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Together, Joey and I are terrible eaters. Or, at least, we have been lately. Heck, we could have a blog about poutine alone. But, that said, we focus on our own dharma; perform our own duties- and therein lies our own happiness. So when and if it boils down to clogged arteries and poor health, we’ve no qualms about what will be ‘there.’ We are, after all, both ‘here.’ And ‘here’ involves a whole lot of high calories, meat, and southern barbecue from this week’s venue, Southern Ontario Smoked BBQ: a family owned pit barbecue restaurant that started its operation as a travelling trailer, now hunkered down in its own tiny, almost clandestined strip-mall venue, sharing its space with a few other almost unknown eateries. Even so, I imagine its incognito location does nothing to particularly work against it.
SOS BBQ has been around for some time, and its steady stream of patrons certainly advocated this, coming and going in a tiny space with contradictory, yet calming glaucous coloured walls, but totally anticipated caricatures of pigs and roasts, chalk-boards, television, and pleather place settings. How could we resist that charm? Or a nice sized menu with all the necessary kinds of barbecue we were both craving the night prior: Joey, ribs; me, pulled pork anything. And, of course, poutine. That was all Joey though. I thought I needed a break from all that. But you better believe that the novelty I always search for was there. This time in the form of a mix I’ve never heard of: Brunswick stew. A tomato base, six bean, corn, and smoked meat stew you could even put on your poutine if you were so inclined. Joey wasn’t. He, like me, got it on the side.
It was barbecue that shouldn’t otherwise exist in the dead of winter. But still, there it was, a full order of smoked ribs on Joey’s side, poutine with chicken and cheese, and stew. And then there was mine: pulled pork piled high on a bun slathered with mustard and sweet barbecue sauce, that Brunswick stew, and a whole lot of coleslaw- my only Mason Dixon weakness.
When it came to the meat, we couldn’t finish fast enough. Our enthusiasm was even rewarded with a pigtail on the side. Tender, fatty, briny; you couldn’t touch it without it sliding off the bone. I liked it; its pickled character was a little too alien for Joey when it came to meat, but if it were anything like his ribs, let me tell you, he’d have no qualms about coming back. I’m eager enough to say the same about my pulled pork. The deep, red ribbons of flesh were moist, tender, and salted just right; I could have easily had it without my pungent, spicy sweet sauce. Without my glossy, droughty bun. Anything meat was certainly the star at SOS BBQ. Our stew was a little too gummy, a little too canned, a brackish brew of overpowering, familiar tomato soup flavor. The slaw, certainly creamy looking, but more wet and lip puckering than we preferred. Any herbs used fell short; I couldn’t taste a thing besides sweet, saline, stale akali flavour. And it was a crying shame, especially with so little side dishes on the menu. We hated to think of them as obligatory options, but we were thinkin’ it. Either way, there was always anything meat.
SOS BARBECUE
525 Highland Rd. W.
Kitchener, ON
519-496-4052
Sunday 12 PM-8 PM
Monday 11 AM-8 PM
Tuesday CLOSED
Wednesday 11 AM-8PM
Thurs-Sat 11 AM-9 PM
ANY PAYMENT
Some years back on a late, cold January night, after I told the louts I worked with to go home, and re-cleaned a supposedly clean kitchen, my old Thai employers approached me in the wee hours of the morning: ‘Weezee,’ they said, ‘Our friends are coming here tonite- could you cook for us?’ It being 1 am, and me loving my job more than anything, I gave a jubilant, ‘Yes.’ Uncle told me what they wanted, and also told me to fry some chicken wings. Easy enough. Still, in my early years of cooking, I did a whole lot of doubting. I had no idea how to make good deep fried chicken wings, besides throw them in the fryer. That was more or less it. Uncle, on the other hand, showed me how he liked them. How he wanted the batter, and how he wanted them fried. Ever since, I’ve tenderly made them the same, unorthodox way. It was a good night. Late, but happy- and some Thai doctor, no matter how many times I said no, stuffed a 50 in my pocket for doing such a good job.
Some odd seven months ago, I went out to eat with my mother at a familiar Thai-Vietnamese restaurant and ordered tamarind chicken wings. A combination I had never, up until that late moment in culinary life, heard off. They were good: sweet, tangy, tart. I liked them a lot. So much so, I bet my mom I could make the same thing, maybe even better. And, as is my mother’s job to prevent her son’s ego from getting too big, she called my bluff. After that, we more or less forgot about the whole thing. That was, at least until last night, when I was bumming around one of three fridges and found a pack of chicken wings frozen and ready to ruin. But I say ruin with total temerity. Consider it a cool kind of valley speak, ‘ruin’ meaning: elevating to a level of pure radical. The trillest tamarind chicken wings in all the land. Here for me, and here for all of you. The ingredients are easy, the process a tad time consuming if you aren’t privileged enough to own a wok stove. But if you have the patience, you can, like my real uncle says, cook no problem.
Serves 3 (or 1 hungry bro)
Ingredients
12 chicken wings (y’know? The ones you get in club packs? They’re like 2 inches long)
¼ cup tamarind concentrate
¼ honey
1 clove of garlic (minced)
1 tablespoon of fish sauce
½ cup flour
1 teaspoon of pepper
1 teaspoon of chicken stock powder (I know, right?)
Enough vegetable oil and a wok to deep fry the suckers.
Lime and spring onion to garnish.
Directions
Generally, I like to fill a wok with oil and keep it on low heat so I won’t have to wait as long later to make it hot enough to fry in; when I’m closer to cooking, I change the temperature to medium high heat. Anyway, I reckon if I’m doing stuff in the meantime, I may as well be productive. Chicken wing woking takes a lot of timing and speed, after all. Also, I like to let my chicken wings sit out and reach room temperature. This ensures even cooking when fried.
Mix the dry ingredients together. Take your wings and throw them in. If they’re a little wet, even better. What makes uncle’s batter so phenomenal is that it’s tacky, doughy, and gummy. No dusting wings in flour here. That said, take your chicken wings, and mix them as much as you can in the flour. Be tough, try and get the flour wet from the wings. If the wings are covered and not sticky, but dusted, you’re missing the mark. That said, you can just dust them too. You’ll just have a lighter batter. But a good, tacky batter- not a wet one used for fixings like tempura or onion wings- enables the sauce to stick to the wings even more effectively.
After a thorough mashing, put the wings aside.
In a bowl, mix the garlic, honey, tamarind concentrate, and fish sauce. Easy peasy. Set it aside.
Check the wok’s temperature (or whatever pot you care to deep fry in- just so long as the wings are completely submerged). If you have a candy thermometer, even better. If not, just drop a piece of gummy batter in and see if it floats to the surface. If it does, you’re ready. But before that, make sure you have somewhere to set the cooked wings. I like paper towel over a wire rack. Next, gently place the wings in the oil. Don’t crowd whatever pot for the sake of not cooling the oil too much. Fry 'em.
Wings will usually sink to the bottom and anchor up. When they’re closer to being finished, they’ll puff up and float a little. To be on the safe side, let them fry another 30 seconds after that, making sure they reach a deep golden brown. Use a spider or slotted spoon to move them around and fish them out of the hot oil. Place them on the paper towel and cook the rest.
Unless you have a second wok, this next part can be tricky. When all the wings are done cooking, drain the wok of all oil into a pot- I don’t care where you get it- but move fast. Wash the wok, and thoroughly dry it. Unfortunately, none of us have the luxury of a wok stove with a hose overhead, and a wirey brush we can use to quickly rinse it with (those were my salad days).
When it’s clean, put it back on the heat and heat it to the highest setting. Conventional stoves don’t even begin to match the heat of the wok, so you never have to worry about burning a thing. What you do have to worry about is losing all that heat quickly; that’s why it’s important to stir-fry quickly and have everything at hand. If you don’t have a wok, you can just as easily use a pan.
To test the wok’s sizzle, drop a bit of the sauce in the pan. If it sizzles furiously and you’re afraid it’s too hot and will burn and evaporate and become gummy fast, you’re ready. Drop all the sauce in, immediately after that, all the chicken wings. Coat whatever way you can. Toss the wok, flip with a slotted spoon, just coat those things and let them caramelize. If you can char them, congratulations: you have one hot wok. This step takes you no more than a minute. If you want a wet sauce, use less wok time. If a dryer sauce, more.
Plate, garnish with a lime wedge and slivered green onions, and enjoy. Sweet, salty, tart. Fantastic. Who needs any Ben Thanh?
Love,
Weezee
You’d think that the bowl of congee would otherwise be my White Whale. Well, guess again, that’s the Chinese bakery, but that’s another culinary critter altogether. It was the kid from Hong Kong though, and his ‘earth-to’ over a bowl of congee that made me really fall in love with everything Chinese food. Go further back, and it was that same Hong Kong kid and a chalky cup of Hong Kong tea that woke me up to a whole other world of culinary sentience. Ever since, I’ve been obsessed with a cuisine I’ve no doubt mastered in another life, and have been trying to return to in this one.
Happy Valley’s Congee & Bar’s lights were a marvel when I first saw them glowing and abandoned months ago in that poor plaza that burned down in 2010. Since its opening a month or two ago, I’ve wondered why it hasn’t been crammed with homesick out of town kids looking for a little simulacrum of the eating houses they miss in Hong Kong, Richmond Hill, Markham, wherever. It certainly was an egg in my beer, reminding me of all the pilgrimages I’ve taken to the culinary suburbs of Canada’s Rose Capital just for some sludgy tea and deep fried devils. It was almost too good to be true. Too good in fact, that the cynic in me was disqualifying it before even eating there; not getting my hopes up, thinking that what it had was already here, thinking it couldn’t last too long, despite its namesake in Hong Kong. I’ve watched enough police dramas and rom-coms to know better anyway. Still, something in my heart of hearts nagged me to pay homage to that emulsified porridge of fat and white rice that inspired my gastronomic vocation, if not career. So I’m paying my dues to the dish, and the dining hall of clinical Chinese cosmopolitanism that houses it. I’m talking wooden booths, flood lights, television screens, hearths, sleek browns and blacks coupled with plastic cookware and the homeliest Cantonese food I’ve come to know and love in my limited adventures of eating.
Happy Valley’s a remarkable place; of course, its menu’s a pastiche of Chinese soul food, and dim sum, but it also operates as a substitute to the banal bars and the typical fare we expect to eat when we go to them. Happy Valley’s a fantastic change of pace for these parts. If I’m not giddy about the boldly inexpensive alcohol, I certainly am about the even cheaper snacks you can grab if you’re adventurous enough. Have you ever paired a Hong Kong Tea with a pint of beer? You can there. I know, because I did it. I’ll never need any whiskey espresso bar again; why would I when I can get a pint of crisp beer with oaty finish for 2.66 and a one dollar cup of the most on-the-mark Hong Kong tea I’ve ever had in town: malty in aroma, bitter and sweet in flavor, chalky and mouth coating in consistency. I saw my future as a retired expat reading the Hong Kong Economic Times: flip-flops, relaxed flower print shirt, comb-over. All this while taking turns between fanning myself, turning pages, and having a sip.
And that was just the start. Deep fried devils, chicken feet, sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaf, dumplings, barbecued pork steamed buns, condensed milk sandwiched between slices of toast, all on the cheap. It was a dream come true. So much so, I stayed after everyone left. If it really was a dream, I didn’t want to wake up. Our deep fried dough gleamed in the light, flakey, and chewy, the consistency was a treat all its own, better when dipped in my congee, bathing over every kind of ingredient: century eggs, meat, seafood, decked to the nines with white pepper and chili paste. The chicken feet, sweet and swimming in a garlic black bean sauce with a delightful caramel undernote- a fatty textural pleasure, especially when paired with beer. And the sticky rice, as expected, was embalmed by the vegetative earthiness of the leaves wrapped around it, aromatically reminiscent of tea. All the trinkets of meat and nuts made it that much more satisfying.
The dumplings- named after Chiuchow city- were another chewy Epicureanism. Packaged with stuffings like pork, spring onions, and peanuts, the pungent overpowering aroma was a memory of my serendipitous culinary youth. The barbecued pork steamed buns too. All too familiar, the sweet, smoky savouriness was good to eat when the things were hot or cold. Happy Valley certainly had it all- for me at least: familiarity, food, congee. It was, like that kid from Hong Kong said years ago about a good bowl of congee, like coming home.
HAPPY VALLEY CONGEE & BAR
140 University Avenue W
Waterloo, ON N2L
(226) 647-8818
SUN-WED 1130 am-12am
THURS-SAT 1130am-130am
ANY PAYMENT
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