Well readers, it's been a few weeks - my computer crashed, then just when it looked like it was fixed, it crashed again (it's death was final this time). Then my iPod - which doubles as my dictaphone - also died. That sad state of affairs paralyzed my writing for sometime, as the precious interviews and pictures contained within those now dead pieces of equipment were lost.
Luckily, the pictures from my time with Surly Tran, buyer from the wonderful and glorious The Brooklyn Kitchen, were saved from the wreckage (I had the prescience to not obsessively erase them from my camera as I usually do once the images are uploaded to my computer), and I was able to piece together my hand-written notes to salvage that cooking date. However, not all interviews were so lucky.
On to the story...
Surly Tran has been in the retail cooking industry for quite sometime and, before moving to The Brooklyn Kitchen as its buyer, she worked for such prestigious foodie destinations as the Broadway Panhandler and Dean & DeLuca. When I asked Surly, a native Californian, how she ended up in cooking supply retail in New York, she told me "Well, food has always been a passion... my mom is an incredible cook, and growing up, eating and cooking was what we did. Every weekend the entire family - cousins, aunts uncles - ate together, so the jobs were sort of natural, you know? Oh, and New York is New York... who doesn't want to live here?"
Surly is a gourmand's dream - she's incredibly knowledgeable, owns every imaginative cooking tool on the planet, loves to experiment in her own kitchen, is entrenched in much of the New York culinary scene, and, man, does she make a mean cocktail. When I found myself lost in Surly's passionate description of her newly-purchased corn kernel remover, I felt slightly inadequate and realized that, for the first time in a long time, I felt slightly intimidated by someone else's food smarts. Her deep familiarity with kitchen tools as well as their proper usage and care and with home cookery is, frankly, beyond my own.
Surly is Steve DeAngelis' (the subject of my last few posts) roommate and landlord - and when I arrived at her apartment, it was after shopping with Steve at the green market and I was feeling sweaty and a little tired. As soon as Steve introduced Surly to me, he exited to the patio to prep the grill and cook the corn for our lesson (that's right, two lessons in one day!). Upon his exit, Surly guided me to their hot and packed-full-of-gizmos Williamsburg-sized kitchen, and jumped into making some corn ice cream. She was 100% prepared for my visit - she had made one batch of the sweet custard the night before, and had the equipment and ingredients ready for another batch. She had even emailed me the recipe before we began.
"Well, the real first step in this recipe is removing the kernels from the cobs," she said as she showed me how the aforementioned Oxo corn stripper worked, "but I prepped that yesterday. I figured it wasn't a really important step for the blog."
She set the little plastic tool down and produced a bag of cobs and kernels from her enviable stainless-steel refrigerator. "So, once you've removed the kernels, you have to cut the cobs into thirds, well, into at least halves," Surly told me as she removed more ingredients and placed them on her counter.
From outside, Steve interrupted us by yelling (a little too loudly), "Surly! Will you turn that water on?" Surly lit the flame under the gigantic pot that Steve would later use to blanch the tomatoes and she kidded, "The things I do, he's lucky I let him live here, I tell you." I noticed that she had only put the flame on medium-high and suggested that turning the fire all the way up would make it boil faster. "Oh, no, no! Pots and pans really can't take that kind of heat. You should avoid using a high flame if you want your equipment to last a long time." This reasoning may explain why my pans all look like a they have survived a house fire.
On another burner, Surly set a more manageable sauce pan and to it added milk, cream, sugar and the broken cobs. "So, Surly, why corn ice cream? It's an interesting and kind of unusual choice," I asked as she set a shiny black vanilla pod from a jar and began to expertly removed its tiny, sweet-smelling beans with a paring knife.
"Well, I love corn. It's sweet and flavorful and it's the season. I thought it'd go really well with a vanilla bean custard. I made it last week and the flavor is just so complimentary to the vanilla and the sugar..."
She added the beans and the shell to the pot, and commented that using the back of a knife is the easiest way to remove those flavorful little specks from their leathery housing. She then moved aside some cooking tools to get to a small Cuisinart that sat on a counter that contained about 1,000 other kitchen items. "Now, we're going to puree the corn. I wanted the custard to be smooth, and if we break up the kernels, it'll give us more flavor." She dumped the contents of a Ziploc into the food processor and pureed them until they were smooth.
She added the puree to the mixture on the stove, and then we waited for contents of the pot to come to boil. Surly, continuing on our previous conversation thread, began to talk about her mom's homemade food. "She is such a fabulous cook, but her recipes are going to die with her... I don't think she thinks that any of her kids are worthy of them; she's the kind of cook that leaves out a very important ingredient or two."
I then told Surly about my attempts to learn how to make vareneky from the old ladies that cook for a church in the East Village. Even with my Ukrainian friend speaking in their mother tongue and making a strong case for me, their response was that I was welcome to volunteer for their rectory, but that they just didn't have the patience to teach me their tricks. This was, of course, after thoroughly and deliberately looking at me up and down and then made knowing faces at each other.
Surly began to describe some sort of Vietnamese dumplings that her mother makes with relish. "It will be a shame to the world if I don't get my hands on that recipe." The contents of the pot began to bubble and steam, and Surly realized that she had lost herself in talk. "Whoa, you can't let this over boil - the cream will curdle." She said, turning off the flame.
"Now, typically, you'd let this sit and steep for an hour, but since we don't have that kind of time, we're just going to make the whole thing." Surly brought out a dish of egg yolks from the refrigerator and whipped them until they were smooth; then, with a wire basket, removed the cobs and the vanilla pods from the pot.
"But before we do that, let's make a cocktail..."
(For Part II, click here; for recipes, click here.)
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