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Skewer Quotes

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Skewer Quotes

“When you visit Gindaco, spend some time watching the cooks make takoyaki before ordering, because it's an amazing free show. The shop has an industrial-sized takoyaki griddle with dozens of hot cast iron wells, each one about an inch and a half in diameter. The cook squirts the grill with plenty of vegetable oil. She dunks a pitcher into a barrel of pancake batter and sloshes it over the grill, then strews the whole area with negi, ginger, and huge, tender octopus chunks. Some of Gindaco's purple tentacles are two inches long. This cooks for a little while, then the cook tops off the grill with more batter until it's nearly full. Up to this point, the process looks haphazard, but then she whips out the skewers. Using only the same slender bamboo skewers you'd use for making kebabs, she begins slicing through the batter in a grid pattern and forming a ball in each well. Somehow she herds this ocean of batter into a grid of takoyaki in a minute or two. The takoyaki cost all of 500 yen, and the price includes a wooden serving boat that you can take home and reuse as a bath toy if you haven't gotten too much sauce on it. A Gindaco takoyaki is a brilliant morsel: full of flavor from the negi and ginger, crispy on the outside and juicy within. Takoyaki also stay mouth-searingly hot inside for longer than you can stand to wait, so be careful.”

TokyoOctopusJapanese CookingBatterSkewerGrillTakoyaki
Book:Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo
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“In the procession of pieces, which Ikegawa changes based on his read of each guest, you find crunch and chew, fat and cartilage, soft, timid tenderness and bursts of outrageous savory intensity. He starts me with the breast, barely touched by the flame, pink in the center, green on top from a smear of wasabi, a single bite buries a lifetime of salmonella hysteria. A quick-cooked skewer of liver balances the soft, melting fattiness of foie with a gentle mineral bite. The tsukune, a string of one-bite orbs made from finely chopped thigh meat, arrives blistered on the outside, studded with pieces of cartilage that give the meatballs a magnificent chew. Chochin, the grilled uterus, comes with a proto-egg attached to the skewer like a rising sun. The combination of snappy meat and molten yolk is the stuff taste memories are made of.”

PiecesMeatChickenYakitoriSkewerOn A Stick
Book:Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture
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“It helped that I was working with a pretty awesome recipe. Baba had this way of drawing out the tender in his meat, marinating and using delicate pinches of spice that he dusted gently over the hills and valleys of slices and rolled balls and rural-hewed chunks destined for gyros or meat trays or to be garnished with salad within a deliciously sloppy naan sandwich.”

LambSandwichMiddle Eastern CuisineSkewerNaan Bread
Book:Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food & Love
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