Japanese Sugar Coated Fish

You read that right. There are no typos or Monday induced mistakes. These really are candied fish.

Despite proclivities to slam two disparate ingredients together in new and interesting ways, this was not one I dreamt up. A tart made with lemon and chilli, perhaps. Tiny shrimp, needlefish and whitebait dried then dipped in sugar syrup? Not one from my brain, nor even from this country.

Japanese through and through, these were brought over by a friend currently plying his trade in Tokyo. ‘They’re good,’ he reassured me before suffixing it with ‘if they are what I think they are.’

Three, four, five bottles of something down and drawing close to 3am, happy on port and still full of steak, the box was opened.

Expecting a dock-like stench, aching under the niff of a thousand trawler decks each with rotting nets, it was a pleasant surprise to find the odour was subtle. Faintly fishy, of course, but no more.

There were tiny pink commas of shrimp, near translucent they were so small. Next to them skewers of larger fish, threaded onto cocktail sticks in order of size. Brown and grey needlefish were piled up in the centre of the tray and another hierarchy, this time of prawns, completed the set.

Everything was glossy, shining under a neat coating of lightly caramelised sugar like Poseidon’s homage to St. Valentine. A cross-cultural melding of something possibly lost in translation.

Knowing the largest fish were the inevitable dénouement of this whole episode, itself threatening to turn into an exercise in extreme eating machismo, we began with the smallest offerings – the tiny needlefish and the small pink shrimp.

The flavour was oddly pleasant. Texturally there was a little crunch, the whole shellfish offering a bite of resistance before yielding and giving up their sweet-savoury contents.

There was an unmistakable flavour of the sea, slightly fermented with the pungent intensity that only comes from preserved specimens but it was neatly countered by the caramel exterior.

Finding our stride we went back for more gathering pace and gusto with each mouthful until we ended with the largest complete fishes clamped between chopsticks. Heads, tails and guts in they went to be chewed up and chewed over. Savoured and swallowed. Sweet, bitter, salty – was this the elusive umami flavour neatly captured in a single morsel?

We didn’t finish the entire tray. It remains in the fridge but not for reasons of disgust. On the contrary – they were very pleasant indeed and would make the ideal companion to a few chilled beers and a bowl of steaming, salty edamame beans. I’m just waiting for the right occasion.

Nose to Tail Tuesday (N3T) – Brains

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single foodstuff in possession of good batter can be rendered not just palatable, but delicious through the simple action of deep-frying.

So said Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice.

I think. Or something along those lines anyway.

But it is a fair argument. Golden batter can hide a multitude of sins, provide a satisfying crunch to an otherwise flabby ingredient and even impart its own magical flavours.

It’s a culinary sleight of hand used the world over from the feather-light tempura of Japan to the more, ahem, heavyweight Scottish offerings (deep-fried kebab meat pizza, anyone? And is it wrong that I find that slightly alluring?).

My old boss once told me of a dinner he enjoyed after a long day’s trek through a mountainous region of the States. In the mood for seafood, he ordered a large plate of Rocky Mountain Oysters.

They arrived not on the half shell as expected, but a steaming mound of golden brown delights, fresh from the deep fat fryer, just the right size to pop into the mouth.

It was only after eating half the portion that his colleague informed him they were not the salty molluscs he thought, but rather the inevitable leftovers of the messy business of cattle castration.

‘Quite tasty,’ he relayed to me, almost romantically.

It was this approach I thought best when contemplating the prospect of eating, for the first time, brain.

The menu tete de porc is gradually taking shape. It needs some work, some gentle refining before it is unleashed upon intrepid diners but it is mostly good.

One course, however, will not make it onto the final bill of fayre.

Removing the brain from the head of a pig is a chore of such magnitude that the final result would have to be rapturously delicious and close to orgasmic in order to make the task worthwhile. It is far from being either of these things. About as far away as it is possible to be.

After stripping the head of the cheeks, ears and snout you are left with something that resembles a science project. What then follows is an hour of finely tuned sawing, cleaving, chipping and brute force in order to remove its contents.

Which are surprisingly small. A disappointing fact at first sight but one that I grew grateful of very quickly when eating time came around.

A pig’s brain is about the size of a large duck egg. Before eating it must be soaked in water for at least 24 hours and then gently poached for about ten minutes. You can use plain old water with a splash of vinegar but we used chicken stock.

What emerges is something that looks like, well, it looks like a brain. There is no getting away from that fact: those familiar little lobes with the swirling labyrinthine pattern twisting across their pale surface.

Each hemisphere was sliced into three, dipped into batter (made with plain flour and ginger beer seasoned with salt, pepper and cayenne) and then deep fried in sunflower oil and suet for about two minutes.

They looked great. Appetising little nibbles whose true origins had been thoroughly and carefully disguised.

My dining partner on this occasion was a chef, also in possession of an adventurous and willing palate. ‘Batter looks good,’ he mused in an attempt to distract us both from its contents.

The small portion was taken outside along with some homemade mayonnaise, plenty of water and a pinch of bravado.

Sitting opposite each other in unintentional gladiatorial style, we each picked up a piece of battered brain and took a bite.

It is not necessary for something to taste actively bad in order to be unpleasant. Texture plays a major role in how we enjoy food. Few westerners enjoy the sticky, glutinous quality of many Asian delicacies such as Natto, made from fermented soybeans.

In that respect brain is unpleasant. Deeply so. What little flavour there is, is not nice. Faintly eggy but not strong enough in of itself to warrant being labelled disgusting.

But the texture of brain is what made us wince. Hard to pin down we tried to find a foodstuff with which to compare it to. The uncooked top of an inadequately fried egg. The slight ickiness of a cloying curdled milk product. Yoghurt that has gone flying far, far beyond its best before date.

It’s somewhere ethereal beyond liquid but stopping short of being solid and it disappeared in the mouth in an alarming fashion, almost flooding the palate with its bizarre nature. The brief respite of the batter only accentuated the downright unpleasantness of what was inside.

We ate another, with slightly more mayonnaise and slightly less gusto in order to galvanise our findings hoping that having removed the shock and awe factor, our second taste wouldn’t be clouded with prejudice. But prejudice merely gave way to knowledge and expectation. I’m not sure if it was better or worse. There was certainly no pride.

The remaining two nuggets were dissected and picked apart in order to pin down what the texture was like but we were still left without an adequate comparison.

A truth universally acknowledged? There is an exception that proves every rule and brain is the one.

Verdict? Brain has made the list. The. List. The list of foods I will happily go a lifetime without tasting again. It has happy company along with tinned tuna and hundred year egg. Don’t try this at home.

In Over My Head?

As the old adage goes, you learn something new everyday.

Yesterday I learnt three things. Did you know, for instance, that the greyhound accelerates to 45 miles per hour in a single second from a standing start? Zero to forty five in a second? Amazing. It is the second fastest land mammal on earth.

The other two factoids I gleaned through empirical, hands-on research and part of me wishes I was still in a happy cloud of blissful ignorance. Here we go: the brain of a pig is surprisingly small. Tiny, in fact. About the size of a duck’s egg.

['Two squeaks, or not two squeaks? That is the question']

The second? There is a wonderful nugget of meat that sits just below the eye socket behind the cheek bone, only accessible with an adventurous finger after the head of a pig has been simmered long and slow. It falls away in a rather satisfactory fashion, a neat little piece of tasty pork.

I know this because of Project Napoleon.

Project Napoleon, named after the Stalin-esque character in Animal Farm, began quite by accident.

I’d had a request to cook (and eat) brain for the Nose to Tail Tuesday feature (thanks for that). With calves’ and lambs’ brain still illegal, it was up to the reliable old porker to provide the means by which this terrifying prospect could be realised.

I put in a reluctant request with my butcher and received a phone call on Wednesday: ‘I’ve got a pig’s head here for you? Do you want the whole thing or just the brain?’

The question was a no-brainer (ha ha ha – sorry). The head is a culinary challenge I’ve been keen to take on for quite some time: a real test that separates those who merely profess a predilection for the holistic approach and those with genuine gastronomic fortitude.

Why does the head divide the cooking fraternity so? It’s about emoting. As humans we have evolved to read faces, to try and glean as much information as possible from them. The slightest movement can give away a secret, a feeling or an emotion.

Presented with the head of an animal, there is a near certainty that we will lean towards anthropomorphosis. And pigs, even deceased and decapitated ones, look like they are smiling. They look content. Happy even. So turning it into food is difficult.

Once this hurdle has been leapt over, the rest is easy.

One option for turning this insanely cheap meat (this one cost just under three pounds) into a viable foodstuff is to make a tête de fromage, not a uniquely male medical condition but a rustic pâté also known as brawn.

Here the entire head is simmered gently for three hours in water and stock vegetables. Once cooled, the meat, fat and skin is stripped from the skull, the stock strained, reduced and turned into a jelly into which the meat is set.

Yum.

Or not.

I wanted something more refined. I’ve always believed that true culinary skill lies in turning the ridiculous into the sublime. The drab into the delicious. Here was a challenge.

Driving home from the butcher’s I started putting a menu together, one that would showcase this unusual ingredient to its full potential.

Head Over Heels

So, here is the plan – to be served to adventurous dinner guests, just as soon as we find some. Any takers?

Pre dinner drinks with pork scratchings and ears Ste Menehould

Deep fried brain on toast with champagne

Sour Apple amuse

Pea & Bacon Soup made with ‘head stock’ with homemade bread

Refined brawn pâté with sage

Confit cheek with apple jelly, candied bacon and summer leaves

Dessert

Cheese and port

Let’s see just what this head can do…

A disturbing confession

This is a post I thought I would never write. I had always vowed that anything grown under laboratory conditions would not pass my lips (see this, rather frightening, vision of the future: lab meat) let alone form even the smallest part of my diet. This included Quorn and Textured Vegetable Products (TVP) such as soya. I have no problem with vegetarianism or veganism, people have the right to eat whatever they wish. Indeed, over the last few months I have found that my own meat consumption has fallen significantly.

We can’t afford to eat quality meat (by which I mean humanely reared) on a regular basis and so we eat it with less frequency rather than accept a dip in quality. This is our own personal choice, much it is personal choice that convinces a person that they do not wish to eat meat at all.

What I do have an issue with is non-meat products that attempt to emulate something that has come from a living, breathing creature. If you make the choice to exist solely on legumes and pulses then make the commitment. Don’t fill your shopping basket with meat free bacon or TVP chicken style pieces. That’s just wrong and leads us to dark and murky places where I think we should not delve (see link above on lab grown meat).

Anyway, back to Quorn. Quorn is a manufactured fungus that was developed back in the 1960s. After being grown in a vast Petri dish, it is then processed into various forms that resemble animal products that we know and love: minced ‘meat’, chunks of ‘chicken style’ pieces and other such culinary abominations.

For some inexplicable and bizarre reason that still defies all rational explanation, a packet of these ‘chicken style’ Quorn pieces managed to find themselves in my freezer. In MY freezer alongside chunks of lamb neck, a bag of pig’s trotters and a frozen tray of game including pigeon, pheasant and venison. They were discovered as I was making room for a bag of ice and a bottle of Stolichnaya and were sacrificed so that we could enjoy some cold vodkas and tonic later in the evening.

They weren’t just sacrificed. In what may be deemed a slight over-reaction, they were deftly flicked towards the bin where they sat, slowly defrosting into their weird fungal form.

But in the spirit of adventure (don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it, et cetera) and frugality (credit crunch cooking – don’t bin it, eat it) I removed them from their rubbishy grave soon afterwards and handed them to my girlfriend who insisted that they were, in fact, ‘quite nice.’

To me, ‘quite nice’ has never been a ringing endorsement. ‘Quite nice’ is how my grandmother might describe an album of pan-pipes music or an episode of Hetty Wainthropp Investigates. Other foods that fall into the ‘quite nice’ bracket include mild cheddar, aubergines and Salt ‘n’ Shake crisps. None are offensive but neither are they worthy of praise and my world would not be a worse place if any of them ceased to exist.

For the Quorn, we decided on fajitas – my rationale being that almost any foodstuff, even one as soulless, soggy and pathetic as Quorn, can be rendered edible with the addition of copious amounts of hot sauce. It’s like balls in a bottle, just waiting to kick some poor, unsuspecting ingredient up the backside and render it a fully-fledged psycho like drill sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket.

We added an onion and a sliced courgette, one of the many that are invading our kitchen thanks to a very productive vegetable patch, and then in went the Quorn. I was surprised to see it caramelising in a similar way to meat, albeit considerably faster. The smell, too, was pleasant. Not necessarily meaty, but certainly not fungal either. The sauce went in (from a jar. I know. I know. I know. But I can’t make everything from scratch) followed by a tin of black eyed beans and it bubbled away for a few minutes whilst we heated the wraps.

Once the tortillas had been filled with the mixture (which was looking disturbingly meaty) they were topped with a little tomato sauce, some cheese and then the whole lot slid into a hot oven.

It pains me to say this but they tasted good. Granted, there was a considerable amount of Who Dares Burns brand hot sauce dribbled into my fajita (I’ve just re-read that and it sounds incredibly rude. Oh well) but the overall flavour was good. Don’t get me wrong, there is more chance of Ellen DeGeneres being caught in a threesome with Siegfried and Roy than me renouncing meat and all its fleshy glory but perhaps I won’t be so fast to judge next time.

Breakfast time and some very old eggs

In keeping with my anthropological approach to eating whenever I am away I eschewed the regular looking breakfast items and went straight for the steaming bowl of what looked like wallpaper paste.

Eggs and bacon are all well and good but whenever I eat anything like that for breakfast I feel so sluggish and tired, like I want to head straight back to bed, rest a hand on my belly and watch some inane television. This was most definitely not what I wanted to be doing during my holiday. I wanted to be suppressing boundless energy and racing from temple to temple and market to market. Not snoozing in front of Mythbusters in an air-conditioned hotel room.

So steaming wallpaper paste it was. If this was full of enough goodness to keep generations of Asian farmers fed then I was sure it could keep me sated for the next few hours, no matter how many over-zealous tuk-tuk drivers I had to fend off.

I assumed that this rather unappetising looking gloop was congee, a breakfast staple round the whole of South East Asia. To the side were a number of bowls of condiments. I rather like this DIY aspect of Thai food, being able to adjust your meal to your exact tastes. Like it spicy? Not a problem. Prefer things a touch sweeter? Go right ahead, my good man.

Unlike here in the UK, there is much less differentiation between breakfast and the other meals of the day. It is not unusual to have fried rice or even noodle soup at an early hour, perhaps thickened with a little egg. Congee is made by cooking rice for a long, long time. Occasionally if you fail to put the kitchen timer on and you forget about the pan of basmati bubbling away, it can take on a somewhat glutinous feel as the starches and grains break down. Well, if you do that for about an hour longer then you have congee, almost like a rice porridge.

And it is delicious. It is warming and filling in the way that you would expect from a bowl full of pure carbohydrate but it really comes alive when you get creative with the condiments. The usual array of flavour options are there (salty fish sauce, astringent white vinegar, sweet sugar and fiery chilli) but these are joined by other tasty morsels such as fish balls (balls made from fish, not trout testes), chicken balls (ditto), crispy fried shallots, thinly sliced green pepper and thousand year eggs.

Now, thousand year eggs do appear on my list of things to try but if I am being perfectly honest they are not up there with kobe beef and oturo tuna. They don’t even come as far up the list as a New York hot dog or genuine boudin noir. They are hovering somewhere between deep fried chicken feet and a Domino’s Meateor Pizza – things that I might eat given the opportunity (and if my curiosity was in need of something a little more adventurous), but not something I would go out of my way to nibble on. They are a frightening looking foodstuff. If you took an x-ray of a raw egg, asked a three year old to colour it in and took a photograph of the result, the negative of that photo would look similar to a thousand year egg.

(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

What we know as the white is not white at all. It is a translucent brown colour reminiscent of recycled glass. The yolk, far from being an appetising yellow, is grey. And hard. Depending on how old the egg in question is, the smell can be no more than a tickle of ammonia to an eye-wateringly sulphurous tang. Century eggs tend to be milder whereas the millennial counterparts really are a force to be reckoned with. Governments in need of an alternative fuel source need look no further than these potent little ova.

They are made by wrapping regular eggs (that taste so very good fried or poached or boiled or scrambled) in a mixture of salt, lime, mud, clay and straw and then leaving them. For ages. Occasionally they are even buried in the ground for several months before they are deemed edible. And here they were staring me plainly in the face, at breakfast.

So, along with a spoonful of all the other delicious extras, I gingerly (oh, thinly sliced ginger was in there as well) added a couple of pieces of strange-shiny-brown-grey-sulphur-egg to my congee. For good measure I stocked up on chillis – my rationale being that the heat from these tiny nuclear strength peppers would render impotent the flavour of the eggs, if necessary.

And it was necessary. The very moment I put this odd, quivering brown and grey jelly to my mouth I knew it wasn’t going to end well. The subtlety of the congee was simply lost amid an explosion of rancid sulphur, like a box of old eggs had been cooked in a catalytic converter. Everything about this bizarre foodstuff was repellent – the flavour, the texture, the smell and the appearance. I didn’t listen to it but I dare say if I had, it would have sounded disgusting as well.

Just to make sure I wasn’t being blinded by preconception I tried another piece. That ended up in the same place as the first one: in a tightly folded napkin. The heat from the excess of chilli became a welcome distraction but I can safely say that, as far as I am concerned, century eggs and all their ilk can stay buried firmly in the ground.

Bangkok

Food dominates life in Bangkok in a way I have not witnessed in any other city. The residents of this vast urban sprawl appear to be engaged in a near perpetual hunt for the next meal. A while back I was discussing the nature of being a ‘foodie’ with my girlfriend. The conclusion we reached was that a ‘foodie’ is one who is thinking about their next meal even before they have finished the one they are eating – and if this is the case, then Bangkok is a city of six million bona fide foodies.

Couple this desire for eating with an almost natural entrepreneurial bent and you have a city where it is possible to sample a new taste or textural sensation every five metres, or so, whatever the time of day.

Restaurants and cafés per se don’t really exist. This is a city that ebbs and flows like a vast ocean and the food carts and nomadic street vendors are the living embodiment of this philosophy. Even the markets, which appear stationary, evolve and shift, tide like. It is, in short, a paradise for any gastronome.

We headed straight for Chinatown. A heaving, sweaty, tightly packed part of the city next to the river. There is no centre, as such, to Bangkok and it is easy to get hopelessly and wonderfully lost in this alien world. So that is exactly what we did. The market here swallows you hungrily, quickly enveloping you in a seemingly endless collection of stalls. The streets are narrow and covered making it even more difficult to navigate your way through the labyrinthine warren.

Rain had leaked through the canopy during the night making the ground underfoot dirty and treacherously slippy, especially for any idiot wearing flip-flops with little grip. Unfortunately that idiot was me. Thankfully, the sheer busyness of the place made it impossible to fall over. I was also a good foot taller than the vast majority of people around me allowing me to be able to see when an impossibly laden cart was heading directly for us, seemingly bending the known laws of physics with its ability to slip lithely through the throng.

The market appeared to be loosely organised into sections although at each junction, and at many places throughout, the system deviated and a wandering hawker would be proffering some tasty treat or other: sliced fruit on ice pepped up with chilli and sugar, skewers of non-descript meats grilling over hot coals, chicken frying in vast woks of spitting oil, steaming bowls of noodles complete with various bits of duck or pig – the choice was so vast as to be almost paralysing, as long as one wasn’t too concerned about the apparent lack of health and safety and basic hygiene precautions.

I take a philosophical view when it comes to such matters. Here in the UK, as in much of the western world, we live in a disinfected cotton wool shroud that appears to be doing us more harm than good. The human body is much more resilient than we give it credit for and if being seared in boiling fat doesn’t kill whatever bugs might be residing in my plate of rice or noodles, then maybe it deserves to have its fun inside my gut.

Suffice to say I am not squeamish about street food. Far from it. I simply adore it and think it gives a better indication and insight into a nation’s culinary culture than any three star restaurant or sanitised hotel kitchen. The streets are where people eat. Together. There is something wonderfully democratic about individuals from all walks of life heading to the same cart to get their Khao Phad or noodles. Street food is the soul of a city and I have never, not once, fallen victim to any malevolent bug caught from a roadside eatery.

In Thailand, street food is an institution. It isn’t a whim dreamt up to please the hoards of tourists that descend upon the country, many of whom refuse to eat anywhere other than their hotels – it is a 500-year-old tradition that exists because the Thais love to eat and they love to share this base pleasure with as many people as possible, as often as possible. The notion of three square meals a day is as alien to the Thais as the idea of near constant grazing is to us. Well, most of us at least.

For our first taste of this gloriously simple food we went by smell alone. It was nearing lunchtime so the fried eggs that appear at carts all over the city first thing in the morning had made way for more savoury and filling wares. It was too early for Phad Thai – more of an evening dish cooked when the sun has set – and we didn’t quite feel confident enough to test the noodles yet. Amid the heaving market was a tiny woman knelt by a large flat pan in which she was frying cubes of what looked like green jelly. We had no idea what it was but the smell alone was enough to convince us to part with thirty baht and sample the strange foodstuff.

Ten of these cubes, each one a large mouthful, were piled into a small plastic tray and sprinkled liberally with dark soy sauce, flecked throughout with the deep red of dried chillies before a wooden skewer was thrust into the steaming pile and we were sent on our way.

I have no idea what we ate (the first of many times during our holiday) but it was delicious: a crispy outside and a savoury dark green jelly inside with an intense saltiness thanks to the soy sauce. But they were filling and we struggled to finish the tray. I closed the clear plastic bag around the remains and we carried on through the market, pondering what we just ate in a happy and content fashion.

That was until heavy traffic forced us to stop outside a stall. A young Thai man, presumably the proprietor of the shop, looked at the bag in my hand, pointed at it then glanced up at my face before breaking into uncontrollable laughter. Still, it tasted good.

Never say never…

We went to the Chinese supermarket again last weekend (you know the one, where it is possible to get all sorts of exciting produce like this). Sitting in the refrigerator section, along with the wonderful fruit and veg and huge bunches of Thai basil, was a selection of eggs.

As well as white hens’ and duck eggs were some slightly more unusual ova including Chinese century eggs and balut. I’ve never even seen balut before, let alone tasted it but have heard quite a lot about this notorious snack, which is a phenomenally popular streetfood in many parts of Asia.

Balut consists of a fertilised duck or hen egg, incubated for about two weeks and then boiled. It is eaten in the shell, usually with a pinch of salt and washed down with a cool beer. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like eggs. A fried egg on toast is one of the finest meals it is possible to have. And I like chicken. But the thought of mixing the two together and creating a bizarre hybrid snack scares me a little. In fact, it scares me a lot.

I like to think that I am a relatively adventurous eater. I will happily eat a meat and potato pie, but crunching through a chick embryo; feathers, beak, head and all, might just be a step too far. Intrigued, I picked one up from the shelf, glanced over at my girlfriend who gave me that ‘you cannot be serious’ look, thought about it for a second and then placed it back with the rest of its partially feathered friends.

However, it got me thinking about foods I wouldn’t contemplate eating. There are very few things I do not like, but this is different. I cannot abide tinned tuna; even the smell of it makes me gag. I will never eat a bowl of cereal out of a box that has not had the bag rolled down to stop it from developing that horrible chewy sogginess. And as for kidney; anything that smells so strongly of wee does not belong on a plate, even if it is covered in gravy and pastry.

But there is a vast chasm of difference between something I know I don’t like and something that my cultural sensibilities have told me is repellent, which is quite ridiculous. With this in mind, I don’t think there is anything that I wouldn’t try, at least once, just to ensure that my instincts were right and I’m not missing out on some delicious Ambrosia (and I don’t mean custard). It is with such a spirit of adventure that I will travel to Thailand next week and, who knows, maybe even try balut.