Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre World of Food

by Andrew Zimmern

  Edna, her three sons, and the sons’ wives and kids all live in one building, with Edna still ruling the kitchen. During our visit, she made rondón, a traditional Creole dish called “rundown” in Creole communities outside of Spanish-speaking countries. Rondón is a melding of flavors and cultures—born in Africa, filtered through flavors of the Caribbean, and now treasured by small communities who have eaten it for generations. It’s a thick stew of meat, vegetables, and coconut milk, sturdy with sweet potatoes, plantains, yucca, and starchy tubers called cocos, which remind me of a cross between a cassava and a potato. The ingredients are thrown into a bowl filled with water. As far as protein goes, Edna opted for a chopped, browned wari, which is essentially a wild jungle rat that resembles a peccary. The starches and meat absorb the liquid as it cooks, resulting in a dish as delicious as it is diverse.

  Rondón is the quintessential Nicaraguan Creole food, and it is something that people like Edna Cayasso revere as more of a tradition than a simple dish. It’s apparent that passing her passion for Creole cuisine on to the next generation is a high priority, as she insists her whole family make the dish together.

  She served the rondón with coconut rice and beans, coconut bread, and two homemade beverages made from cassava and seaweed. These drinks are called “seaweed pop” and “cassava pop.” The seaweed pop was crafted from a puree of local seaweed, rehydrated with water, and seasoned with nutmeg. It’s more of a sludge than anything else. I politely accepted the nearly undrinkable beverage, but in my head I wanted to run screaming from the table.

  Fun Spanish Food Phrases Tengo hambre. I’m hungry.

  ¡Buen provecho! Enjoy your meal!

  ¿Puedo probarlo? Can I have a bite of that?

  Quiero dos tacos de lengua. I’ll take two beef tongue tacos.

  Pareceria bien si, tomarlo. If it looks good, eat it.

  ¡Como gelatinoso! How gelatinous!

  Es rancio. It’s rancid.

  On our last day, I had the ultimate uplifting food experience I’d been hoping for in this country of redemptive experiences. We traveled south to Granada, a city where everything comes together—the Pacific, North, Central, and Atlantic regions—both in the people’s food and in their heritage. Granada is a colonial Spanish town that in many ways has remained unchanged for hundreds of years.

  You can climb to the top of the church’s bell tower and look out over the rooftops. It’s a sea of gorgeous curved clay-tiled roofs, not an antenna or satellite dish in sight. The smell of cooking fires wafts through the streets. It’s an absolutely charming place, with artisanal chocolate shops, and cozy city parks teeming with visitors and performance artists everywhere you look. The narrow cobblestone streets are a challenge to navigate, only because you spend the whole time craning your neck gazing at all the stunning Spanish Colonial architecture. We were there the night of a big poetry and arts festival, where I had the pleasure of meeting the Nicaraguan vice president as well as a bunch of local dignitaries.

  I ended my night at a sleepy little restaurant and hotel where, I admit, my expectations were low. At first glance, Casa San Francisco, a quaint, family-run hotel about three blocks off the main square, was nothing special. However, once I entered the ancient courtyard, I changed my tune. Quiet and beautiful, with a plunge pool surrounded by bougainvillea, the place just had that old Spanish western feel. Upon learning of my arrival, chefs Octavio Gomez and Vernon Hodgson went out of their way to up the ante a little in the kitchen. Vernon decided to reinvent a few rural dishes and raise them up on the altar.

  TRADITIONAL DISHES OF GRANADA

  They kicked off dinner with historical local fruit flavors, serving a platter of nispero, pera de agua, green mangoes, and star fruit. We washed that course down with a batido, a sapote fruit milk shake. The main dish was quintessentially Nicaraguan with a modern twist—wild iguana, marinated in sour orange, cumin, achiote, and garlic. They roasted the lizard whole, crisping the skin just like duck à l’orange—it was outstanding.

  Aged Chontales cheese was the real star of the meal. It’s a small wheel of soft, Muenster-like cheese, served in the ancient style of the Caribbean coast. You allow the cheese to age in the heat of the day, just long enough to produce large maggots. When you open the cheese, these juicy cheese worms, as they call them, are then eaten right along with the cheese, just hundreds of these suckers wriggling on the end of your knife. It’s one of the most horrific and wonderful things I have ever seen on a plate.

  The worm origin somehow remains a mystery, scientifically speaking. But I did manage to get the cultural story. One of the chefs explained that the cheese process originates from the time of the very first Sandinista National Liberation Front. During that period, people near the front wouldn’t throw away old cheese because it was so difficult to obtain any food at all in that time of war. Instead, they let the cheese ferment, hanging it in a sack to eliminate the suero, or whey, from the fresh cheese. Once the cheese lost its liquid, it began the process of decomposition. It’s at that time that the cheese develops the worms, which continue to grow as long as you let the cheese ferment. Some people remove the worms and eat them fried; others eat them in their natural state.

  The whole idea of eating maggot-laden cheese is enough to boggle most anyone’s mind, but what I couldn’t shake is the idea that a traditional food like worm-filled Chontales cheese has been eradicated from this part of Nicaragua. Octavio admitted he’s been clueless on how to make it, consulting aged family members to resurrect the delicacy. The cheese wasn’t a dying breed—it was already dead and in the ground. When the chef learned I was coming to town, he saw the perfect opportunity to re-create this cheese for an audience that might actually enjoy eating it.

  He started out with fresh country cheese, queso casero or queso creolo. (It’s important that you use raw-milk products from rural areas, because dairy products in the city use too much scientific methodology to kill the bacteria and avoid decomposition.) He crafted a basket of plantain leaves, hanging the fresh cheese from it for three days to remove the suero. Next, he rolled the cheese in fresh plantain leaves to hold its shape. Once the cheese begins to decompose, flies will lay their eggs in the rotting matter. On the seventh day, the cheese starts producing eggs, which resemble fine grains of rice. It takes an additional twenty-four hours to hatch the worms. Luis served it to me four days later, which allowed the worms to grow to quite a decent size.

  Although nature does much of the work for you, it takes a lot of patience to stick out the two-week-long decomposition period. That, in addition to the fact that the cheese tastes like a rotten-foot bomb went off in your mouth, has a lot to do with its phasing out. The cheese flavor is strong and pungent—something I adore. It reminded me of the washed-rind cheese Stinking Bishop, which I eat whenever I can find some, but this one has the bonus of the wriggling worms busting out of it. Suffice to say, there’s not a big market for Chontales cheese riddled with maggots, despite the desirable protein in those worms. And the process can goof up on you if the cheese doesn’t lose its liquid. If that happens, the flavor will be kept even more rotten and putrefied and you can’t eat it. So there is a very fine balance here. This isn’t Fear Factor food, this is good cooking.

  The most disgusting-looking food is often the best-tasting. As foul an idea as it is to shove a runny, smelly fromage, riddled with something you’d rather bait a fishing hook with, into your mouth, it was pretty darn tasty. Eating outside your comfort zone allows you to acknowledge the baggage that you carry into each meal, that evil corruptive contempt prior to investigation, which thankfully can disappear pretty quickly.

  Posing with my dinner—a boa constrictor—in Nicaragua. Due to the large number of bones in the snake, this dish is best eaten with your fingers. It’s surprisingly delicious!

  Roasting whole cuy, or guinea pig, with my friend Martha at Fiambre’s in Mitad del Mundo, Ecuador. Eating guinea pig sounds weird at first, but the meat is very tender and falls right off the bone
!

  About to nosh at a raw meat stand in Harar, Ethiopia. I’m sampling the beef here, but they also serve goat and camel.

  A bowl of prepared octopus, the house specialty, at El Grillo Marinero in La Crucecita, Mexico.

  Roasted baby sparrows at a market in Taipei, Taiwan. You eat these things whole—bones, beak, and all! One of my favorite snacks of all time.

  Only in Japan. Massive tuna head, anyone?

  Pheasant hunting just north of Edinburgh, Scotland.

  Snorkeling off the remote island of Nu’utele, Samoa. These waters are so thick with tuna, some Samoans actually use it as currency.

  Reading production notes during some downtime on location in Tanzania

  One of my favorite photos from Bizarre Foods.

  At Maketi Fou Market in Samoa with a mouthful of se’e—sea slug guts bottled in seawater. I can best describe se’e as stringy, salty, and rotten tasting, and not in a good way.

  Attending meat camp (where men gather and eat as much meat as they can for five days) with the Masai tribe of Tanzania was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

  One of the best meals of my life happened to take the longest to eat. It was also the meal that began the latest in the evening and finished the earliest in the morning. To get the full picture of it, we have to backtrack.

  India, much like its food, is complex and full of contrasts. Its capital city of Delhi perfectly exemplifies this, as it is gritty and ugly, yet simultaneously elegant. It’s modern and ancient, affluent and poor. It’s a city of Hindu and Sikh temples and red clay mosques. There is poverty and sickness. There are beggars in the streets, and there are serene parks and gorgeous architecture. Delhi has more than 13 million people, making it the second-largest city in India. There are dozens of indigenous ethnic groups and religious cultures. From some of the best restaurants in the world to humble everyday cafés, you can find every one of the many Indian cuisines represented in Delhi. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to dive mouth first into several.

  VISITING DELHI

  Delhi is the oldest continuously lived-in city in the world, going back at least twenty-five hundred years. The ruins of seven other cities have been discovered on the site, and it is said that Delhi’s food scene can be traced to its medieval inhabitants. Today Shahjahanabad, or Old Delhi, is home to an army of office workers and of shopkeepers who trade in everything from spices to tapestries, bridal treasures to electrical fittings. If you venture through the tangle of streets and dark alleys into busy boulevards, you are likely to find surprises lurking around the corner, especially when it comes to street food.

  Traditional street foods are continuously bulldozed under in a busy, hectic city like Delhi. But you can find cold, spiced frothed milk; tiny stands that serve nahari—a spicy, curried lamb dish; and vendors selling fruit puree sandwiches. I explored Chawri Bazaar and sampled all these goodies there. Food and eating are a strong element of every Indian culture. Interestingly, the one thing that brings most people together in most parts of the world is often what keeps people apart in India. Culture and religion in India segregate people, especially when it comes to food. Some eat meat. Some won’t even allow meat inside their homes. Some fast in order to be closer to God; others say fasting is the path to weakness and is therefore evil.

  EATING EQUALITY

  I visited one place, however, where all cultures, all religions, all walks of life can sit down side by side and share a meal: the Langar of the Gurdwara Bangla Sahib, also known as the Kitchen of the Sikh Temples. Sikh culture promotes nonviolence and vegetarianism. Sikhs are strong believers in Karma and attribute karmic values to everything they do, including the air they breathe, the water they use, and the light of the sun and moon, as well as the food they eat. Around the world, the Sikhs are known for treating all people as equals. This ideology is embodied in the two daily meals served at Gurdwara Bangla Sahib, where anyone can volunteer to cook in the langar, or community kitchen, and people of every race and religion are welcome to eat free of charge. Between eight and nine thousand visitors are served daily, with no division between a lunch and a dinner hour. It’s always mealtime at the langar, and everyone who enters understands that the food is a gift from God.

  The food served at the temple is by no means fancy, consisting of basic staples: dahl, a spicy dish made from lentils, tomatoes, and onions; roti, an unleavened griddle-baked flatbread; and curried vegetables. I helped roll out roti and then stew the dahl and vegetables, which went on to feed thousands of my newest friends. Literally sharing food and culture. It was quite fantastic, although, I must admit, I was glad to be exempted from dishwashing duty.

  DIVINE DAIRY

  Interestingly, a simple ingredient has the ability to bridge the gap between religious and cultural groups. Where religions demand adherence to exclusive diets, milk is one of the only items common in homes across India. To the Hindus, who make up more than 80 percent of the Indian population, the cow is revered as sacred. Thus milk is a sacred ingredient, often used not only in food but for spiritual cleansing purposes as well. Believe it or not, India is the largest producer of milk in the world.

  From main dishes to specialty drinks, milk plays a huge role in Indian cooking. Not all Delhiies are comfortable with the suspect processed version that you and I buy at the supermarket. Instead, they rely on fresh milk from the cows down the street—and, yes, in one of the largest cities in the world, the milkman keeps his own cows in his own house and delivers milk daily. He milks the cows into large cans, hangs them on the handlebars of his scooter, and off he goes.

  Kulfi, a favorite dessert of mine, is essentially the Indian ice cream; it comes in a variety of unlikely flavors, such as rosewater and saffron. The milk used in this treat is simmered down, not whipped, and the result is a solid, dense frozen dessert similar to frozen custard. We always think of Paris and Italy as the global leaders in the sweets department. Nobody ever thinks of countries like India and Japan, despite their great tradition with them.

  ~In Hinduism, the cow is revered as the source of food and symbol of life and may never be killed. Hindus do not worship the cow, but they do consider cows sacred.

  ~In honor of their exalted status, cows often roam the streets of India freely. It’s considered good luck to give a cow a snack. Go with fruit—it’s a bovine favorite.

  ~Be mindful of the cows—you can be sent to jail for killing or injuring a cow.

  ~A roaming cow population creates problems in densely populated cities. For instance, Delhi’s 13 million residents share the streets with an estimated forty thousand cows. Cows make a mess, both with their dung and by spreading trash in the city streets as they dig through garbage searching for discarded food. Of course, they can also act as a living, slow-moving roadblock, creating major traffic jams.

  ~Forget about diamonds, gold, or cold hard cash. The cow is still the most highly regarded gift in rural India.

  ~Consuming beef or veal is considered sacrilegious for Hindus. Slaughter of cows is illegal in almost all the states of the Indian Union. McDonald’s restaurants in India serve only vegetable, chicken, or fish burgers.

  I encountered many other unique dining traditions in the city. Old Delhi’s jam-packed and bustling Nizamuddin neighborhood is the place to experience firsthand the red-meat-rich Muslim cuisine (they typically opt for buffalo). In Delhi’s largest Muslim mosque, I indulged in nayaab maghz masala, mutton brain cooked with cheese curds and curry. They’re also well-known for kalije, which is a savory liver and kidney stew; gurda kapura, chopped kidneys and testicles; and nalli nihari, a spicy stew made with buffalo marrow and buffalo feet and skin.

  And then there is Bengali cuisine, which hails from India’s northeastern state of West Bengal. The culinary traditions there are founded on the rich selection of grains, seafood, bananas, and spices, primarily a customized blend of nigella, black mustard, fenugreek, fennel, and cumin seeds. I visited one of Delhi’s newer neighborhoods, Nehru Place, where I had the
pleasure of cooking lunch with chef Joy Banerjee. Joy is an expert on Bengali food and specializes in re-creating family recipes of a bygone era. He mans the kitchen at Oh! Calcutta, named after the avant-garde British musical from the 1970s.

  Cooking lunch with Joy turned into one of the best eating experiences of my journey. The banana is extremely popular in Bengali cuisine, mostly because it’s convenient and abundant. Additionally, every part of the plant—flower to trunk—is edible. After watching the complex preparation of each banana specialty, I feasted on Bengali dishes like sautéed tree trunks, fish bathed in mustard oil and wrapped in banana leaves, and mochar ghonts, a dish featuring foot-long banana flowers.

  In addition to offering some amazing street food and wonderful cafés, Delhi houses some of the best fine dining in the world. Bukhara, a tandoori eatery Restaurant magazine has often proclaimed as the best restaurant in Asia, is one such place. It’s a see-and-be-seen favorite of rock stars, presidents, and royalty. The food is exquisite. The tandoori is beyond compare, and I’ve eaten tandoori in the best street stalls and most elegant restaurants in the world. Bukhara does simple tandoori cooking better than anybody—it’s magical. What’s more, the casual atmosphere in a place as renowned as Bukhara is rather bizarre. Patrons are urged to eat not with silverware but with their hands. In fact, the chef insists on it, claiming it enhances the whole eating experience, giving diners a deeper connection to the food.