declared "meat in soup is disgusting!" Well, all right then!

That was a new dessert for me, farófias. I normally steer clear of the bright orange heritage Portuguese desserts devised to use up egg yolks left over by the hordes of nuns using egg whites to wash their habits. Farófias comes from the other side of the coin, an example of Portugal's meringue-fluffy egg white desserts, this one with crème anglaise at the bottom and a psychoactive quantity of cinnamon atop.


Ginja Gouge

I asked for quality ginja (sour cherry liquor) at a hotel bar. They poured me this 2011 reserva, and it wasn't until they'd rung my card up that I realized it cost an obscene 29€. I later found it online at €44 for a whole bottle. So, yeah, I finally hit the tourism wall full-force. But even so, it was real good ginja, so I couldn’t bear too deep a grudge.

Ruínas Fingidas
These ruins are part of the sprawling public garden (Jardim Público) in the city center. The town describes it as a "folly", having repurposed an old convent and its grounds into quirky civic parkland. In this photo uppity pea hens peer down on their lessers—specifically, peacocks courting from below.

Redux
Even though I hit mostly lesser-known sidestreety places (Taberna Tipica Quarta-Feira a big exception), the food was, obviously, expensive. Plus they're filled with American tourists. Yet I ate great, and detected no pandering whatsoever. I was mugged only once, though I'd have made out worse if I'd patronized the main-drag joints with colorful umbrellas (colorful umbrellas places are the sign of death in South Europe) serving as traps for spring breaking kids and groovy middle-aged American couples feeling "adventurous".

Well, here's all I've got: Évora, unlike Setúbal, is "on the map". They have Unesco World Heritage status, which inexorably lures the groovy. It's also not far from the obscenity of "Melides" (don't speak it out loud), the Alenetejan beach community where George Clooney and his shiny pals bask in local culture by turning everything into the French Riviera. But while all world regions are proud of their cuisine, Alentejo is pugnaciously, religiously so, which might make pandering viscerally impossible. The food's got to be real, even as the economic wheels spin.

That's my theory, anyway.

Chowhounding Évora (Portugal), Part 1

There is an evil genie aspect to life in Setúbal. I'm a huge booster of soulful grandma cooking. But when that's all there is, months of unremitting peasant fare will leave a hound yearning for precision, refinement, and even mild pretension. One needs some goddam yang to counterbalance the smothering yin.

My desperation has driven me as far as London (which is like Pittsburgh from here - $75 round trip flights), but it turns out that I just needed to drive an hour south to the neighboring state of Alentejo—which I could practically spit at from my balcony—and to its capital, Évora.

The Évora food scene is like night and day. The menus are similar (Alentejo has a distinct cuisine, but, like Punjabi food in India, it's worked into the national consciousness). The difference is the profusion of restaurants that are actually restaurants, not grim lunch pots run by cigarette-dangling wizardly grandmas who can't be bothered to skin the fava beans or core the apples. There are captivating winkles and touches. There is care and subtlety. It's The Answer to My Prayers.

It's also expensive. In Setúbal you can't eat well above 15€ (pricier places exist, but they're clip joints). But if you want a special occasion meal, there's no need to fly to London (aka Pittsburgh). Just head south to Évora. I've never been so happy to fork over €30 or €40 for a meal. You get solid value...at least if you choose good places.

But it's not easy! The most anonymous lunch joint in Setúbal is damned good, but in Evora, you must choose wisely. Let's start with a high note.


Sal Grosso
My top find: Sal Grosso (click the titles, e.g. above, for links) was like manna to my tears. Lemonade for a sleeping bee. It's every mixed metaphor rolled into a giant soufflé.

Sal Grosso is a restaurant restaurant. This may sound like nonsense for those who haven't spent months eating grandma pot lunches, but Sal Grosso has pace, bustle and excitement. The staff knows it's bad-ass, and the customers feel lucky to be there, and the chalkboard menu (largest I've ever seen) is packed with enough choices to stoke anxiety—the good kind. I'd almost forgotten what that's like (normally, I trudge through a dank doorway grunting boa tarde, and a sea of limping pensioners moans back indistinctly while harried Grandma hip checks me out of the way to rush stew to someone's table).

I'm eating meat here, obviously. Pork cheeks, to be specific. And those are migas alongside. No one translates it as "stuffing", but it's moistened seasoned bread crumb, so...yep. This one's tomato flavored and colored, and the acidic sharpness cuts like a knife, perfect counterbalance to the unctuous cheeks.

Big takeaway: Setúbal is for fish—Évora natives envy the quality our grilled fish—but Évora's about meat, further heightening the yin/yang aspect. If you ever visit Portugal, hit Setúbal for fish, Evora for meat...and let Lisbon be your souvenir shop.

Bread's great everywhere in Portugal, but better in Alentejo, and better still here. Yeah, the yellow one is broa de milho, the Portuguese cornbread that is, alas, mostly found in the north.

This was the first salad I've had in two years that didn't come with greasy bottles of oil and vinegar for self-dressing. Fancy!

Pudim de água. "Water pudding" might not sound exciting, but just look at that! Those almond flakes are not throwaway. They're super fresh and careful.

Dangerously high prices compared to my €8 complete lunches back home. But entirely worth it.


A Choupana
Right next door to buzzy Sal Grosso, give or take a century, is A Choupana.

You figure this is the quintessential cozy Portuguese lunch room, right? Straight out of our collective unconscious! Ah, Portugal!

No. None of that's true. Nothing like this exists, aside from this one unicorn. Counter seating is unknown here. The hobbit hole coziness is aberrant. This is not, at all, what Portugal is like.

I desperately want to come back and eat here. My eye is very much on the ensopado de galinha do campo, country hen stew. Not a normal offering, but totally Alentejan (for more on all things hen, see my trip notes from El Salvador). I love counter seating. Table seating makes me feel like I'm on display. For many people, that's a feature, not a bug. But, me, I'm in it for the food. I am not a decor element.

Menu shots:

Recanto
I actually started the trip at Recanto, which I did not fully trust despite its sterling reputation. Online photos had sent up warning flares. But I figured they'd know what they're doing, having earned senior status in a solid restaurant town.

Nyuh-uh.

Welcome to fricking Instagram.

Behold overcooked duck with unrendered rubbery fat strewn with molar-busting pretzel salt, plus a multilayered vaguely Frenchy potato slab reheated to the puckered point, served with a zippy raspberry sauce with strong shampoo vibes. Ugh.

You can fail here. This isn't Montreal (where even crap restaurants are like blessings from some benevolent god).


Snack Bar Portugal

I was here on my one previous visit, and Snack Bar Portugal remains my proudest Évora discovery. No one here knows about it outside its small die-hard clientele, all Portuguese. By contrast, literally every other restaurant was full of Americans, which we'll ponder in an upcoming installment.

This is one of Évora's humblest restaurants, but it's a great restaurant. Cheery, clean, the owner and his family are full of positivity and kindness, and the food has both the grandma soul you'd expect in a humble lunch room, but also some magic.

This watercress soup tasted like saffron. Which makes no sense, because it's not often used here, and certainly never in a cheap canteen. I asked the waitress, and the older Portuguese wife sitting two feet from my right elbow, who'd just eaten an entire meal without saying a single word to her husband, broke in to explain the culinary alchemy that yielded the saffron flavor via a 2000 word soliloquy I 40% understood. None of this would happen in Setúbal, where I don't think anyone even knows what saffron is, and where the wives stay home.

In any case, this was one of the great soups of my life.

Then feijoada do choco. Beans and cuttlefish. Kicked the ass of the versions I've had back home. This was downright magisterial.

Finally, bobo de caramelo, caramel custard. Nothing deep or refined, but all balances nailed. What a meal. I left glowing.


To be continued...