Tag Archives: DC Omnivore 100

Food and Drink, Special Events, The DC 100, The Features
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DC Omnivore 100: #19 Steamed Pork Buns

Photo courtesy of
’04 Small Steamed Pork Buns’
courtesy of ‘jasonlam’

It’s time for another item on the DC Omnivore 100 list of the top one hundred foods every good omnivore should try at least once in their lives.

In the spirit of the recent Chinese Lunar New Year and the Year of the Tiger celebrations, let’s explore the sweet, doughy, BBQ-esque goodness of steamed pork buns. In China, these roll sized delights are regularly consumed street cart food and are also a staple of the traditional Chinese family gathering of dim sum.

The bun’s exterior and its steaming bamboo container might have you thinking that this is just another dumpling. And while you’d be right, this is a dumpling, the steamed pork bun offers a sticky, rich, doughy and savory experience that starkly differs from the clean and fresh taste of shumai and the nutty flavorings of potstickers. Continue reading →

The DC 100
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DC Omnivore 100: #90, Criollo Chocolate

Bars, beans and pods

Bars, beans and pods

It’s time for another item on the DC Omnivore 100 list of the top one hundred foods every good omnivore should try at least once in their lives.

Finding that the Omnivore 100 contained a chocolate I’d not met was a cause for celebration. After all, most any chocolate is good, right?

A quick search revealed that Criollo is a prized bean said by some to make the very best chocolate. It differs from its cousins Forastero, the most common bean from which the majority of the world’s chocolate is made, and Trinitario, a hybrid of the two.

Criollo is described as being aromatic, delicate, slightly astringent, slightly bitter, complex, noble, and comparable to the Arabica coffee bean. It’s also rare, making up approximately 5 percent of all cocoa beans grown, because the trees on which it’s grown have delicate constitutions themselves.

It sounded like something well worth trying — the crème de la crème of chocolate, perhaps — but tracking it down was the first order of business.
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Food and Drink, The DC 100, The Features
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DC Omnivore 100: #37, Cream Tea

Scones, The Jefferson

"Scones, The Jefferson" by Jenn Larsen on Flickr

It’s time for another item from the DC Omnivore 100 list of the top one hundred foods every good omnivore should try at least once in their lives.

Cream tea, high tea, afternoon tea… what’s it all about? And why does the Omnivore 100 list have “cream tea” instead of one of the other terms? I just remembered seeing little signs for “cream tea” while wandering around cute villages in the Cotswolds, but have never seen it used around here. Then there’s the constant “high tea vs. afternoon tea” debates that erupt on food forums, everytime someone asks where to get “a proper high tea” in this town.

As luck would have it, last night at the Women’s Chef & Restaurateurs Awards gala, I had the pleasure of meeting an actual tea sommelier! Cynthia Gold explained the difference between these three terms, with some history to boot. Like so much food lore, the actual reasons were not at all what I expected.

It all comes down to table heights.

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Adventures, Food and Drink, The DC 100
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DC Omnivore 100: #50 Sea Urchin

Photo courtesy of
‘Sea Urchin’
courtesy of ‘aslives’

It’s that time of week when WeLoveDC brings you another edition to our ever growing list of DC Omnivore 100. For this entry, let’s push the envelope and go beyond personal food comfort levels by trying Sea Urchin.

If you’ve watched any Jacques Cousteau-esque nature shows, you know what a sea urchin looks like–a purplish-black, spiked, baseball sized creature attached to the ocean bottom or coral.  And you know that stepping on them is a definite no-no. It’s also one of those peculiar food items, like lobster or snails, where some human was SO hungry and that he/she had no other option than taking on the time-consuming task of figuring out how/what parts of this creature they should/could eat.

Given the spiny, hard appearance of the sea urchin, it’s of no surprise that only a small portion of the creature, its roe (aka: gonads, ovaries, milt or eggs,) is edible.  “Uni,” as the Japanese call the eatable part of the sea urchin, is considered a culinary delicacy in many parts of the world. Sea urchins are often eaten raw, with a squeeze of lemon or used to flavor omelets,  soups and sauces, or used instead of butter. Continue reading →

Food and Drink, Night Life, The DC 100, The Features
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DC Omnivore 100: #58, Beer above 8% ABV

Photo courtesy of
‘the cask’
courtesy of ‘volcanojw’

It’s time for another item from the DC Omnivore 100 list of the top one hundred foods every good omnivore should try at least once in their lives.

Finding a beer above 8% alcohol by volume isn’t the challenge that it once was.  The emergence of the craft beer movement in the past few decades and American beer aficionados unquenchable thirst for unique and challenging brews has caused the market for strong beer to explode.  This is not to say that highly alcoholic beers are something new. In nearly every, beer-drinking country aside from the US, breweries and monasteries have been crafting batches of potent beer for centuries.  It’s only in America that the trend has recently come into vogue.

If you’ve graduated from the typical grocery store, great American swill, you recognize that not all beer is created equal.  There are full bodied beers, crisp and refreshing beers, fruity beers, darker beers, and so on and so forth.  Each has something special that makes it unique, but each still has the same basic ingredients (barley, hops, water, and yeast) and each is created with variations on the same, basic brewing process.

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Food and Drink, The DC 100, The Features
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DC Omnivore 100: #92, Soft Shell Crab

Soft Shell Crab, Al Crostino

"Soft Shell Crab, Al Crostino" by Jenn Larsen, on Flickr

It’s time for another edition of the DC Omnivore 100, where we explore the top one hundred foods every good omnivore should try at least once in their lives…

“Blue Crab Molting Season.” Could there be a sweeter phrase to the foodie ears of our region? Really, it’s one of the best parts of living near the Chesapeake Bay. And for those of us who can’t be bothered with the hacking and slashing to get to the meat out of the crab while in its hard shell, it’s especially sweet.

It seems every restaurant currently has a soft shell crab special on the menu, and that’s no coincedence. From roughly May through June, our local blue crabs are casting aside their old shells, like giggling girls getting beach-ready. It takes about four days for their new shells to harden, so before they become bitter and jaded (ok, I know I’m milking a bad metaphor, I just can’t resist, it’s like a disease) snap them up.

A perfect soft shell crab dish has that signature play with texture – the crisp shell giving way to succulent crabmeat with a little burst of the sea. But I know this particular texture is not initially to everyone’s liking. My gateway dish was soft shell crab roll, often called “Spider” roll. Continue reading →

The DC 100
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DC Omnivore 100: #62, Sweetbreads

 

Vidalia's coddled duck egg with crispy sweetbreads, by Kitchen Wench on Flickr

Vidalia's coddled duck egg with crispy sweetbreads, by Kitchen Wench on Flickr

Our continuing quest to try all 100 foods a DC Omnivore must experience checks out sweetbreads.

There are a few items on the Omnivore 100 list that will elicit a very strong reaction. Sweetbreads certainly has to be one of them. I think there’s no middle ground here, as with, say, sea urchin, you either love it or you hate it.

To the uninitiated, sweetbreads are classified as offal, and are the thymus gland of veal, beef, lamb, or pork. Most of the sweetbreads I’ve been served are veal or lamb, and indeed according to the venerable Fannie Farmer, only veal sweetbreads should rightly be considered (and in the 1918 edition, actually recommended for the “convalescent,” so as I’m sitting here wasting away from flu, a plate of sweetbreads is sounding pretty delicious…). 

It’s hard to adequately describe the taste, but I’ll give it a whirl – properly prepared, veal sweetbreads are slightly firm giving way to a creamy, almost gelatinous succulence. Velvety also comes to mind. I’ve found veal has a more delicate flavor than lamb. 

My very first experience with sweetbreads was about two years ago at PS7… Continue reading →

Food and Drink, The DC 100, We Love Food
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DC Omnivore 100: #28, Oysters

Oysters at Clyde's

Enjoying a dozen oysters at Clyde's

In our ongoing quest to conquer the Omnivore 100 list, we come to #28, Oysters. It’s hardly a chore for me to kick back several dozen oysters. My love affair with the bivalves began as a child watching my grandfather stir up some homemade oyster stew, mesmerized by the delicate edges curling up in the cream. At some point as a teenager I dared my first raw bar, and the salty brine was instantly addicting. I’ve never strayed, even after a disastrous food poisoning incident in New Orleans (on my birthday, no less). No, there really is nothing like the luscious oyster, and we’re lucky in DC to have plenty of places to enjoy them.

They say eating an oyster is like kissing the sea, or a mermaid. I don’t know about that, but I do know that slurping back a mineraly oyster freshly shucked off the shell is one of those things that divides people – either you can’t stand the thought or the taste of them raw, or you love them passionately. While perfectly fried oysters battered in cornmeal certainly ranks high on my list, it’s the ritual of the dozen (or three!) that I really enjoy. So here are my top DC raw bar experiences…

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