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  If you want to find out more about the place that wags inevitably refer to as the Church of the Holy Smoke, it’s a good idea to get acquainted with the Reverend Clinton Edison, the fatherly, 56-year-old pastor who presides over New Zion’s congregation of 40 or so mostly elderly members. I ask him how the barbecues got started, and he treats me to an hour-long yarn.

  As best he can figure, it was 1976—although some say 1979—when a painting contractor named D. C. Ward volunteered to paint the church, to which he and his family belonged. At noon on the first day of work, his wife, Annie Mae, set up a smoker on the church lawn to barbecue some meat for Ward’s lunch. Savory aromas wafted through the air. “Once she fired that pit up,” Edison says, “people started stopping by and asking if they could buy some barbecue.” Annie Mae sold a little meat, then a little more, and pretty soon it was all gone. “My poor husband never got anything to eat,” she is quoted as saying in one of the yellowed news clippings tacked to the dining room’s walls. The following Sunday, Annie Mae asked the pastor at the time whether she could sell barbecue and give the proceeds to the church. He handed her $50, and with that sum she started what could be described as the longest-running church fund-raiser in the state’s history.

  The Wards handled the whole shebang at first, but before long most of the congregation was pitching in. Lunches and dinners were served on paper plates on the church lawn for a couple of years, until the health department cracked down and said they had to move the operation indoors. Fortunately, the church had raised enough money by then to build a wood-frame parish hall with room for a handful of tables and a kitchen. Things took off in a serious way: on some days, the line of barbecue supplicants stretched out the door to the church parking lot. Annie Mae and half a dozen church ladies would bustle around the kitchen in their print dresses and aprons, preparing side dishes and desserts: tender, un-fussy pinto beans that had soaked and simmered for hours; potato salad made with Idaho russets, mashed by hand and flavored with plenty of dill pickle relish; pecan pie with a famously high pecan-to-goo ratio; eye-rollingly good, cinnamon-y sweet potato pie; and more. The recipes were Annie Mae’s, and she resisted innumerable entreaties from customers that she share them. As Edison recalls, “She would say, ‘It’s not a secret; we just don’t tell anyone.’”

  New Zion’s pièce de résistance, though, was its barbecue, prepared in smoke-belching pits by D. C. Ward and the church men. In the early years, they used direct-heat smokers, in which the coals are placed right under the grill racks; it’s a difficult, labor-intensive way to cook, as the meat can easily dry out if the cooks aren’t careful, but done right, it delivers an intensely smoky taste. Later the church switched to indirect-heat barrel smokers, with the firebox off to the side. Beef brisket—loose textured and abundantly fatty even after it’s been trimmed—was always the centerpiece, but there were also meaty pork ribs that you ate using two hands, as you would corn on the cob, along with chicken, its skin burnished and golden and its meat falling from the bone in pearlescent hunks. Links of slow-smoked pork-and-beef sausage—made in nearby Bryan, Texas—added a salty, peppery kick to the ensemble.

  Annie Mae and D. C. Ward did things their own way, which is to say, not in the style you might expect to find at most East Texas barbecue joints. For one thing, they cooked their brisket and ribs for a comparatively short time, not until it fell apart in tender shreds. For another, they didn’t serve their brisket precut and slathered with the smash-up of condiments, from ketchup and Worcestershire to barbecued meat drippings and black coffee, that’s become the thick and hearty style of sauce now common across the state. Instead, the Wards cooked their meats for anywhere from four to six hours, until they were succulent and smoky, and served their sauce—the kind of thinnish, tomatoey, russet-colored brew shot through with vinegar that you used to find in Central Texas—on the side or, if the customer preferred, ladled onto the plate. The signature flavor came from Annie Mae’s special mix of salt, pepper, and secret seasonings, which was not only rubbed on the meats but also added to the barbecue sauce and the beans, as it still is today. “About the only thing it’s not in is the tea, and we’re working on that,” a cook named Clayton “Smitty” Smith tells me.

  In 2004 the Wards, well into their 90s, retired to Houston, where they still live. Horace and Mae Archie, longtime church members, took over the management of the meals and oversaw them until last year, when Mae died of a heart attack. After that, Edison himself took on the job of running the business. “I told everybody we would keep it going as long as the Wards were alive or until the old building falls down,” he said. Given a dwindling and aging congregation, he has had to hire help from outside the church in order to keep up with demand.

  Over time and with practice, though, the group of six has coalesced into an efficient, tight-knit team. During the day I spent hanging around the kitchen, I watched with admiration as they sliced brisket, ladled sauce, toted steaming platters of sides, and weaved around one another with seeming extrasensory perception. Robert Polk, the pit master I met earlier this morning, comes in carrying a gorgeous brisket fresh from the smoker and hands it off to Smitty, who starts slicing it to make sandwiches and plates. The rest goes into a supersize crock pot, where it stays warm throughout service. Ann O’Bryant, a woman in her 40s who does most of the cooking, tells me that she prepares sides “just the way Mrs. Ward did,” and Henry Ford, 16, the newest member of the team, moves quickly as he washes dishes and cleans up. Reverend Edison, under the watchful eye of his wife, Wyvonnia, who helps him manage the place, runs the cash register. He also comes in early to make a few desserts, having added his own, excellent buttermilk pie to the repertoire.

  By around one o’clock, the rush has died down, and I come out from behind the counter where I’ve been shooed so that I’d be out of the way. I find Edison at a kitchen counter putting away leftovers. I have a couple of final questions for him, including one that you could almost call theological: What does the future hold?

  “Well,” he says, “our first goal is to give this place a good face-lift.” I confess that I find this alarming. While I can’t deny that the church hall could use an upgrade—the flooring is cracked, the curtains are faded—too much spiffing up could destroy the joint’s scruffy charisma.

  Perhaps Reverend Edison senses that I’m quietly freaking out. “We’re not going to do much; people come for the history,” he says, as he stretches a sheet of plastic wrap around a bowl of potato salad and puts it into the refrigerator. Aside from a little sprucing up, the reverend says, he and his flock plan to keep things exactly the same. Thank heaven.

  KYOTO’S TOFU OBSESSION

  By Adam Sachs From Bon Appetit

  If the term “globetrotter” hadn’t already existed, it would have to be invented to describe Adam Sachs. Few travel writers delve so eagerly into the local tastes of a destination. He doesn’t just dine in Kyoto, he seeks out the artisans who create its signature foodstuff.

  Mitsuyoshi Kotzumi squeezes a soybean between his fingers and looks pleased.

  “Unyuu,” he says—a Japanese onomatopoeia that means (more or less) the sound of something firm but pliant being squished. This, according to Koizumi, is what a perfect soybean sounds like when it’s ready to become tofu.

  “Like gummy candy,” he says, handing me the wet soybean.

  It is 5:30 a.m. on my first full day in Kyoto. I am wearing a hairnet, standing in a narrow, steamy kitchen overlooking the Kamogawa River, pinching a soaked bean. Why am I here? The reason is bean curd.

  Koizumi-san is a tofu maker at Kinki, an artisanal shop where I have come to witness the daily predawn alchemy by which raw soybeans are transformed into squares of the firm-but-creamy building blocks of kyo-ryori, the cuisine of Kyoto. Ancient land of culture, temples, and gardens, once the imperial capital of Japan for 1,000 years, Kyoto is a city with a healthy obsession for tofu.

  But stay, carnivorous reader. Don’t turn the page. It’s not what you’re think
ing. Believe me—I’m not a morning person, and before coming here, I was never an avid tofu-seeker. The fresh Japanese version is a far more noble creature than the often bland loaves sold in American supermarkets. The difference in taste? Chalk and cheese, I’d say, though that would be unfair to chalk.

  Here, tofu is a delicate handmade food, produced every morning in small shops and large industrial kitchens throughout the country. Each region makes its own styles of tofu, but Kyoto is to tofu what Naples is to pizza, New York to bagels. The Kyoto variety—perfected over centuries by Buddhist monks, in imperial kitchens, and in neighborhood shops like this one—is the accepted standard; it is regarded as the best in Japan and thus the world.

  While tofu has become a mass-produced staple stateside, only now are we waking up to the allure of nonindustrial tofu. Japanese restaurants like EN Japanese Brasserie in New York feature fresh tofu on their menus. Reika Yo, the proprietor of EN, told me it took her a while to educate people about how tofu was eaten in Japan. I’d had great tofu dishes in the formal kaiseki restaurants and raucous izakayas of Tokyo. But Tokyo is so overwhelming; the discreet pleasures of humble tofu are easily lost in the culinary cacophony. I knew that in quieter Kyoto I’d find (and be able to focus on) the real thing.

  Back at Kinki, Koizumi and a few colleagues dart around the kitchen while loungy Blue Note jazz plays on the radio. Through a window, gawky herons are visible gliding across the river. On the far bank, the first stirrings of the morning bicycle traffic. Kyoto is a modern city, with modern sprawl, apartment towers, and a subway system. But it is also a place of serene gardens, of temple life, and of little streets like this one, where you can walk alone in the early morning and observe craftsmen keeping alive old traditions inside kyomachiya, the city’s traditional wooden townhouses.

  My translator this morning is Derek Wilcox, a Poughkeepsieborn chef who works at Kyoto’s Kikunoi restaurant. “It has more presence,” Wilcox says, trying to explain the special properties of Kyoto tofu. “It’s not just this empty block of protein that you flavor with something else.”

  The thing that turns tonyu, or soy milk, into tofu is called nigari. Crystals of magnesium chloride act as a coagulant, much as rennin makes cheese curds out of cow’s milk. The familiar, firm, square-cut variety is called momen-dofu, meaning “cotton tofu,” as it was traditionally pressed over a porous cloth. Kinugoshi-dofu means “silken tofu,” and while silk isn’t actually used to prepare it, the name makes sense: It is a wet, jiggly tofu with the silken creaminess of a custard—the best a soybean can be.

  Wilcox and I leave the staff at Kinki to their morning work. Walking north, we take a meandering course from the river toward Nishiki Market, Kyoto’s famous covered street of food stalls, pickle sellers, tea vendors, fishmongers, a 400-year-old knife shop, and, of course, tofu—lots of tofu.

  As we walk, Wilcox talks me through what he calls “Kyoto Tofu 101.” In addition to momen-dofu, the most flexible, and kinugoshi-dofu , the most refined, we find age-dofu (tofu sliced into sheets and deep-fried), atsu-age dofu (thick deep-fried tofu), oboro-dofu (with a scooped, crumbly texture like cottage cheese), and yaki-dofu (grilled tofu). This being Japan, there are dozens of variations and riffs within this framework, and hundreds of ways to cook it: cold tofu, boiled tofu, dengaku (skewered and grilled), fried tofu balls, and on and on.

  Our lesson is cut short by the sight of Hara Donuts, a happy little take-away place with three giggly girls frying donuts. The house specialty is a tofu donut made with sweet soy milk and okara, the fiber-rich by-product of tofu production. In the interest of research, Wilcox and I eat several. “Almost healthy,” he says. The girls giggle more.

  “Hippie, crunchy, pinko-leaning, in America, we have all these associations for tofu,” says Chris Rowthorn, an expat writer who lives in Kyoto and runs personalized tours around Japan. “But in Japan, you’ll see the hardest construction workers or truck drivers walk into a restaurant and order a block of cold tofu.”

  Rowthorn and I meet for lunch at Tousuiro, a tofu restaurant in a narrow alley off Kiyamachi Street. The kaiseki-style tofu menu begins with a pretty plate of zensai, Japanese amuse-bouches: tamago (omelet) folded with sea bream eggs and tofu; a small pile of grainy okara; and a green-pea-flavored tofu cut into the shape of a Japanese maple leaf. Next comes cold yuba, or tofu “skin,” piled up like soft-serve, topped with purple-flowering miniature shiso leaves and resting on a bed of crushed ice. In every course, tofu pops up like Peter Sellers playing multiple roles in the same movie, a versatile actor showing off its range with various accents and guises. Sea bass is pressed into a block with tofu. Oboro-dofu has a consistency somewhere between burrata and panna cotta.

  After a dessert of soy-milk ice cream, Rowthorn and I chat with the restaurant’s manager, Nagashi Yoshida.

  “Originally, tofu came from China,” Yoshida-san explains. “It was first brought to Nara, which was then the capital of Japan. There were a lot of priests there, so it became associated with Buddhism. When the capital moved to Kyoto, the priests came, too, and brought tofu culture with them.”

  Whenever you talk to people about tofu in Kyoto, this is what they mention: the city’s history, the vegetarian diet of monks, the mountains that surround the city, and the clean water that runs down from those mountains. One night, I sleep at a 191-year-old ryokan, or traditional inn, called Hiiragiya. Each room is a sanctuary: tatami mats, wooden baths, and sliding doors that open onto a little private garden. Samurai slept here. Charlie Chaplin had stayed in my room.

  In the morning, I sit wrapped in my yukata robe and eat the traditional dish called yudofu—squares of tofu boiling in a nabe pot over a small flame. Later, I follow the Path of Philosophy to the grounds of the Nanzenji Temple, where there is another kind of shrine: Okutan, a 360-year-old tofu restaurant. Here, charcoal is brought in, as well as a bowl of broth to simmer tofu.

  The mood is meditative, yet even in my contemplative state I think maybe that’s enough simmered tofu for a while. But this is before I go to dinner at Kichisen, where chef Yoshimi Tanigawa proceeds to blow my mind.

  Michael Baxter, an American who lives here and writes a blog called kyotofoodie.com, introduces me to Kichisen. Baxter is sort of obsessed with the place—and the chef—and it’s easy to see why. Tanigawa is an intense, funny genius who once defeated an Iron Chef on the Japanese program, and whose kaiseki restaurant is run with martial precision. Baxter and I eat Tanigawa’s version of yudofu : a clay pot with tofu that’s whiter and shinier than any I’ve seen. The tofu is dipped into dashi with kujo-negi (local scallions) and covered in bonito flakes. The broth is rich, but the smoothness and taste of the tofu itself is remarkable—bright, creamy, sweet. The tofu, Tanigawa tells us, comes from Morika, a famous shop on the outskirts of town. Instead of nigari, Morika uses calcium sulfate as the coagulant, which for some reason produces a smooth tofu that holds its shape in the hot bath of yudofu.

  “We opened Morika about the time Commodore Perry came to open Japan,” Genichi Morii tells me when I visit him the next day at his shop. Perry’s arrival in the 1850s ended two centuries of self-imposed isolation. When he sailed home, Perry’s ships are said to have delivered to America its first soybean plants. A century and a half later, soybeans are America’s biggest crop, supplying much of Japan’s demand, and Morika is still here making tofu. “Whatever you do, you must love it,” says Morii. “You’ve got to love tofu to make it.”

  I think about that love and dedication—centur ies of bean curd!—when I find myself at Yubahan, a small yuba maker in an old kyo-machiya on a placid backstreet in the center of town. Here, early in the morning, a young man tends to two dozen large vats of simmering soy milk. Slowly, a skin forms on the milk’s surface. And slowly, slowly, the kid deftly runs a wooden dowel over the milk and pulls up a thin, delicate sheet of tofu skin, as his family has been doing here since 1716. I eat a bowl of yuba and watch the boy watching the vats. I think about the ritual slowness of this work. The y
uba is warm and soft on the tongue. This is what Kyoto does so well: coaxing the boring-looking soybean to greatness, bringing out its essence, and finding there something simple, pure, and oishii—delicious.

  TIME TO RESPECT THE RAMEN

  By Kevin Pang From the Chicago Tribune

  Tribune dining reporter Kevin Pang’s eclectic background—born in Hong Kong, raised in Seattle, college and first job in Southern California—makes him a natural for navigating Chicago’s multi-faceted food culture. A dose of hipster humor comes in handy too.

  Not too long ago, I stared longingly out the window of a Tokyo hotel, my eyes laser-focused on a ramen noodle cart by the train station.

  A half-dozen people stood in line, mostly men in dark business suits. They waited and waited, then plopped themselves onto stools outside when summoned by the ramen chef. Sufficiently intrigued, I found myself in line among the suits. Ten minutes later, the cook presented a perfectly composed bowl, primary colors popping, a half-dozen ingredients resting in their respective nooks atop a steam-billowing tangle of noodles.

  The bowl satisfied every taste sense man is blessed to experience. The soy-sauced broth was savory and pure. The noodles: smooth on the intake with an appealing chew. Alternating bites of bean sprouts, braised pork, seaweed and hard-boiled egg ensured every bite highlighted a different flavor.

  My brows beaded with sweat, my heart rate rose, my virginal experience of real Japanese ramen shook me to the core. Ramen was the first food I learned to cook at age 10—drop noodle brick in boiling water, empty sodium packet—and here it was, in the middle of Tokyo’s Shinagawa neighborhood, a dish redefined.

  This following statement I shall defend to the death:When ramen is good, it’s in the top three of the most extraordinary, soul-satisfying foods in the world. Admittedly, ramen gets a bad rap stateside. It conjures images of college dorms and food-drive donation bins. When you can get Sapporo Ichiban noodles—10 for a dollar—at Walgreens, there’s a whiff of cheapness ramen can’t escape.