Montreal Day 3

Today was a mix of local culture (Jean Talon Market), and tourist trap (Old Port). We went to the Science Center (geared to non-science majors, unfortunately) and Pointe-à-Callière, and I learned so much about the Samurai and Etruscans!

Cafe In at Jean Talon Market ~17$

I got a smoked salmon, dill, and capers sandwich, made with some sort of bread (it was like a very light, toasted baguette) that started with a "b", and it was either local to France or Montreal. Without the panini press, the bread had been less flat (but still reminded me of a bagel without a hole). The sandwich came with a fruit salad. I used to hate dill, but apparently, my brain now has become quite attached to that fresh flavour.

[UPDATE 6th August 2013: I think it's a bialy. Pretty common in Ithaca, NY]

My brother got the same type of sandwich, but with Cajun chicken filling instead. He also got  coffee with milk (as he had been each day, even though he usually stays away from it).

Jean Talon Market! ~15$

I enjoy looking at how/what food is sold in other cultures. Jean Talon Market was intriguing because there were a bunch of Quebec or Montreal products, and everything was written in French. Finally, the pages of French vocab for vegetables and fruits have come into use! In addition, it appeared that fewer people knew how to speak English.

We saw cotton still on the branches!

Apparently, there is no tax for products bought at the market! This meant that maple syrup that was 20$ for 3 cans ended up being 20$, and not 23$! Maple syrup bought in a gallon-sized container was 48$. In general, the maple syrup was cheaper than at the RESO or at the gift stores at the touristy areas, and although there were maple leaf and log cabin bottles of syrup, there were also plenty of simple jars of syrup and butter stamped only with a company logo. Along with the economic benefit, I wonder if it's better to buy maple syrup from the market because there may be fewer middle-people, but I know nothing of Montreal's food politics. Needless to say, the market gets far less tourist traffic than the gift stores at the RESO or Old Port. There were also some maple butters that were refrigerated, and the store owner gave my brother and I a delicious sample. I chose to buy a maple butter made with 100% maple syrup. There was also a maple butter with some glucose syrup in it, that didn't need to be refrigerated. When I asked why the 100% maple syrup butter HAD to be in the fridge, the woman said that it would harden if left outside. That defies the concept that heat causes liquids to flow more easily, and I didn't want glucose syrup in my maple stuff!

Pomettes! Crabapples! I always thought that crabapples were this apocryphal non-edible fruit, and that Ms. Krabappel from The Simpsons was so named because she was crabby (but is she?). Yet crabapples are actually real fruits that look like miniature Pink Lady apples! They are the size of large grapes, and taste extremely sour - lemon sour. Apparently, people use crabapples to make crabapple jam, but as we lacked a pot to make the jam, I tried to eat half our punnet within the next two days. They did get a tad sweeter over time, but they were all still much more sour than the sourest Granny Smith apple. 2$ a punnet, which actually equates at least a jar of quality jam, had I a saucepan.

There were also cute punnets (everything is in punnets, and when you ask to buy something, they transfer it to a plastic bag unless you happen to have a reusable bag handy) of ground cherries! GROUND CHERRIES! I'd never seen such a thing before I went to the botanical garden, and seeing them being sold commercially was quite amusing. We didn't buy them though, because we already had the crabapples.

I also bought a cone of maple butter. While the cone was the standard tasteless wafer, the maple butter was thick, creamy, and melted instantly in my mouth. I love maple flavour, and the sweetness could sink ship (a large one, mind you). It was great!

La Fournee de Sucreriers de L'erable 7$

Finally, a pastry shop advertising maple pastries and tourtières (a regional meat pie)! Unfortunately, there were no tourtières that day, so I'll have to wait until I return to try one. I got a maple syrup tart that sweated maple syrup during the day, while my brother got a chevre, blueberry, and "basilic" tart. "Basilic" means "basil", but instead, there were almonds (and no basil!). Either way, my brother claimed that it was delicious. I thoroughly enjoyed my super-sweet maple syrup tart. It was basically all sugar and fat, textured like thick, gooey jam-fudge. While eating, my brother told  me that when he was really young, he used to think that one was supposed to eat the foil too.

Lays Dill Pickle Potato Chips 1.72$
We also shared some Dill Pickle chips, obtained from a gift store at the RESO. To both my brother and I, the chips tasted like Lays Salt & Vinegar chips, and we were right! There is acetic acid in the ingredients! However, there is a hint of dill and there are small green specks on each chip. I wonder why Lays doesn't try to advertise these in the US, since I would buy them instead of the Salt & Vinegar chips (multiflavour chips!)

Acité - Old Port 45$
Throughout our time in Montreal thus far, we commented on the lack of "42nd St"-ness in Montreal. By that, I mean that Downtown Montreal is not littered with gift stores, no one is trying to buy 8 Montreal shirts for 10$, people walking down the streets downtown aren't all waving cameras around, well, it just doesn't look like New York's Times Square, in both atmosphere and cleanliness. However, after shuffling around on the streets of Old Port, we concluded that everything cliche and gaudy could be found in Old Port. Tourists milled around fancy restaurants (steakhouses?), gift stores that sold "I [heart] POUTINE" shirts and "DO NOT TOUCH" beaver tail hats, and overpriced maple syrup, and a guy who juggled sticks of fire.

I wanted to go to Mont Royal Plateau to eat dinner but my brother wanted to eat at Old Port. So, we went to Acité, a nearly empty restaurant with exclusively outdoor seating of about 20, and I ordered snails and my brother got chicken and rice. Out of all things to consume, my brother picked a chunk of chicken and a scoop of rice.

The snails had been deshelled and were like little blobs of rubber in a plain cheese and oil sauce. It was quite bad. I don't recall snails being rubbery and tough (though the last time I'd tried them had been at The Dwarf Restaurant in 2001 or something in Hong Kong, and those had been shelled snails stuffed with delicious mashed potato and cheese). the cheese sauce was nothing special and particularly unctuous. The dish was very shallow. I was disappointed. Needless to say, I also didn't think much of what my brother got, though he seemed happy with the overall meal.

Les Délices de l'Érable 1.73$
My first macaron! Maple syrup flavoured, about 3 cm in diameter, and surprisingly moist! I didn't know macarons were chewy and soft. I always assumed it'd be something like meringue. It was delicious! And, to think that I can make a batch of these for the price of one...

Super C ~17$
We got Oka cheese! With mushrooms! It was semisoft, creamy and mild and had a hint of truffle. It was great! Apparently it is local to Quebec.
We also got ground cherries! Whoohoo! 2.99$ They were phenomenal! They were like mini tomatoes, and tasted like tropical fruit (mango?) and were slightly sour, like a tomato, but were also surprisingly sweet! It was so great pulling apart the outside!

Artisserie Chocolate Cafe Chocolate Mint Truffle Tea

Tea? Yep.
Mint? Yep.
Chocolate? No. Not at all.

:( Kind of a disappointment.

Penn "Chocolate" Festival

"Next semester, I will be more involved in social groups at school."

That's what I said last semester when I realised that I was pretty much in two clubs.

Then I realised that if I joined another two, I'd have no time to do my homework, study, go to the lab, run, and eat food.

This is in addition to the fact that I'm already managing my time better than I was last semester.

So, I didn't join any extra clubs, but I do get emails from the Penn Gastronomy Club (which I should officially join, actually). Recently, I got an email about the Penn Chocolate Festival, and there were going to be "some of the city's best chocolatiers" and free samples present!

At the Hall of Flags in Houston Hall, the Penn Chocolate Festival took flight. Breezy. Short. Among the tumbleweed. It was too timid to be anything like other food events (e.g. Campus "Free" For All), which was good because it meant that each member of the audience had extremely personalised attention from the vendors, which included just two chocolatiers (Really).

Despite obtaining a lot of information from the vendors, I didn't get many samples, which was a bit of a let-down considering the blatant advertising in the email. Then again, the email claimed that there were going to be many chocolate vendors, which wasn't the case.

The sweet, thick and creamy tea (which didn't taste much like tea) with mini tapioca balls in the above image came from Boba Brothers. I loved the fact that the tapioca balls are tiny! (~2mm in diameter; it makes them drinkable via a standard straw, and it is quite a twist). Actually, I wonder how bubble tea would be like with various sized tapioca balls in the tea...

Although the liquid was super sweet, clean/not artificially-flavoured-ish, there was no "chocolate" in it at all.

My second stop was John&Kira's chocolate. The fact that they use local ingredients and have beautiful packaging and are a home business (I talked to Kira) means that their prices are jacked up, of course. For $6.50, I can get Chipotle, instead of a bar of chocolate. However, John&Kira's also have everything that Chipotle, and Godiva, and Lindt don't have; they own the company, they can allow me to make my own flavour, and they use ingredients from around here. The mint in the mint chocolate came from University City's Urban Garden! I have no idea where that is, but it's within a 3 mile radius, probably. According to the brochure, the honey comes from Millerton PA, while the berries come from Meadow Gap PA. I'm not sure why they're advertising that the coffee whiskey comes from Mexico or that the bergamot comes from Sri-Lanka, because those aren't "local", but perhaps the overall message is that these ingredients come from known sources, and we're supposed associate that with fair labour or something.

My first impression was that the ladybugs and the bees were super shiny. They were as shiny as marbles, although more pearlescent. Apparently, there is a really high cocoa butter content in them, since the're some sort of caramel (bees) or ganache (ladybug).

Kira gave me a pretty big sample of dark mint chocolate to taste. The mint was definitely true mint; it isn't the sweet stuff that I'm accustomed to in commercial mint ice cream or mint chocolate; it was legitimate mint-right-off-the-plant. Although I do like the peppermint/conventional mint better, this one was light and delicious too. The chocolate part was... normal, I would say.

I then went to the table promoting Sazon restaurant. The guy who was at the table was a real businessman; he talked non-stop about how his chocolate was real, untempered, pure, made straight from crushed beans from Venezuela (the "original/pure/clean/unadulterated" location of cacao, apparently). He explaining his experimentation with making truffles in his kitchen, and he talked about testing all his truffles on his friends. At one point, he gave someone in the audience a whole truffle. He didn't give any truffles to me though, even though I talked to him for a good 10 minutes about his truffles and cocoa. He walked me through the truffles; coconut ones, jalapeno ones, rum infused ones, berry-filled - "I don't care about rule of 3 flavours - you know, of chocolate, and two others. I just dump them all in together and you can taste them all!", he proclaimed. He pointed out that the ones in the middle compartment were vegan, and the coconut covered ones on the right were raw and made with a ton of coconut butter. "Nothing goes above 105 degrees. I just use a blender and a thermometer; my raw vegan friend is really anal about this," he boasts. Then, he listed the ingredients in these vegan truffles, and I kinda blanked out until him mentioned the word honey.

Honey. From bees.

I'm not vegan, but vegans do not eat honey.

Naturally, I responded, "Hey wait! Vegans don't eat honey!"

The guy (I'm sorry I do not know his name but on the website, he's the Chocolate Alchemist) looked at me in this really exasperated way (and perhaps with a hint of scorn - he's not a vegetarian or vegan), and said "Well, it's just some honey; we don't know if agave is a good idea because it might have corn syrup or other things added, and honey is pure. And, our honey is local. Besides, you know that there are different definitions of vegan and a lot of vegans eat honey."

He didn't say those exact words, but that was his position on the issue. Call me biased, amnesiatic, or downright silly, but if there is honey in those truffles, those truffles are NOT vegan. His (sorta pompous) attitude, coupled with the fact that he selectively gave out truffles for sampling, meant that I didn't have a good impression of his business. I know he's allowed to boast about his truffles and his super-awesome hot chocolate since they do taste delicious (the hot chocolates did, at least), but I felt like he was stepping the line by sticking honey in a "vegan" treat.

So, the hot chocolates were amazing. I tried the Clasico and the Cuaimia. The Clasico was thick hot chocolate that had no watery taste at all; it was literally like drinking flavourful, textured, melted chocolate. The Cuaimia had a hint of chili (although not too much; I think I would prefer more) and was less chocolatey. Neither had sugar, yet they were so flavourful that sugar wasn't needed to counteract the bitter taste of the ground cocoa (not that it tasted that bitter, in comparison to cocoa powder).

Another local vendor was the Kitchen at Penn. They gave out banana pudding, brownie, and and a plastic cup. No spoon. The food tasted ordinary, but I suppose that's the point, because the Kitchen at Penn is supposed to emulate homemade food for college students missing home.

Although the next few pictures depict vacuous, gilded and bland cupcakes, I'm still posting them because they are indeed prettily decorated. Buttercream Cupcakes (a cupcake truck, not to be confused with Call Me Cupcake, another cupcake truck) offers sundry cupcakes, including the best-seller, red velvet.

I tried 1/4 of a chocolate cupcake with peanut butter icing and purple sugar. The peanut butter icing tasted legitimately like peanut butter smothered in cream and sugar. The cake was kinda dry actually.

So wait a minute, two legit chocolatiers out of 5, at a "chocolate" festival?

International Dinner!

My dorm house holds an International Dinner each year, which isn't super international, but is chill nevertheless. There was Chinese, French, Spanish, Mediterranean, and Swiss food. I stayed far far away from Chinese food...because I don't like commercial Chinese food in the U.S. The "French" food was baguette with fondue, although technically speaking [according to my Swiss friend, who's an exchange student], fondue is actually Swiss. He made some swiss potato cheese thing which I didn't get to try :(. Also, he said that you're supposed to make the fondue first, and THEN stick it in the fondue warmer thing, to keep it liquidy. I'm not going to comment any further, because, when found by the Penn Internet Police [hey, they probably exist], I'm going to get suspended for criticising a professor's personality [or, my grade's going to go down].

Anyway, the cheese cubes basically sat in wine in the fondue-maker, because that's not how you make fondue.

This is some Spanish omelette, some corn or flour fried tortilla thing [It. Was. Drenched. In. Oil]. Soooo delicious though!

Mediterranean rice with pita. This pita was the thinnest pita I've never seen in my life... it was wafer thin. Interesthin'. Haha.

I'm not sure what ethnicity this cake was supposed to represent, but the chocolate truffle was extremely soft and ganachey, so I'm guessing it's French. It seemed to be really fresh, actually...Nothing hard and oily, like lower-grade truffles. This cake is definitely not American because it was a small slice by American standards [Think, 1/3 of the size of an American "slice of cake"]. It was extremely moist and gooey, and very dense. It didn't taste like bitter cocoa chocolate, but it wasn't overwhelmingly sweet either. It was almost pudding-like, and most definitely not a brownie. I would say there were plenty of eggs in this cake.

This is amazing... from the Mediterranean table: an almond stuffed into a fig! Amazing!

Not in photos: I had some potato [really nice spices] and dulce de leche [not to my liking] from the Spanish table, and I also didn't try the gazpacho :( since I didn't bring a cup. It's BYOUtensils/vessels!

More Frey Chocolate

Rum milk chocolate; tasted a bit nutty and dessicated-coconutty. I've never had rum before so I don't know if there really was "rum" inside the chocolate.


Dark chocolate truffle... The ganache almost tasted sour, which was a bit bizarre.

Lindor Fail Update!

Yesterday, I blogged about how Choco Amore manages to make spherical chocolate truffles, and is a relatively unknown company. Yet, Lindor, on the other hand, is a freakin' 5th Ave multi-million zillion $$ company, which produces truffles with dimples.

I was browsing through my Food folder and I noticed that in March I had eaten another Lindor truffle [we get random chocolate once in a while], and this time, not only was there a dimple, but there was also a... tumour!
You'd think that a company so profoundly famous and with such "good standing" and such "rich history" would've figured out how to make spherical truffles by now.

Hershey's Hugs

There is always a way to turn something into a party. Seriously, in our English class, we had our final project, in which we read a book and explain stuff to the class [yeah, it was vague]. I don't really want to get into the details for every person's presentation, but NC brought in Hershey's Hugs, which I can now add to my "New Chocolate" list [on the sidebar]!

The Hershey's Hugs were extremely pretty, as they were nicely striped. Although the inside was plain ol' chocolate, the outside white chocolate was surprisingly overwhelming. The whole thing had a bite of caramel [though when I checked the ingredients, I found nothing caramel related... so it could've been the taste of white chocolate that confused me. Though, my taste buds honestly felt as though they were tasting a hint of caramel]. As usual, they melted pretty fast. If you had moulded a few of these into a spherical shape, sifted some cocoa powder over it, and offered it to some person on the street, he/she would most likely state that it was a chocolate truffle.

Lindor Truffles.

I despise the "grown-up" notion that a famous brand name equates quality. I'm sorry, but that is simply false! Just because the name Lindor is on the label does not mean that the truffles that the produce are somehow "superior" than some local chocolate bar.

I'm not bashing Lindor; the chocolate truffles are pretty yummy. They're not as good as some plain dark chocolate bars that one uses for baking. But then again, I have weird tastes.

One of my new year resolutions is to eat 100 different, new, pieces of chocolate/chocolate candies. Here's 1 and 2.
1. Lindor Peanut Butter Truffle.
Aw, the image quality sucks. It was some 500 x 1000 px JPG but I suppose it got compressed. Either way, if you really wanted to see a beautifully-programfully-edited-and-airbrushed picture of a Lindor truffle, all you have to do is go [here].

So. Mind my pun, but the Lindor-Chocolate-Making-Machine fudged (haha. Not.) up the peanut butter truffle. Looks like a golf ball with one dimple. Which thus makes it aerodynamic, but only 1/314th as aerodynamic as a golf ball. Actually, I'm not so sure., because the dimple is kinda big relative to a golf ball dimple. Look's kinda pasty and sweaty, too. Here's a lovely close up:


I did not spray it with cologne.
Taste-wise... The official Lindor website states that it has "...exclusively prepared Lindor Truffles in Peanut Butter for the American taste palate. Delicately pairing the flavors of decadent peanut butter and fine chocolate into a smooth-melting experience, Lindt's Master Chocolatiers have created a recipe to satisfy the cravings of the American chocolate connoisseur".
I LOVE peanut butter. If I could, I would eat jars of that stuff every single day. On bread. On fruit. On chocolate. Even in rice! This truffle should've been the "decadent" thing I asked for. But then again, I'm not American, and perhaps I don't fit this "American palate" of which Lindor speaks. In all honesty, the truffle wasn't that great. The ratio of chocolate to peanut butter was quite unappealing in the sense that the peanut butter taste wasn't that IN YOUR FACE. I am not willing to shell out $2.50 (I think that's how much one truffle cost at the Lindt/Lindor store on 5th ave in NYC?) for a piece of chocolate that. In all honesty. Is average.
Plus, Lindor does nothing for the environment except screw it up.

Organic peanut butter [~$4 for a 400ish gram jar] + organic dark chocolate [~$2-3 for a jar] = many more truffles at a more reasonable price for both me and the world.
One day I'm going to get a whole bar of dark chocolate and spread thick, creamy peanut butter over it, filling in all the smooth crevices. Then I'm going to gently press fresh roasted peanuts over each piece, and tenderly make sure that they are all facing the same direction. I will then use a gold-rimmed sieve and sift light, pure cocoa powder over my suicidal creation.
Psh.... So much for the imagery. As a digression [this will be a later post], doesn't that sound so much more romaniticky-finicky-proper than "mix chocolate, pb, cocoa powder and peanuts together and eat it while chillin'?"

2. Lindor "Extra" Dark Chocolate Truffle.
Was pretty good, I suppose. But wasn't as dark as I wanted it to be. But then again, it's a truffle, not a piece of chocolate for baking into sugar-stuffed cookies.