Brazil: The Ugly (or the kinda weird)
Brazil’s dessert landscape has a few more curiosities:
1. Halls (yes, the company that makes your cough drops) are candy. This realization dawned on me after seeing everyone from street vendors to grocery stores to juice bars hawking them alongside other prepackaged sweets. At first I thought, “Wow, Brazilians must have 24/7 sore throats or something– ick.” But then I peered closely and read some of the flavor names, such as ”Halls Creamy: Tropical Passion Fruit with Chocolate Center.” It’s so weird because they still sell the menthol-eucalyptus-cherry-lyptus-honey-horror flavors right alongside the sweet ones, but they just have a higher “Halls Power” rating of, like, 5 out of 5 for “extra forte-lyptus,” rather than a 1 out of 5 for “Halls Creamy: Strawberry Cream.” Do you think Brazilian kids beg for them when they’re <cough> sick like my brothers and I used to beg for completely ineffective cherry Ludens?
2. Just like the Brits, Brazilians just loooove biscuits. I would say that this love is similar to Americans and their cookies, but it’s different: there are several chain stores that are literally devoted to biscuits, Casa do Biscoito being one of them. Inside these yellow-hued wonderlands, you’ll find enormous, heaping towers of biscuits in every kind of packaging imaginable, from rolls to boxes to sacks. It’s a feast for the eyes, if not necessary the palate. Are wafer-based items included? You betcha. What would the rest of the world do without their wafers? Despite looking down my nose at them as a young dessertatarian, because I thought they were too cheap and light to be proper sweets, I have now come to appreciate their subtle charms and pleasant crunch. The wafers I tried from the Casa, however, sent my development back about a year, as I tried to go for the chocolate flavor, and, as already discussed in a previous post, found them to be totally unsatisfying. I also had to close my eyes during each bite for fear that some of the wafer shards would come flying up and blind me. On the other hand, they were so dry that the billions of crumbs that ended up in my lap just blew right off when I got up. I hope I didn’t blind anyone around me, though.
3. Do you like vaguely sweet corn pudding? Because the Brazilians do. It’s a typical street vendor food that you might think is the aforementioned quindim, but it’s more yellow-yellow what with the corn, rather than eggy golden-yellow. It’s called curau and comes in a dry-ish form wrapped in a corn husk, tamale-style, or in a cup for the wetter version. They both taste… fine… just fine.
Brazil: The Bad
I know that I’m jeopardizing Brazil’s status as one of the world’s great dessert oases and will therefore lose some of you readers here, but it simply must be said: there is almost no fine chocolate culture in that country. I confirmed this with the American owner of our bed and breakfast in Paraty (the fabulous Pousada Guaraná), who had to go all the way to São Paulo for a decent-enough cocoa to make his chocolate breakfast cake. He said there just isn’t the demand for fine chocolate as there is in New York, for example, where even the lowliest of bodegas at least stocks Lindt.
As far as I could tell, if you’re on the hunt for chocolate, you have two choices: Garoto or Cacau Show. Garoto is your average, run-of-the-mill, store-bought chocolate that comes in all manner of Euro-style bon-bons and bars, sort of like Cadbury’s in the U.K. or Hershey’s in the U.S. But I tell you this: Garoto is not even as good as Hershey’s. It’s a little gritty, totally waxy, and flavorless– like cheap Polish or Russian chocolate. Are you shocked that it’s now owned by Nestlé after being founded by a German-Brazilian in the 1920s? If you’re hankering for chocolate, eating some Garoto will be such a frustratingly bad experience, it’s probably not even worth it. You’ll moan and cry in despair and hope that at least there’s a Cacau Show store in town somewhere that you can hop a cab to. Cacau Show is the only “high-end” chocolate chain that I could find. It was actually founded by a 17 year old Brazilian kid in 1988 and is still wholly owned by the original company, which is a real feat in the monopolistic world of foodstuffs. The chocolate is unevenly good. The bars and individual chocolates were a disappointment and lacked a rich cocoa flavor. The brightly-wrapped truffles, however, were actually quite good and come in flavors like coconut, chili pepper, and hazelnut. They were probably the only chocolate I had in Brazil that I enjoyed and filled that terrible void that I was beginning to feel very desperate about.
Brazil: The Good
Brazil provides the dessertatarian with one of her most basic needs: SUGAR. I can’t help but use all screamin’ caps, because, like, seriously, Brazil has a lot of sugar– they even run their cars on it in the form of ethanol. The heft of the typical Brazilian table sugar packet is considerably more than those in the US, too. On my recent trip to fabulous Rio de Janeiro and the little colonial town of Paraty, I did indeed ingest a lot of sugar in a “when in Rome…” kind of way, of course.
Sucos (or juice) purveyors are plentiful in coastal towns like Rio and often have surfer dude names like “Winds” and “Beach Sucos.” Here you can try all manner of wonderful juices, many of which are made with fruits you never even knew existed (if you’re from the Northern Hemisphere). My favorite was the highly caffeinated and addictive açai/guarana mix, which is served in a tall ice cream sundae glass. It’s not juice so much as a melty sorbet that is piled up about an inch over the top of the glass, and it somehow stays there without overflowing. My first thought at this presentation was “I’ll never see the bottom of this glass,” but then after a few ravenous snorts, snarfs, and brain freezes, it would just… disappear. It is so dark purple, it almost looks chocolatey and has a pleasantly gritty, rich texture, with the flavor of black currants. A few others I tried were caju (or cashew fruit, has a putrid smell not unlike durian, but the flavor isn’t all bad and does grow on you when you begin to also taste something akin to pineapple); graviola (or soursop, smooth, creamy, similar to melon or pear in flavor and a favorite),acerola (acidic, berry-like, quite tart), melon (so light and sweet, another winner), guava, cupuaçu (acidic, similar to watery orange juice), and fruta do conde (or sugar-apple, tasty). At night, sucos gave way to caipirinhas, which are fruity, sugary drinks made with cachaça (or fermented sugarcane alcohol). The usual ones are lime-based, but I saw lots with passion fruit, mango, and even one with slices of cashew fruit, which has a creepily meat-like, um, flesh.
Coconut is also featured heavily in Brazilian desserts– good thing I love it, as it is one of those oddly polemical ingredients. I wonder what happened to people in their early childhoods to make them hate the taste of coconut? Did their first-grade teacher whack them with an Almond Joy bar, rather than a ruler, perhaps? Probably the best coconut dessert is also the simplest: cocada (or coconut candy), which comes in white sugar and brown sugar varieties. It’s also nicely shelf-stable, which would make it the perfect gift to bring home, if not for its brick-like weight.
Brazilian bakeries and sweets shops are wonderfully ubiquitous, from self-serve neighborhood joints offering homemade flans, puddings, and cakes, to the famous confeitarias of Manon and Columbo, where you can get French-style patisseries with a Brazilian flair. One of the most popular items is the bright yellow quindim or quindão, which is a kind of puddingy custard flan thing made with tons of egg yolks (a Portuguese technique) and coconut. Quindim actually means “girlish charms” in a Bantu language, which was spoken by African slaves in Brazil in the 17th Century, so you can learn your triangle trade history while you eat. When it’s sobremesa (or dessert) time, here are some more of the heavenly words that your pocket translator (or fluent friend) will conjure for you: dulce de leche, ice cream, tapioca, lemon/lime (you’re never sure which, since they’re both oddly called limãos), fresh fruit sorbet, guava paste, and pastry cream.
You’ll be happy and unsurprised to know that the next posts are entitled “Brazil: The Bad” and “Brazil: The Ugly (or just kinda weird, actually).”
“Hop” Movie Poster: What’s wrong with this picture?
Easter is coming up, and with it, the wonderful CANDY that is only available for a short time each year. When I was a kid, no matter how careful I thought I was being, I would always eat myself to a stomach ache, I loved that candy so much. Therefore, I know it well. As I think a lot of people do.
So what do the designers of the movie poster for the new animated/live-action film, “Hop,” take us for?
Several of these items are not typical Easter candy, such as horrible, horrible licorice All-Sorts, Gummy Bears, and peppermints, and some, namely the candy canes (huh?!?) actually go with another rather well-known holiday. I will excuse the M&M’s, which are basically the correct pastel color, but aren’t really an Easter fixture. But where are the Peeps, the fake chocolate foil-wrapped eggs that make you gag, the Cadbury Cream Eggs, or the chocolate bunnies? Could they not get a licensing agreement with them or something? You’d think that a movie like this would be a product-placement gold mine, right?
And not to nit-pick, but Easter jelly beans should be clearish, not opaque like M&M’s, and there have to be at least a few black ones.
Have the people who designed this poster ever actually celebrated, or at least stolen the candy from someone who celebrated, Easter? Yeesh. I’m sure the movie will be as brilliant as the poster, too.
Margot Restaurant: It’s Flan-tastic!
After spending a rhapsodic two and a half hours immersed in New York City’s best-kept secret, Parlor Jazz at Marjorie Eliot’s, it was time to break the spell at Margot, a Dominican restaurant in Washington Heights. At this wonderful little hole-in-the-wall, you’ll fill up on amazing roasted chicken, coconut fish, fried plantains, and rice and beans. But take heed: save room for dessert! A kindly owner/host-type fellow came to our table after our meal and presented us with the evening’s offerings of sweets: bread pudding made from croissants, flan, and rum raisin pudding. I normally don’t get too excited by these kinds of cold custardy things, because they’re made ahead of time and sometimes sit around in the fridge getting nasty. But this man had a twinkle in his eye as he described his desserts passionately, as if he made them himself… somewhat recently. There were also six of us, so half a dessert each seemed survivable for most of us. They were extraordinary:
The bread pudding was my favorite, with a rich, creamy custard, and not a hint of dryness from the bread. It was also sitting in a thick pool of what tasted like dulce de leche. The flan was perfect: not too eggy, nice and smooth, with a sweet pool of syrup. The rum raisin pudding was equally yummy, but with a strange chocolate cakey-type bottom, which I think was the only thing that didn’t work. Overall, these desserts were worthy of standing up with the great custards of the world, and I can’t wait to go back. Margot Restaurant 3822 Broadway New York, NY 10032-1547 (212) 781-8494
The Grand Tier at Lincoln Center
Does life get any better (or convenient) than eating dinner in the concert hall right before seeing the show? The Grand Tier, in the Metropolitan Opera House, has the pre-theater formula down pat. Make a reservation for 6pm, dine in relative ease for the first hour and a half, then see how the vibe of the restaurant changes as the crowd starts pouring in and the 8pm curtain time draws near. Ladies scamper to wait on long bathroom lines; your waiter, in his haste to quickly jot down your dessert order and move on to the next table, accidentally drops his pen in your lap; and all of a sudden, that big pot of tea and second glass of wine don’t sound like such good ideas anymore. But the food is excellent and most of the desserts, divine. Regard:
The Chocolate Peanut Butter Ganache Tart with caramel crema, chocolate mousse, and huckleberry jam was heavy and decadent, just like it sounds. It was like eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a candy bar at once. Sadly, because of its richness, this one will be the first one to get left behind as the bells genteelly call you to your seat. Since wasting a perfectly good dessert because of a silly thing like time is a sin to me, I wrapped our two leftover bits in an ancient purse Kleenex. This necessitated a good bit of industrious Kleenex removal with my digits when we went to eat them the next day, but we prevailed!
The Key Lime Parfait with spicebread crumble, key lime curd, and compressed pineapples wasn’t quite as delicious. The “spicebread” tasted like cheap ground-up Graham crackers and I couldn’t figure out why the white cream on top had l’air de Cool Whip. But the key lime curd was solid and I’d never heard of “compressed” fruit before. This apparently is a technique that utilizes a vacuum sealer and liquid to infuse the fruit with its own cooked juices and sometimes an external flavor like vanilla, kind of like sous-vide.
The Passion Fruit Crème Brûlée with black sesame seed and coconut macaroons was wonderful. The tangy fruit and nutty seed flavors worked perfectly in the custard, and the macaroons were a delightful little cookie bonus for added texture.
I might have gotten the old-school-sounding Chocolate Soufflé, but since it requires serving just after it’s baked and therefore requires planning, it was only available at intermission. How do you scarf down your dessert in 15 minutes and use the facilities? Well, my boyfriend’s dad informed me that the system works quite well, actually. You place your dessert order, then come back to your table at intermission, where your dessert will be magically waiting for you. If you have time for the toilet afterward, then you can give yourself a gold star.
Grand Tier150 W. 65th St
New York, NY 10184
(212) 799-3400
www.grandtierny.com
Gayle’s Chocolates: A Detroit-Area Treasure
My mom’s the best. Several years ago, she sent me back to Brooklyn with a humble-looking bar of something called ”Gayle’s Chocolates.” She always sends me home with so many wonderful sweets, that I didn’t think anything of it other than “Yay, chocolate.” We’ve got some of the best chocolate in the world here in NYC: Jacques Torres, La Maison du Chocolate, and L.A. Burdick, to name but a few. So when I finally opened my little dark chocolate bar of Gayle’s and took a bite, imagine my surprise when it turned out to be… not just good, but absolutely exquisite. Smooth, sweet, and decadent, it was the perfect chocolate. How could I have made light of my mom’s taste?
On my next trip (and subsequent visits) back to Motown, my mom took me on a Gayle’s pilgrimage. The maroon-colored store is a soda-shoppe/café/lounge mix with lots of chocolate molds of shoes in clear handbags decorating the walls. It’s so darn cozy and inviting, I would like to move in. Observe:
Accustomed to Jacques Torres’s insanely good chocolate chip cookies, I had to see if Gayle could pick up the gauntlet– turns out she can. That cookie was almost just as good– it was maybe just a tad too salty. But it had the same soft butteriness and the same actual layers of chocolate. In fact, the chocolate layer was so pronounced, the top and bottom of the cookie actually separated at one point. Extreme!
One confection I’ve never seen before: the Cakeless Fruit Cake, containing “All the good stuff without the bad!!!” This chocolate-covered treat must have been created using a sweet little bundt pan and is indeed fruit cake-like, with dried apricots, pears, cherries, plums, peaches, nectarines, brandied cherries, and pecans, all sitting atop a soft gingerbread cookie. Of course, the candy makers couldn’t resist putting a huge dollop of chocolate ganache in the center. My head spin-eth.
A word on the shape of their chocolate bars, which aren’t the usual large, thin rectangle model. They are, instead, reminiscent of gold bars in their thickness. While I respect their attempt to be different from the likes of Hershey’s, there’s a reason to keep your bars thin: you have to be able to easily break off pieces. With Gayle’s, you’re either forced to chomp down on the bar yourself, all but guaranteeing that you gobble the whole thing up by yourself, or share it with someone who doesn’t mind your copious amounts of mouth-watering-induced slobber – OR – you have to harness the power of a thousand suns and try to break it yourself, perhaps wedging it against a hardwood floor or jabbing at it with the back of a hammer, and just about suffering an exploded brain or broken hand in the process. Gayle’s: please change this. Are you trying to force me to buy one of your soft truffles instead? Because I will. So help me God I will.
Even if you’ve got no plans to head over to Royal Oak, MI any time soon to check out the Detroit Zoo, fear not: you can order Gayle’s online, and there are several locations at Detroit Metro Airport, so you can grab some to sustain you on your flight to Osaka.
Gayle’s Chocolates 417 S. Washington Royal Oak, MI 48067 248-398-0001 http://www.gayleschocolates.com/ Also at DTWDessert Gum?
Does everyone remember some years ago when there was chocolate-flavored gum? And it was disgusting? Well, it’s baaa-aaack… in the form of Wrigley’s Extra Dessert Delights Mint Chocolate Chip flavored sugar-free gum, where you can “Have Your Dessert & Chew It Too!” (Um, I usually chew my dessert first– I’m not a bird.) We all know that specific chemical the flavorists use to make “chocolate.” But the acrid taste is somewhat masked by a minty flavor, creating a “nice” balance. I’m not saying I’m cool with Wrigley’s claim that this is somehow dessert (!), but it’s worth a try… I guess:
Dera – Pakistani Falooda Kulfi
Dera, located in Jackson Heights, and the tastiest Pakistani restaurant I’ve ever been to, serves a most wonderful dessert: falooda kulfi. It comes, soup-style, in a large bowl and is best shared by two people who know each other quite well (as I believe two people sharing soup should).
Falooda is a liquidy dessert, often a sweet beverage, that comes from South Asia. From what I can surmise, Dera’s has vermicelli noodles, milk, ice shards, tulsi (basil) seeds, rose syrup, green food coloring, and both frozen and room temp kulfi. Kulfi is a traditional South Asian ice cream made from evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk, and heavy cream that is thickened with cornstarch. Observe:
This dessert is a real project to eat, and it’s got several different textures, so it’s interactive good times! The frozen kulfi comes on a popsicle stick that you scrape away at with your spoon. It’s so cold that it starts to freeze the nearby noodles as you eat, turning them from squirmy wormies to stiff wormies. The room temp kulfi is smooth, creamy, and sweet, while the basil seeds add a nice little crunch. The ice shards do get a little annoying after awhile as some of them are too big to want to bite down on, so you end up trying to avoid them to slurp up the soup. As all of the ingredients melt together, the rose syrup turns the soup a nice Pepto-Bismol shade of pink, which is dotted with the green food coloring and yellow kulfi. It is a delicious, impressionist-style masterpiece!
Dera 7209 BroadwayNew York, NY 11372
(718) 476-6516
Times Square Cheese Tour!
No, not THAT kind of cheese. The metaphorical kind that is reserved for places like Times Square. There comes a time in a young New Yorker’s life when you just have to grab a touristy spot by its points (of interest) and rediscover its “charms.”
And thus, after stops at the Whopper Bar for dinner, then the Charmin Ten Star Restroom Experience (in that necessary order), my friends and I began the dessert portion, which included Pop Tarts World, M&M’s World, and the Hershey’s Store:
At Pop Tarts World, we sampled the famous Pop Tart Sushi. Although the pieces looked like charcuterie, the flavor was far from meaty. The filling tasted like a ground-up Pop Tart wrapped up with a Fruit Roll-Up. Not God-awful, but not good either. We then tried a Cinnamon Roll Pop Tart, which was quite good (“buttery” and sugary) and the S’Mores Pop Tart, which was just a-ite. The warmed up tarts come in plastic clamshell packaging, which is pretty depressing– one measly tart per whole huge container. Our planet is going to look like the beginning of “Wall-E” soon enough at this rate. They also had free gingerbread Pop Tart samples, which were like graham crackers filled with icing. They were very dry and would have been much better warmed up. I did not attempt to use the Pop Tart Varietizer where, for $15, you can literally make any kind of Pop Tart you want, although there are enough to choose from in the store– seriously. I was also not strong enough for the Pop Tart sundae station, where, instead of ice cream as your base, you use a Pop Tart. Then you cover it with even more frosting, sprinkles, marshmallows, and a billion other things– talk about gilding the “lily.”
Next up: M&M’s World, which is a 25,000 square foot, Disney World-like three floors of all things M&M’s, like earrings, shot glasses, guitars, puppets, and Monopoly Board Games, in addition to countless silos of the candies themselves in every imaginable color including an unappetizing gray. You can get almond, peanut butter (my favorite), pretzel (a rip-off), dark chocolate (disgusting, as Mars chocolate isn’t good enough to do dark), minis, and peanut. Coconut was M.I.A., however. A chocolate scratch ‘n sniff sticker smell permeates the place when everyone knows that M&M’s actually smell like poop. In my hallowed Dairy Queen days, I recall a time when I was filling the M&M’s bin for our Blizzards, and one of my coworkers (whose back was turned to me) wrinkled up her nose, and said, “What is that smell?!” The store has a sad little “Green” section towards the back on the 3rd floor devoted to something or other about Indonesians using chocolate tree bark to make paper that is selling– for a Limited Time ONLY– at the M&M’s Store (so, um, aren’t all those people going to be out of work soon?). Well, inevitably, my group and I started craving M&M’s and inquired as to the whereabouts of those normal, boring M&M’s packets that you can get literally everywhere. ”We don’t carry them,” an employee informed us. Crestfallen, we spitefully responded that we’d just have to get a Hershey bar across the street. Oh, all the water in the world and not a drop to drink! The mediocre chocolate covered in a sweet candy shell sang its siren song to us. And yet you have to either go through the bother of buying the M&M’s in bulk from the silos or your have to buy an extortionately-priced plastic shape filled with them, such as a champagne bottle for $18.95. We grudgingly purchased a pinwheel shape, which was totally unergonomic as once you pried the damn thing open, many of the candies jumped out of the tray onto the floor. And the pinwheel spaces were too small for adult hands and had tight corners for the candies. Ironically, just outside the store, there was a street cart vending the coveted packets of M&M’s, including the suntan-lotion-tasting, yet oddly delicious, coconut ones!
What a contrast the Hershey’s Store makes. Underneath the massive 16-story marquee proclaiming Hershey’s “The Great American Chocolate Company” is a tiny, cramped, and sad little store. The lighting is a harsh white and we kept bumping into things– an employee informed us that the popular Hershey’s water bottles get knocked over all day and that the majority of their stock has rolled irretrievably underneath various display stands. There is an entire section of the store devoted to Reese’s, which I was ecstatic about as I am a huge fan of the peanut butter cups. (I used to microwave them until they were melty, then I would gobble them up and lick the leftover chocolate off the plate. What can I say? “There’s no wrong way to eat a Reese’s.”). Continuing my tour around the store, I discovered that Hershey’s owns Scharffen Berger and Dagoba (sigh). There is also a poopy chocolate smell that would waft through the store periodically– just like the fragrant aroma of the Kisses. Instead of three floors of all things Hershey, the tiny spiral staircase here leads to a visible storage area on a kind of balcony. The only excitement comes from The Original Automatic and Gravitational Chocolate Machine where you get to wear a Hershey’s Factory hat, crank a metal wheel, and watch assorted chocolate bars come down a twisty shoot and go into a bucket. Woot! Out into the cold, we divided our spoils: bags of Hershey’s Nuggets (truly delicious “extra silky” milk chocolate with toffee bits) and Reese’s Clusters (chocolate-covered peanut butter, pecans, and caramel that seemed totally unnecessary).
We also made a stop at The View lounge at the top of the Marriott Marquis, which is a bar up 48 stories with seating on a lazy Susan that features a 360° view of the City. You pass by the tempting dessert buffet every 50 minutes or so (as well as the dinner buffet, bathrooms, and, you know, exit). The chocolate fountain and petits-fours called to me as I ever-so-sloooowly orbited. Had I not spent $14 on a cocktail plus $8 cover for being present after 8pm, I might have considered the $17 for the desserts. Cruel The View. I’ll have to go back on a reconnaissance mission soon.
Pop Tarts World 128 W. 42nd St.New York, NY 10036 646-682-9977 http://www.poptartsworld.com/nyc M&M’s World 1600 Broadway
New York, NY 10036 212-295-3850 Hershey’s Times Square 717 7th Ave. New York, NY 10036 212-581-9100
http://www.hersheys.com/discover/timessquare.asp The View at the Marriott Marquis 1535 Broadway, 48th Floor New York, NY 10036 212-704-8900 http://www.theviewny.com/