Thi Thử Riki
Ramya Bradbury
For the cabbage, I sliced it thin, salted it, let the salt draw some moisture for a few minutes, then dressed it with a small amount of white vinegar and olive oil. I made a quick pickle with half a red onion and a pinch of kosher salt along with a 50/50 mix of water and vinegar to cover. I boiled the eggs. I sliced the tomatoes.
Starting with the sliced pan de agua roll, first I put on a layer of ground beef, then some cabbage, a little bit of pickled onion, sliced tomatoes seasoned with sea salt, ketchup and mayo, and finally two halves of a boiled egg. Then I closed the sandwich with the top half of the roll and put it in the sandwich press for a few minutes.
The flat slices of egg were a better structural choice on this smaller, rounder roll, allowing all the layers of ingredients to lie flat. The toasted surface of the bread roll was less yielding, so this roll did not swaddle the ingredients quite as well as with the previous sandwich, and you can see that we did lose some of the beef in the press.
Maybe a little bit of both, but one pattern I did notice with the food videos labeled Frikitaki is that they tend to use some substitutions, commonly some type of salami, probably Dominican salchichon, in place of the ground beef. Many of them add cheese. They almost universally go with a sunnyside-up fried egg instead of the sliced, boiled egg. And few of them actually press the sandwich.
Dominican salami is a cooked, smoked sausage, similar to a summer sausage or a more coarsely ground forcemeat like German Jagdwurst. It is commonly cut into thick slices and pan-fried, and that is in fact how the Frikitaki-making Youtubers have generally prepared it as well. As for the cheese, according to this Youtuber, use whatever cheese you wahnt, and as much as you like. Among the most popular of cheeses in Dominican Republic is something called Geo, which is similar to Edam.
The fried salami has a crisp bite and some sour fermented character, complemented by the pickled onion; the yolk of the sunnyside-up egg gushed out the side of the sandwich as soon as it was picked up; the ubiquitous Dominican combination of shredded cabbage with tomato, mayo, and ketchup was a fine accompaniment but this could have used some mustard as well. Regardless, it was as delicious as it was sloppy and made a fine breakfast this morning.
I'm a transgender weirdo who loves music, books, comics, and all kinds of other geeky crap. I edit an arts/music/culture magazine in my hometown of Richmond VA (rvamag.com). But let's not talk about my day job. Let's talk about food. I love food.
I'm a tax guy and technical writer living in the city known to its locals as The Big 'Ago. I self-identify as a fighter against culinary dogma, a sandwich lover, and an overly-earnest hot dog enthusiast.
No denying it, I like the sensual things of the world, especially good food and drink, though I'm no snob when it comes to either. A background in American cultural history and food studies makes me approach the world with a desire for contextualization and connection on the way to synthesis.
I'm a seafood-obsessed environmental scientist from North Carolina currently enduring the pain of living in a landlocked state. I spend most of my free time thinking about baseball, history, Shaw Bros. movies and weird synthesizer music.
A South African now living in Australia, after 12 years in New Zealand and 4 in Ireland. Has worked as an academic researcher for the past decade, which is only slightly less time than it took him to fulfil his promise of writing an entry for the blog.
In the first days, the combination washer and dryer stopped working, not an immediate issue given that we packed enough for a military campaign, but an inconvenience as we pushed into our second week of living in Amsterdam. After a couple of false starts with delinquent repairmen, I opened the door to greet Riki, the man tasked with getting the dryer operational.
The Dutch have such a masterful command of English that interacting with people in this city is quite simple, almost too easy at times for someone such as myself who likes to feel a bit out of place, and thrives on figuring out how to go along and get along. Riki was no exception, the only thing stopping his linguistic outpouring was the time he took to catch his breath as we arrived at our flat.
Riki had grown up in our neighborhood and was soon regaling me with sordid tales from decades past, intrigues with adjacent property owners, architectural dissections of the surrounding buildings. This soon segued into a soliloquy about Dutch welfare economics, followed immediately by a scorching take on the current Amsterdam city government. Riki being a white man of a certain age, I was neither surprised nor pleased by his coded racism.
I rarely am the quiet one in a conversation, but I could hardly even nod before the subject switched. Noting that I had a daughter, Riki was keen to impart some fatherly wisdom upon me. He was surprisingly tender and insightful. A couple of his points struck me poignantly. It is not easy to raise a burgeoning young woman, the constant push and pull of autonomy and protection, and Riki had some salient ideas about striking that balance.
As I checked the time, I wondered internally how Riki maintained his schedule, given that we had spent the better part of two hours together for a fix that did not even need to happen. But, I also took the moment to appreciate this interaction, a chance to glimpse another world on a deeper than surface level. As a keen student of humanity, I found Riki to be an advanced course.
Riki bade me a hearty farewell after giving me detailed instructions for the operation of the proper washer/dryer cycle. He then strode off onto Wilheminastraat, a man motivated for his next mission. I was impressed by him to the point that I started writing this column immediately, focusing on the joy of finding sagacity in unexpected corners.
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