Echando el Bullitre

We've been torturing ourselves by watching back-to-back episodes of No Reservations for the last few days, with the occasional Andrew Zimmern outing in between.

Most recently we watched as Bourdain floated up the Amazon in search of "the last frontier of modern gastronomy" increasingly aware that the idea for this trek might well have been a bit of a practical joke conceived by Ferran Adrià and his mates. In an obvious perma-filth from pain in his lower back, he did rather pointedly encounter a cluster of wild geese at the end of this Herzogian quest. ("Canadian ducks" observed his guide.)

Bourdain had spent most of his time at Adrià's fabled three-star eatery in a fanboi daze. At the end of the meal José Andrés was red in the face and blubbering, but by then they'd consumed a number of solid state cocktails, wine, champagne and some gin and tonics, the latter surprisingly standard-looking in their preparation. The best moment of this paean to El Bulli occurred when a little plate of baby octopuses was placed in front of the intrepid chef and he announced a need to take a picture of it "so I can look at it later and touch myself".

His long overdue trip to the Philippines turned into an extended disquisition on why these islands and their gastronomic treats are not more well known on the international scene. I've never been (too complex from a cartographic point of view?) but I did try a delicious Adobo in Costa Rica last year, at San José's commendable Tin Jo. I have to say I do like the idea of these dampas that Tony visited in Manila; part market, part open-plan restaurants, where you buy the ingredients for a meal over on one side, and then watch as they are fried up in front of you on the other.

Colombian grub appears to be no great shakes meanwhile. Think of the stuff on the typical Guatemalan menu with the largest quantity of saturated fat...and add more grease. Even on the coast, where you's think you can hardly go wrong with lobster and red snapper etc., there's an awful lot of deep frying going on. That said, Bourdain did get led up to one little culinary Xanadu in the hills above Medellín called Quearepaenamorarte, where the resident chef concocted a dreamy little cornless tamal, filled with fish and shrimp embedded in a masa made from plantain, milk and coconut.

Bourdain's exploration of Cuban restaurant food was not altogether encouraging either. OK, it's not going to be like the USSR in the eighties, but some ingredients are scarce and the food culture seems to be as rigid and conservative as it (mostly) is here in Guatemala. The biggest issue is one of mood and morals however. As Bourdain put it: either you are subsidising the locals' dining via the semi-private paladares or you are gorging yourself in state-run restaurants which very few Cubans could ever afford.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention the excellent Dubai episode, which was a superb exercise in presenting the viewer with the opportunity to read between the lines.

Over the years I've had plenty of opportunities to note that there's hardly anything creepier on this planet than the wealthy, Western-educated Arab. Beyond a condescending manner, many are self-involved and seem to have some nasty atavistic switch at the back of their inner selves. But as well as unearthing some fine examples of the type, Bourdain located and dined with an even slimier individual, a British banker patsy, duly coaxed into making grotesquely amoral statements about the virtual slavery which has underpinned Dubai's growth. He only had to set him up with a few carefully couched questions and off he went. Jeremy Paxman should have a go some time.

Much of the early section was led by a more sympathetic Indian finance bod who'd clearly signed up to a rather distasteful Faustian pact, but was making the most of it. Then there was time for deliberately mixed messages about Ski Dubai. "There's an aesthetic sensibility going on here," Tony conceded (as Milton might have noted of Satan's Pandemonium in Paradise Lost), having just observed that the venture must be the most eco-hostile in a city already dishing out an on-going environmental disaster.

There was irony to prised out of another scene in which Bourdain visited the owner of a stable of racing camels who informed him somewhat pompously that 'our race' could not have survived without these animals. Bourdain, taking race in this context to mean human race, duly lectured him on the role of the international trade routes to the Italian Rennaissance, while the Arab, for whom it obviously meant 'Arab', looked on with a blank, me pela expression.

Coco casi chamuscado...

It was his birthday...lucky dog!

Spot the ejote

Some snaps of the tradicional degustation menu at Casa Oaxaca, base of esteemed nuevo-mexicano chef Alejandro Ruiz Olmedo: six compact courses backed up with generous quantities of blue corn tostadas and pan de chapulín (grasshopper bread).

— Taquito de chapulines y guacamole (grasshoppers in little corn tacos, their salty edge burnished with avocado)

— Sopa de Guías con Chochoyotes (squash and greens soup with corn dumplings)

— Verde de Lengua (veal tongue in green mole)

— Amarillo de Venado (venison in yellow mole)

— Mole Negro con Guajolote (free range turkey in black mole)

— Nicuatole (classic Oaxacan corn pudding)

'Comida de menudeo' quipped V when I told her about the single French bean gracing the venison dish. I suppose you do have to be Japanese to get away with that sort of thing, but this really was the most delicious taster menu I'd tucked into since Kyoto.

In the clip below Chef Ruiz heads out to the abastos market in Oaxaca; you will get a sense why this city sports possibly the best regional cuisine in southern North America.

Food Porn (4)

Regular visitors will know that Monday is usually shark day in our household. It comes to us via one of those itinerant indigenes from Quiche with only the most basic grasp of Spanish.

I tried to make some vaguely British conversation about the chilly state of the morning weather with 'Pedro' today, and he nodded in nervous near-comprehension and muttered something like "si, much friiie".

Today we steamed the fish with lime leaves, yaki nori and herbs and then served it with chopped radishes and spaghetti doused in a mee goreng sauce, which I picked up in a packet in Singapore earlier in the year.

We've been eating a few too many radishes over the past few days in truth. And the sauce was just a bit too oily — yet should be easy enough to reproduce according to our own taste, galangals aside, as it is based on tomato, tamarind and chile.

Looking around for recipes online there really seems to be no definitive way to prepare this spicy noodle dish, common to both Malysia and Indonesia and quite similar to Japanese yakisoba.

At the end of last week we discovered an underexploited local plantation of lemongrass, which is bound to come in useful over the course of next year.

El Churrasquito del Diablo

We couldn't wait to burn our own devil today, so we made use of dry twigs and leaves lying around the patio to get things going at lunchtime, which then produced enough carbón to power a barbecue, onto which went slices of shark, halved onions and aubergines, and whole tomatoes and red peppers.

Food Porn (3)

Something of an experiment this, codos with octopus and yaki nori, accompanied by tomatoes, fried aubergine (eggplant), papas and huicoyitos.

The main news is that we have started to make our own picante, even re-filling some of our little plastic habanero empties.

The basic salsa is made from red peppers, miltomate and chiltepe. Some versions have a Thai-twist: usually fish sauce, coconut and perhaps even a trace of red curry paste. Here it was deployed as a dipping sauce.

Food Porn (2)

Más tiburón...this time in a honey and Marmite glaze, served with stir-fry vegetables and sushi rice, al estilo Chapin.

Food Porn (1)

Not so much shark fin soup as shark tail soup — a dish which occurred to us after our regular Monday tiburón delivery left us with a few off-cuts from the narrower end of the fish.

We started off by creating a vegetable broth with some carrots, onions, red peppers, French beans, leeks, celery, star anis and coriander.

Once these were tender we added some Thai green curry mix and half a glass of coconut milk.

After this had simmered for a while, we added our shark meat and shortly after that a couple of generous tablespoons of Thai fish sauce plus a few squirts of lime juice.

Very much de último in went some chow mein noodles and then some fresh mint was sprinkled over the soup as it was served.

Looks like this is going to be a regular feature now...

GuateCooking

To roughly the same extent that Secretos de Cocina is dire, this show on Canal 3 is actually pretty good. (Albeit heavily sponsored by all the gunk you don't really want to be consuming in a land so blessed with fresh ingredients.)

Tooth and claw

Neither of us eat a lot of red meat. I won't refuse it when dining out and we do sometimes have it at home, especially during the dry seasons when I've dusted down the barbecue.

But the majority of our meals here are vegetable and carb-based, and we eat fish three or four times a week. (Generally grouper and shark.) This is a longish explanation for why we weren't tucking into a traditional fiambre on Monday.

For most of last week we were finishing off our curtido, and just happened to pass the Carnicería San Jose opposite the AECID, where the pint-sized proprietor has been treating V to his doting eye for almost thirty years.

We wandered in and later emerged with several chunks of carne de res, which we duly fried with yaki-nori (strangely less expensive in London than in Tokyo), which I suppose serves to lull us into thinking we're not really eating red meat after all.

The butcher on the sexta avenida also sells some rather excellent slabs of high cacao-content drinking chocolate from Mixco, and insists that it is superior to the San Juan del Obispo product, "que solo tiene el nombre."

Monday is also the day that Don A comes round with our weekly ration of tiburón. I used to wonder just how fresh it was, because he appears to have walked for miles with it in his woven sack unrefrigerated, and anyway back in Britain Monday isn't considered the ideal day for going to the fishmonger. Fortunately we now have an professional fisherman from Tampa in the neighbourhood and his expert nose has declared Don A's shark pretty fresh by any standards: "two days since the catch, at most".

V's sister immediately offered up some recipe advice and appeared a little put out when we explained that we like our shark to be fried in olve oil and sprinkled with fresh herbs. There would seem to be a belief in these parts that pescado looks its best covered in breadcrumbs, but generally we only do this with very thin cuts of fish where the migajado helps prevent disintegration.



Another dangerous culinary fallacy cropped up recently on Secretos de Cocina, quite possibly the most cringeworthy cooking programme on the planet. Jorge 'Coque' Calderón is undoubtedly a proper professional chef (and a significant improvment on the mudo he replaced on this show), but his hands are completely tied by the need to prepare every dish with a major dollop of some glutinous processed salsa from Hellman's, Malher or Natura's. His less than impressive assistant had our eyebrows in an elevated position this week, when she turned on a tap before announcing "Hay que lavar bien los champiñones..."

Here's a really big secreto de cocina: don't ever wash mushrooms*. If they must be cleaned, put them in a bowl with some flour and shake vigorously, gently rubbing down any that have managed to remain soiled. Cover them in water and you might as well be eating the rubber soles of your shoes...just soggier and with less flavour.

A few days ago V caught sight of the pic I used for my guest post on AntiguaDailyPhoto.com back in August 2009: the ejotes envueltos, a dish we have somehow neglected to prepare again since then. And so, armed with our new electric whisk, we had another bash at it one lunchtime last week, this time with added spaghetti.




The white queso seco, tipo Zacapa — much favoured by Antigua's street vendors — is an acceptable analogue of Italian parmesan. Being European I tend to take my coagulated milk protein seriously, but I've learned the hard way in Guatemala that authentic local queso is generally cheaper and tastier than anything one finds taking the name of a foreign regional cheese in vain: parmesan, peccorino etc.

That said, we do like to intercept the yoghurt van that delivers once a week at Doña I's shop, because its occupant sells us 2.5lb bags of 'mozzarella' (marca Lactosa) for just Q55. This ability to snag wholesale prices from parked vehicles is just one of the advantages of living in close proximity to a well-stocked local tienda. I've mentioned before that Doña I is also prepared to act as a kind of remote agent by shopping in the market for certain foodstuffs on her client's behalf.

* That is if you can find any champiñones around here that don't cost more than cocaine.

Curtido

Tis the season for...seasonal recipes.

I suspect the reason that traditional Guatemalan dishes like fiambre and curtido are comparatively expensive to purchase is not entirely because the ingredients are pricey (though there are a lot of them), but instead because they take such a long time to prepare properly.

This curtido took us much of an evening to put together. Very much worth it nonetheless.

It's a multi-stage process, commencing with the boiling of the beetroot. This is then removed from the pot and peeled and then potatoes, carrots, French beans and cabbage are each then given their time in the simmering magenta liquid, to which mint and laurel has since been added.

Separately we prepared a dressing with oil, various vinegars, capers and mandarin juice and a rice dish with some of the leftover 'ink'. Before the finished dish is placed in the fridge to curtirse overnight, a boiled egg and some sliced onions are added on top.

The rice comes out looking oddly like raw mince! The colours remind me of another salad I was fond of preparing back in the UK, with cous cous, red cabbage and goat's cheese. Cous cous would be a great alternative, because it too lends itself to the dyeing process and fluffs up rather nicely.

Some of the basic ingredients from our curtido can also be put to good use in the preparation of enchiladas, such as these widely-famed examples from Mamalita's.

Natural causes

We still try to get all our tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers direct from the finca in San Barcholo, a practice followed, we understand, by the powerful buyers of both Paiz and Pollo Campero.

The other evening we had the misfortune to show up just as the little van from the Casa Santo Domingo was taking off with all the available ripe tomatoes. But at Q1 per pound, compared to Q7 the regatonas were asking for in the market last Thursday, it mattered little if the ones we managed to pick up were a little verdes.

You might have noticed how a bunch of bananas will all go mottled together at roughly the same pace, but if you separate them the process is slowed. Well, a corollary of this process forms the basis of a handy chef's secret: loose bananas are a great way to fast-track the maturing process of almost all fruit, avocados included.

Comfort foods

With the weather this stinky our thoughts turn ever more readily to the comforts of the kitchen.

Thanks to a tip off from Rudy, who has researched the matter exhaustively, we are now properly acquainted with Pollo Frito Pinulito, whose patented recipe for fried chicken is by some way the best in Antigua. (We used to patronise Alina's, but they started roasting lower quality birds and at the same time put their prices up.)

Rudy and I met up again recently for another agreeable lunch at Ubi's. We both road-tested the Sopa de Curry con Mariscos, which was delicious. The recipe is based on a Thai red curry paste, diluted to just the right consistency and piquancy to function as a soup. Jeremías is a very competent Asian chef. If I could alter one thing at his restaurant it might have to be the presentation: I'd have preferred a bit of crockery to the plastic bowl my soup was served in.

The pargo in the pic above was a leftover from one of Felipe's weekend festines. We pan-fried it and prepared separately a Malaysian-style fish sauce with red chiles, shallots, coriander, cumin, tamarind, a dollop of honey, y un toquecito de chipilín!

V's sister Silvia is a very different kind of cook. Whereas V can hardly ever bring herself to make the same dish twice, Silvia delights in re-creating the staples Guatemalan cuisine. A couple of Sundays ago she prepared one of the largest ollas I have ever seen of pepián de 3 carnes (costilla, lomito de res and gallina) for a family gathering. It was really delicious; her chiles rellenos are scrumptious too.

If nothing else the elotera metiche seems to have convinced a number of the locals in Panorama that there's money to be made from selling grub to transients and construction workers. This week one of our neighbours opened up a little cafe in their garage selling 'delicious lunches'. I'm looking forward to trying their atoles, especially the arroz con leche.

Rick Stein and the Japanese Ambassador

This mouthwatering show began with an invitation. His Excellency Yoshiji Nogami — the Japanese Ambassador in London — suggested to Rick that he take himself off to Tokyo in order to absorb some of the deep cultural underpinnings of the Japanese relationship with fish. He should then return and design a suitable banquet at the Ambassador's residence for a handful of special guests.

Stein had already been informed that he'd got his Cornish mackerel sushi all wrong. You don't — as he once did on air — just cut up the freshly caught fish and serve it on a little chunk of rice. 'Raw' it may be, but first it has to coated in salt in order to firm up over a couple of hours before being seasoned in a marinade of water, sugar, mirin and kombu (edible kelp). The same technique is applied to sashimi and helps remove any fishy odours.

Sushi wasn't going to feature at Rick's London banquet anyway as when he visited Tsukiji the chef on the right — below — duly informed him that it takes about ten years to learn how to prepare it. (After joking that he'd been a taxi driver until four days earlier.)



I'm glad Stein went to this particular little sushi joint inside Tsukiji because it was one of the highlights of my trip yet by the time I'd queued up and been shown to my place at the bar my camera's battery was dead and I was unable to take any snaps inside. (Many of the pics I was able to take can be seen here.)


The maguro one finds in Antigua these days tends to come from Florida. Rumour has it that the gringo owner of Nokiate used to import his in an ice box inside his suitcase until he got rumbled at the airport.

My neighbour is a Florida fisherman and has filled me in on some of the deeper anxieties of his trade. In the case of tuna you need to get the fish in the boat within about 30 seconds after it catches on the line because the adrenalin released when it starts to fight will eventually increase the acidity within the flesh.



I tested out this little board of tuna sashimi above (one piece already eaten BTW) when lunching with Rudy at Ubi's this week. It was certainly delicious, but not quite a match for the melt in the mouth stuff they serve at the world's largest wholesale fish market.

Sushi has become a form of globalised, aspirational fast food. A couple of decades ago there were hardly any sushi restaurants in London, but they're all over the place now. Antigua Guatemala has at least three now too. In Britain the miniature conveyor-belt model predominates, but I only once saw one of these in Japan (at the Sony showroom) and this had little plates of cake going around it. (Very artistic they were too.)



Nothing compares really with the Japanese way of preparing and presenting this food, as evidenced by the selection of screen shots I took last night from Rick Stein's programme.

By the end of it we both wanted to get on the next flight to Tokyo and V's long neglected project to acquire a live-in Japanese cook is back on the table, so to speak. The Ambassador surely won't want to part with the pair who did most of the work on the night in the embassy kitchen:


It seems that the colours white, green, yellow, black, green and red predominate in Japanese cuisine. (White and red, the colours of the flag are especially favoured.) Freshness and seasonality is all important. The sashimi in the pic below was made with red bream, sea snail, tuna and prawns amongst other things.


Stein and his researcher Takako were also given a very special banquet in their honour by Japan's former (unpopular) PM Yoshirō Mori.



The sashimi course (one of eight) arrived at the table covered by little igloos...



...a technique Rick Stein borrowed for the London banquet:

'Ichintal Bravo'

Before and after...



Ruth came round with this one on Saturday evening asserting that her father had just dug it up in his güisquil field. We prefer it to yuca. It's more moist and yet maintains an earthy aroma through cooking.

Mamalita's...don't take your best shirt

There are two places in the environs of San Bartolo's plazuela that the locals like to go on Sundays to partake of traditional Guatemalan grub. One is called Mamalita's, and the other...well, just don't.

With our appetites already somewhat blunted by the 'gastronomic' festival, we headed in that direction around one o'clock yesterday. To be honest this was already a little late, because Mamalita's is at its buzziest in the late morning (Sundays only). It's the closest thing to a local equivalent of Spain's pinxos /tapas culture — a place to have a beer and a few snacks before going home for the meal proper, typically consumed a couple of hours after what would normally be considered lunchtime.

This friendly, unsophisticated institution is perhaps best known for its enchiladas (Q10 each, eat-in), but I've never felt up to tackling one of these without a bib...or at least a tatty, desechable t-shirt. On this occasion we ordered some salpicón (shredded beef salad) and guacamol with tortillas to go with our litro of Gallo (above).

Much of the food we've been cooking this week has featured the native herb/weed chipilín. We bought a substantial quantity one afternoon at the market and spent much of the subsequent evening painstakingly stripping the leaves off the stalks. (They can leave a bitter taste.)

The last of it went into V's dish below: seared tuna in a parsley, lime and pepper sauce accompanied by pitta bread and a rice cooked in the pan with chipilín, corn, ejotes, broccoli, cauliflower, raisins and hierbabuena. She sprinkled fresh Italian parmesan over it...as she does with most things, while it lasts. A dash of smoky pimentón also went in, but only after the rice had been fried with the other ingredients. All went down well with Baltika No7.

Same old, same old

This weekend Antigua hosted a disappointingly lame gastronomic festival. V had warned me not to have a big breakfast yesterday because we'd soon be gorging ourselves on interesting Guatemalan goodies, but I already had my suspicions that it would be more enticing to people with cameras than those with plastic spoons.

We stayed about half an hour from twelve thirty until one. It had kicked off at midday and already things were getting disheveled and the cooks representing the various aldeas were apparently having difficulty keeping some of the concoctions warm in their earthenware pots.

V's expectations of discovering something unusual were not met. I can't imagine there were many people there who'd never tried a pepián or revolcado.

Given the corporate sponsorship, the prices were a bit silly frankly. In the end we paid Q20 for a rather miserly portion of pollo con crema y loroco, most of which went back home for the dog. It was essentially a boney piece of chicken covered in cream and butter with a barely perceptible aftertaste of loroco, accompanied by agglutinative white rice.

Some of the selections were very well presented, others less so. San Juan del Obispo made a superior effort it has to be said, and the chef (above) was happy to have his picture taken, unlike some of the viejas amargadas I could mention!

I sometimes despair at the quality of local 'gastronomy'. When people learn to cook here they simply learn to cook the stuff that everyone knows how to cook. A sense of what one might achieve given a little passion and creativity doesn't seem to form part of any of the courses taught here. (Indeed, one woman who had recently graduated as a 'chef' was critical of V for adding basil to her pasta once. Apparently la albahaca is for medicinal purposes only. Gnnngh.)

And it is such a pity, because given the availability of ingredients this could so easily be a gastronomic paradise. But the locals seem to revel in the rutinario, or perhaps are simply afraid to experiment, and most of the visitors don't seem to expect all that much (nor wish to pay for it.)

Anyway, as if by way of compensation we moved on to Mamalita's afterwards, where we knew we'd get some decent traditional fare. (More on that ragged little institution later.) And in the evening we much enjoyed Felipe's caldo de mariscos, which is actually a match for any old tom yam you might already be acquainted with.

So this morning I was resigned to having some serious timba trouble and to have no real idea what the root cause of it had been, but I appear to be in the clear so far (apart from the colic attack brought on by this post!)

Foodie share

V now has a favourite Asian curry....better even than the standard red, green and yellows of Thailand.

As a base she used an Indonesian Padang Rendang paste containing shallots, ginger, galangal, dessicated coconut, turmeric, coriander seeds, candle nut, chiles and lemongrass, as well as sugar and salt, which ought to be relatively easy to reproduce without the head start provided by the Dancing Chef paste I'd picked up in Singapore.

She then added a few extra ingredients such as coconut milk, chopped cabbage, lime leaves from the rough land next to our house, and Japanese yaki nori (roasted seaweed).

We used beef, but chicken and lamb are also permitted, I read on the back of the little packet.

The end result was, I believe, a little more liquid than the version one tends to encounter in Padang. And completely delicious.

The rice was prepared with more kaffir lime leaves, carrots, peas, green tea, sultanas and saffron.

Fisch

Here are two fine examples of local fish smoked the German way by an ex-pat lady called Crista (Christina?) who can often be found at Tabacos y Vinos on Thursdays and Fridays.

Yesterday however she apparently got with the programme and came around knocking on doors in our neighbourhood. (Thursday is actually a bit of a dead day for itinerant vendedores in Panorama.)

The shark (foreground) was especially tasty, served by V with a ceviche-style salad, a cabbage salad and guacamol.

Far eastern delights

Yesterday Rudy introduced me to the delights of the coconut chicken curry at La Esquina, which he had previously tagged as part of his 'Cosmpolitan Antigua' series. It has a mild nutty flavour, which made us think of Vietnamese or Malaysian cooking, but without the fieryness.

I have to say I've been a bit sceptical about some of the advertisements in Antigua for authentically far-flung cuisines ever since I tried the green curry at Cafe Flor a while ago. But this is pretty close to being the real deal, and not bad value at little over Q50.

I particularly like the way they serve the water there: in 1 litre carafes with mint and cucumber for flavour. The onion chutney which comes along with the bread is also delicious.