Camberville Cuisine

For this year’s belated V-Day celebration, Hyoun and I made our way to KO Prime, the newish Ken Oringer steakhouse project. It’s steak, and it’s the guy who did Clio and Uni and Toro; we weren’t disappointed in the least. Slick, modern decor accompanied by all of my favorite meats prepared to perfection: foie gras, Iberian ham, wagyu beef. Dessert: an awesome frozen mint mousse with a dark chocolate center and spearmint sauce, and can I just say, dear Boston dessert chefs, PLEASE USE MORE SPEARMINT IN YOUR DISHES, it is sadly neglected for the harsher, less subtle flavors of peppermint, thank you!

Monday, we ended up at Sel de la Terre for dinner since we had to go pick up my new suit from Natick (it has turquoise pinstripes, I am in loooove). Between the two of us, we chowed down on:

- baked aged goat cheese salad with arugula, pine nuts, red onion and balsamic
- pistachio- and black pepper- crusted diver scallops with honey-parsnip purée and Jerusalem artichoke chips
- Provençal braised boneless beef shortribs with olive oil whipped potatoes, roasted Brussels sprouts and crispy fried onions

I wish I could eat like this every night. Yum.

We also finally got up to Kick*ss Cupcakes (yes, their punctuation) to try their deep-fried cupcakes. I liked it okay, though my favorite bite was the last one, where all the remaining chocolate syrup and melted whipped cream had soaked into the vanilla cupcake. Hyoun, being a good Southern boy (and owner of his own FryDaddy), adored it, and pledged to patronize that shop a great deal more frequently.

I like Wednesdays, usually. It’s a popular day for most metro newspapers to release their weekly Food sections. Both the SF Chronicle and the NY Times have articles on food in relationships. Mark Bittman’s posted a yummy-looking recipe for short ribs, and there’s also a recipe for meringues in the Times. The LA Weekly ran a story about bacon-wrapped hot dogs and LA street vendors’ fight to keep selling them. The Seattle Times has a recipe for saucepan brownies; the Chicago Sun-Times says I should try shrimp chips as a new coating for my fried chicken.

However, there was also this article on chocolate in the Times today – specifically, milk chocolate – and a quote inside that grossed me out sufficiently that I will NEVER BE ABLE TO EAT HERSHEY’S AGAIN WITHOUT THINKING OF IT. THANKS, SCIENCE.

Everywhere but at home, American milk chocolate — specifically Hershey’s — is known for its tangy or sour flavor, produced by the use of milk that Mr. Landuyt refers to as “acidified.” Although Hershey’s process has never been made public (and a spokeswoman declined to comment on its techniques), experts speculate that Hershey’s puts its milk through controlled lipolysis, a process by which the fatty acids in the milk begin to break down.

This produces butyric acid, also found in Parmesan cheese and the spit-up of babies; other chocolate manufacturers now simply add butyric acid to their milk chocolates. It has a distinctive tang that Americans have grown accustomed to and now expect in chocolate. “I can’t think of any other reason why people would like it,” said Mr. Whinney, of Theo Chocolate.

… EW. Makes our local chocolatiers sound so much more appealing.