Lately I've been avoiding cookbooks by star chefs. Usually the pictures are better than the recipes and in five years the cookbook is little more than a reminder of a food fad that you wished you had slept through.
Pichet Ong's The Sweet Spot caught my eye and made me break my promise to myself for several reasons. I had read Frank Bruni's review of P*ong in The New York Times and I'm obsessed with pastry, having been a pastry chef once upon a time. I also am fascinated by chefs who make fusion their signature as it is usually a feeble attempt to create something new that usually leaves no lasting positive imprint on my palate memory.
I had some hope for Pichet Ong's cookbook. He's of Chinese descent and grew up in Singapore with more than a hobbyist's knowledge of the food of Asia. He's also pretty darn bright and creative - he went to Brandeis and Berkeley before deciding to head into the kitchen. So he brings background, smarts, and skills to his cooking. That sounded good to me. So I bought it.
These days I have been paying special attention to forewords in cookbooks. The Sweet Spot's forward is unintentionally hilarious as well as hyperbolic. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Ong's former employer, calls The Sweet Spot, "a tremendous contribution to the world of cooking literature" and calls some of Ong's techniques "groundbreaking in the world of pastry and fine cuisine." Note to Jean-Georges: the technique of creaming butter with spices for cookie dough (or any dough) is not new at all. I've been in kitchens where that was just part of what we did, and no one patted us on the back for it.
As far as 'cooking literature' is concerned, I wonder what Vongerichten is thinking? That I should put this up next to my Larousse Gastronomique, my Julia Child, my Elizabeth David, my Ken Hom, my James Beard? Or does he mean that I should just slide this book next to my Claudia Fleming, Emily Lucchetti and Jacques Torres? Second note to Jean-Georges: there is no way The Sweet Spot is getting near Julia. If Mr. Ong is lucky, I'll take the cookbook home and stick it in my closet rather than leave it at work as a reference. Seems most of my cookbook shelves are full and I'm not quite sure who I would remove to add this one in.
Before I dive into the recipes, I do have one major complaint: the word "Asian" is used as a substitute for "pan-Asian" - an obviously gauche but more accurate term for the type of cooking Mr. Ong espouses - and occasionally he substitutes "Asian" for more specific term like "Chinese".
In describing loaf and sheet cakes (page 29) he states that
"Rows of sweet loaf and sheet cakes line the shelves of Asian bakeries... Also, Asian bakers tend to add traditional Asian dessert flavors - such as coconut, red bean, and green tea."
There is no such thing as Asian food or a unified Asian dessert flavor. Certainly you can generalize about Buddhist influence in East Asian countries, but to group so many countries into a single statement is lazy. In China and Japan, I have certainly seen loaf cakes. In Japan they aren't into sheet cakes the way they are in China. Here's a photo I took in Beijing a few years ago of a bakery going to town on some cakes.
You almost never see this in Japan, where the obsession is with French-style pastry. As far as the "Asian dessert flavors" - yes, the Japanese use green tea, but coconut is used in Japanese desserts much in the same way we use it here as it is not grown in Japan (except for Okinawa, which is to Japan what Hawaii is to the US). And I have never had a red bean or green tea-based dessert from an Indian bakery - and India is most certainly part of Asia. yes, I realize I am splitting hairs, but I truly despise when writers get lazy - presumably for the sake of marketing to the lowest common denominator cookbook audience and selling more copies - and make generalizations about the cuisine of an entire continent that has as many diverse food cultures as does Asia. To my mind, the dichotomy of Asia vs the West, which is a constant theme in this cookbook, looks back to the past when we routinely exoticized non-Western culture. There's a kind of politics of identity going on in the writing, but the claim Ong is trying to stake with the "Asian" moniker is trivial at best. Frankly I think Ong and his marketing buddies at HarperCollins should focus more on promoting him as a great pastry chef rather than as a great Asian pastry chef - but hey, that's their angle, right?
Let's talk about the recipes, shall we?
For all my grousing about the writing, the recipes are fun. And the photography is shockingly unpornographic and 'understated' (as Ong writes in the acknowledgments). The recipe layout isn't very easy to read, but at least there are measures in both imperial and metric. For someone like me who has never met a dessert she didn't like, this cookbook is an adventure. There are chapters on the sweet Asian pantry, Cakes, Cookies, Pies and Tarts, Puddings and custards, Candy, Fruits, Frozen Treats and drinks.
Randomly flipping open the book, I found a recipe for Shaved Ice with Summer Corn, Avocado, and Red Beans. This happens to be one of my favorite summer treats. I've heard it called ABC - an abbreviation for the Malay word for shaved ice - in Malaysian restaurants. To me it is the perfect foil to the heat and humidity of a southeast Asian (and northeastern US) summer afternoon. Ong also offers another shaved ice recipe - this time with something he calls Thai Jewels - water chestnuts colored in either red sala syrup or green pandan paste and coated in tapioca, jackfruit, papaya, coconut juice, and palm seeds. Pichet Ong, you had me at hello.
The recipes for ice creams and other frozen treats is equally intriguing. There's a recipe for Mangosteen sherbet, which, unless you are willing to shell out close to $45/lb and happen to live in New York where they actually sell the newly commercialized crop from Puerto Rico, will have to be made with the less fresh but perfectly legal and not so expensive canned product. There's also a Vietnamese coffee ice cream and a lemongrass frozen yogurt, along with a few other sherbets and ice creams. There's watermelon shaved ice served with salt and pepper, too.
I randomly flip open another page: Spiced Chocolate Pudding with Caramel Crisped Rice Cereal. This is a lovely recipe - a chocolate pudding spiced with cardamom, star anise and vanilla served with caramelized Rice Crispies. I swoon just thinking about the simple yet perfect marriage of East and West flavors.
I flip to another recipe - Sweet Potato Doughnuts with Roast Apple filling. Wonderful. There's even recipes for whimsical treats like Chocolate-Covered "Pocky" Sticks, almond fortune cookies, and Chocolate Kumquat Spring Rolls. Coconut "Twinkie" cupcakes with lemon filling combine two of my favorite flavors with one of my favorite forms.
For pastry chefs, this is a great resource. The recipes, which meld flavors of many Asian countries with traditional pastry of the west, are extremely inspiring to the innovation-challenged cook. I found myself imagining what other variants of traditional desserts I could create by using less common (in the US) ingredients.
My favorite recipes in the book are the ones that are less fusion and more authentic - steamed almond cake, steamed pandan layer cake, Castella, yuzu jelly rolls, green tea cake - all are things I've tasted before in 'ethnic' marketplaces or restaurants. That's not to say the other recipes aren't good. On the contrary, I think almost everything in this cookbook reads - what can I say? - deliciously. I can't wait to dig in.
If you don't mind the silly generalizations and can avoid reading most of the helpful blurbs and the introduction, you'll love this cookbook too.
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