Geeze Gravies and Grocers, part 1: Grocery stores.

Milwaukee is not a small place. I have occasionally forgotten that, because I grew up in Chicago, which, in all its immensity, easily dwarfs large numbers of the world's cities. I was reminded of the fact that Milwaukee is not all that small when I was hunting for a particular product.

There isn't much cookery going on right now, as mentioned in last post, but that has got to change. I have to eat, and when I saw my food bill this month, I realized that I can't keep this restaurant eating thing up. Sure, I have no time to cook, and yes, it's given me a reason to try a number of restaurants I've been meaning to try, but the plain fact is that I am a social servant in this culture, and so I never have the luxury of spending all the money I might feel like spending.

For a very long time, I have been trying to make a vegan, no-soy-cheese substitute sauce that will stand in for cheese in pre-1601 recipes. The standard vegan substitute in this situation is nutritional yeast, and, while the nootch certainly does impart a flavor that works and is distantly like Parmesan cheese, my blackened Laurel heart will not rest until I can come up with a sauce that will be cheese tasting and comprised of verifiable pre-1601 ingredients. You can make an argument for nootch based on the idea that yeast was certainly used for cookery in period and that it is occasionally written about in a way that you can pretend implies adding it strictly for flavor, but the plain fact, as far as I can tell, is that nootch as a specifically produced food is pretty recent on the "inventions in cookery" timeline.

This is not true of fermented tofu. Somewhere out in the world there are a bazzillion cooks who, when presented with the same challenge, might have said "Oh, yeah, I know just what to do!" and reached for their jar of doufu-ru, but I had to learn it existed. Tofu is not something I ever loved even when I was eating whatever soy jumped on to my plate, so the chances of me stumbling on this stuff became tiny, tiny, tiny the moment I realized I was going to have to cut unfermented soy out of my diet. 99.99% of the tofu on the American market is your garden variety bean curd that, as useful as it is to the general vegan/non-ovolacto piscetarian, is something that anyone with thyroid issues is not going to be able to touch.

Fermented tofu, according to this article, appears in the written record in China in 1578 CE. And so, having stumbled across the existence of the product thanks to surfing teh internetz, I stumbled around the Milwaukee area trying to find it.

And that brings me round to the point.

I suspected I could find the product in one of the many Asian markets in the area. What I wanted to know was if I could find it elsewhere--the Asian markets most likely to have a wide selection of products tend to be more on the north end of the metro area, and thus, a bit out of my way.

In Outpost? Nope. If it's not at Outpost, then there is little point in trying the more standard grocers in the area, although I did give my favorite Sentry a brief run through, just in case. Nope.

However, there is a grocer in the Milwaukee area, a place of legendary status in this metro area, a place that is considered so upscale that a number of my former acquaintances will only shop there because they imagine it adds to their "high-class" cache: Sendiks. I've only shopped there a few times, never particularly impressed either positively or negatively.

I have an impression now, though.

Sendik's sucks.

It sucks like a suck ass sucking thing of suckiness.

I swear to dog, it has got to be by the good will and generosity of the people of Milwaukee that this local chain continues to thrive--kind of like the same way people kept buying Van Heusen shirts because they were "American made" long after it had become very clear that Van Heusen had shipped its manufacturing overseas. Only a willingness to believe the bluff could explain why anyone thinks this is a chain full of unusual and finer foodstuffs for the tony crowd. That may have been true a long time ago, but it is not true now. Is there a place for Sendiks in the Milwaukee market? Sure. If they are offering a selection of things Joellen Average will never otherwise try at a price that isn't too much for her family to bear, great: I'm all for wider experiences for everyone. And if she gets her little ego boosted, well, as long as she doesn't cross my path, it's all good. But is it the establishment it's reputed to be?

Oh, hell, no. I saw nothing there that I could not find elsewhere--with one exception: the despair-inducing deli section.

Well, let's be fair--I'm not going to like anything with mango in it. I'm especially not going to like it if the "crab" turns out to be that shitty fake crab crap with the allergy-provoking egg ingredients in it. So if your special crab salad has eggs and mangoes in it, I'm going to get sick eating it.

Which I did.

If that was all, I'd shut up. But the cabbage salad sucked. The sushi--not something you'd even begin to expect would be fabulous in a grocery story--was just sad, and that was just a vegetable roll. What the hell would it have been like if there was seafood in it? I have long understood that too much wasabi ruins the balance of delicate flavors an amuse-bouche of sushi can provide, but for the first time ever, I was extraordinarily grateful for the wasabi--it changed the awful vegetable roll into a nice crispy crunchy base useful for transporting the fabulous flavor of horseradish into my mouth.

Gak. Sendik's, I am so done with you.

After that trip, I abandoned the immediate vicinity search and went to a north side Asian grocer. Milwaukee's near north side is not the nicer area, but it's not bad. A lot of rural Wisconsinites find it terrifying, and people have left my place of employment after one visit to a home on the north side, too nervous to look past their lack of familiarity with the urban experience and notice that "lack of expensive houses" does not equate with "radically terrifying and vastly dangerous area of horrific poverty."

I found the above jars at Rhino Foods. I popped it open, and, yay! It does taste remarkably like bleu cheese. Yay.


I'll soon be popping some into a non-cheese sauce, hereafter described as a geeze gravy, to determine how it will work as a flavoring agent in a non-dairy béchamel--essentially, what all vegan "cheese" sauces turn out to be. Yes, every vegan food writer talks like he or she has just invented the Best. Vegan. Cheese. Sauce. Evah. whenever they bust out their recipes (hence my thinking of them as "geeze" gravies), but all this tells me is that American cooks really lack in some basic skills. I am eternally grateful to my Junior High School Home Ec teacher for teaching me to make a white sauce. Little did I know at 12 years old that I was being given a key to a cookery kingdom.

Chianti? You think?

There are a limited number of bean varieties available to the average American consumer in the average grocery store. Furthermore, there is plenty of misinformation to be found on teh internetz: one of my favorite falsities is a statement made in some news paper story on the resurgance of the fabulous fava bean that flatly proclaimed that no other bean was ever eaten in Europe prior to the arrival of New World varieties.

Well, there's a food writer whose going to have an "eh, ah, OOPS!" moment one day.

Fava beans are something that I have had some difficulty in finding around here. I keep looking for canned broad beans or fava beans or whatever, but they just have not been about in the stores I frequent--and don't even think about dried fava beans in the local Sentry.

But, as has been said before, I often shop at my well-beloved Outpost Co-op, and one day some number of months ago, I looked up in the bulk food aisle and saw dried fava beans.

At last. I found them.

So I do my research, and then I research a little more, because I've never cooked them before--I can't even be certain I've eaten them, beyond in my own home made seitan. When all my research is done, I have come to understand that the beans need to have their tough brown skins removed before eating.



It took me days to get what would evenually be about 1.5 cups of beans from dried brown pebbles to skinned beauties ready for cooking. I loved the smooth feel and the look, but other food writers were not kidding when they said the skins were tough to remove. Some of the fava beans, even after 3 days of soaking, never softened enough to be peeled.

I sorted through various bean recipies in various pre-1601 sources, and was not wildly enthused by any of them, but since it was clear that I was going to have to cook the beans first, I popped them into the pressure cooker, covered them with water, sprinkled in a little salt, and let them go.

... Just a little too long. ::sigh::

By the time I opened the pressure cooker, the fava beans had cooked to the "perfect for pureeing" stage. I sprinkled in some olive oil, some poudre fort, and mashed them.



They were okay. The dish was not a sufficient return on my effort, but it was not terrible. Fava beans were not the delish treat I had been lead to believe, but I would make this again if it did not require so much effort to prepare the beans. I put the remainder of the dried fava beans (about 3 cups worth, actually) into the freezer, figuring that it would be some long while before I would want to work with them again. The best thing that came from that experiment was the realization that I had come very close to the water:bean ratio needed for the pressure cooker--throw in pre-soaked beans and then cover with 1/2 to 1 inch water.

And a few days go by.

Now, I have not had much time for cookery--or much of anything else--in recent months, and so, when Wednesday last came along and I needed some supper, Angelique and I went off to a restaurant I had tried several years ago but never really got to know, Sharazad.

On a whim, I ordered the app combo, noting that there were quite a few vegan appropriate items thereon, in addition to the spinich pie (quite free of feta cheese). In the app was a dish called foule--a dish I'd never met, a dish of fava beans. I was eager to try it, hoping that it would be inspiring.

It was, all right. The damn brown skins were right on the beans. Frak! All that time and effort, and the skins are perfectly fine to eat.

Other things I noted: I really like their baba ganooj, more than I like the same dish from Abu's Jerusalem of the Gold (which recently changed hands, totally wrecking the bizarre charm of the former interior). The adas majroush (lentil soup) is very nice, and the next time I go, I think I will be adequately fed via the app plate and the soup. There are a number of fish/seafood dishes on the menu, but I'll likely work throiugh all the vegan things, first. I can get a decent fish meal lots of places in town, but a decent vegan meal is a rarer thing.

And I'll be damned if I peel another dried fava. Feh!