<i> THE</i> EDIBLE ARTS : Immigrants Have Brought a Tradition of Handmade Food Craftsmanship to Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES NEVER CEASES TO SURPRISE. THE WORLD CAPITAL OF fast food and trendy restaurants is also home to a Middle Eastern pastry chef who makes his own kataif dough in time-honored fashion, a noodle chef who’s mastered the ancient Chinese art of hand-swung noodles, and a Thai cookbook author who carves vegetables in intricate patterns once reserved for the Thai royal court. These food artisans are as much a part of Los Angeles’ exuberant food scene as superstar chefs or taco stands.

But the skills these craftsmen possess may be vanishing. Many artisans brought their skills from another country and their children, true L. A. kids now, envision very different lives for themselves.

There are many more out there--not hundreds, mind you, but more than you’d think if you just stick to your tried and true butcher, baker, truffle maker. We can think of a small tofu shop that makes silken tofu fresh every morning just as they do in Japan; a Mexican sweet shop where they take fresh pumpkin and turn it into candied calabeza as translucent as stained glass, and a Chinese rice noodle shop where they steam large sheets of fresh rice noodle and sell them folded like bundles of cloth. With little or no publicity, they’re usually settled into a neighborhood, and practice their craft almost entirely for their own ethnic communities.

ANDRZEJ

Farmers and country people in Eastern Europe have traditionally preserved sausages for the long winter by smoking them. Andrzej, a handsome sausage shop in Santa Monica, continues that tradition, producing dozens of smoked sausages and hams, all made from scratch and smoked over juniper and oak on the premises.

The art is in keeping the taste of the batches of sausage consistent. “And the only way you can do that,” explains owner Andrzej Domanski, “is to taste the raw sausage mixture, taking into account the fact the sausage will shrink up to 20% in the curing and smoking. No matter how accurate your recipe, you have to taste every batch, because each time you make a particular sausage, the meat will have more or less flavor and water content, and the strength of spices varies.”

After they choose the meat at the slaughterhouse, they divide the Eastern pork into the fat and lean cuts they’ll need for various sausages. The meat is given a three-day dry cure; it’s then seasoned and made into the two or three kinds of sausages Andrzej is making that day.

Among the more interesting sausages made here are hunters’ sausage--which is smoked over juniper wood--and garlic-spiked farmer’s sausage. The kabanos , or stick sausage, is made with both fresh and cured chunks of pork stuffed into a very narrow casing. The shop’s most exotic offering is kishke, blood sausage made with buckwheat.

EDELWIESS CANDY KITCHEN

Despite its name, Edelweiss is an all-American sweet shop. Everything is made from scratch in this Beverly Hills candy kitchen, which means that owners Sam and Shirley Rosen make their own marzipan and caramel and blend their own chocolate. Edelweiss is also one of the few shops in Los Angeles to hand-dip candies.

The resident chocolate dipper is Angela Huerta, who was trained by the store’s previous master dipper. Sam Rosen is convinced that “you can’t teach everyone this skill. You have to have a feel for it in order to tell when the temperature and texture of the chocolate is just right to begin dipping.” Huerta works in a room that is kept at a constant 60 degrees. After the chocolate is heated, she pours some of it out onto a marble slab and aerates the mixture with a spatula until she considers it ready to work. She rolls individual candy fillings in the chocolate and finishes by coaxing a tail of chocolate into the special swirl that marks each particular filling. It looks easy but takes enormous patience and skill. If the chocolate isn’t properly tempered, the finished coating may be dull or marred by “bloom,” white streaks caused by cocoa butter separating from the chocolate liqueur.

Among the Edelweiss favorites are classic white marshmallows that are progressively covered in dark chocolate, rolled in toasted coconut, dipped in milk chocolate, then rolled in ground walnuts (these candies have been nicknamed “mousse-mallows” by aficionados). And best of all is the caramallow, their own gooey caramel filling topped with marshmallow and dipped in chocolate.

THE DANISH PASTRY

Few Americans realize that so-called “Danish pastry” is really Wienbrod-- Vienna bread--and no more Danish than it is Swedish or Norwegian. “In fact, it was foreigners tasting this delectable pastry for the first time in Copenhagen who began referring to it as Danish pastry,” explains Ulla Kohler, the Swedish co-owner of The Danish Pastry, a shop in West Los Angeles.

Whether you call it Wienbrod or Danish pastry, the real thing is very different from most of the overly sweet pastry found in Los Angeles. Few bakers have the time or skill required to produce the delicate pastry made up of hundreds of alternate layers of butter and yeast dough.

According to Hokan Gath, the shop’s Swedish-trained pastry chef, the secret to making good Danish pastry is to pay constant attention to the temperature of the dough at each step, making adjustments for each day’s weather.

The basic dough is a mix of flour, eggs, milk, yeast and a small amount of sweet butter. Before folding the butter into the dough to create the layers, the dough has to be chilled to the same temperature as the butter, so that the layers move together when they’re rolled out.

To make the first turn, the dough is formed into a thick slab with half its weight in sweet butter smoothed on top. It is then rolled out again, folded into thirds, and rolled out again to the same thickness. Folding and rolling again and again--that’s how the layers are created--with the dough resting 15 minutes in the refrigerator after each series of turns. After two to three hours of turning, you have hundreds of fine layers of dough and butter, which puff up when the pastry bakes.

Many traditional pastry shapes exploit the lightness of the finished dough. By rolling the slab of dough and slicing it into half-inch-thick sections, for example, you have the classic Danish, ready for a fruit or custard filling.

KALMOLMAL POOTARAKSA

Kalmolmal Pootaraksa learned the formal art of Thai vegetable carving as a teen-ager in Thailand. A cookbook author and former restaurant owner, she now teaches classes in both Thai cooking and in the specialized art of vegetable and fruit carving at Los Angeles City College.

Originally, this art was practiced in the kitchens of the Thai royal court and those of ranking Thai families. When that easy life came to an end, those who knew carving left the great houses and began to teach the art privately and in schools.

Today in Thailand, elegant restaurants might serve the elaborately carved vegetables and fruits as garnishes. A few restaurants continue to offer entire bowls of carved vegetables and fruits accompanied by a sweet dipping sauce. The most common carved fruits and vegetables are watermelons, mangoes, papayas, sweet potatoes, cucumbers and carrots. Pootaraksa has also introduced beets and daikon to her repertoire and, in her own carvings, improvises on traditional themes.

In style and motifs, Thai vegetable carving is related to traditional wood carving. Pootaraksa emphasizes basic carving techniques in her classes. After students have learned to manipulate the small curved or straight knives and the seven special tools used in this technique, they go on to master carving the intricate designs over the surface of the fruit or vegetable.

SHIN PEKING

As you sit in Shin Peking, a Chinese restaurant on Olympic Boulevard, you might hear a curious thumping in the kitchen. The sound is Jose Florentino, the resident noodle maestro, at work slapping noodle dough against a wooden table. Florentino is obviously not Chinese, but he learned this ancient art at the previous Chinese-Korean restaurant where he worked. The noodles at Shin Peking are hand-swung to order, just as they are in restaurants in northern China, where these artful noodles have been a tradition for hundreds of years.

When the waiter gives him an order, Florentino takes a lump of dough large enough for two to eight orders and pulls it into a thick coil. Grasping it at either end, he starts to swing it in jump-rope fashion. As the dough stretches and begins to twist, Florentino goes through a series of intricate motions. Bending the rope of dough around his middle finger, he pulls it out to twice its length and quickly dusts the two lengths with flour. He then repeats the motion, doubling the number of strands each time. The progression is geometric: two strands raised to the eighth power or more. In minutes, he has hundreds of fine strands stretched between his hands. When he’s finished, he cuts them once and slides them into boiling water ready in a giant wok.

At Shin Peking the noodles are served with sauces ranging from squid and sea cucumber in red broth to a sauce of bean paste, onions and ground pork.

PANOS PASTRY

Recent emigres from Lebanon are sometimes startled to come across Panos Pastry on Hollywood Boulevard. They know the name--and the superb pastries--from Beirut, where Panos Zetlian had a shop for many years before emigrating to this country.

In the back of the store, Zetlian and his helpers make filo and kataif dough in the manner he learned in Lebanon. The most difficult to make is kataif , a Middle Eastern pastry dough that roughly resembles shredded wheat. To make this unusual dough, Zetlian first mixes a smooth batter of cake flour, milk, water and clarified butter with a small amount of cornstarch. This goes into a special brass vessel shaped like an udder, with a row of tiny holes across the bottom. When he takes his finger away from the holes, the batter flows out in parallel streams onto a huge rotating copper griddle, three feet in diameter. Starting at the outer edge of the turning griddle, Zetlian spirals the fine lines of dough toward the center like the grooves of a record, carefully angling the vessel to prevent the streams of batter from crossing in mid-air. The fine strands cook just a few seconds before Zetlian’s helper sweeps them off the griddle like a tangled skein of silk.

Zetlian flavors the kataif with rose water for a pastry called beloorie. And boorma is made by rolling kataif in crushed pistachios or almonds, then slicing it into rounds and baking it until crisp.

ST. MORITZ CHOCOLATES

For a boy growing up in Zurich, Switzerland, the idea of becoming a chocolatier is not so far-fetched. The Swiss have been famous for their chocolates since they first blended the New World’s bitter chocolate with their own rich milk. Joachim Caula, master chocolatier and production manager at St. Moritz Chocolates in Beverly Hills, was trained in the classical manner. Apprenticed at 16, he went on to earn chocolate and pastry degrees at a Swiss hotel school. But his interest in chocolate was so intense he took extra classes in chocolate molding and sculpting on the side.

His skill in making exquisite filled and molded chocolates is evident in everything produced at the shop. What he loves most, though, is sculpting fantasies in chocolate, not just any chocolate, but dark bittersweet, eminently edible chocolate.

For his signature chocolate owls, he uses large chocolate eggs as structural elements, a whole one for the body and a second cut in half to form the wings. For the decorative elements, he uses a variety of techniques. The feathers are cut out and stamped from a thin slab of chocolate; finer details are built up with a brush and other tools. As a final touch, he embellishes the owl’s perch, a realistic-looking log, with a brush dipped in chocolate.

By special order, he’ll sculpt a whole family of owls or create elaborate chocolate hearts and flowers, ornate Easter eggs or any other design you request. And Caula gives classes, too, both at UCLA and at the chocolate shop.