Most popular dishes of lockdown 2020

Mini Hungarian language lesson: the secret dish.

"What's a dish universally known and eaten in your country but virtually unheard of outside it?" is a question that makes the rounds on Twitter every few months but I can't be bothered waiting for the next one.

It's "főzelék".

The word itself looks as simple as the dish: "főz" is "to cook" and "-elék" is a suffix roughly meaning "the result of", so "the result of cooking".

Thanks for nothing.

The official definition is "any kind of boiled or parboiled vegetable"; closer, but still a load of bollocks.

So here's mine: "főzelék is made of vegetables and it has a thick sauce".

What kind of vegetables?

Practically any: potato, cabbage, bean, pea, chickpea, spinach, squash, carrot, but usually only one veg at a time.

There is a mixed abomination called "finomfőzelék" but we don't talk about it.

Most of us have been scarred for life by school dinners featuring the pallid little harbingers of death suspended in a beige gel of doom.

In all honesty though, főzelék in general doesn't look very appetising: it has its roots in that old peasant staple of gruel and it has a serious image problem as a result.

Which is why, even in Hungary, you won't see many on restaurant menus, except in specialist outlets.

Today I made garlic bread.

You add flour, water, salt, and most importantly, yeast. When baking bread, you have to let the dough rise.

No reasonable intervention will significantly increase the speed the dough rises for really good bread, possibly the best bread in the world.

No matter how much you yell at the bread, the dough will only rise to the sufficient amount after a given amount of time.

If you go to the store for the mass distributed stuff, the copy pasted churned brand, whatever it is, will never compare to homemade bread.

If you get the store bought stuff, it’s optimized for shelf life, which always detracts from the quality of the immediacy of the homemade stuff.

If you go to a bakery, it’s better, but never as good as the manual kneading you can do for yourself for what you want.

Bread making is simple, and world-class bread making is even simpler than what you may think. Mostly because humans converge on the flavors, texture, and content of their perfect bread.

But world-class bread does have shared constants of quality you can get only from the best.

Flavorless bread is bland. I’m a huge fan of personal choices I get with the categorization one has under the term “garlic bread.”

“Garlic bread” gives me flexibility to experiment with some wild ingredients, knowing it’s always going to be delicious, just in different ways.

Okay, last night’s gnocchi recipe in one single Instant pot:
You’re gonna need gnocchi. I happened to have some that I rolled a while back, hanging out in the freezer. It’s cold mashed potatoes, flour, egg. Simple. But also, store bought is FINE!

Boil them JUST until they float. That’s, like, long enough to get out the rest of what you’ll need.

When the little potato dumplins float, scoop then out gently with a wire strainer like this one, and place them in a colander you’ve sprayed with cooking spray. They are sticky.

Pour out the gnocchi water except dor about the last cup and a half, the really cloudy bit. Set it aside. I use a yeti tumbler so it stays hot. You’ll need it later.

Don’t mistake ‘tater water for a hot beverage, though.

Get your instant pot back on the low-low setting, and put in a goodly-but-not-scary amount of butter. In this case, a teaspoon. Then another teaspoon of duck fat. (Or just a bigger scoop of butter if you don’t have duck fat).

The duck fat I used is from Fatworks:

To that, add a cup of whole milk, or if you’re me, a cup of 2%, and a hearty splash of half and half otherwise intended for your coffee creamer.

Now comes the thawed drained spinach. You want to press out all the green-brown water, and plop that whole block in:

This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.

I think people underestimate QSRs in terms of social utility, but Sukiya et al describe themselves as mission-oriented enterprises. I believe this is largely sincere, and goes back to the 60s and 70s, when the clientele was primarily manual laborers who had migrated to work.

Japan was not a rich nation at the time, and day laborers in particular were both unlikely to be able to cook for themselves and unlikely to have much of a food budget, and so the chains sprung up offering an honest-to-goodness cooked meal delivered in under a minute for cheap.

This heritage continued over the years, even after Japan became a much more wealthy nation, and these chains function as social support and dignity for folks in diminished circumstances.

They also are a wee bit of a cartel, and I appreciate the aesthetics of the cartel:

Back when I was first in Japan, in the mid 2000s, there was an increase in the price of beef.

And the heads of the three chains got together, and decided that the price of the basic beef bowl needed to increase, but given the economic circumstances how could they hold the line.