The dish that absolutely blew my mind was the garlic-and-salt-glazed pulpo de ajillo, which is a very traditional Oaxacan treatment and a centerpiece of southern Mexico’s grandmother cuisine. It’s a dish rarely found in restaurants. Pola takes ten cloves of garlic and about a teaspoon of sea salt and pounds it into a fine paste in her mortar, rolling the pestle around the interior of the vessel with quick, precise strokes. There is not a grain of garlic that’s larger than a piece of sand or talcum powder left in her mortar. Pola turns a burner on the stove to a very low setting and gets the pan hot. Keeping the burner on low, she puts a little bit of olive oil in the pan and begins to cook the garlic and salt paste until it’s cooked through, custardy yellow, and sweet to the taste without that scorching acrid quality to it. She then adds the octopus, cut into pieces, and cooks it for a few moments, then adds a splash of wine, covers the pan, cooking it for about twenty minutes or until the octopus is tender. Then she takes the lid off and she lets that sauce and liquid cook down until it has evaporated entirely around the octopus, leaving all the flavor of that winey sauce concentrated inside this dish. All that was left other than the octopus was the garlic and olive oil; the liquids had done their job. She cranks up the heat for the last fifty seconds, basically caramelizing this garlic in the oil-coated seafood, where it clings to the octopus like a supersweet garlic candy coating. Now the octopus itself melts in your mouth with a sweet earthy flavor that drove me nuts. Some people are crazy about garlic; I’m not one of them. But this garlicky paste of goodness is one of the singular great dishes that I have ever eaten in my entire life, a simple technique-driven dish that I have used over and over again back home with everything from shrimp to chicken. It’s easy.
Hand fishing for octopus on a sunny day in the Pacific is deceptively intoxicating, but I was stuck thinking about the future of fishermen like Francisco. His tiny town of La Crucecita and the once-sleepy port of Santa Cruz, where there was a vibrant fishing industry just a generation ago, is now home to parasailing, scuba-diving, and sea-kayaking companies. The town’s native culture is in desperate trouble due to tourism companies that can drop serious cash for the dockside real estate. They’re squeezing out people like Francisco, whose family is one of the original five that founded the towns back in the day when there was only fishing—before electricity … before the monstrous all-inclusive hotels that now line the beaches.
What was being destroyed stretches far beyond the bulldozed landscape. From our boat bobbing offshore, I could see the giant fishing trawlers plying the waters on the horizon, scooping up every single fish they could like a vacuum. The effect of these massive trawlers on the majority of the world’s conventional fishing fleets borders on the criminal. The equipment is nonselective, with bi-catch totals that are sky-high, about 60 percent of the total weight. Recent studies show that octopus trawlers are returning to ports with a greater percentage of juvenile octopuses, a telling sign that the species is overexploited. The long-term solution for this modern-day culinary Armageddon is to maintain catch levels that correspond to the potential of the stocks available. We have carbon-neutral living standards, so why not a species-neutral meal equation that would allow diners to sleep at night, knowing their dinner didn’t negatively impact the life expectancy of the species? While the idea may strike some people as saccharine, I think it’s a pretty important notion.
Promoting artisan fishing would certainly be a step in the right direction. Francisco’s operation, old school as it may be, is a role model for how we can make it work. Take the animals by hand, catch only what you need, and let the fishery self-regulate. Once trawlers are sent packing, the octopus population will rebound quickly, due to their species’ ability to reproduce in a short amount of time.
Of course, getting people to care about an alternative protein, like octopus, is a hurdle in and of itself. While octopus is wildly popular in most other parts of the world, Americans perceive shrimp, black cod, tuna, and salmon as the sea fare with the most sex appeal and most table-friendly attributes. However, octopus (and the small whole fish that the rest of the world eats regularly) should be on everyone’s radar and dining room table. These are some of the best-flavored sea fare, high in protein, low in calories, usually inexpensive, and fairly easy to prepare. Eating alternative proteins is the only way to ease the pressure on center-of-the-plate commodity foods like chicken, pork, and beef.
Octopus is not a novelty item. It represents our salvation, which was one of the reasons I wanted to go diving with Francisco in the first place. We can control the degree to which we allow development to destroy the coastline of one of the most gorgeous physical landscapes in the entire world. We can control the degree to which we allow commercial fishing to destroy the sea life that has kept families employed for as long as there have been people there. As it stands, we’re teetering on the verge of cultural homicide, watching something die and not doing anything about it. I’m not in the business of guaranteeing Francisco has a job and I’m not in the business of keeping the El Grillo Marinero afloat. I am in the business of advocating the preservation of a culture that will allow those elements of our human development to flourish so that one day my son can meet Francisco’s son and they can go fishing.
Death Match 2009
Can a Matador Save Madrid’s
Historic Tabernas?
restaurant’s life span is much like a dog’s. If it lasts seven or eight years, it’s lived a healthy and decent life. If it makes it ten or twelve, and can put a little money back into the investors’ pockets after paying off its opening and carrying costs, it’s had a really good life. But if a restaurant is a couple hundred years old, passed down from generation to generation, and manages to continue serving up one of the best versions of its country’s national dish, which once fueled the most machismo elements of the local culture—well, a restaurant of that caliber is more than just a precious family heirloom, it’s a national treasure, the Lassie of the restaurant world. It seems that if a restaurant of that caliber is rotting at the core and fading away, it’s worth fighting the upstream battle against the bulldozer of globalization. I’m not exactly sure how to go about it, but I do know that when you find an iconic restaurant withering on the vine, a place that is in and of itself a business, and represents one of the last bottles of Coca-Cola in the desert, it’s definitely something worth hanging on to.
But that task is harder in a city like Madrid than in a city like Milwaukee. Milwaukee is home to several hundred-plus-year-old restaurants. If Karl Ratzch’s restaurant were ever in danger of selling its last schnitzel, the city would pass an ordinance requiring everyone to eat there once a week. There aren’t that many great restaurants in the town, and I am not calling Ratzch’s great, but its place in the city’s iconography is crucial to the local culture. At this point there is no great tidal wave of a food zeitgeist threatening Ratzch’s or any of the other half-dozen ancient restaurants that made the city famous. The Serbian, Czech, Polish, and Ukrainian dining halls that make Milwaukee a great culinary treat for committed food freaks will still be there to visit.
Madrid is a different animal. It’s truly earned its chops as one of the world’s great eating cities, and simply walking down its winding, cobblestone streets really got my taste buds going. Madrid’s food scene is made up of two very distinct culinary styles: traditional Spanish cuisine and extremely modern. I wanted to get started with a bang and raced over to have lunch at an eatery that defines cutting-edge cuisine. My first stop was La Broche, one of the country’s legendary restaurants, which is saying a lot considering that some of the most exciting, innovative cooking on the planet takes place in Spain. Chef Sergei Arola, La Broche’s chef and owner, got his chops working under culinary master Ferran Adria for many years, and his food philosophy and technical execution show it. His cooking style embodies that adventurous, bold, in-your-face cooking that Adria is known for, with an inventive, whimsical touch of what is most often called molecular gastronomy by tho
se who need to put everything in a box with a name and a bow on it. However, Arola is supremely grounded in the strong elements of classic cooking.
Arola made four dishes for me in his kitchen, starting off with seared red prawns on olive gnocchi with an almond milk sauce. He spun fresh tagliolini pasta with seared morels, tiny smoky salty sea larvae, and Parmesan cream. Earthy and bold in the extreme. He topped the dish with an egg yolk cooked “sous-vide,” or immersed in a hot-water bath, which gave it a raw look as it sat on top of the pasta. The first bite disappeared into my mouth with an explosive essence of poached egg, a perfect complement to the pasta and cream sauce, a mad scientist’s nod to pasta carbonara. He followed up the pasta course with a small plate of roasted sardines with black trumpet mushrooms. Simple and elegant, and the culinary harbinger of spring. The last dish went by the simple moniker of roast beef, which was truly the understatement of the day and demonstrates Arola’s whimsical nature. He presented me with a few paper-thin circular slices of blood sausage, or morcilla, served on a disc of olive-oil-fried brioche crouton cut to fit perfectly beneath it. He topped the dish with see-through ribbons of warm, seared rare beef, crowned with an aromatic baby-herbed salad with little bits of microfennel playing the role of agent provocateur. A scoop of foie gras ice cream rounded the whole plate off. It was breathtaking to gaze at, and I could have stopped right there. But prudence ruled the day and I began to eat the stack of the beef “sandwich,” scooping small espresso spoons of the foie gras ice cream onto each bite. Insanely good, and one of my alltime top twenty favorite dishes. I finished with some cheese and fruit and strolled out of the restaurant on a cloud.
How I had an appetite after I left is beyond me. However, all afternoon and evening long I managed to partake in a semi-traditional tapas crawl, stopping in every appealing tapas bar I could find, sampling small plates of angulas (baby eels), pescaderos (tiny sardines), salchichon sausage, Iberico dried cured ham, bouqerones, griddled razor clams, and dozens of other edible delights. It is often joked that Madrid’s restaurants outnumber the local populace by about three to one, and Spaniards take advantage of that fact every few hours. They not only eat—they enjoy food. And there is a big difference. Business or social conversation is an excuse for snacking, and Spaniards have no issue in partaking in a leisurely lunch or eating well into the night, often not even starting dinner until 10 P.M. Remember, Spain is the culture that gave us tapas in the first place. There are a few ideas as to how this small-plate style of eating came to be. Some people will tell you it comes from farmworkers needing small bits of food to hold them over until the day’s main meal was served. Others claim a Spanish king came up with the concept. By law, every drink needed to be served with a bit of food to soak up the alcohol in order to sober up the wine-guzzling workforce. In any case, it’s a brilliant idea that still shapes the local and global food scene. Frankly, I find tapas outside of Spain one of the most tiring of food trends. The whole small-plate phenomenon is an overused food cliché that has spread to nearly every corner of the world. It’s like Top 40 radio; the song is catchy, the hook is good, but when you hear it every hour on the hour it makes your head spin and you quickly tire of the song you fell in love with, killed by overexposure. But in Spain, tapas just sprouted organically. It’s a grazing culture: You eat a wonderful breakfast and spend an hour or two enjoying a leisurely lunch. Midafternoon, you might stop at a ham shop before heading home after a day of work. From 7 P.M. until 10, you eat tapas and drink with your friends, hopping from bar to bar, finally ending your evening in a restaurant. It almost seems like work and sleep are the two things that break up one big meal. Suffice to say, Spain is my kind of place.
My tapas crawl that evening ended at the Museo del Jamón, a small chain of ham restaurants that are really cathedrals of worship for eaters like myself. The name roughly translates in the most dorky of ways as “the museum of ham.” But the idea that great cured meats are under glass and safely away from overeager mouths, accessed only by an audio tour headset, is far from the case. Stroll into the store and all around you are belly-button-high marble counters behind which are more types of cured sausages, cured meats, meat salads, and traditional salume-style fare than you’ve ever seen in your life, hundreds and hundreds of varieties. Of course, they offer the all-star Iberico dried and cured hams as well as Serrano hams, Spain’s version of prosciutto. Their Bellota ham was arguably the finest cured ham I had ever eaten; you could taste the wild-pig goodness, the acorn and hazelnut diet, the delicate salting and air drying, and the thin yellow fat streaked through the meat and rimming the edges of each slice tasted almost as divinely musty as the season’s first truffle. And at over $100 a pound, it better be good! I have often wondered why a Museo del Jamón doesn’t exist in New York. No one can resist the siren song of salchichon and cured ham of such high quality. Back home, the best Iberico, black-footed pig legs sell in some stores for hundreds of dollars a pound. And you have to buy a considerable amount in a store, or pay the markup to eat it in a restaurant, but at the Museo, if you’re a pork junkie like I am, you create your own tasting experience. Point at five or six items in the deli case and ask for two slices of each. You can pay by the gram if you like. They’ll gladly place your selections on a piece of a brown butcher paper and plunk it down in front of you at the counter. There are no chairs, just a bar with a foot railing you can lean up against. You eat some smoked and cured pork, some cheese, some olives, and some insanely fresh crusty bread and drink some inexpensive wine, beer, or orange juice. I know OJ isn’t the beverage that first comes to mind when you think of ham, but the sweet, slightly sour, seasonal Spanish orange juice freshly squeezed one glass at a time is my beverage of choice here. It cuts through that fatty, porky goodness like a bunker-buster missile. That salty, smoky pork flavor paired with oranges just drives me crazy. It’s like chocolate-chip cookies and milk. I’m not too proud to admit that I fed my pork jones at Museo del Jamón almost every single day I was in the city. Don’t judge me! You would do the same thing.
So after stuffing my face for a couple of days, including a percebes (goose-neck barnacles) pig-out of Roman proportions at La Trainera, the best traditional seafood restaurant in Madrid, I’d sufficiently worked up the stamina to eat at Casa Botin. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Casa Botin is the oldest restaurant in the world. The restaurant is scenically located on a narrow, cobblestone street about a block off the Plaza Mayor, which was the site of the heretical trials and subsequent witch burnings during the Spanish Inquisition. Botin cooks everything over wood in the same stoves and oven that have been pumping out suckling pigs and lambs every day since 1725. The ancient structure houses many small dining rooms, and shows its age with its tilted stairs, antique window casements, servers who look pulled right out of central casting, and ecstatic customers slurping down bowls of the classics: squid braised in its own ink and stewed partridge with polenta.
I spent most of my morning in the granite-floored kitchen, piling logs into the stove and cooking with the Botin staff, none of whom is younger than sixty. Hanging out in the kitchen has its perks. I scarfed down as much pig as I could handle, as well as plenty of angulas, freshly plucked at night as they make their way up from the Sargasso Sea. The kitchen prepares the delicacy using a simple glazed clay pot about five inches wide, heated to 600 degrees Fahrenheit. Once it’s hot enough, they add olive oil, garlic, and a single dried hot chili. Next, they dump four or five tablespoons of these baby eels, which look a lot like vermicelli noodle pieces with eyes, into the pot and swirl it around with a wooden fork. By the time it comes to your table, they are cooked. An order costs up to $150, but it’s a unique dish you’re not going to find anywhere else. It’s quite a treat.
After spending some quality time in the kitchen, I headed to a table to enjoy my whole suckling pig. More baby pigs, which are usually under a month old or weigh less than seven pounds, are consumed in Spain than in any other place in the world. The staff there was q
uite proud of me, looking on as I pried open the skull and made quick work of the ears, snout, cheeks, and brains, saving the tongue for last. Everybody in Spain eats this way, so I wasn’t the only one in the dining room getting up to my elbows in pig head. And this wasn’t my first trip to Botin, either. In the mid-1970s I went to Spain with my dad and our friends the Vales, with whom we traveled around the world on a regular basis. This meal at Botin was exactly the same as the one I ate there nearly forty years ago, except a little more expensive. Growing up in a family that placed a premium on collecting the most honest and authentic food experiences we could muster certainly made me the globetrotting immersionist that I am. Eat first, ask questions later.
I was in town only a few days, so in true Spanish fashion, I headed to La Bola for a second lunch. La Bola isn’t as old as Botin, but it’s been open since the early nineteenth century. As I walked through its door, admiring the gorgeous woodwork and old-world leaded windows, I imagined what Madrid must have looked like 200 years ago. The city used to be filled with taverns, somewhere in the range of eight or nine hundred. Today, they’re a culturally endangered species. Only sixty or seventy taverns remain, which is very sad. La Bola boasts an all-female kitchen, with a median age of seventy years. Everybody, and I mean everybody, heads there for one reason only: the legendary cocido madrileño.
The Bizarre Truth Page 9
