Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Upper Canada Cheese Company’s Artisanal Comfort Cream vs Supermarket Brie

Cheese is cheese, isn’t it? Not necessarily. There is an obvious difference in taste and experience between artisanal cheeses & run-of-the-mill mass produced cheese. Yes, there’s definitely a price difference, but the dollar difference is reflected in the experience when you try the cheese.

I dropped by the Upper Canada Cheese Company yesterday. It’s a small, artisanal cheese operation located in Jordan Station, Ontario – basically along the way if you are traveling from the Toronto area to the Niagara region. In fact, if you’re on a winery tour of the Niagara region, it’s on the western edge of wine country – real close to two real gems of the region, Creekside and Rockway Glen. I got to try two of their cheeses: Niagara Gold, and Comfort Cream.

I’m going to tell you about the Comfort Cream camembert-style cheese. If you are familiar with brie cheese and camembert cheese, you know what this class of cheese is all about. It’s about creaminess, richness, and full, soft flavor. It’s not just about creamy richness, though – there’s a blend of subtle and enjoyable flavors. Comfort Cream is not one-dimensional – there’s a deep richness up front that I wasn’t aware of at the time (but definitely am right now by comparison with regular supermarket cheese), and it’s followed by a nice, mellow nuttiness and earthiness. It’s a darn fine cheese.

When I tried the cheese, I was told by the charming lady behind the counter that the cheese I was sampling was, in fact, not quite aged to its peak.  It was about 2 weeks short of reaching its peak – and even so, it was full of fantastic flavor. It also wasn’t as ooey-gooey creamy as it would be at its peak, but I had no issue with that at all. It was certainly a winner already in the taste department.

I sit here right now with a small wheel of Ziggy’s brie cheese. Yes, I know, I’m comparing a brie versus a camembert-style cheese. Still, it’s the closest comparison I have right now, and if I don’t tell you about this today, I’m not going to remember quite as clearly what the Upper Canada cheese was like!

The Ziggy’s cheese is enjoyable. I wouldn’t turn my nose up at it, no way. However, it is very linear and simple by comparison. There is an initial creaminess, followed by a moderate bitterness & roast nut flavor that disappears about 8 seconds later. It’s nice, but now that I’ve tried the Comfort Cream, I know that it could be so much better!

Artisanal cheese isn’t cheap. Figure on paying two or three times the cost by weight that you would for mass-produced supermarket cheese. However, for pure enjoyment and as a learning experience for your palette, I think the cost is justified – even if it’s just every once in a while!

Of course, there’s also the added benefit of supporting a local business, supporting sustainable agriculture and ethical treatment of animals, and the preservation of foodmaking artistry. Those are probably ideals that only the fortunate and privileged can really espouse on, but really, the vast majority of us in North America are fortunate and privileged enough to give some thought & consideration to these things.

If you really enjoy supermarket cheese but wish to continue learning more about the pleasures and complexities that cheese can offer, be sure to check out artisanal cheeses – and then compare against the regular cheeses that you’ve already been enjoying. I promise you it’ll be a worthwhile experience.

In the meantime, I’ll tell you more about other cheese experiences later. In fact, by the end of the week I’ll probably be able to tell you how Upper Canada Cheese Company’s Niagara Gold cheese compares to something like Oka Classic … and Oka Artisanal.

Kenzo Ramen – Downtown vs North York

I like good soup noodles, and I’m willing to pay a little more for a good, quality product. I can make damn good noodles at home, but sometimes when I’m out and about, I still want to eat some noodles. There are two Kenzo Ramen joints in Toronto – one downtown on Dundas, just west of Bay St, and the other in North York on Yonge Street, just south of Steeles. While I was underwhelmed with the downtown Kenzo, I’m positively disappointed by the North York location.

I’m told (by others online) that the North York location is actually owned and operated by a different group of people than the downtown location.  The original owner of the uptown location sold the store and opened the downtown location.  The folks online say that the North York location has, at least, kept the quality at the same level.

I’m not so sure about that. However, it’s not just the food quality that leads me to say that I unequivocally prefer the downtown location and that I will not return to the North York location.  It’s also the service and atmosphere.

First, let’s talk about the food. The reason why I wanted to try out Kenzo in the first place is that I’d heard that they had the best ramen in the city – not Tokyo-good, unfortunately, but at least Toronto-good. The noodles were supposed to be good, and just as important, the soup base was supposed to be good. When I ate at the downtown location, yes, the soup base was indeed very nicely done and enjoyable, and the noodles were good.  Overall, an enjoyable experience, though the environment could have been better.

How so? The decor downtown is lovely, but it’s so low-energy there. The place was full that night, but it was so quiet. It felt like I was in a French fine-dining establishment, but that’s not how a casual noodle joint is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be livelier, and especially for Japanese noodles, people are supposed to make some noise when eating. Yep, you’re supposed to slurp your noodles when eating the Japanese way! It was altogether too quiet, and I just didn’t feel comfortable in that environment for noodles. Plus, the service was slow. Still, I left the place thinking the soup base was really well done, and I might come back again.

The uptown location, however, does not meet the same quality in any way. The soup base was nice enough, but it definitely wasn’t as good as the downtown soup base. The noodles were alright – probably on par with the downtown location. Still, much of the experience comes from the soup base. I will say, however, that they added big chunks of meat into my bowl which was nice. Unfortunately, they gave me the wrong dish – I had actually ordered a different ramen! That’s alright in the end, though. They gave me the same one I ordered at the downtown location so I was able to do a direct comparison.

Service was nonexistent at the uptown location, primarily because it’s too much for just 2 people to handle. The uptown location is run by an older husband and wife couple. The husband is rather stern, and was pretty cold when taking our order, when giving us the bill, and when giving us our change. The wife is friendly enough, but she’s got so much to handle that she isn’t able to give any table sufficient attention. It took a while to get my tea refilled, and while I would have liked to have a third glass, I didn’t want to wait another 15 minutes for a refill.

Plus, I realized when I got home that the guy had shortchanged us. Oh well. I’m not going back there again in any case – that’s just the kicker and the cherry on top.

I cannot in good conscience heartily recommend the downtown Kenzo, but if you must try out one or the other, go downtown. Skip the uptown location. Maybe go to Ajisen Ramen a little bit further down on Yonge Street if you’re up north – the noodle quality isn’t as good, but the soup base is alright and the service and atmosphere are much better.

CPR Lesson – FHM/Maxim Style

I found this video pretty damn funny because it’s (a) absurd, but also (b) imaginative. Sex sells, and scantily-clad models are used to push many products every day. So, why not take that approach for public education that could save lives: cardiopulmonary resuscitation, better known as CPR?

It’s an absurd video because CPR is anything but sexy. It’s not at all a fun thing – if you’re performing CPR on someone, they’re on their way to dying, and you might break a rib or two while doing the compressions. It’s also not a magic bullet: the person you’re doing CPR on might still die right there in front of you. If you find conditions and situations like that sexy and alluring… uh… please keep it to yourself.

Still, the video itself and the idea behind it is amusing, so that’s why I’m sharing it!

Knife Test: Peeling Fruit & Vegetables

I have to admit that my knife skills need a lot of work. By this, I mean my skills using knives in my hands, as well as my skill sharpening them to their full potential. Peeling fruit & vegetables is actually a very good indicator of a chef’s knife skills – how sharp has the chef maintained his or her knife, and how well does he or she wield it?

Here are two clips of people who are very good with their knives and who have obviously kept them super-sharp. The first is a Japanese chef demonstrating the katsuramuki technique of rotating & slicing a cylindrical vegetable (in this case a diakon radish) into a thin sheet. Thinner is better, while obviously maintaining the integrity of the sheet! The second video – at the 4:00 minute mark –  is Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai peeling an apple.

I bring up this topic today because I sharpened my new aogami (blue 2 steel) Tanaka nakiri on the weekend and got to use it for the first time today. I sharpened on a 1000-grit stone and then on a 5000-grit stone, and it feels pretty darn sharp to my fingers. However, the real test was the cucumber that I katsuramuki’d earlier today. All I can say is: the knife isn’t sharp enough, and I don’t think it’s the knife’s fault.

Basically I was peeling my cucumber before making a quick cucumber salad for a snack. I’ve peeled cucumbers before using the katsuramuki technique with a proper single-edged usuba, but also with my simple VG-10 Tanaka petty knife. My nakiri simply did not feel as sharp, and I could tell it wasn’t slicing through the cucumber, just under its skin, as cleanly and as easily as it should.

I can only conclude that I did not sharpen the nakiri to its full potential, and I’m going to have to hit the stones again with the nakiri sometime in the near future.

Now what about my skill level using my knives?  I’m working on my katsuramuki technique because it’s just so darned useful whenever I need to peel something like a cucumber or zucchini, or if I’ve got to make really thin julienne out of something cylindrical like, again, zucchini or cucumber. I don’t use daikon radish much in my cooking at this time. My skill level isn’t quite there yet, though, because I can’t create anything quite as thin as what you see in the video above, I can’t keep the sheet going as far, and because I am an absolute turtle when I try peeling fruit, potatoes, or carrots with a knife.

If you want to put yourself to the test and see (a) how well you’ve sharpened your knives, and (b) how skillful you truly are with your knives, you need go no further than the local fruit & vegetable stand. Pick up a nice cucumber or daikon radish and try to katsuramuki it. Pick up an apple, a potato, and a carrot, and see how well and how cleanly you peel them.

If you haven’t tried this before, I guarantee you’ll find it eye-opening!

“Asian Cuisine” – Unimaginative Name, Great Cantonese Food

I treated my mother to dinner tonight for Mother’s Day, and went to a Chinese restaurant in Richmond Hill called “Asian Cuisine”. It’s a thoroughly unimaginative name, but the Cantonese food and service were far better than I had expected. In fact, I haven’t had good restaurant-cooked Cantonese food like that in years! I enjoyed the food so much that I find myself writing a review of the place right away!

“Asian Cuisine” is located at 9021 Leslie, on the east side just north of Highway 7. If you know how to get to Times Square, just go north on Leslie one light. I have actually been at the plaza several times to eat at “Chili Secrets” (or “half acre” in Chinese), but we thought we’d give someplace new a try. Boy am I glad we did.

I should also add that the complimentary bowl of soup (“lai tong”) was very tasty. We were explicitly told there was no MSG in the soup, and I could see that they used a fair number and amount of ingredients to make it tasty.  That was a good start to the meal and a good sign of things to come.

You can tell when a place stir fries their food properly. Good places have “wok hei”, which essentially means they cook with high enough temperatures during cooking to cause chemical reactions in the ingredients to produce all those tasty, aromatic compounds that make us go “Mmmmmmmmm!” Places that take shortcuts will boil the meat first, and then throw it into the wok for a quick stir before plating the food.

When I sat down at our table tonight, I had heard the roar of the wok burners from the kitchen, but that can be deceptive. The real proof is in the tasting. When I bit into my first piece of beef from the bitter melon & beef dish at Asian Cuisine, I could taste that they cooked their food properly. They cooked the ingredients from raw in the wok at high heat.

When I tried the “three fresh” seafood dish, with scallops, shrimp, and squid on a bed of green vegetables, I knew the ingredients were fresh as well as cooked properly. The shrimp was refreshing, bursting with flavor in the mouth. The scallops had some meatiness & grit to the texture, indicating they were fresh when cooked and weren’t the mushy previously-frozen discs that used to be scallops. The squid had bounce and just the right amount of resistance, and weren’t the hunks of rubber that some places end up serving.

The stir-fried pork neck on greens dish was a little salty, but very well done. The pork neck meat had good texture – it had a bit of its characteristic bounce and resistance, but overall was very tender and seasoned well. What made the dish special, for me, was that the chef used leeks as the base vegetable for the dish. Leeks are aromatic – hence their use as foundation vegetables for western soup stocks – and packed a wonderful, subtle flavor that is often missing from other vegetables used for chinese dishes. Leeks are not commonly used in Cantonese cooking, but the fact that the chef chose to use them tells me that he is truly thinking about how to make the dishes good, interesting, and enjoyable.

Service was good from beginning to end. Though we were the smallest table being served this evening, we were given the same attentive and cheerful service as any other table. In fact, when my mother mentioned to the boss-lady that the food was really good, the boss-lady was visibly pleased and got rather chatty. That’s a very pleasant and positive change from the better-than-thou aloofness that many Chinese proprietors exhibit. It turns out the chef in the kitchen, also a proprietor (the husband perhaps?), had been head chef at other restaurants for the past 11 years. He has experience and the boss-lady was visibly proud of it.

Dinner came to $50 for 3 dishes plus a few bowls of rice. It’s not the cheapest place you can eat, but I think the final tab was entirely worth it. You’re paying for quality ingredients cooked properly and served with a positive attitude. I’ll take that any day over saving $10 or $15 and being served something bland, with poor texture and bad service.

I’ll be back again to try their food on a regular night, and then try their dim sum on a weekend sometime. When my dear grandma was still with us, her favorite restaurant was Garlic & Onion (“Ga Yun Gong”) in Market Village. However, their quality has been declining steadily since then. I’m happy to have possibly found a new restaurant as a go-to place for good Cantonese food.

As we left the restaurant, the boss-lady and the chef said thank you and good night to us. That in itself is a rare thing from a Chinese restaurant. The real kicker though was that I could see that they were sincere. That, my friends, sealed the deal for me. I will gladly give my dining dollars to a small restaurant that cooks with heart & gives real service over a large restaurant that’s just churning out dishes or a chain producing food by the numbers.

It has been a long time since I’ve been impressed with a Chinese restaurant. My mother is even harder to please, and even she was saying how good the food was. If you want good, quality Cantonese food in Richmond Hill, I highly recommend “Asian Cuisine”. It’s an unimaginative name, but it’s seriously good food.