Gift Idea: Butcher Box

Butcher Box is a meat delivery service specializing in grass fed beef, organic chicken and heritage pork. They offer 4 different boxes with a variety of meats and cuts for $129, which includes shipping.

The content of the boxes vary depending on what cuts they have available and they appear to source from a variety of producers. The company sent me some samples and they were tasty.

Pork chops were excellent, flavorful and juicy. Beef top sirloin was a beautiful cut, but people who haven't cooked grass fed beef before should note that it's quite lean and can be tough - marinating it is key. A package of Pederson's Bacon (the only meat with the source listed on the package) from Texas looked like mostly fat but was crisp and tasty when cooked up.

For a meat lover, a Butcher Box would make a great gift.

A House of Bricks...and Meat: Les Trois Petits Cochons

Founded in 1975, Les Trois Petits Cochons was an American pioneer in the sale of French style charcuterie, pate and other meats. For many years, even after the advent of the internet, they stayed small and mostly East Coast focused.  Recently, they have had a change in management and seem to be branching out.

The company sent me a sample pack of pates, sausages, salami, duck confit and cornichon.

Chicken Sausage with Spinach and Gruyere

I'm not usually a huge fan of packaged, gourmet sausage, particularly chicken sausage, but these were great. It's a mild white sausage, sort of weisswurst-like, with a very subtle gruyere flavor. It's tasty and goes well with a nice, seeded mustard.

Saucisson Sec Aux Herbes de Provence

This was a delicious pork salami with a nice balance of spices and a light garlic note. While it's a dry salami, it's juicy and satisfyingly chewy, as opposed to some salamis that are harder.

Duck Confit

These are packaged confit of duck leg and thigh. I'm a big fan of duck confit. These are a little on the salty side but quite rich with great flavor. Shredded and lightly fried to crisp up the fat, the duck was fantastic in a salad, a sour vinaigrette providing a nice contrast to the duck's fat and salt.

Mousse Imperiale is a pork and chicken liver mousse with truffles. There isn't much truffle influence, but the pate itself is fantastic, my favorite of the three.

Terrine de Trois Rois is a terrine with layers of of Armagnac macerated prunes, duck foie gras and some sort of chicken sausage. The foie and macerated figs were great and went perfectly together, but the chicken was like an unwelcome guest at this party, its gelatinous texture a distraction from the creamy foie gras.

Wild Boar Pate is wild boar with pork and chicken liver pate, chestnuts and raisins. This was another great pate with sweet and savory notes.

Cornichons

These were pretty basic but tasty cornichon. Sour pickles are the perfect accompaniment to a charcuterie plate.


The overall quality of these products was outstanding. I would buy pretty much all of it again, and given how much I enjoyed the Trois Petits Cochons mousses, pates and sausages, I will certainly try other varieties.

Many Les Trois Petits Cochons items are available on Amazon, and their website also lists various markets that carry their products.

Five Foods You Should Never Buy

I'm all for convenience food. We all lead busy lives, and we don't always have time to cook. That being said, there are some packaged foods I don't get. Even in a time crunch, these things can easily be made at home and are so much better than store bought equivalents.

Simple Syrup: The people who managed to bottle and sell simple syrup are operating on a PT Barnum level.  It's sugar water for God's sake.  Sugar + water + 3 minutes in the microwave. Oh, you want some fancy, mint infused simple syrup. Take it out of the microwave and immediately throw in a bunch of mint leaves. Done.

Croutons: Slice bread, coat with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, add some crushed garlic if you want, in the oven for five minutes. Boom. Better than any of those salted pebbles they sell at the store.

Salad Dressing: I really dislike most bottled salad dressing. Making a simple vinaigrette takes all of five minutes, and you can vary it by just throwing in whatever's in your cupboard: Tabasco? Sure. Worcestershire? Why not. Dijon Mustard? Definitely. Angostura bitters? Might as well. A simple blue cheese dressing doesn't take much longer.

Tortilla Chips: You don't need a deep fat frier, just a frying pan. Slice corn tortillas, fry in oil, flip and salt. You will never buy a bag of chips again. The only challenge is not eating all of them as they come out of the pan.

Prosciutto. Don't tell me you're still buying prosciutto. Give me a break! All you need to do is get a leg from a six month old Duroc hog, cure it and hang it in your meat cellar for 12 to 18 months. Well, okay, maybe some things should be left to the professionals (or Oliver Klimek).

What would you add to the list?

Ham Tasting

American country hams are tragically underappreciated. Few people know that across the mid-south, we have purveyors of cured hams comparable in quality to Italian prosciutto and Spanish jamon. Last year, I wrote about my experience buying a leg of Newsom's Ham Country Ham.

Recently, I was lucky to join a group of friends in a country ham tasting, featuring five hams from Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.  Below are the hams we tasted ranked from my fifth to first place pick. In parenthesis I've listed the number that corresponds to the picture above.

5.  Edward's Virginia Smokehouse, Surry, VA (#5 in the picture). The aroma was very smoky with some bacon notes. Texture is very dry. Palate was very salty and very smoky. There were fat on edges but it was fairly lean overall. It has a funky finish and is a bit peppery. This one had more smoke and salt than pork flavor. It was very dry and the only one I really didn't care for.

4. Kite's Country Hams, Wolftown, VA (#2). This one had a funky, gym sock aroma. The texture was moist, medium salty, with not much smoke; it was fairly fatty. It was more funky on the aroma than the palate. It had a nice fresh taste and a soft mouthfeel. It was pretty good stuff.

3. Col. Bill Newsom's, Princeton, KY (#3). This is the ham I wrote up last year. The aroma was bacony. The texture was medium between dry and moist.  On the palate, it was medium salty and very smoky with lots of bacon flavor. It was nicely veined with medium funk. Bacon notes ruled this one; it is very tasty and was a favorite of a number of the tasters.

2. Benton's, Madisonville, TN (#1). This had a nice fresh aroma, dry texture and was fairly salty. There wasn't much in the way of smoke. It was nicely marbled and had some good funk. I thought it was very well balanced, not too extreme in smoke, salt or funky notes.

1. Father's Country Hams, Bremen, KY (#4). This one has a strong aroma of BBQ ribs. The texture was melt-in-your-mouth soft. On the palate, it was fairly salty, not as smoky as the nose with a light funk. It was fairly lean. Most importantly, this one had a beautiful, pure pork flavor. It was super-rich, almost like liver in its richness and was packed with flavor. This one was a transcendent ham for me, about as good as any ham I've eaten.

I have to say, this was probably one of the most fun tastings I've ever done. Hams 1 through 3 were all fantastic. I guess I'm not as big a fan of the Virginia offerings.

If you're not up for a whole ham, many of these producers sell slices or chunks of their great hams. It's a fantastic holiday gift for any pork lover.

Ham from Bourbon Country: Col. Bill Newsom's Kentucky Ham

Kentucky is most known for bourbon and horses, but it really should be equally known for ham. Kentuckians will be quick to tell you how great their hams are, and I've even known people who have done Kentucky ham tours (they should make a ham trail like the Kentucky Bourbon Trail).

For the holidays, I was lucky enough to get a whole country ham from Col. Bill Newsom's in Princeton, Kentucky. A whole Kentucky ham is a massive thing; this one weighed 17 pounds and was a full foot and a half long. It requires a deli slicer (which luckily, I have) and a hacksaw (which I had to buy).  This is the story of a boy and his ham.

First, a quick aside on country hams.  When you think of a roast ham or an Easter ham or one with pineapples on it, that's a city ham; those are wet cured and a totally different beast.  A country ham is dry cured and aged.  Prosciutto and Jamon Serrano are probably the most famous examples.

Kentucky country ham is in the same family, but strangely, almost every recipe or instruction I've seen for it recommends cooking it.  Maybe it's because of the American aversion to eating uncooked pork (which is what prosciutto is as well...remember these things are salt cured for over a year), but can you image sticking a Jamon Iberico in the oven?  It would be like drinking a Very Very Old Fitzgerald with Coke.  If I had 17 pounds of what is essentially American prosciutto, I was going to do it right.

And so I hacked my way into the behemoth.  For my first go, I hadn't bought the hacksaw yet, and it was tough going with a serrated knife. The pig skin is leather-thick so it took a lot of work.  My efforts looked less like this and more like this, but I managed to get the job done and free a chunk from the center of the leg. Then I ran it through my deli slicer on as thin a setting as I could manage, slicing against the grain (as you should with any meat) into beautiful, nearly transparent pieces with white veins of fat running throughout.

This stuff is fantastically good.  It's better than any prosciutto I've had.  The aroma is amazing; it permeates the entire room with a deeply porky perfume. Like a Spanish jamon, it's richly porky, but it's also got a funk that you don't get in prosciutto; it's salty but not overwhelmingly so.  It was hard not to eat every piece I sliced (which is why I could never work at a deli).

The tougher pieces near the bones are great for cooking (throwing in a few thicker slices with some eggs makes one of the best scrambles ever), and there's a whole hock that can be used to add flavor to pretty much everything, but the bulk of this is going to be thin sliced and consumed.

I have no idea why Kentucky hams don't have the same reputation as European hams, but this one was clearly of the same caliber.

Col. Bill Newsom's country hams are $6.29 per pound and are nitrate free.  They also have a prosciutto style ham that is even further aged, and if you have any questions, give them a call. Nancy the Ham Lady is more than happy to chat about hams.

Shanghai Surprise: Shanghai No. 1 Seafood Village

Shanghai No. 1 Seafood Village is unlike any San Gabriel Valley Shanghainese restaurant I've been to. Located at the strip mall at 250 West Valley Boulevard in San Gabriel (the same strip mall that contains Beijing Restaurant), the decor can best be described as bordello. The color scheme is black and red with lots of black trim. The chairs are studded with buttons that look like diamonds. The whole place has a feel that you've stumbled back to a ninteenth century bordello or maybe an old Victoria era locomotive dining car.

The menu reminded me of an issue of one of those hair style books at a salon, nearly a full inch thick and packed with large color pictures. The size of the thing seems daunting until you realize that there are only two or three dishes on each page, though it spans from traditional Shangahinese dishes to a dim sum type menu to a vast array of dishes utilizing everything from frog to sea cucumber. The food though, is fabulous.

We split our order between recognizable Shanghainese favorites and dishes we were less familiar with. Among those more recognizable, the highlight was the shen jian bao, traditional Shanghainese pork buns. The buns were crisp and crunchy on the bottom, soft on top, and oozed juice when we bit into them. Xiao long bao were also very well done, certainly as flavorful as my other favorites at Dean Sing World. Spare ribs were rich and tender, though the sauce had less of an anise touch than I'm used to. Stir fried green beans were very good, but about what you would expect. All of these dishes were good, but the shen jian bao are the ones I would be certain to get on a return visit.

Of the dishes I was less familiar with, Old Alley Pork was probably the most intriguing. Served in a red clay pot, the dish consisted of nearly glowing red cubes of pork, equal parts meat and fat. The meat was tender and the fat had a surprisingly toothsome consistency which made you less conscious that you were eating a big hunk of fat. The whole thing was sweet and red. Buried in the pot along with the pork were strips of tofu and a hard boiled egg, all of it stewed in the same, nicely spiced sauce. This was a massively rich pork dish. There was an addictive quality to it, but I still couldn't eat more than about one hunk of pork (which was fine since a small order only comes with five pieces).

Also suprisingly good were the broad beans, big fava beans served in a slightly sweet broth that tasted of sesame oil and was dotted with scallions. The favas retained their texture and picked up all of the good flavors of the sauce. This is one I really couldn't stop eating.

To the extent that any of the dishes had issues, it was mostly in the direction of blandness. Braised three strings, while visually striking with strings of ham, chicken and vegetable, the whole thing doesn't taste like all that much. Similarly, pea shoots in broth were fairly bland, accented only with a bit of salt, it seemed.

This certainly isn't your typical San Gabriel Valley restaurant experience. The service is very formal, though the waitstaff is very polite and extremely attentive. We had a waiter staioned alongside our table for nearly the entire meal. And the prices here are higher than than usual as well (at least for the usual budget friendly SGV), more akin to a place like Sea Harbor than your typical Shanghainese joint.

It may be more of a special occasion stop, but Shanghai No. 1 offers a more refined take on Shanghainese with lots of good dishes and a few (shen jian bao, old alley pork, broad beans) that are really memorable. If you're a fan of Shanghainese, it's definitely worth a stop.


Shanghai No. 1 Seafood Village
250 W Valley Blvd
San Gabriel, CA 91776
(626) 282-1777

Umamicatessen: Willie Wonka's Meat Factory

If instead of setting his eyes on chocolate, Willie Wonka had gone into the meat business, you might imagine a world of high end pork rinds, pig ear garnished cocktails and foie gras doughnuts, and sure enough, all of those things are on the menu at Umamicatessen, the new restaurant from the Umami Burger group.

Located downtown, the cavernous, high ceilinged restaurant's menu is broken into three concepts, each with its own name and style. There is a regular Umami Burger; a Jewish style deli called Cure, and a pork/cured meat/charcuterie section known as Pigg. The Umami Burger menu will be familiar to anyone who has been to one of those outposts. The New York deli has the deli staples you might expect such as knishes, matzoh ball soup and corn beef sandwiches. Each concept was designed by a different chef.

Being a pork fan, I was immediately drawn to the Pigg section of the menu, and was pretty pleased with its offerings. Designed by San Francisco chef Chris Cosentino, Pigg features a wide variety of pork products. The Cone o' Cracklins is a cone of pork rinds seasoned with sherry vinegar and sage and advertised as "100% lard fried." These rinds were light and fluffy with just a slight pork inflection. Far from the grease bombs that are packaged rinds or chicharron, they had the texture of those puffed shrimp chips and were surprisingly free of grease.

My favorite offering though, was the pork liver pate sandwich. Served on a ciabatta roll, the liver was rich and juicy, shimmering with fat, more like a lobe of porky foie gras than a typical liver pate. The arugula and caramelized onions offered just enough sweet and acid to cut the fat. This is really a superior sandwich which I will definitely return to.

For dessert, well, I do love the doughnuts, and in these last days of legal foie gras, how can I not order a foie gras doughnut. The FJ&J is a doughnut stuffed with foie gras and berry jam and topped with peanuts (pictured at right bottom). When you cut it open, the foie, in liquid form, explodes out of the pastry like the liquid center of a molten chocolate cake. The first bite of this is a heavenly mix of sweet jam, fatty foie, pastry and peanuts, but it doesn't hold up as well beyond that first bite. It's one of those high concept dishes that isn't quite as good as amazing as it sounds, though still worth trying.

The tres leches, cajeta doughnut (pictured at right top) was excellent, topped with cinnamon studded whip cream and filled with a milky sauce that references a tres leches cake.

Excessive, silly, strange, delicious, Umamicatessen has everything except the Oompa Loompas.

Umamicatessen
852 S Broadway
Los Angeles, CA 90014
(213) 413-8626

No Fry Zone: (fōnuts)

Fonuts, or (fōnuts) as the proprietors spell it, is a shop on West Third Street that sells non-fried doughnuts (i.e. faux-nuts, get it?). It's hard to understand what would make someone make a non-fried doughnut. The first guess might be that they would do it for health reasons, but given that these are decked out with thick, syrupy toppings, filled with creams and even sprinkled with bacon, I'm thinking this wasn't a health decision. Whatever the reason for the decision, they should reconsider.

Like most doughnut shops, Fonuts has cake and yeast varieties. The cake do fine, they are cake after all. The unfried yeast doughnuts have a taste and consistency similar to Portuguese sweet bread. It's not offensive but it doesn't have the yeasty zing of a good yeast doughnut, plus that type of bread has a perpetually stale mouthfeel.

It's sad because the toppings at Fonuts are remarkably good. The Hawaiian doughnut is a round yeast doughnut filled with an almost mousse like coconut cream with a strong coconut flavor; it's rolled in powdered sugar and just a touch of salt. The sugar/salt/coconut combination is unexpectedly brilliant. The salted caramel doughnut has a wonderfully thick caramel topping with a creamy consistency. The maple bacon doughnut has a white glaze which tastes more of vanilla than maple and a nice sprinkling of bacon; it catches the sweet/smoky/salty balance exactly without any unwanted grease. The PB&J has a rich, dark filling with a strong burst of peanut butter. While they run quite sweet, the flavor combinations are wonderful and are clearly made with great care. The problem is that they lose out to the flat flavor of the bread. While eating them, I couldn't help but think, my God, this would make a really great doughnut, like Doughnut Plant great. Eating at Fonuts is like living a pastry tragedy.

I get that this is an innovation or gimmick (the difference can be hard to tell), but please Fonuts, get a fryer and make us some real doughnuts.

(fōnuts)
8104 W. 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90048
(323) 592-3075

Going Wako for Fried Pork: Wako Donkasu

It just so happened that while I was on a fried pork binge (albeit a Oaxacan one), Jonathan Gold published a review of a Koreatown tonkatsu restaurant. I'm a big fan of tonkatsu, the Japanese, panko breaded, deep fried pork cutlet. The stuff is ubiquitous here in Koreatown, but most of it is sub-par - tough, dry meat, fried to death and buried in goopy sauce. But not so Wako Donkasu.

Wako Donkasu, on Olympic a few blocks east of Normandie, is a mostly Japanese style donkatsu. The only trace of Korean cuisine are two very small but very good panchan: a tangy radish kimchi and a wonderfully garlicky dish of sliced, pickled jalapeños.

The pork is tender and juicy with a light, crispy crust. For the sauce, you are initially given a bowl of freshly roasted sesame seeds with a wooden pestle to pulverize them with. The waiter then dumps the sauce on top and you mix the sesame seeds throughout, which gives the sweet and fruity (but not overly gloppy) sauce a nice nutty fragrance.

We also tried the fried New York strip which was also excellent. It was fried just as carefully as the pork but packed in even more flavor and had better contrast when combined with the sauce.

The combo comes with a fried protein (pork, beef or chicken), a pile of cabbage salad, soba noodles, a fried shrimp and a fried potato ball (think fried mashed potatoes). The soba was fine, but nothing special. The things to get here are the fried meats.

This place is dangerously close to where I work and live. I see lots of fried pork in my future.


Wako Donkasu
2904 W. Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90006
(213) 387-9256

Smoke & Spice: Hunan Restaurant

I was first turned on to Hunan Restaurant in San Gabriel by the inimitable Tony C. aka SinoSoul, recently deemed "LA's Most Controversial Food Blogger." While much of Tony's content may be provocative, he knows his Chinese food, and Hunan Restaurant is some fabulous stuff.

Hunan cuisine, is of course, spicy, but also fragrant with herbs and preserved (i.e. smoked) meats. I'm told that Hunan Restaurant smokes their meats in-house. The interplay of smoke and spice is one of the things that is unique and crave-worthy about Hunan cuisine and one of the strengths of Hunan Restaurant.

The menu at Hunan Restaurant (sometimes called Hunan's Style Restaurant or Hunan's Restaurant) is not particularly helpful to the English speaker, though it is filled with some fairly amusing translations, including a category of dishes called "Hot Pot Soil Food." I'll do my best to describe the dishes in way that makes them easy for the non-Chinese speaker to identify. If anyone happens to know the Chinese names to these dishes, please leave them in the comments, and I'll add updates.

My favorite dish at Hunan Restaurant is a smoked pork with bean curd. Unfortunately, the menu description is something vague like "Assorted Preserved Meats" but what you get is smoked pork belly slices with slivers of fried bean curd, all buried in piles of leeks and peppers. The smoked pork is deeply smoky with fat that melts in your mouth. If you served it without the peppers and bean curd, you would think it came out of a Carolina BBQ pit. It's some of the best smoked pork I've had. Add to that the cushiony, chewy bean curd slices and searing peppers, and you have a dish that is near perfect. I would eat as much as I could, rest to allow the burn to subside, and then go at it again.

Also excellent was the stir fried (non-smoked) lamb with peppers, stir fried with gobs of cilantro. Again, there was a great flavor interplay, this time between pungent lamb, cilantro and other herbs and again, all those peppers.

As a palate soother, the restaurant gives you a free bowl of its sweet pumpkin soup. The bright yellow soup has a smooth, creamy broth with small chunks of pumpkin. It's mild, sweet flavor is the perfect salve in between spicy bites.

The food is generally quite spicy but not inedibly so (at least not what was served to a table full of white folks). If you go with folks aren't huge on spice or bring kids like we do, there are noodles, scallion pies, fried rice and dumplings, all nicely done but none particularly exciting.

If what you want is exciting food though, go for the pork, and savor every luscious bite.

Hunan Restaurant
529 E Valley Blvd
San Gabriel, CA 91776
(626) 288-0758

Salty Pig - Edwards Meats

For my birthday, I am lucky enough to get a certain amount of cured pork products. This year, it was a gift packet from Edwards Meats in Virginia. The sample included come uncooked ham slices, a packet of bacon and some sausage links, which I tackled one at a time.

I fried up the uncooked ham slices in a skillet and deglazed with coffee to make red eye gravy. They were very tasty, like a great diner breakfast ham, but extremely salty. Even with the high salt factor (and I have a high tolerance for salt), they were good enough to polish the whole packet, and the gravy helped cut the salt.

The bacon was very nice but not so different in quality from the Nieman Ranch bacon I get at Trader Joe's.

The sausage was very had good flavor but was better in pieces than eaten as a whole sausage. It's a dense sausage and, like the ham, quite salty. It's great cut up into small pieces, eaten with toothpicks or as an ingredient in omelets, greens or some other concoction (I bet it would be fantastic in jambalaya).

Overall, despite a pretty high sodium level, this was some good pork.

Farmers Market Pork - Jimenez Family Farm

It's amazing how much protein you can get at the Sunday Hollywood Farmer's Market these days. A few years ago, it was just produce. Now you can get fish, oysters, bison, butter, cheese, pork, beef, sausages and more.

One of my favorite meat purveyors is the Jimenez Family Farm stand. Located on the east side of Ivar, north of Selma, it used to be my go-to place for lamb. Oh the lamb roasts and steaks I made from their gamy, domestic lamb. Apparently though, they no longer carry lamb, so instead I went for some pork. Well, the pork was as good as the lamb. A bone-in shoulder, roasted with a nice wet rub, turned crisp on the outside with sections of white and red on the inside. This was beautiful stuff.

They also have goat and rabbit, which I'll have to work up some never for as I've never before cooked them.

Check it out!

NoHO Thai: Swan

I used to go to NoHO for Thai quite often in the days of the great Wat Thai Temple food fair. Once the Temple shut down its weekend food stalls, a few years ago, I spent some time looking for NoHo alternatives, hitting Krua Thai and Sri Siam, but since then, I've stuck closer to home. Finding myself heading to the Valley, I asked my colleagues at Chowhound for a recommendation, and they did not disappoint. From their recommendations, I chose Swan Thai.

Swan Thai on Sherman Way just east of Coldwater, was my latest NoHo try. This is one of those places where pretty much everything is great. Chinese broccoli with crispy pork was better than most I've tried. The pork was fried up to chewy, crispy little chicharrones, the sauce was rich and porky, my only complaint was that there weren't enough of those addictive little pork pieces. Papaya salad was a fine specimen, as was the Thai sausage. The stir fried morning glories, one of my favorite dishes but one that is sometimes mostly garlicky, had garlic but also a real rich meaty flavor. One of my favorite dishes was the oxtail soup, a super-beefy, super rich and spicy beef broth.

This place is definitely going on the must-return list.

Swan Thai
12728 Sherman Way
North Hollywood, CA 91605
(818) 764-1892

Breakfast Pork - BLD

I've long heard about BLD (short for Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner) and its massive pancakes and other breakfast treats (I've mostly heard about the B as opposed to the LD). I finally made it over and was very impressed with the food, if not the rather lackluster service.

This place has been thoroughly reviewed, but I wanted to highlight the braised pork and poached egg breakfast. A Benedict type dish, it features braised pork with hollandaise on toast. The braised pork is fantastic with lots of red wine and caramelized onion notes. The hollandaise is subtle and not at all heavy, which makes it a good complement to the richenss of the pork.

A side of Nueske bacon (what better to accompany pork than a side of pork) was thickly cut and cooked to perfection with nicely caramelized edges.

I'm looking forward to trying the rest of the BLD menu, if I can ever order anything other than the braised pork benedict.


BLD
7450 Beverly Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 930-9744

Pork Pump at Yu Garden

Over the summer, I posted about the pork pump at the Shanghainese restaurant Wok and Noodle. In the comments, Tony C., the inimitable SinoSoul recommended the pork pump at Yu Garden in San Gabriel. It takes me a while to work up to a pork pump, so I took some time, but did manage to head their recently.

For those who don't read Chinese, it can be a little tricky to pick out the pork pump on a menu. At Wok and Noodle, it's "degreased and braised boneless pork leg shank." At Yu Garden, there were two potential items. One was, I think, just labeled braised pork and the other was House Special Braised Pork Shank. I went with the shank, which turned out to be the pork pump.

This was a great pork pump. Occasionally, the meat inside the pump is a bit dry, but in this one, it was moist and fully flavored by the sauce, which had really permeated the thing. The fat was rich and sticky, and after the meat was gone, it was pretty hard not to just eat the fat and skin. On the whole, I liked this pump better than the version at Wok and Noodle, as the whole thing really came together more. I'll have to try it against some of those classic pork pumps that I haven't tried for a while.

While the pork pump was great, and they did a very nice pork fried dumpling, most of the rest of the meal was lackluster. The xiao long bao were dry, with very little broth and the skins were tough. The pickled napa and pork soup was bland, and the scallion pancake was too greasy.

This is a pork pump place, and it would be wise not to wander too far off the menu.


Yu Garden
107 E. Valley Blvd. (just east of Del Mar)
San Gabriel, CA 91776
(626) 569-0855

More than Bread: Qing Dao Bread Food

In my endless quest for great dumplings, especially in the wake of Dumpling Master's closure, I have been scouring the San Gabriel Valley for great dumplings. My latest stop was the Qing Dao Bread Food, which specializes in dumplings and buns.

Overall, the buns an dumplings here were a bit uneven, though the good things were very good. Boiled lamb dumplings were fantastic, with a great well-seasoned lamb filling (indeed, better than those I used to get at Dumpling Master). The fried dumplings were a bit too doughy for me and the other bread heavy buns were pretty unexciting. There was a traditional, but well done pork bao, but for some reason, it's only on the menu in Chinese. Look for it directly under the pork with cabbage on the "Fried Stuffed Dumpling" portion of the menu.

My favorite dish, though, was the noodle soup listed as "pork chop with mustard greens." They nailed every element here, soup, meat and noodle. It was a dark, porky broth with chewy, handmade noodles. The chunks of pork chop, marinated in a sweet soy glaze, were fall off the bone tender. I slurped up all the broth I could and delighted in the varying textures of noodle and pork. Great stuff. This was definitely the best dish of the meal, and the kind of thing I will be craving for a long time.

Between the soup and the lamb dumplings, Qing Dao will be a definite return trip and I will want to try more of their boiled dumplings, but next trip, I'll stay away from the buns and fried dumplings.

Qing Dao Bread Food
301 N. Garfield Ave. #G
Monterey Park, CA 91754
(626) 312-6978

Butchering the Pig

How did I miss this?

One of Mozza2Go's classes for their "scuola di pizza" was entitled "Introduction to Pig Butchery" and included this great description:

Join Mozza Chef Chad Colby as he demonstrates how to utilize a whole pig and turn it into a meal.

Yes, for only $150, I could have learned how to butcher a whole pig. Now granted, this is not the most practical of classes for the lay-cook. I mean, the closest I ever come to a whole pig is at the LA County Fair, but it just seems so cool.

If anyone has taken the class, please chime in. I'd love to hear about it and to know what you did with the snout.

Shen Jian Bao at Shau May

I stopped by Shau May in Monterey Park because I heard they did a great version of one of my favorites, the Shangahineses bun, shen jian bao. The place is an impressive looking set up with a huge menu divided into northern, eastern and southern Chinese sections as well as a Taiwanese section. You order at the counter where they have a large display of Chinese charcuterie as well as a dessert bar filled with various porridges and boba accompaniments. But I was there for the shen jian bao.

These were good bao. Perfectly cooked, soft with a nice crisp bottom and topped with the traditional scallions and black sesame seeds. They explode with jucie when you bite in, like the bun equivalent of XLB, but the flavor was what excited me. Most shen jian bao I've had have a basic, seasoned pork filling, but these were different. It was like biting into a ham or bacon dumpling. The juice and the meat had a distinctively cured taste. Different and delicious.

I didn't try anything else at Shau May because, well, I'd just eaten, but I'll be back to sample the menu and have another order of shen jian bao.

Shau May (aka Kang Kang Food Court)
104 N. Garfield Ave.
Monterey Park, CA 91754
(626) 571-2727

Hilo, Hawaii Eats

Hilo may be the largest city on the Big Island of Hawaii, but this 40,000 person burg still has the feel of a small town. Partly, by Hawaii standards, Hilo is off the beaten track. Most tourists opt for the Kona Coast on the sunny side of the island. In Hilo, nestled on the northeast side of the island, it rains nearly every day. The coast, while beautiful, is made up of volcanic rock, not sand, and the only redeeming factor for most tourists is the city's proximity to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. But I'm a big fan of Hilo with its lush rain forests and craggy coasts.

Foodwise, Hilo isn't in the league of the population center on Oahu, but it has some good stuff if you know where to look. The culinary ethnic mix is pretty similar to Oahu but with more of an emphasis on Native Hawaiian flavors where Oahu's cuisine tends to be tilted more heavily toward Asian.

I'll run through some of the better eats I experienced in and around Hilo today with a wrap up of Hilo sweets on Friday.


Ken's House of Pancakes



Ken's is a classic local diner, and it's open 24 hours which is a huge boon to the jetlagged mainlander waking up at 4:00 am. I actually didn't think the pancakes were that great, but Ken's is a haven for great local food. The loco moco (pictured above) really hit the spot. The Hawaiian breakfast classic of two eggs over a hamburger patty and rice smothered in brown sauce is the kind of thing that lasts several meals. The Ken's version has a well charred burger and a meaty brown sauce. Ken's also does a great saimin, the Hawaiian ramen with a shrimp-based broth, and I enjoyed the blood sausage breakfast, with two nicely seasoned blood sausages, eggs, and hash browns.

Ken's House of Pancakes
1730 Kamehameha Ave,
Hilo, HI 96720
(808) 935-8711


Cafe 100



Cafe 100 is a bustling lunch spot that specializes in loco mocos, but I found it lacking. We got two mocos, a traditiona and a Kalua Pig version. At $1.99, it's hard to beat the value on the loco moco, and the burger patty had a nice peppery flavor to it, but the sauce was disappointing, tasting like it came out of a packet. The Kalua Pig was bland and unexciting. A regular hamburger at Cafe 100 tasted remarkably similar to a McDonald's burger, paper thin patty and all. Given its popularity, I was disappointed that Cafe 100 just didn't measure up.

Cafe 100
969 Kilauea Ave
Hilo, HI 96720
(808) 935-8683


Verna's III

Verna's is a small plate lunch chain that has the advantage of being open 24 hours on weekends. The Kalua Pig with cabbage is ultra-smoky and mixes well with the cabbage, and the shoyu chicken, lean chicken marinated in soy sauce, was also excellent. Not the best plate lunch in Hawaii, but good stuff, and you have to love the motto: If no can, no can...if can, Verna's.

Verna's III
1765 Kamehameha Ave
Hilo, HI 96720
(808) 935-2776


Asami's Kitchen

Asami's Kitchen is an okazuya in downtown Hilo, just a few blocks from the farmers' market. Most of the choices will be familiar to any fan of okazu (spam musubi, shoyu chicken, tempura shrimp, hash patties, etc.), but my favorite thing was the shoyu pork, same as shoyu chicken, but pork. The pork was moist and full of ginger/garlic/soy/pork flavor. They also did a great nori chicken, fried chicken wrapped in seaweed. Asami's was the best okazu I had in Hilo, and I liked it better than the more popular Hilo Lunch Shop on Kalanikoa.

Asami's Kitchen
308 Kilauea Ave.
Hilo, HI 96720
(808) 935-2242


Suisan Fish Market

What's a Hawaiian vacation without poke? I loved the poke variety at Suisan Company. The ahi in the shoyu poke was fresh and clean tasting; the salmon chunks in the smoked salmon poke tasted like chunks of fresh lox, and the kimchee mussel poke had a great flavor with a bit of spice from the kimchee. The fish market is right on the water and most of the poke is super-fresh, but watch the signage as some of their dishes are previously frozen.

Suisan Fish Market
96 Lihiwai St.
Hilo, HI 96720
(808) 935-9349


Queen's Court Seafood Buffet

I wouldn't necessarily recommend the seafood buffet which is weekends only at the Hilo Hawaiian Hotel on beautiful Banyan Drive. Most of it is pretty standard hotel buffet fare, but it's notable for two things. First, the centerpieces of the mostly Hawaiian food hot side of the buffet is a whole roasted suckling pig stuffed with Kalua Pig. You can tear into the glistening red skin to reach the tender, white roast pork or you can dip some tongs into the space where its rib cage would be, which has been hollowed out and filled with the Kalua Pig. Mmmm, pork stuffed pig, and the Kalua pig is nicely done, salty and light on the smoke; take a bowl of poi and enjoy. Oh, and the second thing of note, the buffet comes with a bottomless pitcher of beer. What's not to like?

Queen's Court Restaurant at the Hilo Hawaiian Hotel
71 Banyan Dr
Hilo, HI 96720
(808) 935-9361

On Friday: Hilo Sweets.

Just Ducky: Rodded Restaurant

Just beyond the big Thaitown strip on Hollywood Boulevard lies Rodded Restaurant. Hard as it must be to have a restaurant name that sounds like an "enhanced interrogation technique," Rodded has been hanging on for quite a while with good, soulful Thai cooking.

The various pork and chicken balls are popular appetizers and I found them quite tasty (what's not to like about fried meatballs). My favorite appetizer, though, was the leek cake, a bun filled with leeks and greens which comes fried or steamed.

One of my favorite dishes was ham hock over rice. The hock is braised with a rich soy marinade that drips nicely into the rice underneath. The pork had great flavor and the sauce-drenched rice was irresistible.

I was less enamoured of the stewed duck over rice. While it was nicely flavored, the duck was tough and chewy and the fat was rubbery.

If there is a signature dish at Rodded, it is the duck noodle soup. You can choose from a variety of noodles to be added to the soup which is topped with thinly sliced pieces of duck, but it's really about the broth. Rodded's duck broth is a rich, dark brew, full of duck jus and nicely spiced. Slurp it up!


Rodded Restaurant
5623 Hollywood Blvd. (just east of Wilton)
Los Angeles, CA 90028
(323) 962-8382