Review: Obika Mozzarella Bar, Rome, Italy

So the review in our travel guide (and most of the online listings) gushed about Obika Mozzarella Bar in Rome, and it wasn't hard to seduce me. A restaurant entirely devoted to artisinal Mozzarella Di Bufala, each with the DOP seal of approval? Are you kidding me? I practically had to be restrained from clawing my way down there the minute we arrived in the city.

I need not have rushed.

And really, part of me knew. I liked the schtick of using great ingredients from all over Italy, but fresh mozzarella simply doesn't travel like that. All three varieties that we tasted were ok but not earth-shatteringly good, without that amazing sweet milk flavor I was expecting. Actually the smoked one was most interesting. I'm sure they were terrific when they left the caseificio, but nothing special when they landed on our plates. And they were served on beds of the saddest, oldest, most pock-marked, thick ribbed spinach I've ever seen served in a restaurant. Popeye wouldn't have touched it if Olive Oyl was tied to the railroad tracks.

Then came our entrees. The only two that were both vegetarian and could be done without nuts (because Snacky Pants is severely allergic) were eggplant based. She ordered an eggplant parmigiana and I got a mozarella bomba di risa with grilled eggplant. The bomba was excellent, but served with pesto containing nuts so SP couldn't even try it.

The parmigiana was inedible because the eggplant was barely cooked, not even penetrable with a fork. Mind you, this isn't some special Italian style. Eggplant isn't served al dente. When SP informed the waitress, she said "oh, yes, that is because our eggplants are maybe a little hard", and walked away!

The Obika website claims they are a "a research project based on Italian high-quality products". My suggestion: don't volunteer as a lab rat.

Breakfast In Israel - So Amazing! (including Reviews of the Dan Panorama Jerusalem, Metropolitan Suites Tel Aviv, Vered Hagalil, and Yotvata)

Breakfast at Yotvata Kosher (Dairy) Restaurant in Tel Aviv

Breakfast in Israel is kind of an amazing thing, and a vegetarian's paradise.

Our first venue was the Dan Panorama Hotel in Jerusalem where we were treated to an unbelievable buffet that is included in the room price. Five enormous tables had perhaps fifty or more choices including cheeses, yogurts, and labnehs, breads of all sorts, sweet and savory pastries such as borekas, half a dozen fresh salads that changed daily, an omelette and pancake station, fresh fruit, fresh squeezed orange and grapefruit juice, great mounds of halvah, and I'm surely forgetting some things! Most everything was impeccably fresh and the amazing Israeli produce and dairy products made it unforgettable. The biggest problem I had was not to stuff myself so much that I couldn't eat falafel at a reasonable lunch hour.

When we moved to the Vered Hagalil Guest Ranch in the northern part of the country near the Sea of Galilee, there was again a buffet though of more modest proportions, appropriate to the small and rustic resort. Still all of those superb salads and dairy products to die for, and much needed espresso too.

Breakfast Buffet At Vered Hagalil Guest Ranch near the Sea of Galilee

In Tel Aviv, the buffet at the Metropolitan Hotel and Suites was shockingly bad. It was fairly large, maybe half the size of the Dan Panorama, but everything was sad looking and dirty and tasteless. It was like finding myself at a Residence Inn in the States trying to eke out a breakfast from reconstituted waffle strips and imitation egg curds. We didn't go back after the first day.

Instead we started breakfasting at Yotvata, a kibbutz-run, kosher dairy, diner-style restaurant with several locations. The plate in the pictures at the top of this post costs  all of 42 shekels (about $10), and that includes also a huge pitcher of an absolutely fresh fruit smoothie of your choice (get the mango!), and warm bread.  Served on a patio across the street from the Mediterranean no less. Incredible. I don't think the $10 would even cover the food cost for a restaurant in the US. Denny's should take one look at that picture and lock its doors in shame.

And of course if you have been out partying all night in Tel Aviv, a plate of salads might not sound so good. This fellow below opted for fries and a snooze, then dined-and-dashed after the security guard woke him up!

Asleep in the French Fries After A Long Night of Rosh Hashanah Partying in Tel Aviv

On The Mathematics of Bran Muffins

A truism that I hear repeated frequently that cooking is an art, while baking is more of a science which requires accuracy and following recipes to the letter. I don't think that is necessarily true, I certainly improvise changes to baking recipes frequently and usually with good results. But I think there is an underlying element of truth, which is that with cooking you can generally imagine what will result from a change, whereas with baking it can be much more difficult for us amateurs to predict.

That got me thinking about just how many variations there might be for something as simple as bran muffins. Let's start with a bran muffin recipe I've used before with good success and try to calculate how many ways they could be made. Obviously there are actually effectively infinitely many variations - you could add just one more molecule of baking soda. My goal is to get a rough count of distinguishable variations that a sensitive human could tell apart.

To get started, here are the ingredients:

• 1.5 c. wheat bran
• 0.5 c. yogurt
• 1.5 c. milk (preferably whole milk)
• 1 egg
• 4 T. blackstrap molasses
• 1/4 c. brown sugar
• 1 c. all purpose flour
• 1 t. baking powder
• 1/2 t. baking soda
• 1/2 t. salt

Let's take the amount of wheat bran as a given, and then we can adjust the ratios of all the other ingredients to it. For the yogurt, milk, molasses, sugar and flour let's assume we could use 25% less, 12% less, the same amount, 12% more, or 25% more. Already that is 5^5 = 3125 combinations.  For the egg, let's say we could use 0, 1, 2, or 3, so that is a factor of 4. For the baking powder and baking soda let's assume 4 variations of each, and the salt is assumed to be equal to the baking soda, that's 16 more options.

Of course that is assuming a fixed set of ingredients. We could use cereal bran flakes or oat bran, whole, part skim or fat-free yogurt or sour cream, and the same for the milk, or soy milk, any of a dozen kinds of brown sugar, maybe 4 kinds of molasses and maybe 4 distinguishable kinds of white flour, not to mention that you could whole wheat, or spelt, or teff.. We could use honey or agave nectar or half a dozen other sweeteners. We could add some applesauce for additional moisture. That is 147546 more combinations, not even considering that we could add fruit or nuts or seeds.

Then let's figure that there could be at least 3 levels of how thoroughly we mix the batter, 3 of how big the muffins are (which affects the surface area to interior ratio), 4 types of pans, 6 oven temperatures, and 4 variations of how deeply brown we cook them to, for 784 more options.

That gives us a grand total of 23,135,212,800,000 ways to make a basic bran muffin! 23 trillion ways. And I believe those are legitimate differences, meaning that a reasonably sensitive taster could tell any two of them apart in a head-to-head comparison, and tell you which of the two they thought was better. And if anything, this is probably an underestimate given how conservative some of the assumptions above are.

So what conclusions can we draw from this? I guess one is that there is real value in a recipe. Someone has been willing to put a stake in the ground and say "this is the best bran muffin out of 23 trillion options!" And on the flip side, there is value in experimenting, as there is real reason to believe you can improve your baked goods. Since you clearly can't explore that number of variations, the best way to experiment is hold all other variables constant and change just one thing, like the milk or the type of flour over a few batches, and keep track of which one you like best. Of course that would miss any second-order effects like preferring whole milk with bread flour but skim milk if you used pastry flour. That is just the chance us muffin scientists will have to take!