DAY 3 – NEW YORK STAPLES

Do you get the bagel craze? The stuff is gummy. Even when you warm it up, it stays a bit gummy.

When I got off the plane at JFK airport, it was the cheapest thing on the menu at the cafe’ at the arrival lounge. So I got one. An onion bagel, with bits of fried onions stuck on top of it. Digesting it took several hours because of the onions. I can’t even think what possessed to eat something that was probably fried in car oil or shoe polish…

Anyway, I was supposed to watch a movie at the Lincoln Centre tonight and the area is not exactly a haven of Eastern delights. NY is full of “Delis”. I must have walked past thirty or so, on my way here from 33^rd St. But somehow they don’t tempt me. The one across the street from the cinema is a cross between a deli and a luncheonette. It sells sandwiches and wraps and a few warm things and you can sit inside. I ask for a bagel. And that is already a mistake. It’s gives me away as a bloody foreigner. Nowone asks for “a bagel”. You have to say which bagel you want. Because there are many different ones. The guy at the counter is getting increasingly more nervous by every second of hesitation I display. So I look over his shoulder and say “a black bagel”. Second BIG MISTAKE. What the hell is a black bagel? A black bagel? No, there are no black bagels, they are actually called “pimpernickel” bagels. Honestly, “rye bagel” wasn’t enough, the baroque version that gets one’s tongue tied up in knots had to be the favorite one. I only have some courage left to ask for cream cheese and then leave quickly with the warm package in my hand.

To my delight, I discover that the cheese actually came with a few nice bits of smoked salmon and that the rye, molasses-additioned bagel, tastes wonderful, crunch-creamy-salty-sweet. Truly American.

DAY 2- GIPSY QUEENS

A mismatch of things-edible from morning to evening. Impossible to find one’s happiness in a tea-bag. They should simply be banned. And those giant cups filled of watery coffee and giant muffins and cupcakes…no, no, no. Size matters and I prefer to keep things down a little.

Wholefoods on Union sq. is one of those trendy healthy supermarkets that is always interesting to explore to check the state of the art. They have a lot of things but I suspect that packaging plays an important role in all of it, I mean, the anglosaxon penchant for didascalism in food and the resulting professionalism and charm of descriptions over the actual quality of food (the money goes to the communicators rather than to the producers). There are hundreds of natural remedies for all sorts of ailments. Nuts, flours, sauces, powdered wheatgrass, all the miracle foods, from goji to acai berries. And a lot of pickles, unpasteurized and lots of bottles of kombucha, equally unpasteurized.

It is upon trying to open one of those that the thing literally gushes out into quasi-champagneasque bubbly foamy spray. When we manage to contain the splurge, the entire floor of the supermarket exist is covered with kombucha…

By lunchtime we are in Soho and dive into one of those basement joints where Chinese proletarians in their 50s go to grub some cheap fare. Crusty pork belly and some sliced cold chicken. Less than 5 dollars and there is enough for two. For dinner we try to be smart and follow a tip from “Edible New York”, a magazine we peeked into at Wholefoods, a Rumanian restaurant that promises kitch and a hearty fare:

http://nymag.com/listings/restaurant/sammys-roumanian-steak-house/

But. It actually turns out to be a loud first floor with walls full ugly photoes, business cards and newspaper cutouts. There are no windows in view and too many pot bellies for my liking. So we end up in out 41^st floor apartment and warm up yesterday’s doggy bag from the Korean job.

The real culinary event of the day is an arty one and one we cannot get our sticky fingers into it. At hip Deitch gallery on Broome st., Francine Spiegel makes a splash of fluorescent edible fluids, turning a group of 19^th dressed up ladies into some survivors of a multi-layered mud catastrophy. I did not think much of this. It was a piece of “curiosa” crossing my path and causing minimal damage (read: boredom).

NUEVA IORKE – DIARIOS

 

NIGHT 1 – The Empire State Building and Korea Town The Empire State Building occupies the block on Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th street. All around it, on either side of the avenue, it is a maze of Korean joints, especially restaurants and noodle bars. Karaoke places are up on the first floor and above them there are massage parlours and probably other specialties that would require a longer stay and apt “cultural amabassador” in order to find out. On the first NY that’s what we dealt with: dinner at a Korean restaurant. I knew that meat was going to be involved, plus lots of garlic and kimchi, though I know by now that the cured cabbage they serve up as kimchi is definitely not what one’s honorable ancestors would pay a tribute to. Spotting the right place, that is, one where food has not undergone a drastic simplication in order to fit the narrow standards of a Western palate, is quite a task. But we give it a good go. We inspect twenty or so menu cards before narrowing down the choice to three places. In my attempt to gauge Korean delicacies, I employ my Japanese and Chinese references. For example, I look for dishes that include unusual parts of animals and who dare to mention them in detail. Pig trotters, ox knuckles, beef tongue, that sort of thing. Or unusual combinations of meat and seafood. The best is when the menu mentions something I never heard of before. We end up in a place where you can sit on the floor at low tables and where the kimchi is actually made with whole cabbage and cut just before being served. This is actually a good sign. It means that the kimchi master knew what he was doing and that the spices were actually packed by hand between the leaves. I go for a traditional ox knuckle soup, a tasteless milky liquid that reminds me tales from a dear Chinese friend about bones that are slowly cooked and that produce a nourishing and warming soup. The fact that this tastes of nothing is just normal. Most Chinese health soup (and even desserts) taste of nothing. It is the color, texture and porcedure that counts. Another discovery is the Korean penchant for entrails. Stomach, tongue and intestine boiled and cut in slivers and then served with a sweet miso sauce. One can’t compare this with the devine preparations from Toscana, which goes under the name of lampredotto or trippa, but it was interesting nevertheless. And I even found out that Koreans have a very cheap drink called something like “macalli”, which is rough unfiltered (thus milky) sake wine. Rough but similar to some divine unpasteurized sake I had on the island of Kyushu (Japan). Unfortunately my capacity for eating has limits and so I wasn’t able to order the raw oysters with pear juice…

NUKA BRAN II – NUKA ZUKE

Ok, it’s official: the European (read Belgian) version of Japanese nuka works. The mix of beer (wild fermentation of course) and wheat bran and the micro-climate of my kitchen produce wonders. From time to time, I add more slices of ginger and rub in some miso paste, the nuka mix gives vegetables a pleasant and unsuspectingly complex flavor. I tried some unusual things, like almonds (pickled almonds – can you imagine that?), and classics like garlic, slices of cucumber and radishes. Persil root is already too aromatic to really benefit from my super nuka mix.
I get some moldy scum on top which I eliminate by soaking it up with some kitchen paper. This is a young experiment, over a month only. The real test will be to keep it going for a few months or even years.
One thing is certain: compared with the batch made by a Japanese friend (using rice bran and sake) and kept in the fridge, mine is a lot more wild and kicking!
Personally, I like to eat some of the bran too, especially when the veggies have been in only one or two days.
In general, I find it amazing to have this natural process going on in my kitchen, which can transform the flavor of vegetables in such amazing ways, without any need of chemicals or preserving agents.

NUKA BRAN

Nuka is a way of fermenting vegetables by burying them in a mixture of rice bran, miso, salt and water. You could suspect it could come from Egypt but no, it’s something Japanese. It takes a few days to get going, usually. I am only on day 3 so I do not even know if it is going to work out at all. If it does, then I should be able to bury chunks of veggies (including radishes, cloves of garlic and like) for days, weeks, months. During this time the veggies will be absorbing the flavors slowly released by the chunks of seaweed and ginger scattered across the bran. Isn’t that clever? A natural flavoring machine that needs no electricity, just time!

Now anyone Japanese will tell you that nuka is prepared in bran from rice which is very hard to find in Europe. Actually bran is bran, and rice is a grain, just like wheat or rye. So you can make nuka with regular wheat bran. And I even substituted sake with some artisanal stout from Italy…

Needless to say, all this inspiration is coming from Sandor Katz’s “Wild Fermentation”, a book that seems to be behind some of my weirdest experiments. Next on the agenda is Lebanese fermented grain cheese. T.B.C.

That’s my take on fish!

So nice to be back to the blog after such a long time! Especially with a couple of pics such as these.

For those who want to the get the full story of Monbiot’s fishing off the British coast from a canoe, here is the link to his piece from The Guardian

In a nutshell, the idea is that if you want to eat fish, you should catch your own. And this does not mean to go trailing for 24hours on some “friend’s” motorboat and to be picking out a hundred kilos of dead cod from the impressive pile of rubbish that got scraped off the sea bottom. No, that is not fishing. It is not sustainable, it is not ecological. Admittedly not everyone can start navigating a kayak and keep on it while fighting with some snaky sea creature who would like to keep on living in the sea. It takes time, it takes skill and has a natural reward at the end of it: the fish.

I am not saying that we should all literally do as Monbiot. But we could catch at least the spirit of his take on things and be a bit more creative with our own means. For example, why can’t citizen put pressure on local governments to clean up rivers and ponds? Why can’t we create the conditions for wild fish to grow and proliferate and for skilled ecological fishermen to catch it in decent way and be paid properly to do so? Why? Because there is too many of us who want to eat fish? Rubbish!

Have you seen how much fish waits around in supermarkets and ends up being thrown away, just because mr. and mrs. Smith went shopping at Ikea and forgot to visit the fish counter? Food that is alive (for me food is always alive but unfortunately most of the stuff people eat these days belongs to the category of inert or dead things) cannot be subjugated to the principle of a “constant availability of every food in every place”. Not if we do not pervert it in some way or other (radiated, sprayed with chemicals, made inert in some way or other). Food is not like tennis shoes. But we treat it that way, and with fish it generates disasters.

Have your ever seen what happens to fish in restaurants? I’m not talking about fish sticks, I am talking about top quality fish. Maybe 30%  or at the most 50% of it is used. Customers cannot deal with bones and it is faster to cut off and throw away that strip full of bones. The same goes for trimmings, skins, heads, tails. It is all thrown out. Because it takes too much time to make something out of it. Fish head is a delicacy in China. The carapace of lobsters, prawns and the like can be roasted and ground and the paste can be used to make fish balls or dried into a paste and used to flavor soups. All these operations used to be carried out in Europe until recently and they are still carried out elsewhere in the world. But somehow we don’t care about it any longer. We have no respect, no love and no wonder, for the living creatures we feed on. So it is not true that too many of us want to eat fish. Too many of us don’t even know what it is to eat fish, to disassemble and enjoy it from head to tail, gelatinous eyeballs and salty brains included.

So what I am going to do now? I do not have a kayak and I am not sure what I would pick up off the beach in Ostende…

But I have a friend who is raising tench fish in old ponds on the side of rice fields in the North of Italy. And I know some old men who fish carp in old sand mines and who could be persuaded to sell me one or two. And maybe I could get together with a group of people and we could all sponsor a fisherman…or grow our own fish in a pond…

SOFIA & PAULINO – The Party

It is strange to talk about something nearly two months after it happened. Anyway, this blog is about food so I am going to keep it to the point and introduce the pig from Mr.Dochain, a butcher who raises lambs and pigs in a field in Lustin.

I went to pick it up with Marta, who took the picture with her Leica. 27kg of a pig. I spent the rest of the afternoon shaving it in the back of Brussels’ restaurant Inada, using Inada-san ultra-sharp knife. Then I had to massage it with salt and rosemary to make the meat more tender and insert several dozens of garlic cloves under the skin.

The next day, Sofia and Pualino picked it up and brought it to field where it was to be roasted. It cooked over a fire of cedar wood for 6 hours or so and then longer into the nights. Constantly brushed with a mix of white wine and spices it delivered a juice rosy flesh and prefectly crusty skin. Even the thick layer of fat was exceptionally tasty.

PHASE 3 FUNAZUSHI

First of all some troubleshooting about Phase 2: it emrged from my correspondence with Mr. Tanaka that he uses thin salt instead of coarse salt and that I should have not dried my fish so thoroughly before salting them. Salt crystals make the fish more dry (especially if I dried it out already after washing it) and I probably used too much salt anyway.

So I took the first batch of tenches out of the ceramic crock, washed them, pinned them to a line for 24h (probably a little to long) and then proceed to stuff them with boiled rice, dip their heads in vinegar (or sake) and pressed them together in a pot, with layers of boiled rice and salt. On top of it all, a ring of rice straw will hopefully release millions of beneficial fermenting agents.

The second batch included bigger specimens. Surprisingly these were a little more difficult to gut and I ended up perforating their throat slightly to be able to take everything out while retaining the eggs. This second batch is already more wet than the first ever was, simply because I did dry the fish and used thin salt.

PHASE 2 FUNAZUSHI

I have been waiting since 2007 to make this: the first European version of the Japanese grandfather of sushi.

Nowadays people know sushi as boiled rice slighty flavored with vinegar, pressed into a small mound and topped with raw fish. In fact, it is the fish – from sea bass to sea urchin – that matters the most. The very first sushi of history, made almost a thousand years ago, was all about rice. Fish serves as a fermenting trigger, turning rice into an acidic, cheese like matter.

The original archeo-sushi is still prepared in the countryside north of Kyoto, in the area around lake Biwa. I came across it in a shop in Kyoto in 2003 and took it with me to Europe. Nobody could tell me exactly what the stuff was. In 2007 I went back to Japan and visited Hiroshi Tanaka, one of the few artisanal funazushi makers left in the area. We became friends and since then, he taught me to make miso at home and I sent him samples of my fermented vegetables. Funazushi remains the ultimate challenge, though. It is not just a matter of reproducing an elaborate technique. It is also a question of exploring cultural bridges between Italy, where fish is lactofermented in the form of sardines, and Japan where fermentation is that of a grain. More important still, funazushi is made with local fish from a lake. It is an activity which relies on a specific ecological framework: a limit of water pollution and a wise management of water resources. This is why a support this kind of food. Because it is a indirect way of saying that our rivers and lakes should be fit for healthy fish to swim in them and that fish comsumption ought to be managed with local resources.

Back to the tenches, they have been cleaned and places under a weight in a crock full of salt for 40 days. Soon I will have to wash them and dry them in the air for one night, before placing them in layers with boiled rice back inside the crock. Hiroshi Tanaka is following the whole process by mail, adivising me on what to do.

In a month, I will start a new batch, using bigger tenches.

I think I am getting close to phase 2 of the funazushi procedure. The 20 small tenches I got from the pond of Giacomo Musso near Carmagnola

DINNER 4

Springtime in Brussels means a few vegetable treats. On my way to the permaculture garden my friends keep in Brussels, I came across some elderflowers. Stewed in milk, sugar and a little agar agar, they became an unusual pudding. The path to the garden was lined with tall plants of aegopodium, a very perfumed green that can be cooked or fermented for a very aromatic kimchi. I could even pick a few more hop sprouts, before they grew too tall. In a shady corner of the local park, grew leaves and flowers of “ail des ourses”, a green that tastes like spring onions.

The dinner consisted of Japanese rice, cooked without rinsing for a slightly gluey translucent result and mixed with thinly chopped kohlrabi and mustard greens, oil and shiso sauce.  I made a salad of buckwheat, kimchi and parsley and a frittata with more egg whites than yolks, leaves and floweers of “ail des ourses” and courgettes.