Nudi Product Update | Organic Persimmon replaces Organic Fig

We're replacing the Organic Figs in our Tropical Sahara dried fruit mix with Organic Persimmon. This season had beautiful persimmons  and we just couldn't resist; plus when was the last time you had dried persimmon? At Nudi we're always trying make exotic accessible. Look for further exotic changes to our product mixes in the near future. As always, we are committed to keeping our products 100% natural with no added sulphur, sugar or preservatives.

Team Nudi

Foodie Series: The Pastry Shop | A Dying Art | #1 Bi Bi (Queen)

In my search for the remaining but endangered pastry art galleries as outlined in my previous posting Foodie Series: The Pastry Shop | A Dying Art, my first stop is Bi Bi Pastries.

There are a handful of foodie trips worth taking outside of the downtown core, and little Tehran is one of them. Nestled in a suburban North York plaza, Bi Bi is a wonderful pastry gallery that is "modeled" (something like a localized franchise, perhaps a sustainable food globalization model?) after a famous pastry shop in Tehran.

The history of Persian pastry-much like everything else in Iran-is mixed and divided. I"ll try and cover some of the basic categories and personal favourites but I leave it to you to visit this great little foodie gallery and experience the array of various goodies for yourself. Above and beyond the wonderful experiential characteristics of Bi Bi as a pastry shop, their unique selection of pastries and beverages make it one of my favourite sweet tooth hangouts.

The Goods | Shirini Koshk
On the more traditional end there is shirini khoshk (dry pastry), which could be described as biscuit like pastry, with slightly more variation and complication. Everything from rice based, to chickpeas to walnut and fig filled "biscuits". You can also try shirni yazdi, which is where the modern day muffin has it's roots. My personal favourite in the dry category is Gata, an armenian based pastry of rolled dough with a thick buttery centre.

The Goods | Shirini Tar
And on the other end, there is shirini tar (wet pastry), which is more along the lines of cake like pastry. Unlike shirini khoshk, the exact gastronomic history of shirini tar is unclear, but there is definitely French influence in this type of pastry, with a Persian twist of course. My personal favourites Roulette [much like a French roullete, but with a touch pistachio and rose flower], creme puff [like a French creme puff, but with a much lighter cream and a hint of rose water) and napoleon [layered pastry with the same light cream and hint of rose water]. The third category, is zoolbia and bamie type of pastry, which is actually fried pastry. This my least favourite category so I will skip right over it but some people love it.

Beverages

And finally we get to the wonderful world of beverages, which in fact to some extent carries the gastronomic complications of the pastries they accompany. The are a number of options, but my personal favourite is Majoon (mix). It's puree of ice cream, milk and dates, so very thick, topped with banana, honey, pistachio and a touch of coconut. Nice strong complimentary flavours. 

Other notable favourites are havij bastani, which is carrot juice with persian ice cream (saffron, rosewater, cream), almost like a float. I know, you're thinking carrot juice and ice cream? And I say, root beer and ice cream? 

You can also try various fresh juices, such as carrot juice, pomegranate juice and various shakes like cantaloupe and banana and milk. 

And if your tummy hurts from trying too many things, you can always have a khake shir (teff milk). It's a seed from plant known as lovegrass in North American agriculture. It serves as traditional medicine for digestive problems, and it's refreshing when made into a cold drink with a splash of rosewater.

Last but not least, there is tea. The staple of all human interactions in Iran. Generally Iranian tea is a composition of Ceylon and Darjeeling, sometimes mixed with other variants steeped for at least 20 minutes. Even the tea can be a gastronomic experience as you have it with saffron infused sugar cubes and crystalized sugar (nabat). 

I'll leave the ice creams for another blog posting dedicated to the category in the appropriate season :) 


Next in the Foodie Series: The Pastry Shop | A Dying Art i'll be visiting a true Parisian delight, Nadege pastries...coming soon. 

Foodie Series: The Pastry Shop | A Dying Art

No matter which part of world you’re in, pastry shops have a certain common aura and atmosphere to them. Maybe it’s the fantasy like creations that the wonderful chefs have produced, or the sterile displays that let the grande-oeuvres shine; in fact I get the same calm sensation in a pastry shop as I do in an art gallery. It’s never particularly noisy, just calm chatter or pure silence as the sensualists, bon vivants and hedonists indulge on their favourite guilty pleasures. And a great moment of climax with the hissing sound of steam being released from the espresso machine. Followed by small chatter, forks dingling against the plate and sipping sounds all around the shop. A therapeutic moment of serenity and peace. But all this wonderfulness is endangered, the pastry shop and the unique experience it brings are a dying art, and a cause worth fighting for.

A combination of calorie counting culture and our fast paced lifestyles-the two being closely related-have endangered pastry shops. That is not to say there are no pastry shops in this city, there are plenty, and a few are good. But much like fast coffee culture, fast pastry shops do little justice to the therapeutic experience of a real pastry shop. Over the next few weeks, I will cover a few “pastry galleries” that are my guilty pleasures and stay true to their roots.

Pomegranate: how to humanly eat a godly fruit

Pomegranate for the Masses

Although immensely popular in the middle east and Mediterranean region, pomegranates were relatively unknown in North America until very recently. The rapid large scale adoption of the fruit in this region can be accredited primarily to POM Wonderful, a pomegranate juice company that rolled out an extensive marketing campaign utilizing widespread mass advertising in combination with backing $25 million worth of scientific studies and releasing data "proving" the magical healing powers of the godly fruit. They also had a strong celebrity support base, providing influential PR for their product. (See an example of their ad which was banned by the Advertising Standards Authorty as it exaggerated the healing powers of the drink)

Pomegranate Everything

Thanks to these efforts, you will now find pomegranate in everything from salad dressing to martinis, even Tropicana has a pomegranate and blueberry variety and you can buy pomegranate extract supplements (not that we recommend any of these products, in fact none of these products including POM juice remotely resemble the real thing)

The offshoot effect of this mass marketing for pomegranate based products has resulted in an increase in the actual consumption of pomegranates (Who would have thought? Now only if persimmons could be juiced and if we had $25 millions dollars to spend on scientific research proving that they hold the magical healing ingredient known as: "vitamin c").

The Struggle

And so the struggle begins…I was watching a co-worker trying to peel the fruit, like it was an orange or something. And another friend spent 20 minutes deseeding the fruit, bit by bit, both messy and time consuming. A foodie friend of mine showed off his complicated fill a bowl with water and deseed them by hand under the water method, then he sent me the YouTube video to demonstrate , you be the judge.

I decided it’s time to put an end to this misery and write about the best way to deseed a pomegranate. This method will take less than a minute once mastered, and takes the chore out of eating a pomegranate.

How to deseed a pomegranate in 1 minute

What you'll need:

• A lovely ripened pomegranate (any variety will do, did you know there are over 740 varieties identified in Iran alone! If you like it a bit sweet, go for the rose/white coloured variety)
• A deep bowl
• A spoon
• Sea Salt (optional, but highly recommended)
• Knife
• Cutting board

Step 1. Cut the pomegranate in half over a cutting board. You can put a napkin to avoid staining the board, but I like the natural foodie colours that my cutting board absorbs.

Step 2. Grab a deep bowl and a spoon. Hold the pomegranate over the bowl with the inside facing down. Now squeeze the pomegranate, almost as you would with lemon, in that you’re not squeezing equally inwards, but that as though you are opening a door knob with your fingers. The goal is to not get the juice of the pomegranate (I’ll cover that later), but to loosen the overall structure of the seeds so that they are no longer supporting each other. Think of the structure of the seeds as the pillars that hold the dome, and by squeezing and twisting you’re breaking the pillars. You should see a few seeds already drop into the bowl, but if you see a lot of juice you’re squeezing too hard inwards and not twisting enough.

Step 3. Grab the very end of the spoon with your thumb and index finger, and smack the back of the fruit in a clean and firm motion. Kind of like a whip, but using more of your wrist than elbow. Watch the seeds drop out perfectly. This should get about 95% of the seeds out, for the remaining 5% of the seeds which will be stuck to the skin, turn the skin inside out and they will drop into the bowl.

Step 4. If the pomegranate wasn’t in the fridge, put it in the fridge for 10-15 minutes, they taste yummier when they are cooled down. Add some high quality sea salts, grab a spoon and enjoy.

(real)Pomegranate Juice On The Go

So you want to know what pomegranate juice really tastes like after you paid $4 for the concentrate version and were utterly disappoint and ripped off. Plus you’re on the run like me and don’t have the time or even the right juicing apparatus. Here is a quick lovely method that is surely to get you hooked.

What you'll need:
A pomegranate (yep that’s it)

Step 1. Grab a nice pomegranate with perfect skin. The skin can’t be dry or cracked, this is very important.

Step 2. Now hold the pomegranate with two hands and use the middle part of your thumb to crack the seeds inside the pomegranate. The pressure on the skin will cause the seeds to burst and the juices to be released, the perfect skin will keep the juice inside the pomegranate. Spend time (5-10 minutes) getting the juice from all the seeds. The key is to press as hard as possible without puncturing a hole on the skin. That’s why it’s important to keep your nails out of this. You will soon start to feel a very mushy pomegranate filled with lots of liquids. Once you feel like it’s all mush, and there are no hard parts (if there are you haven’t crack all of it, keep going at it).

Step 3. Now place the pomegranate in your mouth, and using your tooth pierce a very small hole on the skin. You will immediately feel the juices gushing in your mouth. A combination of pressing on the skin and using your mouth you will get most of the juices out. Once you feel like there is no more juice, keep pressing very hard to get the seeds at the very centre of the fruit that you may have missed. To confirm your success you can rip the pomegranate in half and see what remains.

Bon apetite.