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Many years ago I saw a Japanese TV program that explored the food of southern Taiwan and one of the stops was a restaurant that had a 106-year old vat of broth. It was tall and narrow and had a giant hump of crust on one side.
If it's still open, it would be going for 130+ years at this point.
ETA: Found it. Established 1895, the year Taiwan was annexed by Japan. It's not soup, it's a meat sauce (滷肉) used on a noodle dish. Scroll down to the middle of the page, which shows the chef with the pot in front of him.
Cool. The pot is surprisingly small. Is the sauce in it highly concentrated or something?
Yes, 滷肉 ("braised meat") is highly concentrated. You can't eat the sauce by itself like a stew, it would be too rich. So it's usually served on white rice or in this case noodles.
The ingredients are typically finely minced fatty pork with soy sauce and strong flavorings like dried mushroom, garlic, star anise, and a fermented bean sauce that's super salty. Plus other ingredients that make the taste unique to the chef or shop.
Perpetual stew: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew
This gentleman has been experimenting with a perpetual stew for over a year now.
It's a kind of /dev/random, but for culinary ingredients.
The stew of Theseus
I have lived around the corner from this place for nearly 13yrs. It’s fine, not any better or worse than places serving a similar dish but without the perpetual stew marketing.
The funny thing is, this place got famous a dew years ago, so you now have to wait in line for hours to have this perfectly normal bowl of $2 soup. I didn’t really mind because even if there was no line I’d probably eat here once every 3yrs when I was hungry and happened to be in front of it.
But this is relatively common in Bangkok and actually one of my favorite places was recently headshotted by fame. They serve pad kapow, which domestically is the most commonly eaten and beloved dish amongst Thais. This place managed to elevate the dish without getting snooty about it, reasonably priced, fantastic ingredients, consistent quality, great service, hygienic, and just excellent in all regards. It’s a 10min walk and my wife would go there to eat multiple times a week.
Unfortunately a YouTuber made a video about it and now all of the YouTubers who pass through town make a video about it and there’s a 2hr line at all hours. I’m happy they found success, but also obviously annoyed despite the selfish nature of these feelings.
We now order it for delivery every couple months.
Usually the stuff that goes viral doesn’t bother me- the tourists need to eat somewhere, and living here I have much more ability to find good food than they would, so it kind of works for everyone that they end up concentrated in a few places that I don’t miss.
But I do dearly miss the pad kapow at Gapow Tapae (if you’re passing through Bangkok get there 20min before they open and wait in line, it’s worth it).
> so you now have to wait in line for hours
Interesting, I go there pretty regularly and while It is well visited, I not once encountered a queue there
Ok! Maybe I’m wrong, but whenever I pass by (which admittedly isn’t daily or even weekly) I notice quite a long queue.
I’m probably just exaggerating and remembering selectively.
I think there is an optimization question buried here. In tech lots of people have experience with A/B tests, which function on the assumption that you have a stream of fresh sessions which are independent. Multi-armed bandits, Thompson sampling etc give us frameworks for generalizing this towards finding the best option among a finite set of candidates, if goodness is fixed over time. This is kinda the opposite end of a spectrum: you get to run one policy at a time and the whole premise is that goodness is heavily state dependent. How do you decide whether to keep going with your current policy vs when to start over with another?
Sure, the soup is good ... but is it the best they could have after 52 years? By committing to maintaining one pot for so long, they pay the opportunity cost of not being able to explore related long-lived methods. If there's a different recipe that surpasses this one after only one year of simmering, they'll never find it.
At first I thought this might be related to the secretary problem, but of course if after 50 years of recipe B, you have the option of switching back to recipe A if it's better.
I see no reason to believe the quality could be improved over a more normal cook period. Even super long boils like tonkotsu can be achieved by other means (pressure). IMO its more of a gimmick and frankly kinda gross.
I mean, I don't want to eat it either. But the point of generalizing the optimization framework is that it applies to other situations with the same shape.
Maybe related questions:
- if you have the resources to run just one online learning model, but can't stash/restore state to just continue a prior model where you left off, how do you find the best online-learned model?
- you have space in your garden for only one large fruit tree. You have an heirloom apple tree currently and it produces decent but not amazing fruit. How do you choose whether to replace with something else, given that a replacement may take years to develop the root system needed to be really productive?
- (more loosely) you're in career track X and have advanced over years, the work is ok but could be better. How should you decide whether to retrain as something different?
I've gone without a fridge for 8 years now and do something kind of like this usually - I'll cook a pot of food and then steam or boil it again after ~24 hours to reset the clock on it rotting. It's handy for things like eating a whole chicken or other large soup. I switch between being home and on the road a lot so my pot just comes with me and can be re-cooked on my car stove or my home stove. I tend to cook or re-heat once a day. Ideally I'd rather be sharing freshly prepared food with other people every meal and I do that when I can, but this works for when I'm feeding myself alone - cheaper and easier than any other approach.
Resetting it will kill bacteria, certainly. But there are a number of heat-stable toxins that once created will not be destroyed that way.
I guess you've been doing this for a while, and presumably it's been working, plus I know that historically this is how people lived. But be aware it's not risk free.
A suggestion: A pressure cooker - not for the pressure, but because they can be sealed. Heat the food, then let it cool without opening it. Kind of a less secure form of canning.
The bacteria is still there, its just dead. Along with all of its waste. Leaving soup at room temperature over night is crazy. Its usually the biggest food borne illness vector in restaurants so they usually boil then move straight to cooling.
Ive learned leaving soup out and reboiling is fairly common in some cultures which is unfortunate. Bacteria rapidly multiplies at room temperature around the world (well, maybe not antarctica).
> Ive learned leaving soup out and reboiling is fairly common in some cultures which is unfortunate.
I know next to nothing about chemistry or biology but I do cook a lot of food, and quite often have leftovers.
After many years in Germany, I got into the habit of leaving food out, and that would mostly be fine. Very rarely would food spoil, at least from a culinary perspective (I'm not disputing the presence of bacteria or harm of its waste).
However after even a few months in Taiwan I learned that this strategy is basically impossible: food left outside spoils within hours.
Given I originally come from a country that is warmer, but much dryer than Taiwan, where food doesn't spoil if left out nearly as fast, I do believe it has to do more with humidity than with temperature.
You'd be amazed at just how much tolerance human guts can develop for this kind of thing. I recall reading about a hunter-gatherer tribe the discoverer ran across just going to town on horribly rotten carrion. The more rotten the better.
> Leaving soup at room temperature over night is crazy.
And yet, this was common before the electric fridge. I've lived without a fridge for years and the amount of food I ate after being left out overnight would give americans a stroke.
During winter I'll run a perpetual stew pot for a few days, maybe week+ because it's going towards heating anyways.
One of the speculations as to how life was created on this planet: stable environments hosting hydrothermal vents over long periods of time.
Could perpetual stews over decades act in the same manner?
Maybe! Let's try it in a sterile environment, a few million of such stews over a few millions of years.
You first!
I'm currently in bangkok atm. where can I go try this soup?
https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Restaurant_Review-g293916-d87...
Actual customer reviews are less gushing than the WSJ article....
Long time since reviews on the internet mattered one squat. Reviews can be because of everything from a jealus competitor, the platform asking the restaurant to pay to unblock favorable reviews/remove unfavorable ones, doing the opposite when you don't pay, or simple a bunch of people who basically fill the web with junk.
More often than not I have a great experience in restaurants with 2-3 out of 5 in ratings, and shit experiences with restaurants with 4-5/5 ratings, I've simply stopped reading reviews at all, anything with numbers on the internet is basically fuddled with nowadays.
Wattana Panich is absolutely not worth waiting in line for. Any number of places make a better version of that dish.
If you want to wait in line for something actually worth waiting for: https://maps.app.goo.gl/GodS2ozgTYR1K4kGA?g_st=ic
I always get the pad kapow with half crispy pork and their sour pork soup. My wife gets the pad kapow with glass noodle. Their spice levels are accurately described. If you are not tolerant to spice, definitely get one of the lower levels, they aren’t over the top and the dish does need some chili.
Also, feel free to get in touch for more places to go and things to do (lived here for over a decade): firstname.lastname at gmail.
Its on Ekkamai rd, "Wattana Panich"
Forever soup isn't new, of course.
Poor families do it to cheaply make long lasting meals.
My late maternal grandmother used to have a pot of forever soup on the stove, and she would put whatever she had on hand in.
Spare ribs, check. Leftover veg, check. McDonalds fries, gross, but check.
One of my grandfather's favorite jokes whenever we visited was to yell across the house that guests had arrived, and to add some more water to the soup.
Of course, my grandmother was a farmer all her life before I was born, so she was always making far too much food (nobody ever left hungry was a mark of pride) but it took some growing up before I really contemplated the kind of life that joke would have come from.
And yes, always had soup going.
It wasn't until college did I realize that "fill up on water" wasn't a normal response to a kid who says they're hungry.
Wouldn't toxics like nitrites accumulate over the years? Also, I'd assume the purpose of perpetual soup is to concentrate the aroma and the taste, but is there going to be a diminishing return?
This was something I was genuinely excited to try while in Bangkok, took a Grab across town to make it happen, but it was it is honestly not good, the Google reviews seem to coincide with the consensus that while the concept is cool, the execution isn't and it tastes very meh.
I do wonder if there’s some pluralistic ignorance going on, where travelers convince themselves it must be amazing because everyone else seems to think so.
It didn't give off the vibe of years of collected flavors; it was a thin broth and it didn't taste like much else other than beef broth from a fancy instant noodle packet and a ton of MSG (and to be clear, I'm normally a proponent of MSG but it genuinely was overdone here).
Maybe it really is just the volume that they're going through that's affecting the taste and composition, because they were doing decent business, but this was the biggest disappointment on my short visit to Bangkok.
I wouldn't expect this to be better tasting than a regular soup/stew. If you keep eating it, new stuff added today has been almost completely consumed in a week.
I would eat it out of respect for the craft and the values that are being preserved.
Seems reasonable to conclude that people might do it to say that they did it, for the same sort of reasons why one might get a warm pint in a run-down, cramped, 500-year-old pub instead of a cold pint at a newly-opened, comfortable pub
No this place has always been mid, years before they got famous.
Is this like how Italian families sometimes a forever pot of tomato sauce continuously on a low heat on their stoves?
This Italian here has never heard nothing like that. Tomato sauce can be simmered for several hours, but there is no refill.
I've never heard of anyone doing this among any Italian Americans I know. Is this something you've seen first hand?
I've seen this done for a few years (2-3?) but only in a crockpot sized container, honestly still tasted alright. Not sure I'd have a full bowl of stew 52 but seems [great] for fermenty-salty dipping sauce like saltwater.
The grime around the pot convinced me they’re telling the truth about 52 years :)
> The grime
Oh, you mean the flavoring!
*52 years concentrated heavy metal soup.
Why concentrated?
Disgusting.