Les Grillades (Ottawa)

Today's food post is a bit weird: I'm giving a big thumbs up to a restaurant without being able to write much about what I had there, for the simple reason that I'm talking about Les Grillades [85 Holland ave], and they serve Lebanese food, which I'm not very acquainted with. So... here's my fantastically uninformed post about a Lebanese brunch.

I went in for Sunday brunch with no idea what to expect, and let me tell you, this isn't a typical Ottawa greasy shawarma shack! This is a real restaurant.


We started off with a bit of turkish coffee.


A plate of fresh veggies awaited us as we sat down. Incredulous, I inquired of one of my Lebanese companions: "So you just eat... the onions... raw? Really?" I'm certainly not known for turning away from raw foods, so I dove in carefully with some green onion (verdict: not bad, but apologies for my breath afterwards):


Then the brunch dishes started arriving. We didn't actually order anything specific, just "brunch". I was introduced to Labneh, a sort of strained yogurt (delicious!):


Some meat and cooked cheese:


And what was probably the best dish we tasted: this was made from fava beans, it was extremely tasty, and I was told the name (possibly 'Foul'), but it was unfamiliar and escapes me now:


All in all, loved it, and at around 100$ for a table of 6, quite reasonable.

Tourtière HOWTO

Guests and co-workers have asked me to share the recipe for tourtière (meat pie) and for pie crust. I'm hoping this illustrated HOWTO can serve as the reference I point them to.

Pie Crust

These instructions are for 1 crust. You need 2 (top + bottom) per tourtière, so we'll make 4 of these. I make them individually in the food processor. I use the same kind of crust for dessert pies as well, this works for everything.

1.25 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
1 small stick of butter, chilled (~110 grams)
~1/8th cup of ice water (as required)

Combine the flour, salt, and sugar in the food processor.


Cut your chilled stick of butter into little pieces.


Start the food processor and quickly throw in about one piece of butter per second. This should take about 10 seconds and break up the butter into tiny clumps. When you're finished, it should look like this:


Add 1/8th cup ice water (or a little more, as required) in a very slow thin trickle while running the processor. The dough will rapidly start clumping up and after about 20-30s will form a single ball. Don't use too much water! It shouldn't stick to your fingers, it should stay in ball shape when handled.


Press it lightly onto a counter, then wrap in wax paper and chill for 30 minutes. When you take it out of the fridge, let it stand for 5-10 minutes so it softens and is easier to work with.

Filling

(makes two)
1 red onion, finely chopped
1 white potato
2 cloves of garlic
2 lbs ground pork
1/2 lb ground beef
1/2 cup beef broth
spices (basil, nutmeg, cinnamon, bay leaf, cloves)

Dice your potato. Cook it in boiling water with a bit of salt for 10 minutes (until tender), then drain and reserve.


Chop up the onion and mince the garlic.


In a large skillet or casserole, cook the onion and garlic in a bit of vegetable oil until tender, about 3 minutes.


Add the pork and beef. Let it cook on high heat about 5 minutes, stirring frequently. Add some salt and pepper, the spices, and the beef broth. Turn down the heat and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring from time to time to make sure all the meat cooks evenly and the beef gets mixed well with the pork. It looks like this when you just start cooking:


After 30 minutes, take the meat off the heat and let it cool down. Go back to your potatoes and mash them up:


Then combine them with the meat

Roll the Crusts

While your meat mixture continues to cool, it's time to prepare the crusts. Flour your work surface and plop down the first ball of dough. I like this cutting board, it has a gauge to help with shaping.


Now roll it out so it's bigger than your pie tin. [Note: never buy a teflon rolling pin like this one, it's junk. Get a proper wooden one.]


Place it in your pan and run a knife gently around the edge to cut off the overflow.


Spoon in your meat mixture into both bottom crusts. Brush some beaten egg onto the edges to help seal the top crust.


Place the top crust on top, and brush the whole surface with some more beaten egg. Use a fork to texture the edges and seal both crusts shut together.


Bake at 375F for about 60 minutes.


Done! Make this 1-2 days before you're ready to eat, it's better after a day or two.

Feast of Fields Ottawa 2009

My guest post on Feast of Fields 2009 just went up on TheFood.ca! Check it out.

Overheard in Ottawa

"No, we were waiting for you at the *other* 'Pho Bo Ga La with a blue sign on Somerset'..."

This Week in Food

Ice Cream at The Piggy Market

A few coworkers recommended I check out Pascale Berthiaume's (who provides the ice cream for the Wellington Gastropub) ice cream, now being sold in Westboro at The Piggy Market. They're located in the rear half of the old, now defunct, Westboro Market.

I gave them a first visit this week to check them out, and so far I've a very positive impression of the place. I stopped in on my way home from work on Thursday, around 20:45. They had been closed for an hour and forty-five minutes, but they still let me in to buy ice cream as long as I paid cash (the charge machines and register were closed for the day); they get 6 out of 5 stars for service. Again, on a coworker's recommendation, I picked the Peanut Butter Salted Caramel flavour.

Outstanding! And check out the ingredients: yolks, cream, sugar, peanut butter, caramel, salt, vanilla. That's it! Goes for 10$ a tub.

Ron Eade on Butter Prices

Omnivore's Ottawa weekly supermarket specials roundup includes these few words from Mr. Eade:

Anyway, my gold star of the week goes to three chain stores, Price Chopper, Food Basics and Superstore Loblaw for selling various brands of butter, salted or unsalted and sometimes both, at $2.97 to $2.99 a pound. Really, I can't understand how stores get away with charging $4 or more for a pound of churned animal fat. (I'll bet it has something to do with the government-sanctioned cartel marketing board that controls milk prices. Reach for the sky, buddy, this is a stick-up.)

Now a complaint like this about the price isn't too punchy in a vacuum - we need to put it in context to see if there's really anything to gripe about when it comes to butter prices! How does this compare to the rest of your grocery basket?

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada provides a bit of historical data for retail prices of various dairy products.

They also provide an overview of the butter sector, but this report is quite misleading; it significantly understates (by 50%!) the price of butter as they got the units wrong, claiming an average price of 3.84$/Kg in 2005. In Table 2, they present the AC Neilsen retail price survey data in $/Kg, adjusted to what I assume are 2006 dollars, but the Neilsen price survey measures the price per pound of butter (454g). I wonder how many people noticed the error.

It's best to ignore the above report then, and go back to the original data, in nominal dollars per pound of butter. As we can see from the series representing the price of a pound of butter, retail has crept up towards the 4$ mark for the last few years, but the nominal price, from 2006-2008, has hardly increased.

I've plotted this data against milk prices and the Core Consumer Price Index (which includes dairy products, btw), using 2004 as a baseline:

So it seems that although the price of butter has shot up a bit faster than core CPI around 2004-2005, it's been relatively flat even in nominal dollars over the last three years, meaning it's actually gotten cheaper in real terms.

Hardly cause for panic! Happy cooking.

Booking a table

This impressed me a lot, it's very slick:


GMail managed to look into this restaurant confirmation email and see that it referenced an event at a specific time, so it created a link to add to my Google Calendar!

Following the link to their website reveals, however, that reservations are done through some third-party widget that's not OpenTable.

It's a shame that restaurants in Ottawa are fracturing their reservation systems across several providers like this, just like online classifieds for the city are fractured across Kijiji, Craigslist and UsedOttawa, reducing their utility for everyone. Restaurant reservations are the sort of service where these third-party hosted reservation service providers can hugely benefit from network effects. Once one service reaches a tipping point (like it seems OpenTable is achieving in some US cities), it will enable the creation of location-aware mobile apps and a whole bunch of other useful services for finding restaurants around you.

It seems to me that as a restaurateur, you'd have see huge benefits from going with a large provider that's essentially advertising your restaurant for you by publicly listing availability of tables. You'd want to go for the dominant service that could offer this, which hasn't (yet?) happened with OpenTable in Ottawa...

That didn't take long

Wow, the Kanata Costco sells Manchego cheese now. In three years it went from unobtainable to completely mainstream.

Three years ago, you could buy some 6-month and 12-month manchego at La Bottega. If, you know, you got lucky. Very lucky. And wanted to pay about 60 bucks a kilo.

Now it's at Costco for 35$ a kilo.

This Week in Food

Will Ron Eade wake up with a head of lettuce in his bed?

First up is Ron Eade's column from Ottawa Citizen blogs, where he heaps some well-deserved praise on Kevin Mathieson (of Art-Is-In Bakery) for his bread. Eade says it's better than ACE bread (n.d.a.: no shit), and I for one am glad to note that the supply problems I was hurting from a year ago seem to be a thing of the past: whereas last year, getting your hands on Art-Is-In bread required much haste in returning home from the office, this year I find that retailers aren't consistently running out by late afternoon.

Eade calls New York Times' Mark Bittman's bread recipe a good replica of Art-Is-In's, which I have to humbly disagree with. Bittman's recipe is good, it's my go-to recipe for homemade bread, but I hardly think it's close to equal to Mathieson's.

I think it's awesome that he can get away with saying:

I'm not kidding when I say you need a six- to eight-quart heavy cast-iron Dutch oven with lid. Every kitchen should have one.

Yes, every kitchen should have one - but when I say anything like that, people roll their eyes at me. If you're a newspaper columnist though...

Amate

Got around to trying Amate (link goes to ottawafoodies.com) for some quick Mexican take-out. I came in a few minutes before they decided to shut down for the night, and ordered a tostada with some puerco pibil. Unfortunately, I only got a tiny spoonful, maybe 40g, of pork but hey, what I tasted was good. I think they're still going through opening pains and are a bit disorganized, so it's not fair to say more at this time - let's give them a few more months.

I'll probably try my hand at making puerco pibil myself (in more generous quantities) when I get a free afternoon.

Malak Pastry

I've lived in Westboro for over a year and had never tried Malak Pastry, despite it being right at Carling/Broadview - shame! It's a bakery offering up a range of baklawa (which I'll admit I know little about). I asked for the shopkeeper's recommendations and got a few samples to try before buying, and was incredibly impressed. Delicious! They weren't yet listed on OttawaFoodies, so I'm adding them presently.

foods++;

Finally, I've tried sauerkraut (at a corporate event at the office, no less), bringing my 100 Food countdown (previously blogged about) to 57% completion. Moving up 1% in two months is a rather pathetic pace, so I'm going to make a bigger effort.

Wake-up Call for the Foodie

Or: I fail at omnivorism, apparently.

I know how much everyone hates blog memes that rely on propagating lists, but this one has merit as a device to instill humility in this foodie's psyche and renew my drive for exploration and experimentation. I'm talking, of course, about the Very Good Taste Omnivore's Hundred, a list of 100 foods that's making the rounds right now, billed as a collection of meals any self-respecting omnivore must have tried at least once.

Why am I calling this a wake-up call? Because I just went through the exercise and scored a rather pathetic 56%, forcing me to realize just how little I've really experienced. Try it yourself.

Here are the instructions from the original post:
* Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
* Bold all the items you've eaten.
* Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
* Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

I'm crossing out Whole insects, Fugu, and Roadkill, so I'm really aiming for a score out of 97. Oh, and the insects thing is probably negotiable after a couple of drinks. I did my counting on Google Spreadsheets, so the following should get automatically updated whenever I check off something new.

Update: ah of course, the iframe won't show up in RSS readers. You have to click to go to the real page.

Kimchi

I just want to post a pointer to Ron Eade's recent blog entry about making kimchi at home. A quick perusal of the instructions reveal it's a fairly involved multi-step process, but overall it still seems simpler than I'd ever imagined.

I buy my kimchi at 168 Market on Somerset, but they seem to only have a single variety and it's not quite as good as what they serve at, say, Seoul House. I've asked around and people seem to only be aware of 168 Market as a source, so perhaps I should try making my own someday - I'd just have to massively scale down the quantities from Mr Eade's typical batch size!

I Think Spolsky Missed a Detail About Starbucks Queueing

This week saw the publication of another Inc.com article by the inimitable Joel Spolsky, and as usual it's a fun, geeky read. His ranting analysis of the queueing and order taking procedures at Starbucks supplement a section about an instance of unfriendliness on the part of the staff, which I'll ignore in favour of concentrating on the (more interesting and less Godin-esque) part of the article on queueing procedures and order taking.

Read the original article [http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080801/how-hard-could-it-be-good-system-bad-system.html]; I'm only reproducing a small, relevant portion here:

"Her main job was to go down the line of people waiting to order and ask them what they wanted in advance of their arriving at the cash register. There, they would be asked to repeat their order before paying and finally joining the line of customers waiting for their drinks to appear.

This premature order taking did not appear to improve the store's productivity. The cashiers still had to take the same number of orders, wait for the customers to fiddle with their purses for the correct change, and so forth. The coffee producers -- known theatrically in the trade as baristas -- still had to make the same number of drinks. The biggest benefit of the procedure, I thought, was that the barista got started on a drink a few seconds earlier, so people got their orders filled a little bit faster, even though the overall rate of output for the store was the same.

A network engineer would say this was a situation of 'same bandwidth, lower latency' [...]"

I disagree!

Armchair Psychology

Firstly, I might have a bit of an issue with the claim of lowering perceived latency by reducing the gap between paying at the register and receiving your drink, because I believe I'd start measuring latency when first giving the order, not when paying. Let's ignore that though; Spolsky correctly assumes the early order-taking is useful in preventing customers from giving up and leaving when faced with a long line. This should be no surprise to anyone who's read Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion [http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/0688128165] Once we've expressed a choice, painted a mental picture of ourselves as buying a cup of Starbucks coffee this morning, our internal need for self-consistency will force us to rationalize staying, even in the face of long lines. Seriously, read this book, it's an eye opener.

The Benefit of Longer Queues

Ahem, sorry for the digression - back to queueing. Joel states:

"[...] while not even increasing the total number of Frappuccino Blended Coffees that could be produced per unit of time?"

Aha, that's the thing! What's missing here is that the goal isn't to increase the Frappuccino throughput, it's to increase the total throughput across all drinks, and it's absolutely crucial to realize that the drinks are different, and have different preparation times. I think the point of the pre-order taking is to increase the job queue length, and that increasing total throughput by doing this is actually an achievable goal.

Your typical Starbucks counter layout looks something like this in Canada (simplified):

Section A: 2 Espresso machines, steam wands for frothing milk, grinders.
Section B: 3 Thermos canisters of brewed drip coffee: light, medium, dark roast.
Section C: Cash registers, in front of which customers line up.
Job Queue: {DripDarkRoast, DripDarkRoast, Cappuccino, Latte, Cappuccino}

There is no need to view the job queue as FIFO, in fact, it's intuitively obvious that reordering jobs depending on what's available at any moment (out of steamed milk - need to make more, out of ground coffee - need to grind more, etc) should improve the throughput somewhat. Now, assuming you have enough baristas, you can make 2 espresso-based drinks and 1 brewed coffee simultaneously. Maximum throughput will be achieved when all 3 execution units are kept fully busy, which means your drink pipeline should have at least two espresso drinks and one brewed coffee in it to guarantee full utilization after popping the next job off the queue, AND your staff must be allowed to reorder as they see fit. Practically speaking, since pouring a cup of drip coffee takes less time than paying for it, you should have much more than a single drip coffee job in the queue.

So the expediter can indeed cause the throughput to rise - It's clear to me that the job of the expediter is to increase the pipeline length to maximize the chance that all execution units are kept busy. One might argue that this can be done without an expediter, by having the cashiers simply take more orders and queueing them up, but that seems like it would be too much of a cognitive load: in addition to payment processing, they'd be forced to be perfectly aware of what's in the queue, who's busy, which machines are free, etc. The constant context-switching between smiling to customers, counting change, and checking the state of the queue would slow them down, which is why I think it makes sense to offload all of this decision-making to the expediter, who's then free to apply whatever algorithm she chooses in deciding whether to take more orders or pause.

The Smugness Corner

I frequently buy my morning coffee from Bridgehead Coffee in Ottawa, where the barista often sees me standing in line and starts making my usual drink before I get to the cashier to place my order, which results in incredibly low perceived latency. Go Bridgehead.

Argh! Missed it!

Totally non-techie post today for food geeks: it seems that La Bottega in Ottawa received a single Spanish jamón ibérico last Friday. I missed my chance to buy a few slices, reading about it only after the fact on Ron Eade's (the Citizen's food editor) blog, which I was only recently made aware of. Damn.

It is easy to underestimate the significance of this news item, but thankfully, in his video post, Eade reminds us that this is quite notable, as it is the first time jamón ibérico (made from pasture-fed black pigs of certified race) is available in Ottawa. In fact, until 2005, it was illegal to export it to North America, and since the ham must cure for three years before being ready to sell, it's only now starting to appear on our shores, and is a tad expensive (La Bottega was moving it at 200$ per kilogram).

[sure, I paid 30$ CAD for the plate above last month but look at that marbling!]

Ottawa food enthusiasts have no doubt noticed that much cheaper (but still delicious) jamón serrano has been available in local food shops for a while now, which is made from white pigs with less restrictions on feeding.

Towards an Efficient Pancake-Serving Strategy in Office Environments

Background

I was invited to sit in on a "Social Committee Meeting" at work [Solace Systems - ze cool message routing company that allows me to pay the bills]. I provided some constructive criticism of last year's pancake breakfast by pointing out that although a delightful time was had by all, surely the quality of the food would have been even better if instead of thick store-bought pancake mix, we had prepared homemade batter for all the crêpes [if I recall correctly, it ended up being a mix of store / homemade, or perhaps it was all-store, I'm not 100% sure, but the dimensions of the final pancakes indicated the batter was likely a bit thick].

I was subsequently assigned the task of making the pancakes for all the engineering staff this year. Yay me and my big mouth.

Problem

After I expressed the opinion that the batter should be made fresh and cooked on the spot (just-in-time cooking), concerns were raised that it would be impossible to produce pancakes at an acceptable rate to feed all 30 or so expected attendees. Two options present themselves:

1. Find a way to make pancakes fast enough with the single heating element available (let's say we are shooting for 60 pancakes in 20 minutes or so). This is hard because there is no possible parallelism.
2. Find an acceptable way to preserve pre-cooked pancakes and reheat them in situ once at the office, without destroying their texture or flavour.

Test Procedure

jpdaigle@vitis:~$ make pancakes
make: *** No rule to make target `pancakes'. Stop.

This weekend, I endeavoured to measure the rate at which I could cook pancakes (evaluating the feasibility of option 1), and, should an acceptable rate prove unattainable, I would experiment with pancake reheating.

I used my usual batter recipe and a single well-seasoned pan at medium-high heat, starting to cook the first pancake at 13:15 EST on Sunday. I logged the time at which each pancake was completed and transferred to a holding plate.

I completed seven (7) pancakes in 13 minutes, for an average of 111 seconds per pancake. The graph above demonstrates that the output rate remained mostly constant over the course of the experiment, which I interpret to mean the pan had attained its nominal temperature before I started cooking the first pancake, and there were no noticeable speed gains to be had as time wore on.

At this rate, it would take nearly two hours to feed 30 engineers, assuming each desired two pancakes. Clearly, we had to consider Option 2.

I decided to eat three (3) pancakes on Sunday to establish the "fresh pancake" baseline, and refrigerate the other four (4) for consumption on Monday, to determine what they'd taste like after 24 hours, and a chill / reheat cycle. [Note: I am well aware that a better approach would have been to bake a fresh batch on the second day, so that it may be compared directly to the 24-hour-old batch instead of relying on memory, but I ran out of flour and could not purchase any more on Monday, as it was a holiday in Ontario and all the shops were closed. Even if this had worked, we'd still be comparing different batches of batter, with possible variations in the egg/milk/flour ratios that are hard to control for.]

Results and Conclusion

Day 2: Of the four (4) remaining pancakes, I reheated the first two (2) in a microwave to test the naive approach. The result, however, was disappointing: the pancakes came out warm, but too damp and mushy. They did not meet the high standards for what I'd feel comfortable serving to my coworkers.

The remaining two (2) pancakes were reheated in a very hot seasoned pan, about 15 seconds per side. I am pleased to report that although the final result is a pancake that is a bit drier than the original, it retained its taste and texture acceptably, and this method cuts the 111 seconds needed to cook a pancake down to 30 seconds to simply reheat it. It would allow us to feed 30 people in about a half hour, which points to a possible approach for the Solace pancake breakfast.

Future Work

Find how to accompany the food with good espresso; I don't have any proposals here.