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Jonathan Gold on eating your entire city

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The first question I asked Jonathan Gold after watching “City of Gold,” the new documentary about his life, was basically this: Did you set out to change Los Angeles, or just to find the best tacos?

In the film about the Los Angeles Times food critic, the food Gold has spent a lifetime uncovering gets at least equal billing to the city in which it is cooked. 

We follow Gold into South Los Angeles, where he enjoys a fat, grilled hot dog at Earlz Grille, then east to Boyle Heights for tacos slathered in a pumpkin seed-based salsa at Antojitos Carmen, on to Alhambra for a staggering plate of Chengdu Taste lamb cubes pierced with toothpicks and drenched in cumin, and west to Attari Sandwich Shop, which Gold describes as basically re-creating a Tehran cafe from 30 years ago.

You like to eat? You will love this movie — and you will grow to love L.A.

I have extolled Gold in these pages since 1999, from the first time I read him compare a rolled South Indian pessret in a Cerritos deli to an Eero Saarinen structure, “a beige, lentil-flour pancake with the dull, smooth sheen of a freshly pressed pair of gabardine slacks, as big around as a phonograph record and bent into a kind of ’50’s-curvilinear shape.”

That was eight years before the Pulitzer Prize judges found Gold, who at the time was writing for the LA Weekly, and awarded him their prize for criticism, the first ever for a food writer.

And now comes this 90-minute documentary, the near-perfect vehicle to distribute Gold to the masses. 

The film weaves Gold’s descriptions of great L.A. meals from his Times and LA Weekly columns with stories of the people who cook the food, Gold’s life story (and quirks) and the music, architecture and life of Los Angeles. Director Laura Gabbert has managed to make one of the finest movies ever about Los Angeles, without once mentioning the movies or Malibu.

Jonathan Gold’s L.A. unfolds before us as a flat, mini-malled and traffic-choked metropolis, far more brown than blond, whose Technicolor allure explodes solely in plate after plate of food.

“That was intentional,” Gabbert told me in a Q-and-A session I led with her and Gold after a screening at the Landmark Theatre on March 12. 

“We just followed the lead in his writing. This is his Los Angeles, and it’s many of ours. This is the way we see the city.”

“City of Gold” depicts an L.A. of immigrant bounty. The most moving moments of the film, hands down, come when once-struggling restaurant owners — Thai, Latino, Ethiopian — tell how a single Jonathan Gold review brought hordes of new customers to their restaurants and transformed their lives.

The delicious irony is that these immigrants succeed by cooking the most authentic native food possible. They resist the urge to Americanize their food, and when Gold discovers and rewards their craft with his words, they become successful Americans. 

At a time when entire political movements have organized against immigrants, I wondered aloud if the movie wasn’t a full-throated retort.

“I’ve been writing about immigrant communities for 30 years,” Gold responded. “I like immigrants. I think we should pretty much let everybody in — well, maybe they should be able to cook. Donald Trump is a guy who eats a lot of white bread.”

I asked the 300 people in the sold-out audience how many had visited a restaurant because of a Jonathan Gold review. Most of the hands went up, like the many toothpicks jutting out from that Chendu Taste lamb. That’s why I asked Gold if his mission was to find great food, or to transform L.A.?

“If I’m doing anything that’s beyond writing about food,” he said, “it’s to get people in Los Angeles to be a little less afraid of their neighbors. And it’s easy to live in one part of town and not really interact with other parts. There are a lot of ways to do it. But you might not go some place to see an Indian movie or a Nigerian art exhibition, but if I tell you that someone is making a bowl of noodles like you’ve never had in your entire life, maybe you’ll make that drive.”

Gold grew up in a “highly Reform” L.A. Jewish household, where his father was “the most overeducated probation officer in the history of Los Angeles County.” The household was filled with high culture, if not great food. The links between food, tradition and family that Gold has spent a lifetime searching out didn’t exist in his childhood home.

There was one exception.

“My father definitely considered deli to be a sacrament,” Gold said.

I quickly asked Gold to name his favorite deli in a city rich with them.

“Langer’s,” he said, to wild audience applause. “The pastrami sandwich — there should be a marble statue of it in the Civic Center mall.” 

In a scene in the film that takes place in New York City, Gold and his wife, L.A. Times Arts and Entertainment Editor Laurie Ochoa, dine at an Italian restaurant with New Yorker food writer Calvin Trillin, whose books “Alice, Let’s Eat” and “American Fried: Adventures of a Happy Eater” influenced Gold, then a UCLA liberal-arts graduate, concert cellist and nascent punk rocker, to explore his food obsession through words. Why is it, I asked Gold, that so many great American food writers, from A.J. Liebling to Calvin Trillin to Gold to Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman — are Jews?

“Um, “ he semi-joked, “we think about food a lot. We’re a hungry people.”

But if a good appetite, as Liebling wrote, is the first requirement of a great food critic, Gold’s achievement goes well beyond that, as does this movie. Hunger leads to curiosity; curiosity leads to discovery; discovery leads to empathy. It is a recipe as simple as a slice of sashimi, and as beautiful.

At the Sundance Film Festival, where “City of Gold” premiered to critical acclaim last January, a viewer pointed out that it was the only doc that wasn’t “a social issue documentary.”

Yet somehow, Gold said, it is exactly that. Most journalism focuses on the things that divide us. Gold’s focus is on one of the few things that unites us.

“The idea, which is so completely obvious,” he told the Landmark crowd, “is live in your entire city. Reach out to people. Everybody has something worthwhile and delicious for you.”

“City of Gold” is screening across the city. Follow Rob Eshman's thoughts on food on Instagram and Twitter @foodaism. 

Rob Eshman is the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Jewish Journal.

Kombucha lessons

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Over the winter holiday, I got really good at making kombucha.

I did my online research, copied and pasted a basic recipe from a website called thekitchn.com, then began riffing on my own flavors. Ginger-honey, pear-lime, pomegranate, verbena-kalamansi. I picked most of the fruits from trees in our yard — they don’t call it homebrew for nothing. At Whole Foods, 12 ounces of kombucha will set you back almost $4. Homemade, it’s basically free, just a jar of tea and a little sugar.  

My wife, Naomi, was leery at first. She’d adapted easily to my pickle- and yogurt-making spree, probably because her taste buds, like the rest of her, were born and raised in Brooklyn. The yogurt she now makes from a Yonah Schimmel’s starter culture is every bit as good as Yonah’s.  

But kombucha is from Asia, not the shtetl. It is black tea and sugar fermented with the help of a slimy blob called a SCOBY, which stands for a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. (You can buy the blob on Amazon, like everything else.) The plain gallon jar on our kitchen counter looked like an aquarium full of bilge water with a dead jellyfish inside. Naomi was dubious.

And yet, after seven days of creation, the kombucha turned out delicious. Dry, sparkly and slightly sweet, with just the tiniest hint of alcohol (less than .5 percent) – a marriage of tea and Champagne. The SCOBY set loose a zoo of probiotics, as well, which seem to soothe, strengthen and calm my innards. WebMD will tell you there are no double-blind studies proving the stuff works. But kombucha has been around 2,000 years longer than WebMD.  

We poured some kombucha into a jar for my booch-loving niece and headed down to Grand Central Market to meet her. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the place was packed, brought back to life by dozens of artisan food stalls. At Wexler’s Deli, Micah Wexler was selling house-cured lox and pastrami. There was falafel on freshly baked laffa, or flatbread. The longest lines were for tacos with hand-formed tortillas and stewed meats – recipes centuries older than the hipsters who swarmed the food stalls.  

After lunch, we walked down Spring Street to The Last Bookstore. It, too, was packed. Two warehouse-size floors of new and used books and a line at the cash register that made me wonder whether print is the new digital.

On our way home, we passed a large, well-lit music store on Santa Monica Boulevard and, on a whim, pulled over. As we crossed the threshold, I noticed the motto on the sign: “The Last Record Store.” It turns out that LPs, too, are making a comeback in their own niche. The Last Record Store didn’t have only gently used albums from the ’70s, such as “Yaffa Yarkoni Sings Yiddish” and “Tov ‘L’Shir B’Yahad — Best Songs of Camp SWIG” (really!); it also had the new, shrink-wrapped double-LP soundtrack from “The Hateful Eight.”

Everything old is new again, right? We had started the day tasting an ancient drink we had learned to brew ourselves. We ate lunch at a long-dormant urban space brought back to life with good, handmade food. We shopped for books on paper and music on vinyl. And in none of these activities were we alone. 

In droves, Americans are drawn back toward the traditional, the handmade, the old. Nostalgia may be a factor. In the chaos and constant newness of modern life, it’s easy to romanticize the past. But we also go back because sometimes what was is irreplaceable, if not better.

A new longitudinal study released late last month found that the best diet is the simplest: heavy on grains and vegetables, light on meat, minimally processed. Not sugar- and/or fat-free or vitamin-enriched or fast and quick, but real. A little bit of gribenes — chicken skin and onion fried in chicken fat – is good for you. Coke and Diet Coke – bad for you. Homemade kombucha, which costs about nothing to make, is awash in probiotics and has 35 calories a serving — great for you. Because it’s the real thing.

The lesson goes far beyond food, and books, and pieces of vinyl. It’s the reason not to worry too much about the future of Judaism, as well, thinking it is in inevitable decline.

“We assume Jewish life is linear — thinking every generation is less engaged than its predecessor,” the historian Jonathan Sarna said last November at a Brandeis University conference. “But anyone who properly studies history will actually see that it is not linear at all, as is the case with any other religion. Jewish life in America is cyclical, not linear.”

By focusing on what works, what has stood the test of time, what is literally good for us, we reinvent, revive and renew the gifts of food, culture and tradition — not such a bad lesson from a simple jar of tea.

No need to reinvent the kombucha wheel. The recipe I followed to make homemade kombucha can be found here.

The kombucha SCOBY I purchased can be found here.

Rob Eshman is publisher and editor-in-chief of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal. Email him at robe@jewishjournal.com. 

Follow Rob Eshman’s food life on Twitter and Instagram @foodaism. Sign up for Jewish Journal’s curated weekly Foodaism newsletter at bit.ly/JJfood.

There Will Be (lamb's) Blood

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The night before the slaughter, the goat appeared in my dreams, crying. I awoke, startled, at 3 a.m., then tried to go back to sleep. But when I closed my eyes, I saw the damn goat. This time it was curled up, asleep in its barn, unaware that in just a few hours, a rabbi would slit its throat.  

I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night — the thought of dinner was giving me nightmares. 

Meanwhile, my wife, Naomi, slept soundly beside me. We were at a Jewish food conference called the Harvest Gathering. The invitation to attend had been too good to pass up. I often write and teach about food, and Naomi — Rabbi Naomi Levy — deals in the realm of the soul. In a Venn diagram of our interests, a Jewish food conference is smack center.

My problem was that along with tastings of cannabis-infused matzah balls, marijuana-cured lox and a dinner in a sukkah, the day’s activities would include a demonstration of kosher slaughter, or shechitah. 

We had talked about the goat slaughter just before going to bed. I was resolved to watch, even though for seven years, until not long ago, we kept two pygmy goats as pets in our backyard. Goldie Horn and Ollie now live in Simi Valley at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, where the campers renamed them Shlomo and Yaffa. The goat in my nightmare looked a lot like Shlomo. 

Naomi told me she had no intention of watching. But, I said, the whole point of the experience was to connect us to the reality of the food we eat.  We both eat meat, yet, like most people, neither of us had witnessed the process of turning a living, breathing mammal into food.

“You eat it,” I’d said to Naomi that night. “You should see how it’s done.”

“I’ve had surgery too,” Naomi shot back, “but I don’t need to see an operation.”

This is what happens when you challenge someone trained in talmudic disputation. You tend to lose.

Naomi was right.  We are at the end of the line of so many unpleasant processes we don’t feel compelled to see.   How awful is a gold mine in Africa, or an underwear factory in China? Even the most vegan of rabbis still reads a Torah written on the skin of goats — who presumably didn’t volunteer for the honor.  It is good to see the world as it is and fix its broken parts.  But we choose what veils to peel back, and which to leave, well, veiled. Must we watch our food die?

But confronting dilemmas such as these is what we had traveled to Colorado to do. We had been invited to Devil’s Thumb Ranch, a high-end resort nestled among pine-crusted mountains north of Denver, along with 70 mostly young food professionals — chefs, entrepreneurs, writers and activists — all foodies who also happened to be Jewish, but with varying degrees of connection to their heritage. The late September conference — which was organized by Hazon, the Jewish food renewal movement, and funded by the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation — had as its goal, in the words of organizer Sarah Kornhauser, “to combine food identity with Jewish identity.” 

It was a simple, brilliant approach to two very different problems. The first is the weakening of Jewish identity among 20- and 30-somethings who are fully assimilated into the larger culture, a particular focus of the Schusterman Family Foundation. The second problem is our nation’s industrial food system, which serves up massive quantities of cheap food at the expense of our environment and our health. Hazon has long sought to rally the Jewish community to create, in founder Nigel Savage’s words, “a healthy and more sustainable world.” 

Food is a particularly good way to reach younger Jews, because Jews, it turns out, are just like other people. What rock ’n’  roll was to the boomers, food is to GenXers and the tweens. It’s their cultural touchstone, their way in to the world.

Last spring I taught a course at USC Annenberg School of Journalism called “Food, Media and Culture.” It struck me how much time and money my young students spent eating out (and posting their meals on Instagram).  Then I realized: For a generation that spends more and more of its time virtually, food is tangible, immediate and gratifying. Young people may not have to pay for music or TV, but you can’t pirate food. Entertainment, even sex, comes to this generation via a screen, but no tech guru has been able to figure out a way to digitize dinner.  In an increasingly virtual world, food is their last real, authentic experience. 

By exposing young food professionals who happen to be Jewish to the ethical and ritual traditions of food in Judaism, you strengthen their connection to their tradition. At the same time, you spread the best Jewish ethical values about food to the larger world of consumers and suppliers. 

“This is the vanguard of Jewish leaders who have the power to shape the world,” the Schusterman Family Foundation’s Lisa Eisen said at the conference. “The world needs the intentionality and the compassion that our tradition literally brings to the table.”

The conference program aimed to present both Jewish food traditions and ethics, and to examine how those translate into the real world. So, for instance, on the first day, Woody Tasch, the leader of a social movement called Slow Money, spoke about how local investment can create a sustainable, healthier food supply. Then author Joan Nathan, who was treating Jewish food seriously a generation before the rest of the world caught on, called upon the chefs and professionals to become Jewish home cooks.

“Jewish food goes through the lifecycle of the year,” Nathan said. “Memories are made from traditions. The importance of home cooking is that it is what our kids remember.”

The meal that first night, like a Passover seder, symbolized everything we had been talking about during the day. The theme was, “a whole boat dinner.” A company called Whole Boat Harvest in Denver, which specializes in selling species the industry ignores or throws away, provided a different sustainable kosher fish for each course.

“It’s all about translating values to the plate and out into the world,” said Denver chef Daniel Asher, who oversaw a team of five participant-chefs, each one responsible for one course.

Asher is Denver’s own “rock star chef,” a burly young man with a ponytail and a wide-open face. He described each course the way a boomer might have described a new Stones song: from a first course of halibut with harissa butter, lightly pickled celery, fresh radish and salsify from chef Lior Hillel of Los Angeles’ Bacaro L.A. restaurant, to a dessert made by L.A. chef Deborah Benaim — panna cotta topped with sustainable caviar. 

As a survivor of innumerable Jewish banquets featuring factory-raised chicken or endangered Chilean sea bass served with indifferent vegetables, I couldn’t help but notice how serving great food, thoughtfully sourced, infused our evening with what Asher called “sacredness.” 

The next day, chef Ann Cooper led a workshop on improving school lunches, something her Chef Ann Foundation, based in Boulder, Colo., is doing in districts throughout the country. Ari Weinzweig, co-owner of Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Mich., spoke to the group about the importance of extending the ethic of good food to all aspects of one’s business.

“Here’s a big problem in the restaurant world,” the gangly, bearded Weinzweig said. “Everybody wants sustainability, but they treat employees like sh–.” 

If the night before was about embracing what Asher called “the sacredness of joining around the table,” this day was about the Jewish value of repairing the world, and the many ways food enables us to do that.

This was when I realized I was at a Jewish conference in fall 2015 with no panels on continuity or intermarriage, no hand-wringing over Iranian nukes or Palestinian knives. Too many Jewish conferences dwell on what’s wrong with the Jewish world. This one brought together a room full of people who are doing their best daily, meal by meal, to make things right. It made me wonder whether the Jews with the most radical agenda and greatest opportunity to fix the world are the ones working in the food industry. 

Then came evening. Naomi and I had hashed over whether to watch or not to watch the slaughter, and now the moment had arrived.

At dusk, a bus dropped us on the shores of Lake Granby. A large white tent, the conference version of a sukkah, was set with long tables for the feast. Outside the tent, a whole lamb was splayed above a pile of burning embers. It had been roasting for hours; its gums shriveled to reveal its massive white teeth. This would be our dinner, as there would not be enough time to prepare and cook the goat we were about to slaughter.

And where was it?

Kornhauser pointed us to the other side of a tent, where a large dog crate sat on a wide, blue tarp. 

“We were going to do a goat,” she said, “but the goat fell through.”

I looked inside the crate, and a lamb stared back at me. It was creamy white, the size of our spaniel. 

At least I wouldn’t have to watch a goat die. Phew. But a line from Jonathan Safran Foer’s book “Eating Animals” popped into my head. To eat meat, he wrote, is to suppress “a gnawing dread that we are participating in something deeply wrong.” 

Two rabbis asked us to circle around the tarp. A long explanation of the laws of kosher slaughter followed. 

The process does not permit any pain to be inflicted on the animals, the rabbi said. Kornhauser asked us to keep quiet,  but there was nervous chatter.  A man stood up and asked people to honor the request for silence. It was funeral solemn.

 The rabbis had to tip the crate to urge out the lamb, which they quickly put onto its back. It didn’t bleat or protest in any way. The older rabbi, Moshe Fayzakov, ran his fingernail 12 times over a razor-sharp blade to make sure it was smooth. A chef beside me winced.

The younger rabbi, Yisroel Engel, quickly bound together three of the animal’s legs with a string that looked disconcertingly like the fringes of a prayer shawl. Rabbi Fayzakov recited a blessing, then Rabbi Engel dipped his hand into a bucket of water and washed the lamb’s lengthened neck to make sure no pebbles or dirt would nick the blade.

I was sitting three feet away and watching as Rabbi Fayzakov bent down and made a quick slice across the lamb’s throat. My eyes closed involuntarily. When I opened them, blood was everywhere. 

Quickly, the older rabbi pulled the blue tarp completely over the animal. Someone asked if that is part of the ritual. 

“No,” Rabbi Fayzakov said, “but it’s not pleasant to see what comes next.”

“Unfold it,” several of us said. 

He did, and we sat in silence, staring at this once-beautiful animal, its head at an unnatural angle from its neck, bright red blood pumping onto the sky blue tarp.

And then the lamb kicked. I grabbed the leg of the man sitting next to me. 

The rabbi explained that while he cuts the jugular, he leaves the spine intact in order to keep the blood moving. Jewish law prohibits the eating of blood, and the process drains as much of it as possible. The unbound leg serves as a kind of pump. “The nerves kick in,” said the rabbi, “but the animal is dead.” 

The worst was over. I moved in close for a photo — and failed to notice that a thin stream of blood was running onto my pants and shoes. 

I knew what we had witnessed was kosher done right, in the best of circumstances, with an animal that had had a short but happy life. The preparation, the prayers, the sheer intentionality of the moment did as much as may be possible to ennoble what is an undeniably gruesome act. If the organizers had been searching for the best way to dramatize what Jewish food ethics bring to the table, they’d found it.

The cannabis tasting that followed right after? I’m still trying to figure out what was so Jewish about that — but no one seemed to complain.

We moved to a table laid out with cured salmon filets and rows of matzah balls on sheet pans. 

As Colorado’s legalized marijuana industry booms, trained chefs are now looking for ways to expand the offering of what are called “edibles.” Josh Rosenberg, the young owner of Rosenberg’s Bagels & Delicatessen in Denver, turned, of course, to his tradition.

“Food and cannabis are two things very dear to my heart,” Rosenberg explained.

He’d cured the lox in alcohol infused with cannabis. He made the matzah balls by sautéing marijuana in chicken fat and incorporating that into the dumplings.  

“Pot shmaltz?” chef Asher called out. “Josh, you are a visionary.”

No one got wasted. But I can say a little lox took the edge off the kosher slaughter.

After a while, we gathered and talked about the rituals of Sukkot, the harvest festival, then filtered into the sukkah for a dinner. Naomi, the resident rabbi — who, by the way, stayed edible-free — was asked to offer a brief teaching.  She stood up. After the lox and matzah balls, she joked, would anyone remember anything she said?

I did. She spoke about time — as Ecclesiastes does on Sukkot — about time spinning out of control and the need to slow it down. She talked about how Sukkot, during which we are asked to dwell in huts outside our homes, forces us to think “outside the box.” If we are to thrive, she said, we need to do the same — rethink the structures that no longer serve us well, whether in Jewish community or in the food industry. Blessing our food, she concluded, teaches us to be open to all the blessings in our life. 

Maybe it was the beer, the matzah balls, the PTSD of the lamb slaughter — but I looked around and saw quite a few tears around the table. The lamb had entered our bodies, and words of Torah our souls.

“The road to the sacred,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, “leads through the secular.”

The whole conference had been a keen reminder of that: how the everyday act of getting and making food presents us with constant moral and ethical choices that either can elevate us and our society or drag us down. Over 3,000 years, Judaism has had a lot to say about those choices. 

“Synagogue is not a place I connect with being Jewish,” food entrepreneur Tal Nimrodi said at a closing circle, “but this is the kind of place I can connect. I am surprised how many of my food values are Jewish values.”

The conference organizers understood this and saw food as one of the best ways — maybe the best way — to bring Jewish learning to a new generation.

For so many of us, and especially the chefs, that was the revelation at Devil’s Thumb Ranch: that Jewish teaching and practice can inform and enrich their professional lives. Great food and Jewish life and learning are not separate. They are, like me and the rabbi, married.

Below is video of the kosher slaughter. The content may be too graphic for some viewers

 

 

You can follow Rob on Instagram and Twitter @foodaism 

Eat more cholent

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My resolution for the New Year is to make more cholent.

Cholent is the traditional Sabbath stew, assembled and put in the oven (or on the stove, or in a crock pot) on Friday before the Sabbath, then cooked at a low temperature until Sabbath lunch.

I made one this past Shabbat. We’ve been exiled from our home while it’s undergoing repairs, and we’ve been staying with my parents. My mother made many Jewish foods while I was growing up — latkes, blintzes, chicken soup — but not cholent. I could see why. In Encino, the Old Country, it never stayed cold long enough to hunger for a big pot of meat and beans. Also, we weren’t observant Jews, who don’t cook on the Sabbath. Why cook a whole stew when you can make yourself a tuna melt?

But my Brooklyn-born, observant rabbi wife craves a good cholent. Cholent is her Proustian madeleine: One bite and memories come flooding back of Camp Ramah, of her Boro Park home, even of the post-Sabbath-service cholent at Temple Beth Am. Which, to me, tastes like adobe. To her, like home.

That’s it, though: Cholent is the taste of home. Having a big pot cooking all night and day perfumes your house, whets your appetite for hours. Cholent is gastronomic foreplay. It demands that you take time on Saturday for a big meal. No errands. No Home Depot. No running off to a movie. It demands you invite friends over: No one makes a cholent for two, or even four. And it demands you slow down and relax the rest of the afternoon — cholent wants you to nap. It is healthy eating, but it is not light eating.

These are all good things, as far as I’m concerned — good smells, good food, long meals, a good nap — and cholent is the way.

Some people prefer a Moroccan-style cholent, called a dafina, or the more general Sephardic style, called hamin. Both have more intricate spicing than Ashkenazic cholent, which is less fussy. My version splits the difference. Keep in mind: Whichever you choose, this is as easy as cooking gets. If you can throw clothes in a suitcase, you can throw ingredients in a pot, and that’s cholent.

Here’s my recipe:

FOODAISM CHOLENT

4 tablespoons olive oil

2 turkey legs  

2 pounds short ribs or brisket

2 pounds beef knuckle or shin bone

1 pound white beans or garbanzo beans, soaked overnight and drained

2 heads garlic, peeled

1/2 pound kosher sausage (merguez, turkey, Italian)

2 onions, peeled and sliced

2 potatoes, peeled and cut in 2-inch chunks

2 yams or 1 small butternut squash, peeled and cut in 2-inch chunks

2 carrots, peeled and cut in 2-inch chunks

10 eggs, whole, in shell 

2 dry or 4 fresh bay leaves 

1 teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon turmeric

 (optional)

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

(optional)

1 teaspoon hot paprika

1 tablespoon salt, or to taste

1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper, or to taste

Preheat the oven to 250 degrees F. 

In a very large oven- and stove-proof pot, heat the olive oil until hot. Add the turkey legs and sear on all sides until brown. Remove. Do the same with the short ribs and knuckle bone — keep your range-vent fan on — and sear them well. Just as the meat is finishing, place half the beans in the pot. Add half the garlic. Lay in the sausage and turkey legs, the remaining the beans, the remaining garlic, the vegetables, the whole eggs and the spices. Add water to go 3/4 of the way up to the top. Bring to boil then simmer one hour. 

Cover with a tight-fitting lid. Place in preheated oven. 

Cook overnight, at least 8 hours. Check twice or so to make sure water is still at 3/4 level, adding more if necessary. Serve hot, offering each guest a little of everything.  Great with some harissa on the side.

Serves 10 very hungry people.

NOTE: For a vegetarian version, leave out the meat, add more squash and a handful of rice. No one will starve. 

Katsuji Tanabe takes 'Chopped!'

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Katsuji Tanabe is the onion of kosher chefs– every time you think you've figured him out, you find there;'s a whole other layer.

Tonight Katsuji held a party at the Mexican Consulate near downtown Los Angeles to screen the episode of the Food Network show, “Chopped!” on which he appears as a contestant.

I first met Katsuji when he was the chef at the kosher steakhouse Shilo on Pico.   He stood out.  Katsuji grew up in Mexico to Japanese and Mexican parents.  He came to America at age 19 with no money, and worked his way into some of the finest restaurants. He isn't Jewish, but he was intrigued by the challenge of cooking kosher.  It was clear he was cooking at a level that went unappreciated by many patrons.  Katsuji was working up hand-chopped aged burgers with cashew milk blue cheese and authentic Baja style tacos with homemade habenero salsa.  The clientele just wanted well-done steak.

Katsuji moved on to open his own place, Mexikosher, also on Pico, where those homemade salsas are center stage.  It's inexpensive, delicious, and maybe the most inadvertantly healthy Mexican food in LA– no cheese, sour cream, lard.  “99 percent of Mexican restaurants aren't kosher,” is the place's motto. “We are the 1 percent. Occupy Mexikosher.”

Katsuji's  first on screen appearance on a food show was in a web series on jewishjournal.com, The Chosen Dish.  He made Thai Tuna Tempura Matzoh Balls. The Food Ntework heard of him and made him a contestant on “Chopped.”

About 60 friends, family and colleagues gathered in a function room at the Consulate to watch the show with him.  Katsuji was his ebullient self– dressed in fancier street clothes, his hair slicked back, he rushed to hug people and introduce friends to one another.   The crowd was as eclectric as the chef. I met an attorney named Ottavio Olivas who moonlighted as the creator/chef of a pop-up called Ceviche Project.   I met a producer from the Travel Channel who worked with Katsuji on his next top secret TV project.  I met a guy who plays hockey with Katsuji.

Hockey?

“Oh, he's crazy competitive,” the guy said.  “He plays in a league, like four times a week.”

Before the show started we ate hors d'oeuvres, including one based on something Katsuji invented for the show– schwarma mole.  A mixologist poured a drink of tequila, pear liquor, ginger liquor, lime, soda and mint, with– as a nod to Mexikosher– a Manischewitz floater.  There was also lots of beer– Katsuji likes to party.

Once we sat to watch the show, the Mexican Japanese Christian kosher cooking hockey playing chef's competitive streak really became apparent.

He trash-talked his opponents (“His plate looks like dog food.”).  He got in their heads. (“I'm crazy enough to open a Mexican kosher restaurant, what can't I do?”)  He talked smack. (“You look tired,” he said to one chef. “You should just quit.”)

But what he really did was cook like a demon.  The gimmick of “Chopped!” is you have to make three different courses from three different sets of bizarre ingredients.  You have 10 seconds once the ingredients are revelaed to start cooking, and 20 minutes to cook.  The completed food sits for 45 minutes before the three-judge panel tastes it.  The day goes from 5:30 am – 11 pm.  

“They have you meet at a Starbucks in the morning. They want to get you hyped,” said Katsuji.  Beforehand a friend had tipped him off that he should just drink water all day, no coffee.   He said that helped him stay calm as the other chefs got more and more wired.

The results were three inventive dishes that drew less on his kosher knowledge and more on his mad Mexican cooking skills.  If the hockey game in handy it was in being able to survive and long slog of competitition.

And when the onscreen announcer declared Katsuji the winner, the crowd in the Consulate erupted in applause.  Katsuji stood in front of the screen, cradling his toddler daughter, beaming.

“Do you think you'll get first place?” the TV announcer had asked the chef.

“Is there anything else?” he asked right back.

Lenny's Deli steps in to fill the Juniors void

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Last night after seeing a movie at what seems to be the cultural center of West Los Angeles Jewish life — the Landmark Theatres at the Westside Pavilion — we walked over to the new Lenny's Deli.

Lenny's filled the void left by Juniors — and I'm talking about a literal void.  Juniors was 11,000 square feet of real estate at the corner of Westwood and Pico Blvd. For 53 years it served as bakery, deli counter, restaurant, meeting place and all-around noshery for LA Jews.  As Michael Aushenker reported in the Jewish Journal, when Juniors abruptly announced it would shut it doors on Dec. 31, 2012, one regular summed up the feeling of generations of custimers by calling the news, “horrific.”

Then Lenny Rosenberg rode into town.

Actually, Lenny is a pretty familiar face: he owned the Bagel Nosh in Beverly Hills, and tried, unsuccessfully, to take over the cursed Morts space in the Pacific Palisades.   The latter effort foundered for reasons that have more to do with that stretch of property, and the internecine battles over retail in the Palisades.   As restauraneurs from Danny Myers to Joe Bastianich will tell you, a successful restaurant's fate depends as much on the location and the lease as it does on the chef.  Maybe more.

Lenny took over the Juniors space.  He hired back almost all of the deli's 100 laid-off workers.  He updated the menu with more organic foods, vegetarian and healthy options and even put in the now standard line about using local ingredients whenever possible.  That means, I think, the kishke comes from Sherman Oaks. 

We ate at the late Juniors about a month before it closed, and frankly, you could tell it was a deli in the fourth stage of a terminal illness.  The deli counter looked like it had been lifted from Communist Poland, the wait staff moped, the food tasted of salt and apathy.

Lenny Rosenberg has revived the place.  It's not called Juniors any more.  It's called Lenny's.

At 10 pm, many tables in the cavernous space were full.  The place itself was remodeled — new upholstery, new floors — not retro Lower East Side like the delicious, hipster Wise and Sons in San Francisco, just functional, pre-modern San Fernando Valley circa-1990.  

The menu is vast and traditional.  My wife's lox and bagels was very good, my kids ate their meaty meat things — pastrami, corned beef, etc — and liked it.  The sandwiches are of the piled high variety, and come with cole slaw.  I ordered my usual late night deli treat: grilled swiss on rye with Dijon mustard, sauerkraut and tomato.  I told Lenny it's a vegetarian Reuben.  My son wondered why, with five pages of food on offer, I had to order off the menu.

I had wine from a good selection.  The kids had egg creams, which were delicious.  We almost ordered the kishke, but this is 2013, and there's only so much Lipitor I can take.

The food was absolutely good.  Much better than good in the case of the lox, my sandwich and the egg creams and the homemade rugalach.  While Juniors had become a regular let down, Lenny's, I think, will now be a pleasant surprise.

Lenny came over to say hi — he knows me from the Journal.  The man is working hard, hard to make Lenny's succeed.  He's back to running a bakery, a deli counter, a restaurant and a catering outfit.   He instituted actual Shabbat services in a meeting room at the rear of the place.  He looks exhausted, but driven. He's also thin as a rail, which ordinarily I would think disqualifies you as a deli owner, but in his case is probably just the delightful side effects of stress and overwork.

But Lenny's does work.  The booths are back to being filled with the mishmash tureen of film-goers, hipsters, Persian Jews, seniors and soccer families that used to fill Juniors.  Not every foot of the 11,000 suare feet is teaming, but if Lenny can hold out, maybe he'll get there. I hope so.

Because it's good to have a deli on the corner of Westwood and Pico.

The Word of the Day Is Knaidel

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How do you spell knaidel?  M-a-t-z-o-h B-a-l-l.

The word that 13 year-old Arvind Mahankali from Queens, NY spelled to clinch the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee championship last night is German for a small mass of dough.  But its most common meaning in America is matzo ball.

Normally the word, which is German and Yiddish, is used in its plural form, knaidlach—because who can eat just one matzo ball?

From Los Angeles to Queens, the only place you’ll see the word is on deli menus. And not just in America: the menu at the venerable Harry Morgans deli – branches in London and Latvia—features Chicken Knaidlach Soup for £5.95.

I feel for the kids who lost out to Mahankali.  They’re home Googling knaidel, finding that it’s spelled in English many different ways: knaidel, kneidel, kneydl. 

There’s just as many ways to make knaidlach as there are spellings.  You use matzo meal, of course, and eggs, liquid, along with a fat and salt.  The liquid can be water or chicken broth or even seltzer.  The fat can be schmaltz—solidified chicken fat—or oil. If you use lard you’re in the wrong cookbook.

You can eat turkey outside of Thanksgiving, and you can eat matzo balls when it’s not Passover.  But the spring holiday that marks the deliverance of the Children of Israel from slavery in Egypt is the time when most matzo balls get made and eaten.  Jews had to flee Egypt before their bread had time to rise, so they are commanded to observe Passover by eating matzo, which is made only with flour and water.  Those matzos, ground fine, become a meal that can be used to make dumplings—which is all knaidlach are.

You might wonder why we eat matzo to remind us how we had to hurry out of Egypt, then make matzo balls, which take a almost two hours to mix, rest and simmer.  You could knock off a few loaves of quick bread, or even some pita, in that time.  The deep theological answer is this: matzo balls taste really good.  

You mix the ingredients, simmer them in soup or water, and the dry, unforgiving shirt cardboard that is matzo transforms into a small, warm bosom, tender and soft.  A knaidel is our small miracle of transubstantiation—maybe that’s why we eat them in Spring.

Great matzo balls should be as soft to eat as knaidel is hard to spell.  There are certain Jews who claim to prefer the kind their mothers made, the ones with a dense core of unfluffed dough.  These sinkers can require a steak knife to cut and a load of seltzer to digest.  I suppose you can get used to them, even come to think they’re delicious, in the same way the Romneys convinced themselves Karl Rove was telling the truth about the Ohio results.  People we trust can feed us crap and we’ll think it tastes like truffles.

As with most simple foods, the important variations are in technique, not ingredients.  If you’ve been blessed to learn how to make matzo balls by watching your grandmother, mother or mother-in-law, and she knew what she was doing, you’re fortunate: it’s all in the details:  Mix the batter lightly, don’t beat it.  Let the dough sit in the refrigerator until it is well-chilled.  Give those matzo particles time to absorb liquid and fat deep into their stiff-necked cells.  Form the dough again with a very light, but confident touch.   Roll pieces the size of a large walnut between your palms, quickly, but don’t rush it.  The rounder the ball, the more attractive—a misshapen ball floating in soup looks disturbingly like brain.  But don’t obsess: you don’t want to press the air out. You’ll get the hang of it.

Finally, once your balls are simmering, DO NOT lift the lid to peak. There are many commandments in the Jewish religion. This is the one I’m most scrupulous about following.

The knaidel maker at the Passover seder is the central object of scorn or praise.  At our seders, where my wife, the rabbi, leads the service, beautifully, I notice that few people will judge her either way.  But that moment when the chicken soup with matzo balls finally arrives, and people pick up their spoons and cleave a knaidel in two, and lift a portion to their mouths, and swallow— that moment is an eternity.  If the soup is hot and the balls are light, and well-salted, the entire table erupts in a semi-orgasmic chorus of ahhs, like the Children of Israel have been delivered all over again.  It is a moment of sheer joy, and relief, and for the cook, a feeling of utter victory and vindication.  

Arvind Mahankali would understand.

 

[RECIPE] Rob Eshman's Matzo Balls

4 eggs

1/4 cup schmaltz (chicken fat) or vegetable oil

1/4 cup chicken stock or water or seltzer

1 cup matzo meal

1 teaspoon salt

1/4-1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper

In a large bowl, mix all the ingredients. Do not overbeat. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until well-chilled–  two hours or more.  

Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil.  Wet your hands. Take a lump the size of a large walnut and using your palms, form into a round shape. Drop into the water, reduce heat to a simmer and cover. Cook for about 40 minutes.  

Remove the balls with a slotted spoon.  Taste one to make sure they're cooked through– they probably will be.  Serve in hot soup, sprinkled with fresh parsley and dill.

7 Rules for Perfect Hummus

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When was the last time you opened a tub of hummus and swooned?  When was the last time a restaurant put a plate of hummus in front of you, and you said, “Oh my God.”

Most of the hummus recipes you come across on web sites, in print, on YouTube—they’re just wrong.   Most of the hummus you buy in stores, or get served at restaurants—it’s just okay.

As hummus gets more and more popular,  its manufacturers are aiming more and more for the middle.  They are substituting variety for quality. You can get mediocre hummus in ten flavors (Avocado! Chipotle!), but try finding just one batch of perfect.

And perfect hummus does exist. Lina’s in the Old City of Jerusalem. Naji’s in Abu Ghosh. Light, almost fluffy, full of fresh flavor, creamy, warm.  It’s not Middle East peanut butter.

I eat hummus every day.  I make it about once a week.   I’ve used recipes, I’ve created my own, I’ve tweaked like Steve Jobs (z”l) on a bender.    Below you’ll find my basic recipe, which I’ve adapted from Erez Komaravsky’s, the Israeli chef and cooking teacher.  (A story on Erez appears in this month’s Saveur, along with the recipe). 

Whether you use it or find your own let these rules be your guide. 

1. Do not used canned  garbanzo beans.   Ever.    Take the canned beans in your cupboard and give them to a food bank. 

2. Fresh ingredients are always better. Always.  Fresh ground cumin seeds, fresh squeezed lemon juice, fresh garlic.  Never used bottled lemon juice, though a touch of citric acid can help. Erez uses a mortar and pestle to grind his cumin.  You’ll taste the difference.

3. Use good quality olive oil. Lots of it.  In the hummus, as well as on top.

4. Don’t forget the pepper.  I use Aleppo pepper, but hot paprika or ground chili works too. 

5. Use water.   This is key.  Reserve the water you boiled the beans in. As you blend your hummus, add the water to achieve a creamy consistency.  Use a bit more than you think is correct, because after it sits you’ll see the water is absorbed.   If you’ve refrigerated your hummus, you can refresh it by whisking in some warm water.

6. Serve warm.  Freshly made warm hummus topped with a bit of mushed-up garbanzos, drizzled with olive oil, and topped with chopped parsley and paprika is the ideal.  And the pita should be warm too.

7. Use a blender, not a food processor. You get a  creamier consistency.

[RECIPE]

Galilee-Style Hummus

[Adapted from Erez Komaravsky. See original here.]

INGREDIENTS

1½ cups dried chickpeas, soaked overnight; drained

½ cup tahini

¾ cup EV olive oil, plus more

¼ cup fresh lemon juice or more

2 tsp. ground cumin

2 cloves garlic, peeled

1 t Aleppo pepper or 1 small fresh hot red chile pepper, stemmed and seeded

1 1/2 t Kosher salt, to taste

INSTRUCTIONS

Bring chickpeas and 4 cups water to a boil in a 4-qt. saucepan. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook, covered, until chickpeas are very tender, 1-1½ hours. Drain, reserving ½-1 cup cooking liquid; let cool until warm, not boiling. Transfer all but ¾ cup chickpeas to a food processor with the tahini, oil, juice, cumin, garlic, chile, and salt; purée until smooth. Add reserved cooking liquid and continue to purée until airy in consistency, about 5 minutes. Transfer hummus to a serving dish. Top with remaining whole chickpeas, drizzle with more oil, and sprinkle with salt.

After a a few minutes, taste and adjust seasoning.  You may need more water for a creamy texture.

Israel à la Tarte Tatin

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Restaurants have souls.

It comes across as much in the food as in the feeling you get from being there. You don’t find it out from the advertising. Otherwise every time you ate in an Applebee’s you’d feel comfy and at home, instead of bored and dissatisfied. You don’t discover it in the marketing. Otherwise every time you ate in a Burger King you’d feel edgy and cool, not gross and sad.

And it doesn’t even come across just from the food. Plenty of places with great food leave you cold. Meanwhile, a place with a warm soul like my late, lamented Benice in Venice, may never get a Michelin star, but leave their diners feeling warm and satisfied.

And that explains why a visit to the small and very French Tarte Tatin Bakery & Café on Olympic Boulevard near Doheny Drive makes you feel like you’re at home … in Tel Aviv. The pastries at Tarte Tatin — pains au chocolat, croissants and, of course, tartes tatin — look and taste like something in the window of a Paris patisserie. They are stacked up behind the counter of the tiny all-white space, and they are deceiving. Because as good as they are, as French as they are, as close to the Patricia Wells-ian ideal as they are — the soul of Tarte Tatin is Israeli.

Chef and owner Kobi Tobiano is an Israeli of Algerian heritage. His little gem of a cafe is the kind of place you’ll find tucked into a side street off Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard. It has no pretensions. The service can be spotty, sometimes rushed, always familiar. The food aspires, and reaches, an international standard. It is small, it hits way above its weight, and it is full of surprises — just like Israel.

The biggest surprise of all: You’ll find the best Israeli breakfast in Los Angeles at Tarte Tatin.

In that imaginary café off Rothschild, breakfast would mean a selection of craft breads, thick leben cheese doused in olive oil, some feta, olives, chopped tomato and cucumber salad with za’atar, maybe a bite of homemade hummus and a couple of eggs. Order the Israeli breakfast at Tarte Tatin ($16) and that’s what you get, along with dark, hot coffee. It’s all laid out in neat white ceramic dishes, and every bite recalls Tel Aviv. Ask for Tobiano’s smoky hot harissa, as well as for a glass of limonana — lemonade with mint.  

The other surprise is the Tunisian Tuna Sandwich ($11.95), which has become my favorite tuna sandwich in the city. Tucked into a soft, homemade French roll you get olive-oil-packed tuna, slices of potato, a shmear of that harissa, olives, hard-boiled egg, pickles and slices of preserved lemon.

Where do the excellent olives and leben in this Israeli-French café come from?  Tobiano’s Lebanese supplier, of course.  An Israeli chef of Algerian heritage running a French cafe in Beverly Hills using ingredients from Lebanon to make the best Israeli breakfast in all of Los Angeles — of course.  

Tobiano trained professionally as a pastry chef and served as one at Charles Nob Hill in San Francisco. He arrived in Los Angeles and worked as a private chef. Tarte Tatin is his dream-come-true place of his own, and as hard as he works — constantly, ceaselessly — and as much as he bemoans his lack of rest, you can tell he has created a place that exactly reflects the food of his heritage, the foods of his home, the foods he loves. That’s what makes Tarte Tatin special. That’s what gives it its soul.

Tarte Tatin Bakery & Café, 9123 W. Olympic Blvd., Beverly Hills. (310) 550-0011. NOTE: Tarte Tatin is not certified kosher. But it is certified a Foodaism favorite.

Rob Eshman is publisher and editor-in-chief of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal.