How to Love Eating Without Tasting

COVID, childhood bakeries, choux pastry, and changing my mind

Woe is Me, A Culinarian With COVID

I’m not one to spend the end of the year reflecting or the beginning of the year setting resolutions, and I don’t think you need another piece on that anyway. I am growing and stagnating and doing and talking shit and learning. I always have, I always will. Besides, the new year I honor goes with the lunar cycle anyway!

What if, instead, I started with some real, almost mundane musings of past and present?!

I’ve spent the last 2 weeks indoors recovering from COVID. People have asked me: how have you been keeping busy? It’s easy. I’ve been lamenting the state of the world, reading Parable of the Sower, watching so many movies from the early 2000s, and going through it with the fevers, aches, chills, coughs, fatigue, and what feels like the cruelest symptom of all – an almost complete loss of taste and smell.

As a baker/chef, I cannot tell you the amount of fear and anxiety I have surrounding this. Truly, I cannot smell a thing. And weirdly, I can sometimes remember what things taste like. Without belaboring the *special* relationship with food and the senses my profession has provided me, I will tell you this: textures have never meant more to me than now. And that means the joy I get from eating has changed greatly.

Without the ability to fully sense butter, I still experience a pleasant creaminess from what I can only describe as a smooth, silky paste. Since I can’t taste clementine, what I get instead is an explosion of brightness on my taste buds, and an accompanying lingering acidic discomfort on my teeth. Strangely, even though I can’t really smell, a grated mound of parmesan emits something that makes my stomach churn and lurch almost instantly. And chewing freshly baked bread (another COVID activity when strength has allowed) triggers a sense memory of the nutty satisfaction of gnashing through a mouthful of loaf. Eating is really weird right now.

One thing I’ve made and eaten, however, has felt like a surprising, saving grace: choux au craquelin aka bánh su kem aka cracked-top cream puffs. Let’s talk about that!

Falling In and Out of Love with Choux

My first encounter with these guys was at the 24-hour local bánh mì chain just down the street from my childhood home. That place was as classic as it gets. You’d walk into this tiny little store – one door to get in, one door to get out – immediately to the right on the counter was a hot case full of the usual suspects, patê sô with pork and chicken fillings (flaky meat hand pies), egg rolls, and bánh cam (sesame balls). Look further down the counter for hotel pans filled with bánh mì fillings, sticky rices and their toppings, different types of chè (what our Pilipine friends call halo halo or cendol!), and of course, the quick and busy pairs of gloved hands rolling up sandwiches in parchment paper, snapping a rubber band around the centers, and bagging them up in plastic with napkins.

Bánh Mì & Chè Cali on McFadden!

The choux lived in a place I admittedly didn’t care for much and have grown to really respect in the last year – the cold case. Here, you’d find flans, lustred and golden brown in small, squat containers with a plastic spoon taped on the top; tri-colored agar jello cups, coffee, pandan, and coconut flavored, more stiff and serious-looking than their western counterparts; and finally, what I want to talk about, cream puffs.

I remember my first time eating bánh su kem. I was in middle school, and my best friend at the time would excitedly buy a clam shell full of them after school. I took a bite of one, the bald, refrigerated skin pulling away from my teeth like soggy rubber. Then came the very odd sensation of a cold, nearly tasteless cream erupting out of the pastry and into my mouth. I kind of hated them, but didn’t know how to tell my friend. So, I smiled and moved on. We never had them in my home, and my family didn’t seem to care much for them, but my memory of this awful cream puff experience has clearly stayed with me all these years!

To be clear, I love this bánh mi store and it’s buy 5, get 1 free deals. Now that I’m a small business owner, I think cream puffs were perhaps just an afterthought, which is fine. It was something fun to have in the store and made accessible to people. After all, no one has to make the best of everything.

But this week, allured by the idea of making a Thai tea pastry cream for a client’s birthday cake, I set to work with my partner playing taste taster. I’ve ended up with way more pastry cream than I know what to do with, and remembering Santiago’s nostalgic love for profiteroles, I sought to try and redeem the standing of the humble choux in my eyes.

A Recommended Choux Recipe!

After a half-hour of scanning my books and the internet for a recipe, I landed on an adaptation of this one from the Flavor Bender. Dini’s been making choux since childhood and has incredibly detailed instructions, so I’d recommend it as a solid starting point. You don’t even need a mixer or any special tools really. Just a good intuition, a keen eye, and some perseverance if things don’t end up right the first time.

And so, using memory and intuition to craft elements of what I intended to be a *good* pastry: I mashed, rolled, and punched out circles of panela sugar craquelin, folded chantilly into my Thai tea-speckled pastry cream, and watched as my choux dough cooked on the stove, being careful to add just the right amount of eggs so that my dough turned into a shiny, goopy, v-shaped batter on the whisk. There is nothing quite like the thrill of watching that circle of battery goop puff up and rise in the oven, turning into something quite unlike it was before.

Thirty minutes later, impatiently, I filled the choux pastries and took my first bite of what I can only describe as heaven. No flavor, but what my teeth sunk into felt light-as-air, crunchy, and sumptuously creamy all at the same time. And though I couldn’t taste or smell, that bite of fresh out of the oven bánh su kem is the most satisfying and sensual thing I’ve eaten in a very long time. I will be thinking about that for a while.

Has my mind been changed? Absolutely. And I’m glad for it. It reminds me of a principle I hold highly in my philosophy of eating — if you didn’t like something before, just try it again. New year, new me, right? In 2024, I love choux. That’ll be my only kitschy reflection as the year starts.

I’ve also been turning around an option in my mind… is this the year Radical Joy focuses on the pastries I grew up with? There is so much to explore here… only time will tell ;)

XO, V