Start Wearing Purple

Gogol Bordello
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Food, Glorious Food -- well, and some grapes.

What’s a Great Way to Get a Fish Fried? Give It a Shot of Vodka
By HAROLD McGEE

FRYING fish is not exactly a new idea, but people do come up with new ways to do it. Some are more practical than others. At last year’s Madrid Fusión, the annual gathering of the world’s restaurant avant-garde, the Spanish chef Dani García demonstrated a method that couldn’t have been simpler:

Take a small whole turbot untouched by a knife, dredge it in a mixture of bread crumbs and flour, and drop it directly into hot oil. The skin puffs out away from the body, insulating the interior from the high heat, so you get an ideal result: moist, tender flesh and crisp, flavorful skin.

There is one small problem. The technique works only if the skin is perfectly intact. The slightest nick quickly turns into a major breach, oil pours through, and the fish ends up overcooked and sodden. Which is what usually happens. Despite his access to pristine fish, Mr. García estimated his success rate at around 10 percent.

A more reliable innovation comes from Heston Blumenthal, chef at the Fat Duck near London. Mr. Blumenthal recently undertook a series for BBC Two television and a book, both called “In Search of Perfection,” in which he updated classic British foods. His beer batter for fish and chips, developed with the Fat Duck’s research manager, Christopher Young, is unusual in two ways. It’s squirted as a foam from a soda siphon — the sure sign of a post-Ferran Adrià preparation — and half of its liquid is vodka. The siphon makes things easier if you have more than a few batches to fry, but even without a siphon the vodka is an excellent trick. More

Recipe: Fried Fish With Vodka and Beer Batter

South Africa’s Trove of an Elusive Grape
By ERIC ASIMOV

IF you love wines made from the chenin blanc grape as I do, you are grimly aware that your source for good bottles has been more or less restricted to one: the Loire Valley of France.

Should a disaster befall the vineyards of Anjou, Saumur and Touraine — an earthquake, perhaps, or a plague of chardonnay-loving vignerons — the world’s reservoir of Vouvray and Savennières could be wiped out. We’d be left to battle for the few good chenin blancs from California, or the already scarce bottles from Paumanok Vineyards on the East End of Long Island.

However farfetched this scenario may sound, all who hold chenin blanc dear should be soothed to learn how far the wines from South Africa have come in the last 20 years. Only South Africa can rival the Loire in its taste for chenin blanc. More

Sticky Rice

Biggest steamer full. Hmm...