BakeSpite.net

Hi there, Spitesketeers. Tonight is another delicious dinner at Chef Ryan’s, also known as Studio 54. We’ve live blogged from here before, but tonight I’m trying something different: a dry run for next week’s PAX coverage.

I’m trying to determine whether or not it’s actually possible to liveblog an event using an iPad, up to and including grabbing photos with the little photo dongle thing. So bear with me.

Tonight’s menu is a pretty simple izakaya-style Japanese course, Ryan being of Japanese extraction and all. We also have a few other random things to snack on.

We have some sausages that Cat picked up at a Polish deli she photographed the other day, all freshly made and tasting of delicious smoked white meats. And of course the traditional Studio 54 gin and tonic, made with Tanqueray Rangpur.

I photographed the two together because they’re a good match, believe it or not. Smoked sausage doesn’t necessarily seem like the perfect match for a G&T, but the Rangpur has a great lime flavor that goes quite nicely with the pork.

And now it seems the egg omelets are ready for consumption, so I will let this test entry stand. OM NOM NOM NOM

A little while ago, Cat and I had some house guests — old friends of hers. Who, as it happens, are pretty serious foodies. So I decided to introduce them to the weird world of Japanese Kit-Kats. They were totally game; in fact, I offered them several choices of bars to sample, and they picked the one that seemed strangest: Ginger Ale.

Ginger Kit-Kat. Photo by Jeremy.

I didn’t have high hopes for this one, because — well, look. White chocolate. Nothing good ever comes of that.

Or so I thought! But Ginger Ale Kit-Kat isn’t exactly plain white chocolate. The bar’s coating has a slightly lemony flavor, and the hint of citrus gives personality to what is normally a sort of overly sweet, lifeless mockery of real chocolate. It doesn’t exactly bring to mind “ginger ale,” though. In fact, the first sensation this bar gives is that it’s a lemon Kit-Kat — pretty decent, but not what was billed.

But then, something crazy happens. Right about the time you fully process the taste, the wafer and creme hit your tongue. Suddenly, the flavor totally changes. The candy bar begins to fizz, literally fizz, just like real ginger ale. The taste of the Kit-Kat mellows and loses the citrusy sharpness of that first impression, broadening into something much closer to ginger ale.

The secret of this particular confection is that the wafers infused with something akin to Pop Rocks. Our foodie friends suggested it’s some sort of citric acid; whatever the case, it creates a convincing sensation of eating ginger ale. It’s strange and unexpected, but it works, and it’s incredibly satisfying — an unconventional approach to the classic Kit-Kat that creates a curious confluence of snacks all at once: chocolate bar, fizzy candy, and soda. Unexpectedly, Ginger Ale Kit-Kat has become one of my favorite iterations in this particular venture.

“This broth is great! I wonder what their secret is? Why’s it so good?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s basically just liquid pig.”

(Saiwaii Ramen, 2240 Irving Street in San Francisco. It’s new, and it’s pretty decent.)

Today was Cat’s birthday, so I wanted to do something nice for her. “Nice” as in, “make her a cake.” Her request was strawberry shortcake, which was something I’ve never made before. So, I grabbed a somewhat random recipe off the Internet and ran with it. For better or for worse!

The results were… interesting. I went with this particular recipe because it seemed fairly simple and looked like a novel change of pace from the usual spongecake style of strawberry shortcake, which I’ve never been a big fan of. When I think strawberry shortcake, I generally think of bland, spongy, wannabe angel food cake, which is no way to celebrate a birthday!

What I didn’t realize — probably because I suck at reading recipes — is that this cake is less of a cake and more of a pastry. The texture of the cake is almost like a shortbread cookie, except lighter and airier. It’s also only mildly sweet, which is nice. It’s a rich, crisp, light, buttery wafer, which ended up being a great complement to the sweet berries I picked up on the way home. Bringing the two together was hand-whipped heavy cream, which I sweetened slightly with vanilla extract and two teaspoons of brown sugar.

I thought it was surprisingly delicious, one of the very few strawberry shortcakes I’ve ever enjoyed. Cat, on the other hand, seemed initially taken aback by the uncharacteristic texture and consistency of the cake. She liked it, thankfully (because it sure would suck if the birthday girl hated her cake), but only after she warmed up to it.

All in all, a modest success.

It seems like my life is full of New Yorkers. I love them, but as we all know, the common thread that binds people from New York City is their adamant, unshakable belief that NYC is innately superior to all other points on the map. That’s fine. Home town pride is natural. I still have a deep fondness for my home towns of Flint, MI and Lubbock, TX… even though I really shouldn’t.

The one area that New York pride really grinds on my nerves, though, is when it comes to pizza. New York-style pizza is, in my opinion, just shy of inedible, with their platonic ideal consisting of plasticky cheese and a miniscule hint of sauce scraped haphazardly across a thin, cardboard-like crust. I have eaten New York-style pizza in New York from New York pizzerias that have been canonized by New Yorkers, and that pizza was unremarkable at best, awful at worst. It’s even worse when certain unnamed people at 1UP insist on buying San Francisco-made attempts at NYC-style pizza for staff meetings and parties. Bad as New York-style pizza is, true disaster strikes when people who aren’t currently living in New York City try to mimic it.

Frankly, the whole thing put me off pizza for a few years. I’d convinced myself that I just don’t like pizza altogether… until one night last summer, when I walked past a local pizzeria called Irving Pizza and bought a slice on a whim. It was fantastic, and it reminded me that I don’t hate pizza — I just hate the oppressive fascism of New York pizza adherents.

Custom margherita slice from Irving Pizza.

Irving Pizza, so named because it is located on Irving Street, made me love pizza again.

The crust is thicker than New York pizza, yet it’s thinner than the Chicago tradition demands. It’s soft but not doughy, and the crust edges are reminiscent of a good ciabatta; tender and spongy inside, but crisp and brown outside.

The sauce is rich and well-seasoned. It’s not applied too heavily, but it still has enough of a presence that you can actually taste it, unlike the faint intaglio of red you see on New York pizza. I’m not entire sure what the cheese blend consists of, but it’s definitely more than just mozzarella. It’s melty and always perfectly browned, and thick enough to make you feel like you’re actually eating something substantial without giving you what Cat refers to as “cheese belly.”

The best part about Irving Pizza, however, is their lunch deal. Four bucks gets you a huge slice of pizza and a gigantic drink. (They no longer advertise the special on their menu, probably because it’s such a good deal.) Their afternoon slice selection is pretty poor — usually just cheese, pepperoni, combo, and Hawaiian — but there’s a secret. If you ask them to add a couple of toppings to a slice of cheese, they’ll send it back to the kitchen and have it tricked out to your custom specs. They accomplish this by dropping on whatever toppings you ask for, sprinkling on a bit more cheese, and running the thing through their oven again to reheat it and seal the toppings with the added cheese.

The margherita shown above is the fruit of this particular cheat; as you can see, they don’t scrimp on the toppings when you ask for a custom slice. They covered the thing with huge, fresh slices of tomato and a ton of shredded basil. Actually, this slice is a bit more meagre than normal, since they usually include a lot more cheese on the top layer. So long as the added toppings don’t fall off en route to my mouth, though, I’m not too picky.

For my money, Irving Pizza is probably the best, most satisfying pizza I’ve ever eaten. It strikes a perfect balance between taste, texture, and substance. Of course, pizza’s a matter of taste, and since BakeSpite’s co-proprietor is rather ferociously from New York City… you can probably expect a rebuttal soon. But hey, if you’re ever in San Francisco, I recommend you try Irving Pizza to decide for yourself — it’s just a block south of Golden Gate Park, right at 19th Ave.

Man, now I want some pizza.

Death of me? Yes, as in: “This project is going to be.” Although I think it’s very likely that today’s entry represents the absolute nadir of this endeavor. From here, it can only get better.

Unlike the other Japanese Kit-Kat bars I’ve been writing about, there’s nothing particularly exotic about this one. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one exactly like it on sale in the U.S., but I’ve never really looked, and in any case it conceptual components are certainly widely available here. And I scrupulously avoid them! But here they are, combined in a single offensive package.

The villain of this piece? A Kit-Kat White Bar, aka a white chocolate Kit-Kat Chunky. It’s similar to the banana bar from a few days ago, except without even the promise of a slightly unusual flavor to spruce it up. It’s just… an oversized Kit-Kat covered in thick white chocolate. But it was donated to the Kit-Kat Densetsu cause by David Ellis the last time he went to Japan, and he contributed it in good faith! So I was determined to do my part and choke it down.

Photo tragically taken by Jeremy.

Crivvins! Look at that thing. You could kill someone by shoving it through their skull. It dwarfs the paper plate it was photographed on!

Needless to say, this was not good. At all. All the issues that beset the banana bar are present here — the chocolate shell is way too thick, and since it’s white chocolate, that means suffering through endless waxy mouthfuls of overly sweet cocoa solids and assorted sweeteners. The interior is totally decent, but it’s completely overwhelmed by the awful white chocolate-y-ness of the outer portions. I felt nauseous all yesterday afternoon, and I’m pretty sure I know where to point the finger of blame.

I actually don’t hate white chocolate as much as most people; it’s interesting in moderation. It’s delicious when it shares room and board with macadamia nuts in a cookie! But this is not moderation, it is a violation of human rights. I intend to file a complaint. Actually, I guess that’s what this post is.

Like I said, it’s all uphill from here, in a good way. But first, maybe I will write about something that’s not Kit-Kat for a while. I need a break, because this one broke me.

Today, a palate cleanser. After a harsh regimen of weird imported Kit-Kat flavors all built on a white chocolate base, I desperately needed something a little more normal. So I decided to crack open one of the flavors I’ve been saving for a rainy day: Whole Wheat.

Whole wheat flavor Kit-Kat. Photo by Jeremy.

OK, so I guess the premise of a whole wheat candy bar isn’t necessarily inherently appealing… in fact, it sounds a little odd, when you stop and think about it. But I’ve been banking on the hope that the “whole wheat” referred to the wafer inside the bar rather than some weird flavoring added to the chocolate exterior. Happily, I was right.

By and large, this was essentially just a normal Kit-Kat mini bar. A blind taste test would have left me thinking I’d just eaten a plain ol’ Kit-Kat, although I’d probably have walked away idly wondering when Kit-Kats got so darned good. The difference between this and your typical off-the-shelf bar is incredibly subtle, which is a welcome change of pace from all the bizarre colors and wackily intense flavors Japan usually churns out.

While I’m not entirely certain what makes a whole wheat wafer different from a normal wafer — what are they usually made of, anyway!? — from the end-user perspective, it’s definitely not as sweet. There’s a slightly nutty note to the flavor, and the texture is a bit… well, “grittier” sounds negative, but it’s slightly grainier and less crisp. But not in a bad way.

The change in the wafers has a similar effect to using dark chocolate: It cuts the sweetness just a bit. Given that candy bars tend to be a bit too sweet, that makes this one of the best Kit-Kats I’ve ever tried. Which, at this point, is saying quite a bit! I’d call it second-best, in fact… right after the amazing winter premium Kit-Kat I found in Inara in 2008, which had dark chocolate covering wafers with a black tea creme. Man, I’d kill for one of those… but in the meantime, whole wheat makes for a nice second-best.

Huh, another green Kit-Kat. Well, so be it. I wonder what “zunda” means…?

Hm. Oh. Oh. Oh, holy crap. It’s a doughy mochi dessert made with soybeans.

Japan, why you even got a do a thing?

Zunda Mochi Kit-Kat. Photo by Jeremy.

Needless to say, this was another Kit-Kat variant that I found myself approaching with sheer dread. I’m really not a big fan of Japan’s gooey foods, like this and monja-yaki. And, I gotta say, edamame and chocolate are not high on my list of “great tastes that taste great together.” Formula for disaster?

Yes! But fortunately — for a certain value of “fortunate” — this is one of those Kit-Kat bars that could only be described as “incredibly bland.” If my eyes were closed and I didn’t know it was supposed to taste like runny soybeans and rice, I’d think I’d been unfortunate enough to have been given a normal white chocolate Kit-Kat. There was maybe a tiny hint of vegetable-ness in the creme filling, I think… but then again, maybe I was just imagining things to rationalize the fact that I’d paid a buck-fifty to import a tiny candy bar that tastes like the sort of thing I wouldn’t normally eat for free if someone handed it to me.

Actually, that bit about my eyes being closed isn’t quite true, because this one smelled a lot different than a normal Kit-Kat. It took me a minute to place the odor, but it’s almost exactly like xôi (pronounced “soy”), which I confirmed with Cat in one of the goofiest conversations we’ve ever had:

Me: Hey, can you smell this?

Her: What is it this time?

Me: It’s supposed to taste like edamame, I guess.

Her: [look of revulsion]

Me: No, smell it. It smells like xôi, right?

Her: Well, edamame is soy, so that makes sense.

Me: No, like Vietnamese xôi. Sticky rice.

Her: [sniff] Oh, yeah, I guess it kind of does.

And that is all I have to say about that.

Every once in a while, these Japanese Kit-Kats surprise me. Sometimes it’s a terrible surprise, like when something that should have a savory soy sauce taste end up reeking of maple syrup. But occasionally, it’s a pleasant surprise. Such is the case with Kit-Kat Calpis flavor.

Photo by Jeremy

In case you’re not familiar with Calpis, it’s a yogurt drink that is sold in America under the name “Caplico.” This, one assumes, is because “Calpis” is distressingly close, phonetically speaking, to “cow piss.” Not really the association one wants attached to their beverage, yannow?

I wasn’t entirely certain what to expect from this one, but I didn’t have high hopes. I’m not too keen on yogurt drinks, and even worse this was yet another white chocolate variant of Kit-Kat. How could a white chocolate candy meant to taste like frothy yogurt possibly be delicious?

The answer: By totally not tasting like white chocolate or Calpis at all. Nope, this particular variant basically tastes like the candy bar version of a lemon poppyseed cookie. Is that rad, you may wonder? The answer is yes: It is rad. The flavor is largely concentrated in the wafer-n-creme portion of the bar, but there’s a faint hint of lemon to the chocolate as well. It’s a well-balanced mix, not overwhelming at all, and does a lot to redeem the entire concept of a white chocolate Kit-Kat.

I mean, I’m not gonna run out and marry this variant or anything, but it’s good!

Welp, I’ve been dreading this one for a while now, but I feel kind of obligated since Chris Kohler was kind (?) enough to donate the subject to the cause. And Cat started some hardcore diet of sadness and deprivation today, so it seemed as good a time for me to suffer as any. Love and solidarity through shared palate punishment, and all that. And thus I bring you: Kit-Kat Densetsu Banana Bar Edition.

Pray for me.

Photo by Jeremy

The notion of a Kit-Kat Banana Bar makes my stomach flip-flop a bit for not one but two, two, two exciting reasons!

First: it’s a Kit-Kat bar, not the usual mini-Kats I’ve been writing about, which means that it’s basically a single Kit-Kat stick xeroxed to brobdingnagian size, with all its component bits basically maintaining the same ratios and proportions as its smaller counterpart. Look at the thickness of that, uh, chocolate? If you can really call a waxy, yellow, banana-flavored substance “chocolate.” (Legally, I don’t think you’re allowed.) The scaled-up size means that if there’s a part of the bar I don’t like, it’s not a delicate hint like on a normal Kit-Kat. No, it’ll be a monstrous, never-ending beating of my taste buds.

Secondly: banana. I like bananas as much as the next dude, provided the next dude isn’t a monkey, but banana candy does not have a good track record in the history of our humble species. Banana-flavored sweets tend to be cloyingly perfumed and generally just too danged strong, savagely inflicting a chemical fruit taste upon your gentle taste buds without even offering a decent amount of potassium to justify the assault.

Needless to say, I approached this venture with some trepidation.

Funnily enough, though, that terror wasn’t fully justified. I can’t say I’ll be going out any time soon to stock up on Banana Kit-Kat bars, but at the same time I don’t feel a need to scald my tongue until it forgets the heart-rending sensation of what it’s like to taste, either. I have had considerably worse in the course of this endeavor, that’s for sure.

This bar has two redeeming traits. First, while the yellow “chocolate” is very definitely banana-flavored, it’s not stridently so. Uh, assuming flavor could be said to be strident. It’s nowhere near as delicious, rounded, or mellow as a real banana, but so far as grotesque polychemical mockeries of fruit go, it’s pretty alright. And secondly, the makers of this particular confection had the good grace not to make the wafer-and-creme filling part taste like banana, too. The actual flavor of it was sort of lost amidst the banana-ness of the coating, but at least it wasn’t suffused with perfumed faux-fruit essence. The straightforward neutrality of the wafer is a sort of… of… flavor oasis for your tongue. The eye of the fake-banana storm. A seventh-inning stretch for your tongue amidst an imaginary plantain home run rally.

I guess what I’m saying is that the Kit-Kat Banana Bar is surprisingly inoffensive — maybe well-balanced, even. So I guess we can take Japan off the trade embargo list again. You guys got lucky this time.