Gelato

Despite the chill in the March air, there were plenty of people lining up for gelato at Giolitti, one of the oldest and most famous gelaterias in Rome. Even though I wasn't as excited about gelato as I was last year in Florence, when I had never had it before, I decided to find out what the Giolitti fuss was all about. Even the street outside the shop was hard to navigate, jammed with people old and young, tourists and Romans, half trying to get out with towering ice cream cones, half trying to get in. I made it through the door and to the end of the line in front of the cash register - you have to pay first, then give the receipt to the men dipping gelato - and finally made it to the front, where I ordered a cono piccolo.

Then came the next challenge - deciding on flavors. Fortunately, there was such a packed crowd between me and the counter that I had plenty of time to watch people passing by with their cones and make my choice. Dark, light, and bright looked good, and apparently a dab of cream on top was free, so after debating the virtues of amarena (slightly alcoholic cherry) versus fragiole (strawberry? raspberry? not sure), I chose the cherry, paired with chocolate, topped with panna. As you can see above, the metal basins of gelato were all emptying at an incredibly rapid pace, and every so often a guy would come through the doors behind the server, give a shout, and slide a new batch into place. This was really some of the best gelato I have had - maybe it was the addition of the panna, but I think it was actually lighter and creamier than most, well-worth the fuss.
My other gelato venture of the trip was much lower-key. Fior di Luna, a tiny shopfront somewhere in the neighborhood of Trastavere, was deserted except for the girl behind the counter. But there were signs proclaiming "artigianale" and disclosing the points of origin of each flavor of chocolate gelato, so I figured it must be high quality. I probably should have chosen one of those Venezuelan or Ecuadorian chocolates, but instead I got a small cup of two of my favorite flavors, zabaglione (winey custard) and pistacchio (you can tell it's the real thing when it's more brown than green). Interestingly, the zabaglione melted a lot faster than the pistachio. They were both very intensely flavored and pleasant to eat while strolling through the quiet neighborhoods and piazzas toward the river.

Pizza

Maybe I wasn't feeling in a very gourmet frame of mind, or maybe I'd been scared off by all the warnings that Rome isn't the place to come for food in Italy, but the main thing I was looking forward to eating while I was there was pizza. I carefully consulted my guide books and the New York Times reader recommendations so as to avoid sub-par tourist traps, and ended up with decent and extremely filling lunches both Friday and Saturday, though not the kind of world-altering pizza I was secretly hoping to find. My first pizza, at Ecce Bombe near Piazza Navonna, was Roman-style, with a paper-thin crust and minimalist toppings - I ordered a Margherita, and it came with just the one leaf of basil in the middle. The crust was nicely blackened and blistered at the edges, and there was olive oil dashed across the cheese on top.
The next day, after waking up jet-lagged at 5:30 and spending all morning at the Vatican Museums, I was in a complete daze, art-drugged and exhausted, by lunchtime, but I still managed to find Amalfi, a Napolitan-style pizza place a few streets from the Vatican. I ordered the pizza funghi, which turned out to be just ordinary button mushrooms. The crust was thicker than my first pizza's, though still nowhere near the chewy density of your standard American pizza, and it too had charred edges and barely-there toppings. It was harder to finish than the other one, though, due to the breadier crust. Also, the waiter propped the door open just behind me and a cold wind was blowing on my back. When I had eaten about a third of my pizza, another lone diner was seated diagonally across from me and struck up a conversation. He told me he was a lawyer from Sicily and was in Rome for business, but that he lived here 12 years. I told him I was a lawyer from Japan, and showed him my Japanese guidebook, especially the Japanese-Italian phrasebook, which I personally found hilarious. I guess you have to be able to read katakana to get much out of it, though. My pizza finished, I left the Sicilian lawyer to his baba au rhum, and was off to St. Peter's for an overdose of renaissance architecture and art.

Aroma

With only a short time in Rome, Thursday night to Sunday morning, I didn't have a moment to lose. As soon as I had checked into my hotel and unpacked, I picked up my map and my guidebook and set out to get my first look at the city. I spent my first few days in Florence last year getting hopelessly lost and wasting lots of time wandering around (though it didn't really feel like wasting time, as I got to see a lot of off-the-beaten-path areas of the city that way), and I hoped that by orienting myself and figuring out Rome's neighborhoods as soon as possible, I would be able to get to all the places I wanted to see and spend less time in deserted alleys and hidden neighborhood piazzas. My hotel was in the historic district, not far from the Spanish Steps in one direction and the Pantheon in another, and I encountered both in just a short time. I kept passing a triumphal column (it turned out to be Augustus's) again and again, so I knew I was walking in circles, and by about 8:00 I became literally dizzy with exhaustion. I realized it had been about ten hours since they had last fed us on the plane, and that it was time to find dinner, pronto.
On the next street over from my hotel, all the touristy trattorias have waiters calling out to passers by to come in and eat, so it wasn't hard to get a table. The restaurant was punningly called Aroma. The menu was predictably overpriced, and the dining room was full of tourists, but the food was actually quite good (though I have to admit that I wasn't feeling very judgmental at the moment). I ordered the "specialty" pasta, supposedly-homemade tonnarelli cacio e pepe - thick, square-shaped noodles cooked al dente in a creamy sauce surprisingly sharpened with finely ground black pepper and nubbly with shaved parmesan. It was exactly what I needed to restore my strength, both rich and piquant, chewy and very easy to eat. I also ordered chicory, a green leafy vegetable similar to kale which was sauteed in olive oil and red pepper flakes, and had a similar soft but peppery quality to the pasta. In Italy, vegetables are always a separate order from the main dish, which is unfortunate in that it adds 5 to 8 euros to the total cost, but great in that you end up with a larger portion than I'm used to (especially in Japan, where the side vegetables that come with a meal often consist of half a carrot, a single bean, and a head of asparagus). There was tiramisu on the menu for dessert, but I was just too sleepy and said no - though not without regret.

Oishissima!

I went to Rome last weekend. Veni, vidi, vici - that was the strategy, and with only two and a half days, plus the night I arrived, it was an ambitious one. Even walking around all day from dawn till after dark, sometimes trotting to make it to a museum in time for my reservation time, it was impossible not to spend a lot of time getting lost and stopping to stare at one or another wonder of the world. Fortunately there's plenty of oishiness in Rome to fuel the conquest. The next few posts will cover my Roman holiday from the gastronomical perspective. Though there would be plenty to say about everything this trip taught me about art, history, art history, and the way the whole Judeo-Christian Greco-Roman collision changed the world, that would be the subject of another blog... or a whole book.

Springtime Cakes

Cherry blossom season is such an overwhelming identity for spring in Japan that the blossoms make their way into all kinds of unexpected places this time of year: Hello Kitty wash towels, ice cream, excuse-our-construction signage. Both the cherry flowers and the leaves can be part-pickled, part-candied, and used to top Japanese sweets like steamed tea cakes or to wrap glutinous rice cakes (mochi). In the Sakura Roll Cake above, a whole sweet-and-sour sakura blossom tops off the thin coating of cream, and the filling contains lots of finely chopped flowers. As for the green cake, it was quite mild tasting and I couldn't decide whether it was pistachio or matcha flavored. The tart flavor of the sakura blossoms combined with the barely sweetened cream were what made this cake memorable.
Gateau Chocolat is a name given to a huge variety of chocolate cakes in Japanese patisseries (I've even seen the name applied to chocolate-flavored bread filled with chocolate-flavored cream, at Mont-Tabor bakery in Azabu Juban). This particular Gateau Chocolat is a dense, rich, brownie-like cake, crisp and crumbly at the edges but moister toward the pointed center. It contains bits of orange rind and chopped chocolate, and toward the bottom it's flecked with patches of a lighter-colored dough that has a slighty nutty, slightly molasses-y flavor similar to chocolate chip cookie dough (the website calls it "crumble," whatever that means). Though it's not a particularly springlike cake, and the citrus notes actually give it more of a wintery feel, there are certainly plenty of days in early spring when it feels like winter. And isn't chocolate always in season?

Petit Decorer

Minami-azabu 1-4-21

http://decorer.jp

Tuscan Bean and Farro Soup

Almost a year after I returned from ten days in Tuscany with an overweight suitcase bursting with jars of honey and slabs of chocolate, I'm nearing the end of my stock of Italian-bought foodstuffs. Today I cooked the last of my borlotti beans with half a cup of my dwindling supply of farro wheat to make a final batch of bean and farro soup. I ate this soup in Lucca on a cold, windy day with quickly alternating rain and sun (there had been hail the day before in Siena). It was close to three in the afternoon, and the sun was shining when I began my late lunch in the plastic chairs set up in front of a cheap little eatery that seemed to sell mostly sandwiches and cake. The rain began to fall only minutes after my soup arrived, and I had to dash indoors with it while the waitress dashed out to pull all the place settings off the patio tables. The thick soup was the perfect fortification for such a day, and I've made it (or my own version of it) on several particularly cold weekends this winter, using genuine beans, wheat, and olive oil from Lucca.
It's really the oil that elevates this tasty but simple dish into the realms ordinarily reserved for nectar and ambrosia. I still have about half a bottle of my organic, d.o.p., cold-extract, extra virgin, made-with-olives-of-Lucca olive oil, and rather than cooking with it, I save it to pour over this soup and the occasional bean or vegetable dish, where its power is instantly apparent. Before tasting this oil, I was skeptical every time I heard or read about how you should buy oil you'd be happy to drink straight - I had sampled a lot of fancy oils at the Whole Foods tasting counter, and they all just seemed like olive oil to me. Well, I'm here today to testify that there truly is a difference. This oil from the olives of Lucca is sweet-smelling, peppery, and transformative. It makes whatever it's poured on taste amazing, but in a way that's not assertively olive-oily, so you wonder, "What is it that makes it so delicious?" until you realize it's the olive oil. I think this is why Americans come back from Italy raving about the food there, which is all liberally doused in what must be similarly good-quality oil.
Epicurious has a recipe for Tuscan Bean and Farro soup, which is where I got approximate proportions and cooking times, but the truth is I don't remember there being any vegetables at all (or any onion or herbal flavorings) in the soup I ate in Lucca. This is peasant food, and shouldn't get too fancy. It's an ideal recipe for winging it - I don't think it would be possible to mess up, unless you burned it. What I do is cook a pot of beans (soak overnight, then bring to a boil, then turn to the lowest possible heat and cook half an hour, then add salt and cook for another half an hour). I take the beans out, leaving their cooking liquid simmering, and add farro in the same proportion as I had dried beans (for example, if I cooked 1/2 cup of dried beans, I'd add 1/2 cup of farro - this, by the way, makes two hearty servings). Bring it to a boil, then turn down to low. Meanwhile, mash the beans roughly with a fork so that they're about half pulverized, but some are still whole, and add them back into the pot. Keep simmering the soup for at least 1/2 hour until the farro is cooked through - it should be chewy but shouldn't loose its shape - and the liquid has cooked down to your desired consistency. I like it thick and sludgy, like oatmeal, so I end up cooking it for about 45 minutes. Then dish it up, make a little well in the top with the back of a spoon, and pour on the olive oil. Serve with another good peasant food, like cavolo, and imagine yourself in a stone courtyard in Lucca, the sky half brilliant with sunshine and half shadowed by threatening clouds. Buon appetito!

Patisserie Sadaharu Aoki

Of all the French pastry shops in Tokyo, Patisserie Sadaharu Aoki is the most outrageously sleek. Just look at the logo: black letters, gray letters, upper case, lower case, all in that slim, trim, minimalist font. The stores themselves have the same bare aesthetic, with big glass windows and spotlit display tables. But the cakes are an explosion of color, especially the kinds of color you don't expect in a cake. They're not squares or triangles, but long bars, like ingots of gold. And the flavors are a daring blend of French and Japanese obsessions, things like the famous matcha opera (a layering of green tea and chocolate) and the yuzu cheesecake (the Japanese citron mixed with fromage frais). Sadaharu Aoki is a Japanese pastry chef who studied and made his name in Paris, so the Tokyo branches of his name are actually outposts of the French mother-ship.
Perhaps because I eat so many purple sweet potatoes, I was instantly drawn to the purple cake above. The color reflects the main ingredient, cassis, which I think is the same thing as the English black currant. However, while you never see black currants in anything but jelly, cassis is a popular flavor in Japan, found in everything from soda to chewing gum. Here, there are two cassis layers: the mild, moussy top and the sharp, sour middle layer with bits of berry included. These fruit layers alternate with plain chocolate cake (possibly with some almond in it, though I didn't taste that - I'm just guessing by the almond perched on top). Between the bottom chocolate and cassis layers there's a very thin, invisible from the outside, layer of crunchy, sweet praline, and on the very top there's a thin coating of sticky chocolate on one side and a swirl of crystalized sugar and pulverized pistachio on the other. Not only is this cake a looker, it's also an intriguing and delicious combination of flavors and textures.

The chocolate-almond cake is simpler, but absolutely perfect. It's everything a grown-up could wish for in a chocolate cake: moist, rich, and dewily alcoholic. The bottom layer is soaked in some kind of liquour, while the upper layers are crumby but still luscious with the ganache filling. A thinner, stickier layer of dark ganache is poured over the top and sides, and there's a ridge of milk chocolate standing upright down the center. Though the almond flavor isn't noticeable, I think it contributes some moisture to the cake layers, and though chocolate is the overwhelming impression, it's far from on-dimensional with the combination of dark and milk. This is the best chocolate cake I've had in Tokyo, where most cakes are dryer and lighter and more refined. The big flavor and rich density of this cake push it ahead of the competition.

Fall and Winter Fruit Trees

Japan has a temperate climate and in Tokyo the weather rarely gets below freezing, making it ideal for many fruit trees, above and beyond the famous flowering plums and cherries. Trees that actually produce fruit in the city include all varieties of citrus, persimmon, and even olive and caper trees. When you see a tree like the persimmon above, oddly growing amid the concrete a few blocks from Tokyo Midtown in Akasaka, you suddenly realize where the concept of Japanese flower arrangement, ikebana, with all its bare twigs and odd decorations, must have originated. And the citrus tree below, photographed in the Aoyama cemetery, is a living model of the tiny trees found in every full Girls' Day display, covered in gorgeous orange globes of fruit.

Country Ma'am

Two fun things about Japanese snack foods: the endless variety of unexpected flavors, and the tireless succession of "limited edition" seasonal production of those flavors. Case in point: Country Ma'am cookies. Above, from left to right, are the autumnal pumpkin, the seasonless chocolate chip, and the springtime strawberry. Pumpkin and strawberry flavored chocolate chip cookies? Only in Japan. But when you think about it, or better yet, taste it, you realize: Why not?
Country Ma'am is, in my opinion, the superior fake chocolate chip cookie sold in Japan, much better than competitor American Soft. They're quite small - about the size of a silver dollar and just 50 calories each. The outside has a crumbly crispness, but the inside is soft and chewy, and filled with miniature chocolate chips (and white chocolate chips in the strawberry and pumpkin varieties). They're very sweet, unusual in Japanese treats. An interesting thing to note on the package above is the Japanese depiction of a pumpkin pie, with little green pumpkin seeds sprinkled over the top, and a green-skinned Japanese kabocha squash modeling in the background.
Though the pumpkin cookie isn't strongly pumpkin flavored, the strawberry cookie actually has a pink, external coating of fragrant berry-flavored crust on top. (As you can see, the package is also cutely polka-dotted.) And while the pumpkin cookie has only white chocolate chips, the strawberry has both white and milk chocolate. So, as much as I love pumpkins in general, I would have to say I like the strawberry cookie better. But actually, however exciting it is to get new flavors with the seasons, the plain "chocochip" is better than anything else I've had so far. Especially when warmed in the microwave, as they recommend on the package. Mmmm....

Le Souffle

Le Souffle is a cute little French restaurant on the second floor of a nondescript building somewhere in Nishi-azabu. The dinner menu includes various appetizers, fish, and meat dishes, but the main event is clearly the souffle, which comes in about ten savory and maybe twenty-five or thirty dessert flavors. Served with thick cream that comes in a 100-gram measuring cup in either steel or copper, the savory souffles range from simple gruyere cheese to fancier (and more expensive) ingredients like smoked salmon and crab. The dessert souffles have a sweet sauce on top of the cream in the accompanying cup, and the same flavor is incorporated into the souffle itself. The choices are really overwhelming - all kinds of fruit flavors, coffee, chocolate, mint, Grand Marnier - you could go every day for a month and never have the same souffle twice. Also, they seem to be cooked to order, and the menu tells you the approximate wait time, which is 15 minutes for a simple souffle and up to 25 for a more complex one.
I visited Le Souffle with Abby and Eve, and we each ordered different things and gave each other tastes. The top picture is my dinner, a Souffle Champignon. There was a puree of mushrooms, though no visible pieces, incorporated into the batter, and it had a mild mushroom flavor and a slightly browner tinge than Eve and Abby's gruyere cheese souffles. I didn't use all my cream, as it diluted the flavor and wasn't really necessary, as the inside of the souffle was already quite creamy, although the top and sides were nice and springy and actually difficult to collapse - it was much firmer than the souffles I've had and made at home.
For dessert, I ordered the Souffle Framboise, which arrived dusted with powdered sugar and was pink inside. It came with raspberry sauce and cream, and unlike the savory souffle, the sweet one really did benefit from these additions. Eve's vanilla souffle was custardy and simply comforting, while Abby's praline sauce had a delicious caramelized flavor. But I was very happy with my pink dessert, light as air and just barely sweet. Though there were several men dining while we were there, I feel like this is a very girly restaurant, with all the souffles in their cute individual ramekins, light and ladylike.

Le Souffle

Nishi-azabu 3-13-10

Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0031