Throw a Party & Roll Your Own

I recently discovered that I've accumulated quite a few photos of pasta making parties from the past year. Himself and I agree that those evenings were some of the best and most fun we've ever had. Anyone can make pasta alone, but making it in a group is such fun. All you need is a pasta rolling machine, a few appetizers, a handful of friends, some wine and a little music, and the party makes itself--and dinner! Let's face it--it just doesn't seem like work at all when you're with friends.

Pasta is one of those things that, the more you make it, the easier it is to do. And there's nothing quite as pleasurable as a bowl of the fresh stuff--you'll swear off boxed pasta, for sure. You can get a good, basic hand-crank pasta maker for $30 to $40, so it's not a budget breaker. I've seen the nonas in Italy turn out tons of pasta using only their rolling pins, but you'd probably lose a few people if you tried that. Plus, the hand-crank machine itself is kinda fun.

Andy's getting the hang of making dough from scratch.

 Or IS he?

Ally masters the ins and outs of the pasta maker, no prob. 

 Heirloom tomato salad with fresh burrata on a toasted baguette is a good starter to nibble on while you wait for your turn with the crank. But anything--olives, bruschetta, whatever--is great. 

Mark's quickly gotten the ravioli stuffing down to an art (this guy is a physicist, so I knew pasta making would be a snap for him). 

 Ally cuts the ravioli while a pot of boiling water awaits... Yeah, that's a six-quart Kitchen Aid mixer in the background, but I'm not interested in getting the pasta making attachment for it. The hand-crank model is more textural and more satisfying.

 The ravioli shouldn't all be of uniform shape and size. If it is, it will look store bought, and you don't want anyone thinking that when you've done the work yourself. But the size should be consistent enough that it will all cook in the same amount of time--and fresh pasta takes only a couple of minutes in the boiling water.

Maybe black isn't the best color to wear when you're playing in the flour. By the time Missi and I finished, it looked like we'd been dusting for fingerprints. Of course, you can always look at your clothing and play a game called "Who touched me THERE?!"

Missi and Casey got a little competitive with their pasta making. I think she's trying to distract him while he's at work here...

Back in the fall Himself and I spent a weekend in Santa Barbara making pasta for a photo shoot for "Endless Pastabilities," a story I wrote for Edible Santa Barbara. We all had a blast turning out dough and pasta, scavenging in the garden for fresh ingredients and discussing the unlimited things you can do to create unique pasta dishes.

 Lights! Camera! Action!

I'm such a spokesmodel for fresh pasta!

Fresh herbs pressed between two sheets of fresh pasta dough makes a lovely presentation.

While you can accomplish this alone, it's good to have an extra pair of hands near by when you're feeding the pasta through the press.

This dough with fresh herbs laminated into it is lovely stuff--tasty, too!

Everyone pitched in, including editor Krista and photographer Steve.

When all the work was done and all the photos taken, we sat down to a dinner of five different pastas, including pasta made with pistachio flour and dressed with cardamom, dried apricot and toasted pistachios; chestnut flour pasta dressed with jalapeno peppers, fresh mint leaves and cacao nibs; and regular pasta dough with fresh herbs pressed inside of it and tossed with some good olive oil and a bit of Parmigiano Reggiano.

If you've made the sauce and the ravioli filling in advance, then you can pour some wine and focus on taking turns making pasta. But please, please please...if you're going to have a pasta-making party, don't embarrass yourself by using store-bought sauce! If it's springtime, pasta primavera is in order--just grab what's in your garden or what you've picked up at the farmers' market. A basic pasta sauce of crushed tomatoes, garlic, a handful of fresh herbs, a few red pepper flakes and a couple finely minced anchovies, cooked for just a few minutes is bliss in a bowl (and for those of you who don't like anchovies, fear not--you won't taste them, you'll only get a richness of flavor that rounds out the other ingredients).

I invite you to stage your own pasta making party and send me your stories and photos. Hmm, is "invite" the appropriate word, or should I say "challenge?" If the pasta turns out disastrously, you can still have a good laugh about it and then order a pizza--that is, until I tell you why you MUST make your own!

Week #27 Swedish

If you're looking for Scandinavian food in Los Angeles, good luck with that. Actually, we did find some, but you just don't "go out for Swedish" here like you can for Italian or Chinese, or even Ethiopian.

So dusting off the cookbooks was in order, in my case, Culinaria's collection of European specialties. Since Sweden is the land that gave us the smörgåsbord, I decided to make some dishes you'd typically find on one, or at least on an authentic one. None of this everything-but-the-kitchen-sink spread on a long table like you tend to find in American feeding trough-style restaurants.

Ikea has a market of prepared Swedish foods, so we forged past all the amusingly named furniture to buy pickled herring, gherkins, cloudberry jam, crisp bread, cheese and a few other things to boost the authenticity level of our home-cooked meal. While we were there, Himself and I ate dinner in the restaurant. The Burbank Ikea is probably best known from those guerrilla movies that keep popping up on You Tube, so I wanted to be as discreet as possible about taking pix, just in case they thought we were some of Those People, and asked us to leave. (What would that say about you, being kicked out of Ikea, I wonder?)

Busted, heh heh! These are the very same meatballs, mashed potatoes, gravy and lingonberries you'll find in the photo on the Wikipedia page on Swedish cuisine! And all are available in the food market at Ikea, as well as in their cafeteria.

Yeah, Swedish meatballs are pretty clichéd, but you know what? This plate of food was quite satisfying. And I appreciate discovering that I actually like Swedish meatballs. I'd been under the impression that I didn't, because I'd been grossed out over the years by too many of those nasty things coated with a sickly sweet goo made of grape jelly or Odin-knows-what. Swedish meatballs are basically just smallish beef meatballs that are plainly seasoned and served with gravy. That's all there is to it. The potatoes contained bits of peel, which is always a good thing. The lingonberry jam reminded me a bit of cranberry jam, but it was sweeter and not quite so astringent. It was good, but I think I'll stick with my cranberries.

Anyway, back to the home cooking: Himself and I decided to put together a small smörgåsbord for ourselves:

"Sun's Eye": Himself said that if he didn't like this, he was going to rename it "Sauron's Eye." Fortunately, he liked it!

 Okay, so this is one of the coolest looking things I've ever made: Solöga, "Sun's Eye." As the name suggests, you create an "eye" on a plate, one per person. There are no precise measurements--just use as much as you want. Himself and I shared this one, along with several other dishes in our mini-smörgåsbord.

To construct it, chop anchovy fillets and arrange them in a round in the middle of a plate. In concentric circles, build out rings of chopped onion (I rinsed the onion well before plating to remove its harsh edge), finely chopped fresh parsley, finely chopped pickled red beet and tiny cubes of boiled potato (I used waxy potatoes, which hold their shape better when cubed). Place a raw egg yolk (a very fresh one, please) in the center, atop the anchovies. Chill the dish before serving. (Here's the disclaimer: Don't serve raw egg to the very young, the very old, the pregnant or the immune system-compromised. If you're unsure whether you should trust eating raw eggs, look for those that have been irradiated.) I added a grinding of black pepper but no salt--the anchovies provided enough for the entire dish. This combination may seem pretty weird, but the dish was really, seriously good! We all but licked the plate clean and agreed that we'll definitely be having this again. Next time I want to trek to the fish market in downtown LA to get fresh anchovies. I'm sure they'll make my Solöga even more authentic.

Rödbetsallad

Alongside the Solöga we had a salad of pickled red beets, apples and gherkins with some sour cream and grated horseradish root mixed in. When the meal is heavy on seafood, it's nice to have tart foods to mitigate the fishiness.

Räksallad, along with pickled herring, cheese, rye bread & knäckebröd

The Räksallad or "shrimp salad" is actually a dish of cooked shrimp served cold with a dip that's heavy on sour cream, fresh dill and lemon juice. Once again, the tart helps rein in any excessive seafoodiness. Hm, is that a word?

A great snack: knäckebröd with cloudberry jam and an aquavit-laced cheese

Cloudberries look rather like large golden-orange raspberries, and they have incredibly large seeds. Still, they make a good jam and are worth all the tooth-picking that ensues. Morfars Brännvinsost is an aquavit-laced, semi-firm, aged cow's milk cheese. I couldn't actually taste the aquavit, but its light astringency was a good match for the sweet jam, and I appreciate the slight crunch of grana in it that you typically only find in much harder aged cheeses like Parmigiano reggiano and pecorino. 

Knäckebröd, or crisp bread, was devised some 500 years ago as a way to preserve bread. When you live in a place with weather as inclement as it is in Scandinavia, you learn a thing or two about creating indestructible food--that's what all the pickled fish is about. Anyway, it is made of whole grains and does a fine job of, um, keeping the plumbing clean. And that's enough about that.

By the way, I learned that the smörgåsbord was originally a side table of appetizers. At some point it moved to the fore and became the meal itself. Smörgåsbord means "sandwich table" and the "gåsbord" part means "goose butter," so I guess we know what those first sandwiches were made of! (Incidentally, while the word "smörgåsbord" is Swedish, the concept of the long table filled with a variety of foods is by no means unique to that country. You'll find similar spreads around the world.)

 

Semla

Berolina is a Swedish bakery in Glendale that produces goodies from the homeland, along with an array of European breads and pastries. I popped in to sample a semla, a lightly sweet bread that reminds me in texture of brioche. You carve out the middle (it's used to garnish the one in this photo), fill it with marzipan and top it with a lightly sweet crème chantilly. The marzipan has plenty of sugar, making the less sweet bread and crème a good foil for the richness inside.

Speaking of marzipan, the Swedish seem to have a passion for it, becaue it pops up in a lot of desserts, like the Princess Cake.

Princess Cake

Princess Cake, as with the semla, consists of lightly sweet cake and crème chantilly, but this time, with the marzipan coating the outside. It's a good thing the marzipan is the only sweet element--any more sugar and these desserts would be too sweet. Some Princess Cake also contains crème patissiere. I'm sure that variety seriously pushes the boundaries of what a person could and should eat!

So maybe this wasn't a full meal in an authentically Swedish restaurant, but I think we got a pretty good idea of what the cuisine is like. Of course, if I ever get a chance to visit Sweden I'll certainly avail myself of everything there is to try, especially that aquavit...

At the Halfway Mark: Looking Backward and Looking Forward

I posted Week #26 a couple of days ago, putting me squarely at the halfway mark in my "52 Cuisines in 52 Weeks" blogging project.

Am I weary yet of this goal I've set for myself? Nope! Am I running out of cuisines? Not by a long shot! Do I crave a good ol' American hamburger? Not really, but I did enjoy an Umami burger this week, so I've not completely forsaken the food of my native land.

But at the halfway point I'm beginning to think I should do more cooking in this exercise of eating my way around the globe without leaving Los Angeles County. Perhaps I can share a recipe or two along the way. So the second half of this blog project will feature a combination of cooking out, bringing in the prepared foods of (and perhaps from) those countries and dining in their restaurants. I may not be able to manage this every week, but for the second half of this project, I'm certainly going to try for a better balance of sampling food from other countries that is cooked by those for whom it is everyday fare and giving it a go myself.

In a day or two I'll begin with a peek into Scandinavian cuisine, and I'll be making a curious but photogenic dish called Solöga, "Sun's Eye."

Stay tuned!

Week #26 Taiwanese

The cuisine of Taiwan borrows heavily from southern China and also from Japan, thanks to 50 years of occupation early last century. I'm still trying to figure out the differences, but at this point I don't see a lot. Still, I'm glad for the opportunity to feast on dumplings, which are incredibly popular in Taiwan.

Din Tai Fung Dumpling House in Arcadia is a veritable palace of dumplings (they have locations in Taiwan, too, but for now a drive into the next valley will have to do). We knew it had to be a good choice as soon as we walked up--the place was buzzing and full, with people waiting both inside and out. When we left it was still busy. To our surprise, some friends popped in and were seated at the  table next to ours. "We're on the way to Palm Springs, but we just had to stop off for some dumplings!" they said. Instant party!

The restaurant has windows into the kitchen, so you can keep an eye on the progress of all the dough that's being made fresh by a battery of nimble fingered dumpling wranglers (say that three times real fast!). I had to shoot this photo through a covered glass, so the quality's not great. But you can see the guy in the foreground to the left rolling out lengths of dough and pinching it into pieces that his compadres behind him will roll out, fill with all sorts of meats and vegetables and crimp into the appropriate shapes. Everything is made by hand here, every precise fold on every delicate dumpling.

We went with our friends Andy and Mai, who are regulars here, and we let them navigate the menu for us.

 We started with xiaolongbao or "soup dumplings," juicy dumplings filled with pork and crab and steamed. The operative word here is "juicy," because when you chomp down on them, they squirt broth into your mouth...and onto your shirt if you're not careful! If they've just arrived at the table it's best to nip a tiny hole in the dumpling and carefully slurp out the soup, so you don't burn yourself. But don't wait too long--when these delicate dumplings cool, they tend to stick to the parchment paper beneath them and can tear when you try to pick them up. And you don't want to lose a drop of that yummy broth.

 These steamed half-moon dumplings are filled with well-seasoned chicken--flavorful with onion and ginger, but not hot. Each dumpling has a different shape, so if you're a regular here, you can look at a steamer basket of dumplings and know instantly what's inside them.

These steamed shrimp and pork shiaomai look like tiny volcanoes about to blow shrimp out the top! They're both tasty and fun, and the shape makes them easy to pick up, which is handy if you're a klutz with your chopsticks.

 

Does this dumpling look more like a large mushroom or a tiny chef's toque for Remy, the rat in Ratatouille? 

The shrimp and pork wontons with spicy sauce were especially good. We ended up dunking the dumplings into the sauce as well. (The menu read "wanton with spicy sauce," but I'm not going to debate its morality!) Like the shiaomai, the pork and crab dumplings and a few other dishes on the menu, the wontons combined meat with seafood, something I'm finding quite often in Asian meals that doesn't seem to show up on Western menus.

Okay, so it's a dumpling house, but we were seduced by the homemade noodles as well...

Beef noodle soup is a popular fast food in Taiwan, and it made a great add-on to our dumpling feast. This bowl of noodles contains spicy roast beef and bok choy in a super-rich broth. In spite of its popularity, beef isn't consumed with much frequency in Taiwan, because the family oxen are valued for the chores they perform. It would be akin to eating your pickup truck, I guess.

  Mmm, just saying "pork mincemeat sauce" makes me drool. This mixture included tiny cubes of firm tofu, which gave the sauce varied texture, while the edamame provided a fresh touch.

   

  

Just because it's not a green bean house that doesn't mean the dumpling house skimped on the sides. These green beans sautéed with garlic were seasoned to perfection. In fact, they made me lose sight of the dumplings for a few minutes.

 

Porkaboo!  These pretty pillows are buns filled with pork meatballs and then steamed. Every fold of every dumpling and bun was perfection--a work of art.

Here's my lovely spread. The tiny dish between the soup bowl and teacup is filled with black vinegar and slivers of fresh ginger. Dipping the dumplings into it helps cut the richness and give them a little extra zing. Some people opt for soy sauce instead, but black vinegar provides a lot of flavor without the added sodium. Black vinegar isn't just about the sour--it's a full-flavored sauce all on its own, a grain-based vinegar that is aged similarly to balsamic. And you can always add a little soy and hot sauce to create your own custom blend.

There were also sweet dumplings for dessert, but by this point we were ready to roll out the door like beach balls. Maybe next time we'll get one less order of savory dumplings and save room for the sweet. And then maybe not. Once you get started it's so easy to say, "Just one more...oh, and that looks good, too..."

Week #25 Rustic French

A lot of people think of French food as oh-so posh and la-di-da. Anyone who's dined at a high end French restaurant would be justified in making that assessment, what with the classic plating, pretty garnishes and all the other niceties of haute experience. But then there's rustic French, which is more reflective of the necessity of using everything available and letting nothing go to waste, a legacy of hard times throughout the centuries. French cooks have done such an exemplary job of taking their resources and producing something good, that you're convinced it must be fancy. Americans are wealthy enough (relatively speaking) to chuck out the bones, organs and other odd bits they've grown unaccustomed to eating--or that they connect with lean times. But these are the parts that make some of the best, most satisfying food, and French cooks are masters at utilizing it all.

This is what I kept thinking about as we enjoyed our rustic French dinner recently. I noted throughout the evening that our meal looked like a study of food preservation methods. Since it was late wintertime, this meal reflected what we'd be eating when we're relying on our reserves of food and awaiting the return of springtime and a new growing season.

We had the good fortune to dine with our friends, Bert and Noel, who have spent a considerable amount of time in France for more years than they likely want to admit. Bert knows his way around France--and French cuisine--like he knows his way around his own house, so we went to Cafe des Artistes in Hollywood with our own personal authenticity meter, and we let him order. It was a nibbly night, meaning we enjoyed a succession of appetizers and dishes to share around the table. I'd eat every meal this way if my dinner partners were always amenable. It's a good way to try a lot of dishes, and it's more fun to share and discuss.

 

The house paté and house rillettes were served with onion marmalade and cornichons and lots of toasted baguette slices. Marmalade is a tasty way to preserve onions when you have a bumper crop. Cornichons, of course, are tiny pickled cucumbers. Rillettes and paté represent similar methods of preserving meat for future use, paté by collecting, grinding and seasoning meats, then pressing the mixture into a mold and cooking it.

  

Rillettes is meat cooked slowly in its own fat, then pulverized with some of that fat and seasoned to form a rich spread. It keeps well when you spoon it into ramekins and cover it with a thin layer of fat, which seals out the air. The cornichons and marmalade added the sweet and sour notes that kept these fat-happy meats from being too rich.

  

 This Alsatian tart flambée was made with farm cheese, bacon and onion. Of course, bacon and cheese represent ways of preserving pork and milk for later consumption. My only problem with this tart was that as a Tennessee farm girl, naturally I assume all bacon will be smoked. The French just don't do it this way. Still, it was really good, but if I ever make this tart, the bacon I use will be smoked!

  

No, the French don't call it French onion soup! Soupe a l'oignon gratinée is good way to utilize a surplus of onions once you've made enough marmalade. When you slowly, slowly, slowly cook down those onions, you discover how much water there is in them, and when it's all cooked away, you're left with a little bit of rich, sweet yummy onion confiture. Simmer this with some beef stock, made with those bones you didn't throw away. Ladle it over some stale bread that you didn't throw away just because it was stale (it's good for making croutons, too, by the way), grate some cheese over it (gruyere for authenticity, emmental if you'd rather) and hit it with the heat. Et voila! You have one of the best, most nourishing and satisfying bowls of soup ever.

 

Our concession to France's north African influence was an appetizer of grilled merguez sausages, made of lamb. We dunked them into harrisa, which added a zingy little accent to our French meal. Maybe it's not as ubiquitous as Indian food is in England, but still such dishes are growing in popularity around France.

  

You can't get any more hearty-peasant than cassoulet--duck confit in a pot of beans and veggies with browned crumbs on top. Confit is a method of preserving meat, especially pork, duck and goose, by cooking and storing its own fat--similar to rillettes, except that those pieces of confit are kept whole. This dish and these meat preservation methods originated in the southwest of France. I'm not proud of it, but hey, I snatched that duck leg!

 

When there's good cheese to be had, for me it trumps dessert every time. Goat cheese, bleu and morbier with dried fruits and nuts were the perfect finish to our meal. France boasts several hundred cheeses, so we have our work cut out for us. What a happy chore that would be...

With a meal is this satisfying, accompanied by a generous flow of Cote du Rhone, why would you need fancy presentation and such? I'll take rustic cuisine over haute any day!

Week #24 Oaxacan (Mexican)

Lately this "52 Cuisines" project has been heavily weighted toward Asian food--obviously the blog itself has been!--so it's time to visit a different hemisphere for awhile and explore another of Mexico's many cuisines.

The cuisine of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, contains a dizzying blend of indigenous ingredients, like chocolate and peppers, with the Arabic contribution of nuts, raisins and spices brought to the region by Spanish explorers. (Our hemisphere repaid the favor by sending tomatoes, potatoes, corn, chocolate and peppers to the rest of the world. Not a bad trade, I'd say.)

Antequera De Oaxaca is a modest little restaurant on Melrose between Koreatown and Paramount Pictures. This strip of Melrose has tons of great finds, and Antequera is the place to go for Oaxacan food cooked by Oaxacans for Oaxacans. I met Pat for lunch there, and we sampled an array of eats, with an eye toward carrying home plenty of leftovers.

Black beans are popular in Oaxaca, sometimes simply smashed and smeared over a tortilla.

 Pat ordered what looked a bit like a Mexican pizza, a giant, super-thin homemade tortilla topped with the smashed black beans, Oaxacan queso, tomato slices, cabbage and avocado. This is about as light and as vegetarian as a Oaxacan meal can get, unless you opt for a very basic salad. A smart choice if you don't want to fall into a postprandial coma at siesta time. Or if you're constantly training for marathons, like Pat is!

  

a quartet of memelas

In the memelas the black beans were spread on each of these four masa cakes, then topped with Oaxacan cheese and chorizo (12:00), zingy, flavorful chicken (2:00), pork (5:00) and beef (9:00) and a slice of avocado. A pleasantly warm salsa on the table provided a little extra kick. I appreciated our server bringing the  memelas with this assortment of meat so we could sample them all. The chorizo was surprisingly mild, while the chicken was the one that carried a surprising punch.

The masa cake is a flat bread roughly the size and shape of a hamburger bun bottom, and while it didn't feel at all greasy, toasted on a grill, I'm sure it was loaded with lard, so lush was its texture. Crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, with a nice bit of char from the grill. Okay, so that's not umami--I wonder what it is in the carbony flavor that so appeals? I think I could have eaten an entire basket of masa cake and been quite happy.

 Stew made from goat ribs--all those little bones give the broth extra richness.

I just had to give the goat stew a try. It was tasty and only a wee bit gamy. A generous squeeze lime helped tame it. It came with a roll of fresh, hot tortillas, so I could fish out hunks of goat meat and make my own tacos with fresh onions, jalapenos and cilantro.

  

Horchata: a rice drink that is lightly sweet and refreshing. This one had pecan pieces and chunks of cantaloupe in it.

While Oaxaca has a diverse cuisine to match its diverse landscape, it's probably best known as "the land of the seven moles" (although there are many more) and we're not talking little animals. This region's cooks are the ingenious souls who took chocolate and made something savory with it.

  

These don't look like much, but they're the secret to great mole. At 2:00 is poblano, a red chile mole base; at 6:00ish is pepita, or pumpkin seed, and at 9:00 is almond.

A typical mole recipe calls for about two dozen ingredients, but it can contain even more. Making it is understandably a labor intensive endeavor, so you have to set aside a day to do nothing but roast and toast, chop and pulverize and mix, so you can make enough mole to last a really long time. It's fun to do in a group, and the effort is worth it. If you dissolve a couple of generous spoonfuls of one of these pastes in a little broth, you'll quickly create the most wonderfully flavored, richest sauces you can imagine. Pour it over the meat of your choice, or drizzle it over an enchilada or into a taco. It's bliss. Forget the bottled stuff--try making your own mole sometime. Be sure and invite over some eager friends to help share in the chores and the rewards.


I have a trio of moles on hand (they're in the photo above) that I picked up at L.A.'s Central Market, a downtown treasure trove not only of fresh produce but of authentic Mexican eats. The green mole is made of pepitas (pumpkin seeds) and is mildly spicy. The almond mole is redolent of toasted almonds and packs some heat, while the poblano mole is chocolaty-good and contains the heat and smokiness of an array of dried chiles.


There's a more obscure mole called manchamanteles, a.k.a. the "tablecloth stainer," because it's made with lots of charred tomatoes. I've not found this one yet, but I'm eager to try it, with lots of napkins!

Chicken mole tamale: a rich, happy-making treat wrapped and cooked in a banana leaf. This time the mole is on the inside rather than the outside. A squeeze of lime helps balance the richness.

We're not even scratching the surface here on Oaxacan cuisine. There are chapulines--crickets--which were not on the menu the day we went to Antequera De Oaxaca. I had them a couple of years ago on a jaunt to Mexico, so if you want to read about it, check out my blog entry on chapulines and huitlacoche. 


My colleague and friend Nancy Zaslavsky is passionate about Mexico and its food. If you want to learn more about the cuisine of Oaxaca--and if you want to visit and learn to cook the local specialties--check out her culinary tours of Mexico. She's been carrying guests to Mexico for years now and teaching them to cook authentic Mexican food on its home turf.

Durian: King of Fruit & Fruit of Kings

...as the saying goes in Thailand.

Durian is especially beloved amongst the Thai. It's rich and smooth, with a consistency similar to that of an avocado, and a sweet lush flavor all its own. But you're forbidden to bring it onto a bus or into a taxi. Nor can you carry it into a public building. Walk into your hotel with a durian tucked under your arm like a football, and you're sure to be relocating soon. Why?

Because in spite of its flavor, this fruit's odor is so outrageously rank as to make dog breath seem positively perfumy. Its smell has long strained the bounds of hyperbole for adequate descriptors, including sweaty gym sock and rotten egg....actually rotten anything!

 I was surprised to find this woman selling cut durian on the street, so tightly are its possession and transport regulated.

It's really large, so you can't just buy one and munch on it like an apple while you're out in the open. You have to carve through its thick, spiny exterior to reach the soft, creamy pockets of fruit inside. Its fragrance--odor is more accurate--is most assuredly off-putting, but durian is addictively tasty.

 Here's the fresh stuff. Durian is creamy, with a consistency similar to that of an avocado, and a sweet delicate flavor.

While durian is available much of the year, the season runs from late spring into early summer, when you can find the best and sweetest specimens. It's readily available dehydrated and made into a paste, which you can either bake with or eat right out of the tube. Durian is also dried into chips. Think banana chips, but thinner and with more flavor.

 

Durian paste is available in these tubes that are about the size of cigars. The larger size looks like a package of golden cookie dough.
The paste delivers the flavor with only a slight odor.

  

These lovely cakes remind me of Chinese lotus cakes, but they're filled with durian paste. They're sweet and tasty with none of the stout odor of the fresh durian.

  

Durian chips are an incredibly popular snack. They carry none of the pungent smell of the fresh fruit.

A couple of years ago  I had some ice cream in L.A.'s Thai Town that was made from fresh durian. It was simultaneously sweet and savory, with a back-flavor of garlic. Or was it sulfur? Hmm. No matter, it was intriguing but good. And it makes me consider that old smelly-as-tasty conundrum. Some of the stinkiest cheeses have the mildest yet richest flavors. I don't understand it, but I appreciate it. The same is true with durian.

I realize I'm not doing much to sell it, but durian is actually a lovely fruit, once you get past the smell. And you should, if you get the opportunity. If you live in a town with a strong Asian presence, chances are the Asian groceries carry it when it's in season. This won't provide the best example of how tasty it is, though, since it will have been picked green and shipped halfway 'round the globe. Still it's worth a try. If your travels ever take you to Thailand--and they should--you should seek it out. But don't let your nose boss around your taste buds. Let them have their say. If for no other reason, you'll claim some amazing braggin' rights!