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!

Mango Custard Tart

SP and I made deliciously juicy mango custard tarts using this Fruit Tart recipe. The tart includes defrosted frozen mango, sliced and layered onto a light custard cream that is enrobed by a sweet buttery crust. The above tart was decorated by me (with the aid of a spoon, because the mango was surprisingly slippery!). The tart below was decorated by the SP, the Super Pastry-making-guy.



Notes on the Method:

• With the same amount of dough and cream, instead of one tart, we ended up with two generous tarts that were smaller - 6 to 7 inches in diameter?
• As I didn't feel like washing my rolling pin, we just pushed chunks of dough into the pans and flattened them with our fingers. This worked pretty well, though the edges should probably get more dough next time. The holes in the bottom need to be larger and more numerous so that there is less puffing of the pastry. Also, we only froze the flattened-out tart shells for about 20-30 minutes (while we made the custard cream), so there was no prechilling of the dough.
• The dough, when done, really does clump up into a ball when stirring with a spoon (or for the other folk, a mixing blade)!
• We used fat-free milk for the custard cream even though the recipe specified fat/low-fat. I don't think that it matters, taste-wise.
• A lot of the ingredients were NOT dutifully measured, but everything turned out fine!
• We replaced the corn starch with three tbsp of white flour in the cream. I think this is what gave the custard a more doughy/floury/pudding texture as opposed to a light pastry cream texture. Either way, it was still not too heavy (not like egg tarts at all!), had the viscosity of chocolate mousse, and paired well with the crust. Before incorporation of the heated milk, the egg yolk mixture had the consistency of pancake batter. On the heat, after merely a few minutes, the cream started to thicken!
• The only fruit we used was mango. Fortunately, mango is really shiny, meaning that there is no need for an apricot jam glaze!

Thickening custard on the heat!

Shells - baked, and filled with custard.

I am pleased with this tart because I can now successfully gauge when custard is "ready", and so can SP! This is a skill that will help him woo the women (far far far in the future)! Also, we had heaps of frustrating fun decorating with irregularly-shaped mango slices. The best end to the day was, of course, sharing a whole tart and watching the Q&A video on Curiosity's second day on Mars. 

Changes I would make include substituting whole wheat flour for the white flour, using two egg yolks instead of three, and adding more corn starch & milk. I would also make the give the sides of the tart thicker crusts so that they don't burn as much, and I would poke more holes into the crust to let air out (so the dough doesn't puff up).

International Dinner

I never got around to posting about my dorm house's International Dinner! Oh No! So here are some pictures. I was near the mid/end of the line, so a lot of the food was undergoing peristalsis, digestion, or absorption.

 Plum tart. DELICIOUS CAULIFLOWER AND LENTILS!

 Balsamic strawberries, vegetable dumpling, an olive bread thingy, crepes, and a cheese bread.

DELICIOUS CHEESE BREAD THING!

"Cows Make Delicious!"

Australian meat pies are, to me, originate from either an inexpensive restaurant, or the freezer. I did make them from scratch two weeks ago, but, ironically, the "real" version to me is the frozen kind I used to stick in the microwave, or the hot, fresh kind I got a Penrith Plaza (or my primary school tuck shop). The Australian meat pies that I knew weren't made with whole-wheat flour or American cows.

So I've decided just to make meat tarts because:

1. I had a pound of minced cow pieces and I didn't feel like making meatballs

2. Tarts use less pastry than pies.

Fortunately, one pound of minced cow filling fit perfectly into 19 pastry shells!

For 19 egg-tart-sized pastry shells:

180 g of butter/1.5 sticks cut into about 320 g whole-wheat flour/2.5 cups and 1 tsp salt, with some water added to make the crumbs stick to each other to form a dough.

The top of the filling hardens/crisps a bit when cooking, while the inside of the tart remains moist and delicious (I'm assuming).

Along with apparently being a good spaghetti sauce...

...INGREDIENTS FOR THE FILLING:

1 large diced onion

40 ml ketchup

1 tsp Vegemite (optional, since this is not an Australian meat pie, after all)

6 heaping tbsp steak sauce

2 tbsp barbecue sauce

450 g minced beef

1 tsp salt (optional)

1 tbsp cornstarch/cornflour

250 ml water (or tomato juice, if you have any)

METHOD

1. On high heat, cook onions, ketchup, Vegemite, steak sauce, barbecue sauce, and salt for a few minutes.

2. Throw in minced beef and listen to it sizzle for a few minutes.

3. Mix the cornstarch with a little bit of water, then dilute with remaining water. Pour water+cornstarch into saucepan.

4. Simmer on medium heat for around 20 minutes. A little less is fine. Just make sure the mince is cooked. If you are a vegetarian, use your eyes.

5. Scoop about 1.5 heaping tbsp of filling into each pastry shell. The filling will look very liquidy, but the liquid will congeal to a terrifically juicy meat filling thing in the oven.

6. Bake in an un-preheated oven on the lower rack for 15 minutes at 221 degrees C/430 degrees F. Let sit in oven for an hour or so. OR, just let them bake for 20 minutes. Either way, you just want to the crust to be cooked.

Something that's been on my mind recently is Chowder saying "Cuz cows make delicious!" from the episode "The Garage Sale". It goes something like...

Mung: We're going to-

Chowder: gettin' a cow?

Mung: Why do you want a cow?

Chowder: Cuz cows make delicious!

Mung: Delicious what?

Chowder: A garage sale, huh? Why would anyone want to sell their garage?

(this is paraphrased)

Kiwi Froyo

Kiwi.

Previously called "Sprinkles". The most popular flavours in Philly include vanilla, chocolate, original tart, and cookies and cream. Seasonal flavors turn up every few months.

Owned by Ryan and Matt Mealy, Kiwi is a frozen yoghurt (okay, for this post I will spell it "yogurt") store located on 36th and Chestnut, and I signed up for a Preceptorial lead by them. A preceptorial is basically a 2+ hour class that isn't going to be graded, and I suppose Penn gives them out because it's a way for students to learn things that aren't part of their majors/requirements. For instance, I signed up for a Thought Experiments Preceptorial, which is... well, philosophy, right? There was also one called Wine Tasting, and I got accepted into it but I'm not 21 yet so I can't actually go, legally.

I thought that this Kiwi Preceptorial would be interesting because it would open my eyes up more to the commercial/production aspect of food companies. I also hoped that there'd be a tour of the actual store, including what ingredients are used and how flavours are created. This wasn't the case though; the Preceptorial focused mainly on business. Ryan and Matt are businesspeople. They love food, sure, and they love frozen yogurt, but they are fully focused on the -open-more-stores- & -promote-Kiwi- & -sell-more-. They grew up in a family-business household, they have business degrees, and they decided to open up a frozen yogurt store because frozen yogurt was a business-grabber, with it being touted as "healthy" and all. If, for some reason, the frozen yogurt business dies down (although I highly doubt it, with more and more people believing that frozen yogurt is healthier than ice cream), they claimed that they are ready to pursue a different fad, including non-food ventures.

See, if I was going to open a bakery/patisserie, it'd be because I like food and I love baking and I want to cut out the stigma that pepper, vinegar, and chili "are too weird to put into sweet cookies/cake". So, this Preceptorial showed me why businesses expand and why Aramack and Campbell (and all the other places I applied to for internships) want Management and Marketing degrees. Thanks. Biology (and Chemistry, even though I really don't want to admit that) gets thrown out of the window. Actually, I take that back. I did ask Ryan whether they created their own froyo from scratch, and she said that they currently didn't. "However," she said with a grin, "my husband, who is a scientist, will be working on it at some point, although he doesn't know it yet."

Which goes to show that I should marry a Whartonite. Haha. I think that I prefer Engineers.

The Kiwi story, as I said, starts off from a family business; Ryan and Matt had a bunch of experience helping out in the family furniture company. They claim that each company needs to offer something "new", and to stay within that niche, in order to get recognition. The "new" thing for their furniture company had been that they offered same-day delivery, and the "new" thing for Kiwi is that the frozen yogurt is self-serve. I had never gone to Kiwi before, so, yes, I agree that this is indeed new. Unlike Flurt or any ice cream stores, Kiwi gives you a container and 14 flavours from 14(?) machines to choose from (16 in other Kiwi stores; only Philly has 14 flavours. I think that this is due to the fact that there is not enough wall space to stick in more machines here). For 49c / ounce, you can fill out however much of frozen yogurt you want; you just pull down the lever and let the frozen yogurt flow. Then, you can add toppings/fruit, and you weigh the bowl and its contents, and pay. I suppose this is great because it

1. Offers customers customizable sizes.

2. Offers customers every single flavour in one sitting.

3. Offers customers the ability to have 90% toppings and 10% froyo, if they really wanted to.

4. Means that employees don't have to be trained to make the perfectly pretty froyo. When I was at Carvel, I had to make sure that the ice cream on the cone looked pretty. If it looked wonky, customers would appear a bit upset, and I'd look unprofessional.

5. Means that only 1 container needs to be ordered. There's no such thing as a "small", a "medium", a "large", an "extra large", or a "kiddie cup".

6. Is "new".

Initially, Ryan and Matt were going to Franchise, but they decided that they should just open their own store, and they were going to call it "Wondercream", which has various connotations, one of them being inappropriate and another of them meaning "fat" (if you think about the word "cream", you will instantly think of "fat". Yes, you will, because the Media said so). Technically, they're still registered under the name Wondercream, although the name Kiwi is "fresher" seems to make customers like it more.

Back to the story. Ryan and Matt opened a store in June 2009 in Cherry Hill, NJ, and it was a really tough time up to that point because literally no realtors wanted to rent to a new company. Apparently, that's how it is in the business world; you're of zero value until you stick a dent in your market. (This is where I think the story got confusing, because Ryan said that they had started searching for location, equipment, interior design etc. in "December 2008" and that "after 16-17 months, we finally opened", which would imply that they started in December 2007. Nevertheless, the point is that they took a while to plan everything.) They ended up signing four leases before even opening the first store, and because nearly no-one turned up on their opening day, they had this huge "Grand Opening" and gave out unlimited free ice cream to everyone at their Cherry Hill Mall place. Both these events demonstrate how confident they are; apparently, they gave away 15000 oz of frozen yogurt to ~2000 people. Matt laughed about how it was a huge business risk, but that summer, they averaged 700-800 people per day.

This was a different story in Philly though; when Kiwi opened here in September 2009, the unlimited free froyo idea made people line up and just TAKE AND TAKE and be CRAZY! It's pretty interesting to see both Ryan and Matt laugh at all these events, which one could consider to be "failures" or "setbacks"; again, they're really confident people. They "want to dominate", they say.

So, here is the advertising component of Kiwi from Ryan and Matt. I'm typing it down because it's true, although I'm not sure how much more likely I am to buy froyo from them when I would rather buy bread since I like bread more:

1. Customers are greeted every. Single. Time. //I guess I'm indifferent to this part, unless I get discounts or something if I become a loyal member.

2. 30 toppings. //Thanks for the choices, but I'm not paying 49c for an ounce of marshmallows or an ounce of sprinkles. I'm paying 49c for an ounce of frozen yogurt.

3. Clean. //Whoot!

4. Fruit delivery 3 days a week! Fruit is also freshly cut!//See comment 2

5. Short shelf life of everything; no HFCS, no preservatives. //Whoot!

6. Good place to go for lunch. //But is there a nutrition label somewhere? See, I would pick a sandwich over this because I know that I will get enough protein and iron from eating whole wheat bread. For froyo, how much sugar did you add?

After the preceptorial, we all went to Kiwi to get some froyo. Everyone got 25% off, and I got $5 off because I was one of the lucky 25 people out of the 40 or so people who signed up at the right time. $5 gives ~10 oz of yogurt, and since I actually didn't bring any money with me (hey, with a prepaid meal plan, what else would I be using money for?), it was really useful having a few sets of scales sitting there so I could measure my yogurt content. I ended up with 8.7 oz of various flavours, but not all of them. The restaurant environment was pretty cheerful, but that may have been because of the swarm of people in there from the Preceptorial.

I tried original tart, peanut butter, green tea, chocolate, strawberry, mint, cheesecake, mango, and I want to say pomegranate but I'm not even sure that flavour exists. I just know there's another flavour buried underneath the ones in the pictures. The peanut butter flavour actually tasted like peanut butter, which is a change from "peanut butter flavoured" items such as Clif bars or cookies etc. The green tea flavour was light and poofy, as was the original tart flavour. Actually, all the flavours tasted very light (but NOT BLAND) and watery/icy. Another word I would use to describe Kiwi froyo is "fragile" because it melts mad fast.

Yes, I'll go again next semester, when I don't have a meal plan. I'll do a proper flavour review because I was too preoccupied talking to someone new (who I guess I will never see again, unfortunately) who I had met at the Preceptorial.

Egg Tarts!

Here is a rare double post :D

Today I made egg tarts.

Yes. The almighty Hong Kong Egg Tart. The kind that costs 1HKD to get in HK, yet costs 1USD [7-8HKD] to obtain here in the U.S.

I made 25 of them today.

They did not fail.

And without further blabbering, I present: EGG TARTS!!!!!!!!!! :D

The sugar-butter-egg-flour shell. With vanilla.

The sugar-egg-egg-egg-egg-egg-egg-milk-water filling. With vanilla.

Add Heat. More Heat. Oooh it's sizzling. "It's hot, hot! So delicious... T-t-t-tasty-tasty." ... That's what she said.... Fergie, I mean.