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 Honolulu Lite. Extra.  Charles Memminger |
Popovers require
persistence, patience
and a bit of expert helpThe restaurant manager was alarmed when we stepped off the elevator -- a photographer heavily armed with cameras and wearing a black beret, a columnist wearing a wry smile (or was it pumpernickel?) and a young girl wearing a look of weary resignation at having been dragged along on yet another embarrassing enterprise with dear old Dad.
"How'd you get up here?" the manager stammered. "I thought I had turned that off. What do you want?"
CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM
The Star-Bulletin's Charles Memminger learned about the art of the popover at Neiman Marcus' Mariposa Restaurant.
"Popovers," I said. "We're here for the popovers."
By her startled reaction, you would have thought that Tony Soprano and a couple of his henchmen had stepped off the elevator. Had I brought a feather, I could have knocked her over with it, but no luck there. I explained that we from the Star-Bulletin and we were there -- "there" being the Mariposa Restaurant in Neiman Marcus at the Ala Moana Center -- to watch Chef Doug Lum make the popovers for which the restaurant is famous.
The manager asked to see our credentials because, apparently, there are marauding bands of journalists around the island sneaking into restaurant kitchens to take photos of baked goods. As it turned out, I had left my official columnist badge at home (with the feather) and so she would have to take our word that we weren't a bunch of kitchen weirdoes.
The chef had not yet arrived, but she nervously let us into the kitchen. Then she scampered away to check our story with Interpol or something.
I looked around the kitchen and smiled. A cook was just pulling out a rack of golden-brown popovers from the oven. A mound of warm popovers were piled on a counter. We clearly were in the center of the popover universe.
AT THIS POINT, some of you may be asking, "What the hell is a popover?" To ask that labels you as a pathetic soul, someone who has gone through life without indulging in one of the great culinary experiences the world has to offer.
A popover, in the most simple terms, is a hollow breadlike roll. But to a devoted cult of popover fanatics, of which I confess to being a member, it is a glorious object, golden brown, crispy on the outside, moist on the hollow inside, whose dynamic structure is formed by the forces of nature.
That is, when it's made correctly. Popovers are supposed to be hollow, crispy and light, but whenever I try to make them at home, they come out like little brown baseballs.
It is one of the great mysteries of life, or at least the Internet, why some people's popovers pop and others flop.
"I was trying to convince my husband that popovers are the most amazing food ever invented but kept having to serve little pucks," lamented "Pamela" on one of the many popover Web blogs.
It is no wonder that those of us defeated in our attempts to make popovers sound like monks unable to reach enlightenment while the dude next to you is floating 3 feet off the ground.
THE PROBLEM IS that the basic recipe for popovers is simple. Simple like a haiku, yet very deep.
The first popover recipe was published in 1876 by Mary Henderson, who laid out the embarrassingly modest ingredients: "Two cupfuls of milk, two cupfuls of flour, two eggs and an even teaspoonful of salt."
That innocent combination of groceries has made grown cooks weep, especially in my kitchen. After donating the results of my last popover effort to the local Little League franchise, I decided to seek professional help. I would learn the secrets of making popovers.
In Hawaii, that means going to one of the few places famous for making popovers on a grand scale, the Halekulani Hotel or the Mariposa Restaurant.
Diners sitting down to lunch at the Mariposa are treated to a fresh popover as an appetite whet. They are possibly the most perfect popovers in the world, but success did not come easy.
Popovers are a specialty at most Neiman Marcus restaurants, but Chef Lum ran into a serious problem when the restaurant opened in 1998: His popovers didn't pop, they exploded. A popover specialist was sent to Hawaii from Los Angeles, but his popovers blew up, too.
"We were literally throwing out barrels of exploded popover shards," Lum said. The simple flour, egg, milk concoction could not be brought to its duty.
"We needed to break the code," he said.
Engineers were brought in to calibrate the ovens. He and his cooks experimented with different amounts of ingredients. Prayers were said. Animals sacrificed. (Actually, only cows and only for steaks and hamburgers.) But to no avail. The popovers remained explosive.
"We didn't give up because we knew that the Halekulani was making them," Lum said.
Finally, by taking into account the chilly nature of a restaurant adjacent to an air-conditioned department store and taking a crash course on the science of protein strands and the gelatinized starches, they came up with a popover that not only popped, but popped liked a champ and stayed popped. Word spread and soon they were serving more than 600 popovers a day with papaya-pineapple butter. Even the chef from the Halekulani visited to pay homage to the popover breakthrough.
"He was very interested in how we can successfully deliver so many to so many tables with such consistency," Lum says, bragging just a bit.
DORRIS PETTINGILL, manager of the Patisserie in Kahala, went through a similar learning curve even though she turns out only 12 popovers a day. She fiddled with the temperature on her convection oven and found the exact mixture of eggs, flour, milk and, in her case, oil that made perfect popovers.
I contacted many bakeries throughout Honolulu, and the Mariposa, the Halekulani and the Patisserie appear to be the only establishments willing to take on the elusive popover.
Sadly, despite all the research and interviews, I am incapable of telling you how to make popovers pop in your own home. Each cook seems to have his or her own method to success. Cooking popovers is so much a Zen experience that each cook has to travel his own road and find his own way.
I finally I did make a batch of popovers that popped successfully. As they puffed higher and higher in the oven, it was magnificent. I'm not sure exactly where Nirvana is, but I felt for a brief few moments that it was somewhere near a kitchen in Kaneohe.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com
