Cooking The Books

The Food of Kerala

Kerala is at a similar latitude to south east Asia and touching down in Trivandrum (or the post-colonial Thiruvanananthapuram if you like a tongue-twister), the state capital, with its dusty potholed-roads, banana trees, motorbike ricksaws and the stylised script gracing shop fronts you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Cambodia’s Phnom Penh.  A quick glance at the people though, the gentleman in their mundus and lungis and the elegant, colourful shalwar kameez of the ladies, remind me that I’ve left the familiar oriental region and headed somewhere new.

Whilst the population may differ the crops don’t and leaving the confines of the city, heading into the region's backwaters, one is soon surrounded by coconut palms and rice paddies and these crops are reflected in the cuisine, the reason I have come to this part of the country.  India is a vast country though, spanning a good 2,500 miles north to south and the southerners take full advantage of this with wheat from the north also prominent in their cooking.  No meal better shows the use of local and the non-local grains side by side than the first of the day.

On the Keralan breakfast table rice is transformed into a number of flatbreads – liquidised into batter the previous evening the overnight fermentation lends a sour twang to the huge, paper like dosai.  This same batter, sometimes with the addition of curd, is poured thicker to create uthappam, served plain or sprinkled with onions, tomatoes or both.  Another version called appam is thicker in the middle, thin and lacey around the edge.  This fermented
batter isn’t only cooked on the tawa (griddle) though, poured into egg poacher-like steamers the bubbles provide lift, creating the tender idli with a texture not unlike the middle of a soft white loaf.  The wheat of the north is ground into white flour and made into a simple unleavened dough which is skilfully stretched, swung, rolled and twisted – oiled at every stage – into the delightfully layered porotta, the slightly chewier forefathers of the Malaysian Roti Canai.  Whole-wheat flour is turned into chappatis and their deep fried, pillow-like puri. 
 
Whilst there is a broad array of carbohydrates the accompaniments are much narrower as all are served with coconut chutney and sambar, the local thin vegetable and lentil curry fresh with the flavour of tamarind.  This is India so you eat with your hands, and only one of them too, the locals pinning the bread to tray with their middle and index fingers whilst the thumb and ring finger deftly tear lumps off from under their palms.  The few tourists ignore the no left hand rule or at least try not to break it through the sneaky use of an elbow.

Whilst the breakfasts were a highlight, what had drawn me to the region were the vegetarian dishes I’d tasted in the south Indian restaurants of London, lightly spiced and heavy on coconut.  Our first meal didn’t disappoint as we squashed our way onto a communal canteen table, the only white faces in a sea of locals digging into cheap vegetarian thalis, or Kerala meals as they were called in many places.  Metal trays were slapped down in front of us, quickly followed by a ladleful of rice from a communal dish hanging from a waiter’s arm.  A few small metal dishes followed, one containing lime pickle, two more the aforementioned sambar and coconut , something sour, something yoghurty and a payasam –semolina and sweet milk – for dessert.  The meal still wasn’t complete though, finished by two more staff, one depositing a poppadom and the other the dishes I had been waiting for – the first a cabbage thoran (a dry stir-fry with coconut and vegetable), the second the bright colour of diced beetroot, yet more coconut and the crunch of fried urad dal.  Taking our queue from the locals, who now seemed more interested in us than their dinners, we crushed our poppadoms onto the rice, pouring on the sambar and mixed it all through - with the fingers obviously.  Far easier than tearing the bread one-handed but the sloppy handfuls from table to mouth more alien to our Western upbringing.

It was here that we hit a wall with our Keralan ordering, or the dishes I was familiar with anyway.  Wanting to be more picky in what we ate we left the cheap vegetarian hotels (a term also used for places that just served food) and headed to restaurants with menus, hoping to order things by name rather than taking potluck on the ladle.  Looking at menus though everything was new to me, what I thought was Keralan food wasn’t in sight and I was confronted with chicken 65, garlic chicken, ginger chicken, beef and chicken fry.  The thorans we’d just enjoyed were not present in the vegetarian section, replaced with peas curry, peas roast, vegetable curry and vegetable roast alongside things more familiar from home - paneer muttar, aloo gobi and bhindi masala - the same transport that brought the wheat from the north also bringing
recipes from there too.  This isn’t to say the food wasn’t fantastic or interesting, chicken 65 – a vinegar and chilli batter coated snack from Chennai – ended up as one of the highlights of the trip and before I investigated the heritage of dry dishes of beef and chicken fry - simply cooked with chilli and onion - I hadn’t really thought of Kerala’s Syrian Christian community, known it existed even.  I was also happy to learn that ginger and garlic chicken were both Chinese in origin, adopted by the Indians and given a local twist, which also explained the fried noodles.  Where was the food that I thought I’d be able to order though?

A trip through the backwaters on a houseboat started to unravel the mystery as the home-style dishes we were dished up, as well as being arguably the best food we had, were Kerala through and through: cabbage thoran, lightly spiced with mustard seed and turmeric, was joined by okra thoran and another of green beans.  Firm steaks of fish were marinated red and deep fried, topped with raw red onion and the fried curry leaves so common to the south’s food.  This was cheap, local food drawing on the local ingredients, the stuff served up at home or in a working mens’ hotels and stirred into rice with fingers, not the food you ordered by name from a menu, well not in our experience anyway.  Throughout the remainder of the trip, whenever we fancied the crunch of lightly cooked vegetables and sweet coconut we headed to a vegetarian hotel, washed our hands in the communal sink and were guaranteed a ladleful of at least one would make it onto our partitioned metal tray.

Kerala is not only famous for its vegetarian food though, sat long and thin down the south west edge of India it has a vast coast with the Arabian sea.  Its backwaters – separated from the sea by narrow banks of coconut palms - are loaded with large fishing boats that come night fall set off into the ocean to trawl.  The backwaters aren’t just a day time parking lot for the boats either, their saltwater is full of fish and their edges are lined with huge cantilevers, Chinese fishing nets, that are lowered into the water at dusk to catch whatever happens to swim by.  Small boats also ply them, throwing nets or diving for shellfish. 
In the travellers haven of Fort Cochin fishmongers set up by the Chinese fishing nets and you can buy the days fish and shellfish then pay a 100 rupees for local stalls to grill it for you.  Huge prawns, weighing over 400gr each and stretching over half a metre from toe to tail, come it at 600 rupees, or £9, a kilo - similar crustaceans were £45/kg last time I saw them for sale here.  Tucking into the body the meat was the equal of any lobster even if the size was a little disappointing for such a vast beast, braving the spikey legs though – all 50cm of them – yielded at least a normal king prawn’s worth of meat for each of their four sections. 

Cochin was also the first place whose restaurants offered some Keralan classic fish dishes, even if their pandering to the adventurously-challenged visitors meant they shared the menu with attempts at Western food.  Fish molee was tasty and more delicate than expected, steaks of firm fleshed fish and slices of tomato simmered in a lightly spiced coconut milk base.  Fish fry took the same firm fleshed fish, coating it in a fiery paste of chilli powder, spices and vinegar (not unlike a chicken 65), and fried till crisp but tender.  Fish pollichathu wrapped the fish and spices in banana leaves before grilling, the leaf protecting from the heat and keeping everything inside beautifully moist. 

The food-related interest in this port town didn’t end with the restaurants though.  Once capital of the Indian spice trade it stills sports some large spice warehouses that any rikshaw driver will take you to, the owners happy for you to wonder between the sacks of spices whilst they go about their daily work.  The smell was intoxicating, sackfuls of vanilla pods vying with similar quantities of star anise, cumin, fennel and any other spice you could think of.  Another room brought more cassia bark than I’ve ever seen, stacked in boxes floor to double height ceiling, literally 15 foot high of Chinese cinnamon, some lower boxes splitting under the weight.  I’d rued the missed opportunity when I walked past a small flour processing mill in Trivandrum but another request of our driver found us at this cottage industry, a small shop front laden with bags of chappati, white and rice flour hid a hive of manufacturing activity behind.  The mill worker ecstatic that we took interest in his daily job, walking us through room upon room of different machines, one 
grinding and bagging turmeric, another brown rice flour, him passing us a pole and encouraging us to get involved.  I’m not sure who had the biggest grins by the time we left.  Winding through the streets on the way back to our hotel brought something of interest on every turn, a stall overflowing with bananas – green, yellow and red – or ladies sat on the pavement rolling poppadoms and laying them out to dry in the sun.


Heading inland and into the clouds of Munnar you arrive at a land of tea and spice plantations, the altitude bringing the temperature down and the moisture up, just what these plants want.  As far as the eye can see was a mosaic of rich green, spotted with tea pickers and the egg-shell blue of their villages. Supplied free of charge by the plantation owners the accommodation, small or not, is a welcome perk to supplement the 6 rupees a kilo they earn when picking tea, averaging 21 kilos a day the 126 rupees (£2) doesn’t go too far.  We learned around a thousand wild elephants lived in the nearby forests and are regularly seen amongst the tea when they come out in search of food, the closest we got to seeing them was dung and flattened grass though.  In town the culinary highlight was a restaurant that eschewed the usual metal plates or trays in favour of banana leaves, the sambar and coconut chutney poured directly onto the green leaves to join huge dosai and the doughnut-like vada, made from ground lentils then deep-fried.

Our final destination was Varkala, one of Kerala’s main resorts which for many is all they will see of this state on their trip.  All along the cliff-top come evening the restaurants fill stands with ice and lay out beautifully fresh fish – bright eyed and red gilled pomfret, sear and king fish are staples with the occasional impressive guest, a 1.5 metre sail fish or large barracuda that steaks are cut from.  What should be heaven is marred by a look at the preparations on offer.  There’s not a molee or pollichathu in sight, or the opportunity to have it in a local curry.  Instead we’re offered it with garlic butter or cooked on the tandoor, tasty and Indian but not an India anywhere near here. 
To add insult to injury they’re served with chips and buttered vegetables and share the menu with pizza and pasta.  The same happens at breakfast, it’s far easier to find a low-grade French toast or croissant than it is the life-affirming dosai and porotta.  I found it quite upsetting and by the end of our few days relaxation here I was taking rikshaws into town for my breakfast, the transport there and back costing more than the meal but worth every rupee.

With the trip at an end we just had time for an afternoon in Trivandrum, desperate to immerse ourselves one last time in Keralan life and, more importantly for me, Keralan food after the last few days of global tourism.  A tray of rice, sloppy with sambar, crunchy with thoran and eaten with the fingers was just the ticket.

Tapas24, Barcelona

Last week I made my annual trip to Catalunya and decided to spend a couple of days in Barcelona with the gf before meeting up with my family on the coast.  Having no idea about the city's food I turned to twitter for some inspiration and ended up at some really good places, the first of these being Tapas24.

Tapas24 is sister restaurant to Comerc24 and ran by former El Bulli chef Carles Abellan, so one would expect some little twists away from the norm.  It's unassuming from the front, just being a couple of tables on the pavement and a door leading downstairs, and pretty unassuming when you get inside too with a few tables dotted around and an open kitchen and bar surrounded by folk drinking wine and eating tapas.  We decided to join the bar dwellers so we could watch the chefs do there thing.

When we sat down the couple next to us were eating a plate of red slices of something that looked rather good so I directed a customary 'Que es?' to the waiter and failed miserably in understanding his speedy reply.  Luckily for me the lady of the couple must have heard my inquiry as she pushed the plate towards us, now sporting a lone slice, and said 'Try it, it's fish' before telling us at a much more ear-friendly speed that it was called mojama.  After devouring this lone slice - and deciding to order more - we turned to the menu and found the unassuming ex- and interiors belied a rather fantastic menu. 

The classics were there, sure (your patatas bravas and your tortilla), but they sat alongside mini-burgers with foie gras and ham and cheese sandwiches - bikini - with black truffle, not to mention jamon iberico and buffalo mozzarella.  We decided to supplement the mojama with the bikini comerc 24, the McFoie, some Padron peppers, a Russian salad, Braves, Pa amb Tomaquet (tomato bread) and some cava and red wine to wash it down.

The mojama came served with darkly toasted almonds and a drizzle of strong olive oil - it was fantastic stuff.  The initial taste was like an expensive ham, salty and melting on the tongue.  Up to this point you'd be forgiven for not thinking it came from the sea but the aftertaste quickly stopped these thoughts as a strong, but pleasant, fish flavour came through.

A bikini is a cheap eat by the beach, €3 of plastic bread and plastic cheese to fill the gap between a vast late breakfast and an evening of grilled seafood.  Here it was transformed to posh tapas though with some top draw ingredients.  The bread was still mass produced - would anything else work? - but the ham was now jamon Iberico and the cheese buffalo mozzarella, black truffle added its inimitable muskiness.  It was very good.  If I was being critical the one thing I would say is the use of a squeezy bottle of melted butter to grease the outside left butter hot-spots that were literally soaked in the stuff.  When I recreate this for the blog - I have the truffles waiting - I'll thinly spread the outside instead for a more even flavour.

This was my first encounter with Padron peppers and I loved every one.  The sweet earthiness was a delight and the tentative Russian roulette of waiting for a hot one certainly didn't detract.  The occasional tingle of warmth suggested my time had come but then the one truly hot one showed prior peppers had been false alarms.

The McFoie was billed as a mini-beefburger with foie gras minced into the patty and the fatty liver making a second appearance in the accompanying mayonnaise.  I watched this being made and at one point it did look like a normal burger, sat inside a tall bun, but a few minutes inside the contact grill left it flat and crispy.  The foie gras definitely added some fat to the patty but I found the taste a bit lost, this could have been due to the preceding hot Padron pepper though.

Pa amb tomaquet (pan con tomato/bread with tomato) was simply the best I've eaten.  The usual slices of country style bread replaced with a thin, ciabatta like loaf cut into top and bottom.  It was crunchy and sweet, which is how I like it.

The low point of the meal for me was the patatas bravas (or Braves) on the menu.  The potatoes were chips, and good ones at that, but there was just far too much mayonaisse for my tastes, they were literally swimming in the stuff. 

Braves aside it was a fantastic start to what turned out to be two days of culinary delights in Barcelona.  It was pretty cheap too - a pair of cavas, a pair of red wines and all the food working out not a lot more than €20 a head.  Definitely recommended and, if you eat at a UK time seemingly OK to get a seat - at 8.30pm on a Saturday we were seated instantly.

The Wurst Sausage Ever

When I was a child my granddad was a butcher. Unfortunately I was too young to learn the art of butchering an animal from him but I did take a few things from it. Outside of the obvious appreciation of good meat the things that stick in my mind the most are a trip to the abattoir and its huge basket of complete with eyes cow skulls outside (I’ll have to try look out the photo of that one), the huge walk in freezer full of sides of beef and half pigs and, and this is my favourite of them all, making sausages. I was probably younger than 10 when I made my first sausages. The machine my granddad had was a huge red enamelled cast iron thing with foot pedal control and I remember struggling with the speed at which the filled skins fired through your hands when you depressed the pedal. The big coils of sausages you could make were so much more impressive than links of bangers everyone else had too.

This love of bangers had stayed with me and as well as making the occasional sausage myself I always seek out any interesting sounding local sausages when I’m away on holiday. This was no different when I was in Sölden, Austria snowboarding last week. When away I pretty much exclusively eat local food, the only real exceptions are one McDonald’s cheeseburger (I like to compare the McDonalds of the world) and if I’m travelling as a group and have to succumb to the boring tastes of my travelling partners.

On the last night in Austria we ended up in a fairly local establishment and looking through the local specialities a starter that stood out was ‘Saure Wurst – a local sausage with vinegar and onion’. Once I’d read this my mind was filled with images of some kind of strange preserved sausages, like those little wild boar sausages in jars of olive oil you see in Italian delis but utilising one of the cured and smoked Austrian delights I’d had many times before. How disappointed was I when a plate of sliced pink meat paste with washed out flavourless onion scattered over turned up.  To think folk around the world have the audacity to moan about British sausages. It wasn’t actually too bad, but then I don’t mind a bit of Spam or luncheon meat and raw onion is quite tasty stuff.

To start with this plate of food is doing the country’s cuisine, or the region of Tyrol’s cuisine at least, a bit of a disservice though. It may be far from my favourite but there are some nice dishes available. One of the finest of the week in fact was the main that followed this sausage starter – schweinhaxen.

This shank of pork had been stewed until the skin was gelatinous, the fat buttery soft and the meat melt in the mouth – textures that a lot of the time seem to be shunned by the lean meat modern palate. It was served with sauerkraut whose sour, fermented taste had been given a boost with chunks of smoked pork. These two didn’t need a lot more and the boiled spuds' blandness were perfect for their richness.

The Tyrol is a mountainous region, cold and snowy for half the year even with its southerly location, and this is reflected in the heartiness of the cuisine.

Ceviche

I love to travel.  The older I get the more I want to see the world, experience different cultures and experience the food.  These last few years I’ve been pretty lucky and been to some amazing places. 

The most recent of these was Peru.  When we planned to go to Peru the last thing on my mind was food.  Everyone knows why you go to Peru and that’s to see the Inca remains, to walk the Inca Trail and visit Machu Pichu.  If you’ve got time you also visit the birth of the great Amazon River and if edgy urban sprawls are your thing spend a few days in Lima.  I’d resigned myself to this year’s holiday being a bit of a culinary desert, yes I’d get to eat some guinea pig and a bit of llama but as far as the cuisine went I wasn’t expecting a lot.  The flights were booked way back in February though and the more I started looking into the place the more I noticed food being mentioned.  Seemingly I was way off the mark.  Whether it was ceviche, causa, chicharrones, anticuchos or lomo saltado everyone that had been spoke highly of Peruvian food.  They also spoke of a national obsession with the country’s cuisine rating it right near the top of world when it came to food.

I could, and probably will, write about Peruvian food for a long time and have lots of photos of the various dishes to back up my ramblings.  I think the number one dish in Peru though is ceviche and so that is where I shall begin.  Ceviche is nothing more than seafood, for the most part raw but sometimes cooked and cold, which has been marinated in citrus fruit juice.  If this seafood started off raw then the citric acid effectively cooks it, denaturing the proteins and changing it from translucent raw to opaque cooked in appearance.  This is then mixed with red onion and chilli and normally served with the giant Peruvian corn, called choclo, and some cold boiled potato.