Connoisseurship and criticism in the art of The Kebab.

At the end of next week, I'll be moving to Seoul, South Korea where I will undoubtedly continue to write these blogs, updating you with food experiences from the New World. However, what I have for you this evening is an account of the most incredible, sumptuous, delicately fragrant food from the oldest of worlds, biblical in its simplicity but simply complete and excitingly earthy.
Down a back alley off Stoke Newington High Street in London, lies a veritable mecca for fans of Turkish cuisine. Mangal Ocakbasi is an unassuming bring-your-own-booze kebab grill house, which I have absolutely no problem calling my favourite restaurant. In the world. Ever.
The reasons for this are manifold but range from the outstanding quality of the kebabs on offer, to the freshly baked flat bread to the most incredible, smokey Şakşuka, a starter of oily aubergine, tomatoes and onions.
One of the best things about the place though (other than the outrageously cheap prices) is the sense of old-world theatre surrounding it.
This feeling of authentic Trojan drama starts as soon as you walk through the front entrance. As you open the door, an enormous convection chimney sucks the outside air into the room, flinging you into a wall of smoke, primary colours and amazing smells. Once you're sucked safely inside, you walk past the grill and get a view of the enormous kebabs and skewers on offer and sit yourself down with meat on the mind.
On the menu are thirteen different kebabs, mostly chicken or lamb and you can choose minced or cubed meat. As well as the kebabs, there are yoghurt dishes, where the meat from the kebabs is mixed with yoghurt to make a sort of meaty, yoghurty dry stew/curry.
Typically, I visit Mangal with a good friend of mine, Jim Cotton, who actually introduced me to the place and typically, we order the mixed meze (hummus, aubergine, yoghurt and tomato and onion, always great) followed by lamb shish and the chicken Tavukbeyti. I get the impression though, that anything you order here would be absolutely as if Ataturk himself had grilled it on a middling Autumn evening somewhere on the great sweep of the Bosphorous.
The meat is of the best quality and the lamb shish perfectly cooked; smokey and charcoaly on the outside and erotically innard-pink in the middle, where the meat has been kissing the skewer. The Tavukbeyti, or minced chicken with parsley lemon and garlic is the real star of the show though. Perfectly weighted with salt and lemon and garlic and all of the fresh, base flavours of humanity that are so instantly and primally satisfying; those flavours that release an intense injection of narcotic satisfaction into the brain. This is food that humans have been eating since the dawn of time, unsullied and unadulterated by the spice trade or any twist of modernity. It is humble, yet creamy, luxurious yet composed of natural, good things, ruffage and vegetation, caveman meat cooked over an open fire, ingredients that would have been gathered and hunted by our forebears in Byzantine lands.
After the carnage, comes some sweet relief and although we were more then satisfied by the meats and meze, we ordered baclava which was rich with oily honey but also crunchy and meaty with nuts; an excellent end to a fine repast.
So, if you're ever in Dalston or round Stoke Newington way- fascinating areas in a modern city, one which is changing increasingly rapidly- make the trek to this outstanding place and dodging new wave idiots wearing vintage pants on fixed-wheel bikes, drop in for a taste of something that probably hasn't changed much in thousands of years and hopefully won't for millenia to come.

Neo-colonialism and duck tongue

Think of all of the different uses for your tongue. In no particular order of usefulness: tasting, licking envelopes, cleaning your teeth, talking, getting stuck to icy things, painting, obsequious flattery...the list goes on. Have you ever wondered though, what uses a duck might have for its tongue? Perhaps you haven't. Did you even know that ducks possessed such organs? You probably didn't.
Well then, it's lucky I'm here on hand to tell you that ducks do have tongues and that they taste horrible.

I was in London last week on business (well, not really it just sounds good) and to make a day of it, I thought I'd have a spot of lunch in Chinatown. After a lovely walk through Embankment gardens in bright sunshine, I got to Chinatown and began my quest to find the dingiest place with the best eighties decor in the neighbourhood. As I walked past one row of restaurants, I realised there was a police crime scene happening outside a bookies at the end of the street, complete with police tape and bloodied clothes. I had found my spot! The most authentic looking place on the street was London Jade Garden, so I popped in and got a table for one.

The menu here is great, over 40 items of dim sum which you tick off on a little paper menu thing they give you. The service however is rubbish. Having lived in Spain for a few years, I'm quite used to surly staff and bad manners and I've learned to laugh it off and when you stop taking the whole thing quite so seriously, bad service can actually be very funny. Especially when an tiny, angry Chinese man is thrusting a plate of ducks tongues under your nose.

Once I saw this on the menu, I couldn't resist ordering it. There are plenty of other agricultural by-products on offer, from chicken claws to pig's trotters but the one that jumped out at me was the duck tongue in black bean sauce. I ordered this and some other dim-sum dishes and sat back to wait, listening to the punters sitting nearby complain about the service.

When the food arrived, I was presented with a plate of around 10 duck's tongues in black bean sauce. Never having eaten duck tongue before, I had no idea how to proceed and so picked up one of the tongues in my chopsticks and had a closer look. They are sort of tongue-shaped with a hard bone or piece of cartilage running down the middle. The sauce disguised the colour, but they had been boiled and when I scraped off a bit of the coating, it turned out they were a lustrous and appetizing grey. As is often the case with offal and cast-off bits of animal, it isn't so much the taste that's the problem, rather the texture. The taste was overwhelmingly of the sauce, but there was a hint of weird ducky fishiness underneath the complex blanket of flavours administered by the sauce.
Now to the texture. I would liken it to eating mussels insomuch as you have to scrape the meat off the 'bone' with your teeth. The one thing it reminded me of most though, was eating pig's ears in Madrid. A similarly gelatinous, rubbery quality adhered to a hard piece of cartilage which was pretty awkward to eat.
I'm sure duck tongue is a speciality in China and is probably very popular but I do not recommend ordering this if you see it on a menu anywhere. The other dim-sum dishes I ordered were excellent but next time I have Chinese food, I'll probably just stick to the business end of the duck, shredded and rolled up with plum sauce in some pancakes. Xie xie!

What's the worst/strangest thing you've ever found in your food?

Long dormant but still champing at the bit, ready to make mouths water by invoking the myriad and complex flavours of the New World, I'm back and haven't you just missed me?
Moving away from the traditional Pastry Disgrace formula of reviewing restaurants and what they do best, I find it can be equally fun to look under the grubby sofa of the food industry.
So, to fill you in on my absence, I've been working at a summer school, where the food wasn't quite inedible but did disappoint with its monotony and low quality ingredients, often unfortunate traits of large-scale catering on a budget. Saying this, when you're hungry, you eat, right? That's right.
The school had a couple of hot options every day and even had a healthy salad bar available every lunch and dinner time. The bar contained an assortment of greenery, tomatoes, cold meats, and leftovers processed into the likes of potato salad and I think it's safe to say that everyone took advantage of it, if only to break up the monotony of the school-dinner like hot options (lumpy custard-check, weird jelly desserts-check, bad gravy-check). That was, until weird things started showing up in the salad leaves...
The strangest apparition was one lunch time amongst the lettuce when what appeared to be tree leaf, brown, curled, dead and full of gritty mud sat winking at me from amongst the rocket. Thankfully, it didn't go in my mouth but it did remind of some other awful experiences with foreign objects in food that just shouldn't have been there.
One of my favourite stories comes from my brother who swears blind thathe found a whole cow's eyelid, replete with eyelashes, lurking under the pastry of a "Fray Bentos" pie!. Another friend of mind once found a pig's tooth in her Chinese meal. So in that spirit, this week's blog asks: What's the worst thing you've ever found in your food?